How ServiceNow Consulting Can Help Remove Friction and Support Business Agility

What Is the Value of ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is one of the most comprehensive and widely-used cloud-based enterprise software platforms on the market. A ServiceNow implementation is a common starting point for many IT initiatives because it provides a convenient platform for adding new applications.

But, what is the value of ServiceNow as a platform that makes it so convenient and valuable to enterprises of all sizes and industries? Some commonly-realized benefits of the platform include:

One-Stop Shop for Business Needs

As a cloud platform for hosting (or building) enterprise applications, ServiceNow allows enterprises to build a “one-stop” shop for all of their needs. With the ability to build custom integrations for existing software or to create entirely new apps to fill gaps in the business’ IT strategy, ServiceNow makes it easy to fulfill all of a business’ needs from a single platform.

This helps to streamline workflows and reduce friction in the organization to increase business agility.

Breaking Down Organizational Silos

In any organization, it is easy for silos to form where specific departments, teams, or even individuals work independently and don’t share information. This creates situations where one department doesn’t know what the others are doing. Also, they may not be able to appropriately prioritize their own efforts to mesh with overall organizational objectives.

Having separate platforms for different departments’ IT solutions can make this problem worse.

By providing an “all-in-one” platform for important business applications and data (including communication and task management apps) ServiceNow integrations can help break down organizational silos. With easier sharing of important data and universal business workflows, employees can put their activities in a wider organizational context and work towards the company’s most important objectives.

Increasing Business Agility Through Automation

Automation is a key process for increasing business agility. Creating custom applications or integrating existing apps with the ability to automate core business workflows can provide an enormous increase to efficiency and responsiveness throughout the organization.

By providing a single platform that makes it easy to integrate (or create) business automation apps, ServiceNow can improve business agility. The ability to embed AI and analytics solutions into nearly any app makes it easier to anticipate issues and make smarter business decisions.

Whether you’re looking to simplify service operations management, make service delivery faster, or improve responsiveness to common issues, automation with the ServiceNow platform can be invaluable to your business goals.

3 Common Challenges During a ServiceNow Implementation

As beneficial as a ServiceNow implementation can be for an organization, implementing any new cloud platform will always come with some challenges. Some of the more common challenges for implementing ServiceNow in an organization include:

1. Resistance to Change in the Organization

For any change in an organization, there is bound to be at least some resistance to that change. Resistance to change is nothing new. In fact, there are articles on dealing with resistance to change from publications like Harvard Business Review going back to the 1960s—well before the “cloud” existed as a concept.

When implementing ServiceNow, especially in a larger organization, it’s important to account for the fact that some individuals may be opposed to the change. Finding ways to highlight the benefits of the change to these individuals can help to increase adoption and ensure a smoother transition from the legacy system to the ServiceNow-enabled solution.

2. Managing Internal Requests for Change

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the resistance to change challenge, some departments or teams in the organization may be too eager to adopt a new solution. With the ability to create custom apps on or integrate new enterprise applications into the platform, ServiceNow can create an opportunity for departments to make an overwhelming number of change requests.

Creating custom solutions for every business process can delay a ServiceNow implementation and make internal business workflows more complicated. So, it’s important to have a way to prioritize the most important changes that will have the largest positive impact on business operations. This is something that an IT service management consultant with experience in ServiceNow implementations could help with. Additionally, having a priority list of business objectives could be useful for assessing which change requests are critical, useful, or not important as needed.

3. Lack of Expertise in the ServiceNow Platform

One of the biggest challenges in deploying a new IT platform is that there may not be enough people with expertise in that platform to properly manage it. This is as true for ServiceNow as it is for any other platform. Because of the sheer scope of features and solutions available through the ServiceNow platform, it’s unlikely that any one person in the organization will have a comprehensive understanding of every possible function and interaction.

This is why it’s important to work with ServiceNow partners who have a depth of experience in using the platform to achieve a variety of business goals. In many cases, a ServiceNow consultant may have relevant experience and knowledge that can help identify the perfect tool to use for a given situation or streamline a specific process to increase business agility.

So, why would your organization need to use ServiceNow consulting services? The primary reason is to help manage some of the common challenges of a ServiceNow implementation—such as the aforementioned lack of expertise or helping to manage change requests.

However, that isn’t the primary business benefit of leveraging an experienced ServiceNow partner. Given enough time and budget, most organizations would be able to handle these challenges eventually. But, the issue is that no organization has unlimited time and budget to spend on a new IT platform.

Simply getting an IT transformation done “eventually” isn’t enough to ensure the kind of business agility needed to stay competitive in an ever-changing world. Markets are constantly shifting—and the businesses that can stay ahead of trends and adapt to them the fastest will have a competitive edge over the ones that cannot.

Additionally, no organization has a truly unlimited budget that can endlessly absorb cost overruns on IT implementation projects. Being able to complete an IT transformation efficiently by staying on-budget is important for avoiding excessive resource drains that can compromise other business operations. It’s also important to ensure that the cost of implementing a new IT solution doesn’t outweigh the potential benefits.

This is where having the support of a dedicated and experienced ServiceNow consultant can help.

An MSP can provide numerous benefits to your business by acting as a ServiceNow consultant:

• Streamlining ServiceNow Solutions to Improve Efficiency. ServiceNow has a massive list of features and integrations to sort through—not to mention the ability to create custom applications on the platform. This can make it difficult to pick the best features and tools. An experienced ServiceNow consultant can help you choose the optimal tools and integrations to use for your business based on your existing processes and most important goals.
• Providing Solutions for Common Implementation Challenges. From integrating legacy apps and systems to providing strategies for improving end user buy-in, a ServiceNow implementation partner can be invaluable for overcoming common challenges. Odds are that if you’re facing an issue, your MSP has helped other businesses with that same issue and has a relevant solution for it (or can create one more quickly and easily than your own IT team could internally).
• Expert Assessment of IT Needs. To achieve maximum ROI, it’s important to run IT like a business. An expert implementation partner can help your business assess its current IT resources, stakeholder needs, and its overall readiness for an IT transformation. This can prove invaluable for optimizing the transition to a new cloud-based software platform, as it allows you to prepare the most important tools and resources for your needs.
• Improving Time to Value. The time it takes to start seeing an ROI from your new enterprise software and service platform can be critical. Long service deployment timelines delay the ROI that your business can get from a new software platform. A ServiceNow implementation partner can help streamline the process to improve time-to-value so you can realize ROI sooner rather than later.
• Helping Improve Automation. Automation is a critical tool for streamlining business workflows and improving productivity-to-cost ratios for every business unit. An experienced ServiceNow partner can help you find the best ways to automate key processes using the platform so you save time without creating confusion or errors in key business processes.

Contender Solutions is an elite ServiceNow consulting partner that has extensive experience in helping businesses get the most out of their ServiceNow implementation. Our Contender Activate IT advisory service brings decades of experience in enterprise transformation to bear for our customers.

We have a well-established playbook of ServiceNow implementation best practices that emphasizes organizational design and roles, business processes and operations, key performance metrics reporting and data, testing, and automation. We have helped numerous businesses in different industries achieve their IT goals on the ServiceNow platform while improving time-to-value, minimizing costs, and setting the business up for continued long-term success.

Are you ready to transform your IT? Do you need help creating a roadmap to implementing ServiceNow that maximizes its benefits while minimizing costs? Reach out to the team at Contender to get started!