SITUATION & BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The IT Service Management (ITSM) team of a large nonprofit American health insurance company had a solid understanding of its applications and the infrastructure they ran on but wanted to better understand the interrelationships between them.
Their development teams utilize configuration items (CIs) such as computers, servers, storage devices, and networking gear as the underlying infrastructure that leverages the resources of data storage and memory. In an efficient system, those resources are leveraged to use as much capacity as possible when they’re needed and turned off when they’re not needed.
Most companies, if they have a good view of those individual components, can see how they operate individually. But they have more difficulty viewing the interrelationships between components and determining what application each component is serving. Until recently, the ability to see these interdependencies and relationships—called application mapping—was not available, but recent updates to ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) products now provide this ability for enterprise-wide service management.
The ITSM team, which had been running ServiceNow for several years, learned of these enhancements and decided to invest in the new technology. However, they needed help with configuring ServiceNow for these capabilities in the enterprise, and based on an existing relationship with AIM Consulting, asked AIM to lead the project.
SOLUTION
AIM conducted interviews with stakeholders to determine their needs and objectives, and performed a thorough analysis of the company’s development environment and applications that needed to be represented in the project.
There were over a dozen major applications in total. Following the formulation of a design and delivery plan, an AIM ServiceNow architect and developer configured ServiceNow’s new components for the company’s environment to provide a more holistic view of their CIs and their interrelationships.
AIM also built demos so stakeholders and workers could provide additional feedback during implementation of the final product and earned the company’s trust to work independently, managing the work while maintaining regular communication with stakeholders. The ServiceNow components were released with no issues or surprises.
RESULTS
With the new ability for application mapping to the various CIs, and a better upstream and downstream view of resources, the ITSM team can now quickly identify and address inefficiencies across the enterprise. The effect was like turning on a light in a dark room.
Over the long term, leveraging the new features with ServiceNow will lead to huge improvements to existing processes like incident management and change management, and being able to find root causes and understanding upstream and downstream impacts and issues across environments. The comprehensive view will also help to improve communication across organizations and enable stronger forecasting and planning. Additionally, with these enhancements, the ITSM group receives even more value from its existing ServiceNow investment.
Delighted with AIM Consulting’s ability to configure the new ServiceNow components expertly for its organization, the client continues to leverage AIM technology services in other departments.
