Your ServiceNow investment went live. But did it deliver value?
Going live with ServiceNow is an important milestone, but how do you know whether the investment has paid off? Sofigate’s Issam Sersar explains why organisations need to look beyond implementation and focus on how the platform improves their business.
When a ServiceNow implementation goes live, it’s often a moment of celebration for everyone involved, marking the successful delivery of a project that may have taken months of planning and hard work. However, even when everything works as expected, there’s still the question of whether the investment has delivered the improvements the business originally set out to achieve.
According to Issam Sersar, this is something organisations often struggle to answer.
“Most customers don’t set up metrics against the business case. It gets delivered, implemented, goes live, and that’s defined as success in technical terms,” Issam explains.
Without a clear way to measure the results, organisations may know that their new platform works, but have little evidence of whether it has improved the way they operate.
A new platform won’t fix an old way of working
Issam describes how organisations sometimes replace their old ticketing systems with ServiceNow to benefit from automation, self-service and more efficient IT service management. However, rather than taking the opportunity to improve their processes, some choose to replicate the way they have always worked, bringing their existing inefficiencies into the new platform.
This means organisations can end up investing in a more advanced system without making the changes needed to get the most out of it. For those already using ServiceNow, it’s therefore worth considering whether the platform has genuinely improved how the business operates, or whether it has mainly replaced the technology used to manage the same processes.
Business value needs measurement and ownership
Consider an organisation investing in ServiceNow to improve incident management, with the aim of reducing delays, automating incident routing or improving service levels. While ServiceNow provides the capabilities to support these goals, demonstrating whether the investment has delivered the expected improvements becomes difficult without a clear understanding of how the previous processes performed.
According to Issam, another common challenge is maintaining the connection between business strategy and technology implementation. Management sets the direction, business teams translate it into requirements and IT is responsible for delivering the solution. As responsibilities move between different parts of the organisation, the original objectives can gradually lose focus.
To avoid this, business leaders need to stay involved throughout the implementation, with clear responsibilities and regular communication between management, business teams and IT. This helps ensure that the technology continues to support the original business goals and that its performance is measured against the outcomes the organisation set out to achieve.
AI will accelerate your processes. Are they the right ones?
As organisations increasingly introduce AI and automation into their ServiceNow environments, it’s worth considering whether the processes they want to automate are working as intended in the first place.
“If you’re going the wrong way and you use AI, you’ll just go the wrong way faster,” Issam points out.
AI can take over routine activities and free up specialists to focus on more valuable work, but automating an inefficient process won’t necessarily improve it. The same applies to poor-quality data, which can undermine the results organisations expect from AI.
If you’re going the wrong way and you use AI, you’ll just go the wrong way faster
Issam also believes organisations should approach AI agents much like new employees, with clear responsibilities, proper onboarding, performance expectations and regular reviews. Whether agents are developed internally or together with a partner, organisations should retain ownership and continue evaluating how well they perform.
Looking further ahead, Issam encourages organisations to imagine a competitor entering their market with AI at the heart of its operations, free from the legacy systems and technical debt that established businesses often carry. How would such a competitor organise its work, and which existing processes would it choose to do differently?
This perspective is particularly relevant for organisations investing in ServiceNow, as it encourages them to look beyond improving individual processes and consider whether their current ways of working still make sense.
Ultimately, getting lasting value from ServiceNow means continuing to question and improve how the business operates, even after a successful implementation. A useful starting point is to consider whether today’s processes support the business as it is now or the one it wants to become.
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