The San Diego release of ServiceNow was made available to all customers last week. AC3 had the opportunity to play with this release for a few months as part of the early access program. In this article, I want to draw attention to three features that I feel demonstrate ServiceNow delivering value by connecting systems, process, and data to drive alignment and efficiency in the enterprise.
As can be expected with each mainline release of ServiceNow, many improvements and additions have been made across the platform. While much talk surrounds the new user interfaces, which I agree are impressive, I wanted to look at how ServiceNow is strengthening its promise of being a “platform of platforms”. The value of ServiceNow is never more evident, when it can remove the inefficiencies from hand-offs between different teams, processes and tools and provide insights into how these streamlined services are performing. Here are three highlights for me that expand on the theme that ServiceNow is a platform of platforms.
Cloud Provisioning and Governance
More enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud strategy to distribute their workloads, optimise costs, and reduce risk. What can be gained by not placing all our eggs in one basket, can be lost by introducing new challenges to align different providers who each have their own native management tools, differing products and skills required to operate their platforms. ServiceNow’s Cloud Provisioning and Governance application seeks to address this by providing a management layer over these public cloud providers. Due to this layer being on the Now platform it can use data already in ServiceNow to apply the enterprise’s unique business context and established channels of engagement and reporting.
In this release, CPG has extended its reach into multiple cloud providers with support for Terraform templates. Terraform is widely used to define infrastructure as code to manage the provisioning of cloud resources and infrastructure through configuration files. By adding support for Terraform, ServiceNow can now act as a central place to discover, initiate, and track provisioning tasks in Azure Cloud, AWS Cloud, IBM Cloud and VMWare Cloud. Requests for resources can be submitted from a catalogue item that proceeds through a data-driven approval process that is consistent across all cloud providers. Consequently, consolidated reporting, such as business unit utilisation, whether it be aimed towards charge-back or simple show-back is also made possible across multiple providers.
While the Cloud Provisioning and Governance application can be hard to justify in single cloud environments due to typically good native tools, it begins to make a solid case for those enterprises adopting multi-cloud solutions.
Alignment Planner Workspace
The IT Business Management suite has been renamed to Strategic Portfolio Management in San Diego. This is clearly a shift in focus from managing individual projects and agile teams to an offering that allows you to plan, deliver and track value across different project methodologies. The Alignment Planner Workspace is key to this capability and has seen significant improvements made in each release since it first appeared last year with the Quebec version of ServiceNow. The APW now integrates with records from Project Portfolio Management, Agile 2.0 and SAFe. It combines the Demands, Projects, and Epics from these methodologies into a roadmap view. These work items can be linked to a hierarchy of organisational, departmental, and business unit strategies to ensure all plans are aligned to the high-level initiatives of the organisation. I particularly like that organisational milestones and project milestones can be shown in the roadmap. This has enabled me to see targets and key dates set for my team against the milestones and key dates in each project they are working on. This, along with the completion progress of each project or epic shown in real time is providing me with insights into how we are performing towards our company’s goals. Implementing this only required work to add our hierarchy of strategies and goals, the integration with PPM and Agile simply worked. I must attest that this was not by accident but due to an ongoing commitment at AC3 to avoid and revert certain customisations in our ServiceNow instance. I have also welcomed the addition of an integration with Azure DevOps that allows Epics from ADO to be shown alongside other work items in the Alignment Planner Workspace. Azure DevOps is the first such integration and is likely due to the close partnership between ServiceNow and Microsoft. I anticipate the official Jira integration plugin will soon support this integration too and may even be easily adapted to work in its present version. Now that these plugins are released on the ServiceNow Store they can benefit from more frequent updates than the bi-annual mainline release. So, if your teams are using Jira it is advisable to wait for the official APW support rather than customise. In summary, enterprises using different delivery methodologies and tools will benefit the most from this new tool. It grants a holistic view across all delivery streams in real time that would not otherwise be possible. But even for those organisations using one delivery method, the Alignment Planner Workspace is a powerful tool for communicating an organisation’s key goals, underpinning business unit goals and the initiatives planned and in action that serve to meet those goals.
Digital Portfolio Management
Continuing this theme of connecting tools, platforms and streams of work brings me to the Digital Portfolio Management application. This new tool connects data from different ServiceNow applications in the Strategic Portfolio Management (formerly ITBM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) product suites to show the full lifecycle of applications and services in a central location. Using the definition of Business Applications, Services and Service Offerings from the Common Services Data Model (CSDM), the Digital Portfolio Management application will show activity surrounding each service in the context of the plan-build-run lifecycle of those services. Stakeholders can view a portfolio of services that they own or care about. Here they will see aggregated metrics for service availability, open incidents, service subscribers, and customer satisfaction scores for services in the portfolio. They can dive into each service to see more detail in three views aligned to the lifecycle stages of; plan, build & run.
The ‘plan’ view pulls roadmaps from Alignment Planner Workspace, backlogs from Agile 2.0, ideas from the Idea Portal, demands and upcoming projects from Project Portfolio Management into one page. In the ‘build’ view we are presented with performance metrics on active projects from Project Portfolio Management and change requests from ITSM. With further integrations, we can even add Changes created from DevOps teams operating in ServiceNow or external tools such as Azure and Jira. This view will also show any Improvement Initiatives in action from the Continuous Improvement Management application. Finally, in the ‘run’ view we can see insights into the service operations. Metrics for service availability, open incidents, problems, service level agreements (SLAs), catalogue activity and service subscribers are retrieved from IT Service Management. Also, customer satisfaction scores from Surveys and Assessments are shown here too. These metrics can each be clicked into and explored further to show how they have changed over time.
The Digital Portfolio Management application is a powerful tool that connects multiple ServiceNow Applications to provide a service-centric view of plans, activity, and performance. If not already obvious, it does require a heavy investment in the ServiceNow platform. This includes the adoption of multiple applications in the SPM and ITSM suites and reaching the ‘Run’ maturity level in the CSDM. Many enterprises will already be on this path and can take immediate value from activating Digital Portfolio Management. Those that do, may find this provides the stimulus to drive further adoption within the enterprise.
While I am very excited for the new user interfaces in San Diego, I am equally looking forward to these features that really leverage the power of a platform that can connect information and action from different sources to drive efficiency, consistency, and alignment in the enterprise. Here I’ve described solutions to provide a single management interface for multi-cloud environments, roadmap planning across multiple delivery methods and a workspace to explore plans, projects, and operations as they relate to business services. It is likely for most customers that these solutions build upon existing deployments that have settled and who are looking to push their level of maturity. It is equally likely that customisations made to ServiceNow products will need to be identified and managed to successfully implement these solutions which requires a trusted partner to navigate. If these are of interest to you at your organisation, or you have already started the journey then I would love to hear from you.