Tell us a bit about your background and experience with ServiceNow.
I’ve worked in the ServiceNow platform since 2015, having worked in large environments like Qantas and Origin Energy as they adopted ServiceNow and transformed how they operate. I joined AC3 in 2019 as the ServiceNow Practice was gaining momentum. My background lies heavily in IT service management, SIAM (service integration and management) and technology transformation, which set me up to progress further as the ServiceNow Platform started to grow and mature, and adoption was accelerated.
What is ServiceNow and how has AC3 established its ServiceNow Practice?
ServiceNow is a technology platform that aims to digitise, integrate and automate the flow of work throughout an organisation. For a long time, there was a misconception that ServiceNow was just another Service Desk tool, but over the years it truly has become the platform of platforms, with solutions spanning IT, HR, finance, facilities, procurement, project and portfolio management, governance risk and compliance, customer service management... and the list goes on.
ServiceNow segments its capabilities into various product lines – IT Workflows, Employee Workflows and Customer Workflows. More recently, ServiceNow is starting to mature in offering solutions based on industry segments, as it aims to truly evolve the ways in which highly regulated industries operate.
AC3 started its ServiceNow journey back in 2015. We adopted ServiceNow as an internal tool to service our customers, but soon had customers enquire if we offered ServiceNow services. As such, being a growing managed service provider across IT, we assessed and established Domain Separation within our AC3 ServiceNow instance and started onboarding customers to leverage the platform’s power. This approach involves carving out a protected section (domain) of our ServiceNow instance for a specific customer. It’s particularly beneficial for customers who don’t want their own instance, don’t meet ServiceNow Minimum Annual Contract Value guidelines or want to tap into a best practice solution with no effort based on AC3’s best practice ITIL Processes. In 2018/19, a decision was made to move our ServiceNow capabilities into its own practice due to increasing market adoption, and I joined the organisation in April 2019 with the core goal of growing and scaling our capabilities.
When I joined, we were playing heavily in the IT service management capabilities of ServiceNow and were a ‘Specialised’ partner of ServiceNow. We soon moved to Bronze partnership status in 2019 and, as the partnership model evolved, we moved to Premier. We are now sitting at Elite partnership status, which is as high as we can go without being a multinational.
Over the past few years, our focus has been on broadening our skillsets through certification, platform coverage and what we offer to our customers. We have implemented capabilities across a large portion of the platform, and this continues to grow as the platform expands on the back of ServiceNow acquisitions and innovation to broaden platform capabilities.
What does AC3 do in the way of ServiceNow and how does it help organisations within the ServiceNow Platform?
Being an IT managed services provider, our highest volume of work and what we truly excel at are the areas associated with enabling IT service management, SIAM, IT operations management (ITOM), strategic portfolio management (previously ITBM), security operations and strategic platform integrations. This is our sweet spot, as it aligns closely with our core business. We have had the pleasure of contributing to the enablement of large transformations in these areas to enable our customers as they evolve their operating models, and harness more of ServiceNow to unlock that journey.
We are seeing a growing focus for our customers in driving greater governance, technology life cycle management, cyber resilience, efficiencies in delivery and cost management in how IT functions. We are also seeing increasing demand for the SecOps suite and have completed multiple deployments of vulnerability response to aid in cyber security processes.
Plus, we deliver a lot of solutions via the ServiceNow app engine. These are generally to meet bespoke requirements for line of business teams, and harness the ServiceNow workflow engine to digitise the way in which they operate. We migrate teams away from legacy ways of working – email-driven work assignment, shared mailboxes, paper forms, disparate knowledge management sources – and arm them with capabilities that aid in the flow of work, greater customer engagement, the ability to truly report on demand, performance and decision-making.
We also deliver managed services for the ServiceNow platform to support organisations in driving greater adoption of what they are licensed for, keeping the lights on and driving ongoing iterative change in ServiceNow to underpin continual improvement efforts. Our managed services are a growing part of what we do as organisations look to get more out of the platform and to digitise ways of working. This is offered for a customer’s own ServiceNow environment, or within the AC3 ServiceNow environment where a customer may maintain a tenancy and adopt AC3’s best practice processes.
What are some of the most common challenges you see in how organisations leverage ServiceNow?
Quite often, we enter an already established ServiceNow platform, and it isn’t in a healthy state. It is heavily customised, the security posture of the platform is low and there isn’t any real governance of how the platform is managed and maintained. These issues are the direct result of now aligning to ServiceNow best practices and have a material impact on the future adoption of new features and drawn-out upgrade processes.
How do integrations into ServiceNow help to add more value to AC3’s customers?
We see ourselves as a specialist integration partner within ServiceNow, having integrated over 50 different technology platforms into it. ServiceNow makes it really easy to establish seamless integrations between platforms with pre-built APIs and service graph connectors to enable integrations quicker than ever before. It has never been easier to support the flow of work between technology systems and to enable a federated environment – be it internally or with service providers. Quite often, we help customers on the journey to enable a 360-degree view of their operations and performance, whether it be by ingesting data into ServiceNow or by extracting data from ServiceNow into a broader data solution or data lake to consolidate data-sets.
Where do you see organisations maximising value from the ServiceNow platform over the coming years?
As ServiceNow continues to acquire organisations that contribute to its product stack within ServiceNow, we’ll see an increasing use of machine learning and AI driven capabilities across the market. As ServiceNow continues to factor these capabilities into the platform, this will also make them easier to use. It may mean organisations will need to adopt a higher level of licensing for certain capabilities, which unfortunately is often a hinderance to adoption. I believe, though, we will see organisations weighing up the opportunity cost of not pursuing these AI and machine learning capabilities so that their people can focus on the work that isn’t as administration heavy, and has higher value for the people they serve. The market is dictating organisations to do more with less, and automation is the best way to achieve this to remain competitive.
What are you most proud of since joining AC3 and leading up the ServiceNow Practice?
Without a doubt, I’m most proud of what the team have achieved as a collective. As the AC3 ServiceNow Practice has scaled and broadened our platform coverage, we’ve had to adapt and evolve how we operate as a team and constantly challenge the status quo, and we’ve been recognised in the industry for our work in the way of an ARN Innovation Award and also named as a Rising Star by ISG in the ServiceNow ecosystem. It hasn’t been easy, and we’ve had to do a lot of things for the first time within this fast-moving platform, but we’ve remained determined and held true to our culture and values. My team inspire me every day through their actions and interactions with our customers. They truly represent what we are about at AC3.