Advancing service management across the enteprise

At its core, a service is defined as a transaction between a requester and a provider. Every department across the enterprise has its own set of services that can be automated to improve the service experience for both requesters and providers. Customers use ServiceNowto define, structure and automate those services, removing inefficient, manual processes, such as using emails and phone calls to get something done, or spreadsheets to track progress.

The new applications and capabilities in this ServiceNow release help organisations structure and enhance the service experience. It provides customers the ability to have a dedicated service catalog and knowledge base for every department. This release allows individual departments to fully configure their own business processes and workflows and to have dedicated analytics and dashboards to provide visibility into the work of each team.

The new applications, Marketing Service Management, Legal Service Management and Finance Service Management, come pre-populated with common service catalog items that each organisation can customise and augment based on their unique requirements. Employees can now use a single system of engagement to request services such as collateral from marketing, contract reviews from legal or purchase orders from finance. All requests are tracked in the system providing up-to-the-minute status, eliminating the need for employees to send dozens of emails to check on progress. Employees can either go straight to a specific department to find information or submit a request or they can search all departments through a new enterprise-wide service portal.

ServiceNow is also providing customers the ability to rapidly create new applications through a codeless, template-based process. The template provides three easy-to-use options:
· Basic Service Management includes a simple, fully functional request management and tracking application for services that do not require an approval workflow;
· Intermediate Service Management adds workflow-based approvals to the Basic Service Management application; and
· Advanced Service Management allows customers to fully configure the application with support for more robust workflow and tracking capabilities including managing parts inventories and remote workers.

This allows the entire organisation to leverage a common platform and approach to manage services and provides employees with a single point to engage all departments across the enterprise to get work done.

ServiceNow has introduced a new financial management application to help organisations better understand the connection between the costs associated with delivering the services across the enterprise and the value those services deliver. It helps organisations import actual IT costs sourced from the general ledger including those associated with business services, applications, projects and infrastructure. The application maps these costs to the consumption of these services across the organisation. ServiceNow Financial Management gives CIOs an interactive dashboard so that IT can drive dynamic cost allocation based on usage rather than an arbitrary “IT tax.”

This new release improves ServiceNow Facilities Service Management by providing new support for planned maintenance. This capability helps organisations execute and manage scheduled work, enhancing preventive maintenance and limiting downtime for physical assets. This release also provides a new integration with Workday to improve the automation around employee changes such as onboarding, off-boarding and employee moves. Finally, this release provides new collaboration capabilities that capture and integrate unstructured data such as chat, enhanced LiveFeed and threaded discussions.

“Our customers have been leading the charge to expand the use of ServiceNow across the enterprise to help improve business process for some time,” said Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, ServiceNow. “This release improves the ability to quickly stand up new services across practically any department and put the power of service management into the hands of business leaders across the enterprise.”

“My firm has eight departments rolling out automated workflows based on ServiceNow to replace our reliance on email,” said Rob Pickering, vice president of Information Services, AAA Allied Group. “For example, the marketing team is using ServiceNow to help manage creative services requests from across the enterprise, eliminating email for a more efficient and structured workflow, and gaining visibility into their entire process so they can prioritise and improve their business performance.”

“My organisation is using ServiceNow to streamline requests around student financial aid, project tracking, contract management and more,” said Link Alander, vice chancellor and CIO, Lone Star Community College. “Having one platform helps my team drive greater efficiencies to our business users. Now we get visibility into our services so we can measure and improve them. And most importantly, it delivers a vastly improved user experience to our students, staff and educators.”