Is it really so complicated?

During 15 years, we travelled the world to visit and guide our customers across 4 continents; always focused on the ServiceNow platform; supporting the transformation journey of 150+ clients.
After coming back home, most of the time, the first thing that came to our mind was: Why is it so complicated?

Obviously, we know where the complexity is coming from... but surprisingly it seems that very few people are really taking action and are really changing the way they manage their transformation.

What are the consequences of not changing the way we drive transformation?
We are not going to describe it with the common business challenges of high costs, low ROI, misalignment IT and business and so on, this is too generic. Let's be more pragmatic and close to the day-to-day activities around ServiceNow, what are the concrete consequences?

1. Spending millions of $ and thousands of hours in doing lot of things, keeping everyone busy... but at the end you feel that you have not achieved a lot of value. Did anyone feel that at any time?
   We have heard too much the common "at the end we do basic ticketing"

2. Killing the motivation of the teams, hearing about cool and innovating solutions all day and then they send them back to basic workflows, catalogues and portals for ITSM... repetitive and not very motivating.

3. Getting lot of pressure from the business users on the ServiceNow platform and you hear again and again about the bad user experience, the inability to meet their requirement, the slowness of implementation, the high costs of any project.

What are the causes of such complexity?
It depends on the situation of each organizations, but we would say that there are 3 main categories of organizations working with ServiceNow:

1. Organizations with low maturity where they tend to overcomplicate everything because a lack of experience on implementing such large platform like ServiceNow. They feel that if it is not done exactly as they need then they cannot work with it. They feel that they are very special and their business is like no other, so they need a platform totally customized for them.
   Many are saying "we don't want to customize", but reality is that they over customize again and again.

2. Organizations with high maturity where they tend to overrate the knowledge that they have on ServiceNow. They hire a ServiceNow architect, they assign a platform owner and they drive the transformation themselves. "Why do I need external help? I have an architect" but the reality is that the knowledge is limited, outdated most of the time because the architect doesn't have time to focus truly on the technology and the platform and struggles most of the time with internal complexity, meetings, business requirements... when does the architect have time to learn and be up-to-date with the platform?

3. Organizations with medium maturity that already understand that they need to keep it standard and simple but the pressure of the organization and business is just pushing them to do again and again the wrong things and they don't know how to control it and keep it on track.

We understand all these situations because we have been working with 150+ ServiceNow clients, all industries, worldwide.
The main problem in the market? Talent... lot of technical implementers but very few people who really can guide you and build a strong architecture, linked to clear business outcomes, understanding the importance of UX, the importance of organizational change management and the governance of the platform.

This is why we have created The now Advisors, we fill the GAP, we provide what is missing; an independent company who has only one objective: providing the best ServiceNow outcomes to your business. We don't recommend with an objective to sell implementation services, we don't implement.

What is missing?

• Strong architecture and governance layer. The demands from the business must go through an experienced governance layer to evaluate, assess and propose the solution. The solution will not only meet the requirements, it will exceed the expectations.

• People and Process. Focusing only in technology will just create frustration with your business users. They don't really care about technology, they care about experience.

• Get the right knowledge to manage the ServiceNow Platform. This is not about coding, development or javascript. It's about leveraging everything available on the platform, which is a lot.

• Measure, show value and sell it internally. If you cannot measure it, then it will be always about perception. Measure what you do and what you achieve, and do your internal selling.

We recommend based on the best business outcomes for you, because this is the only way that we provide value, guiding you and making sure that you avoid doing the same mistakes that others already made.