Case Study: Cloud & Operations
SITUATION & BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A high-performance running shoes, clothing, and accessories company had contracted with a large consulting firm that provided ServiceNow cloud hosting, but was unable to meet the needs of the client. While a more affordable hosting cost was provided, there were several significant challenges introduced:
- Limited access to customizing the instance: The company had limited admin access to the ServiceNow instance. With no ability to customize the platform to suit their needs, they were required to work with the provider to make any required change. Even small and common modifications to the instance, such as changes to forms, workflows, assignments, and notifications were impossible to make without assistance from the provider. This regularly resulted in changes taking weeks, rather than minutes or days, to find their way to production.
- High costs for service: The provider’s service rate to modify the instance exceeded $200/hour, regardless of the change. This was far too expensive for the company’s budget and the limited level of support being received.
- Increasing backlog: Because of the previous two reasons, change requests piled up, with no ability to address organizational business needs outside of the expensive change process available from the provider.
With the ServiceNow instance stagnating from the lack of change, confidence in the platform was degrading, to the point where only basic incident response and change management was being provided across the organization. Knowing that something had to change, the company reached out to AIM Consulting to provide a review and set of recommendations for how they could proceed.
SOLUTION
AIM Consulting worked with the company’s IT staff on determining the best course of action, which became the migration and hosting of their instance to ServiceNow. All existing data, functionality, and workflows were moved from the original provider and to ServiceNow in just over a month. Not only that, but AIM also enhanced their current capabilities by implementing several business needs as part of the migration effort.
AIM began by working with several members of the IT team to catalog existing ServiceNow workflows, pain points, and desired enhancements that would enable them to better leverage the platform across the organization. The team was using an inefficient change process that did not meet their needs, a consequence of being unable to sufficiently leverage the original hosted solution. Consequently, AIM included process enhancements in the new ServiceNow implementation plan. For instance, an agile approach was utilized to deliver the new functionality and continually incorporate feedback. Thanks to this, the team was able to keep in lock-step with the solution as it evolved.
The company also wanted to migrate their existing data to the new solution. AIM Consulting’s deep knowledge of ServiceNow enabled the migration of data from outside the UI, as the provider was not being responsive to supporting any migration efforts. Moreover, additional effort was required to ensure that data from custom tables were mapped to the correct fields in the new data store.
Subsequently, the new ServiceNow production environment was provisioned, and sub-instances cloned and data migrated across them. Following a fast and intense period of testing, the IT department signed off and their new ServiceNow environment was up and running.
As a standard final step, AIM provided a technical deep-dive with several IT workers on the basics of how the platform works from a technical and developer standpoint and left detailed documentation in place regarding the new change processes.
The implementation also included a badly needed ServiceNow UI update, upgrading the instance from the March 2015 Fuji release to the July 2017 Jakarta release, for the first time enabling a themed instance that aligns with the company’s corporate branding.
RESULTS
The company’s IT team is enjoying the independence and full administrative access over its new ServiceNow implementation and is showcasing it to the rest of the company, anticipating a growing user base in the coming months. The fresh UI will help to broaden the appeal of the new solution to the business.
Now that IT has the ability to enhance and customize ServiceNow workflows, IT can produce changes internally without lengthy response times from an expensive third party. With the change process more closely aligned with IT workflows, ticket numbers are increasing.
