05/29/2014 | Cloud & Operations
In late April, over 6,000 people gathered in San Francisco for ServiceNow’s Knowledge14 conference. With more than 300 sessions, attendees had extensive opportunities to participate in both technical and business-related tracks, discussing everything from administration to enabling non-IT services.
Shawn McCoy, AIM’s Principal Consultant in ITSM strategy and measurement who exhibited at Knowledge14, shares the following high-level observations:
1. The emphasis was on becoming a service-oriented enterprise
From an overall messaging standpoint, the conference really emphasized that IT is moving beyond the walls of the traditional and becoming a stronger enabler of services to the business. This message resonated with everyone we had a chance to speak with. IT has a general tendency for being very technology oriented. There’s a lot of emphasis on infrastructural and operational concerns, but businesses also need to have service orientation. It’s the quality of services that really differentiate the great IT shops from the good ones.
2. Eureka, the upcoming release of ServiceNow, was on display everywhere and looks great
All the labs were done on Eureka, the upcoming release of ServiceNow. The platform was on display everywhere and there was quite a bit of interest being generated. There were a lot of great usability improvements. One of many things we saw — and really liked — was the new Business Services Map (BSM) visualizations against the CMDB content. That’s really going to help teams with improved impact and risk awareness.
3. The CMDB (configuration management database) is going to be more useful
It is clear that ServiceNow is working hard toward making the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) more useful and anything that helps clients better leverage their CMDB is something we’re always interested in learning more about. As mentioned, visualizations have improved a lot and in general things are looking more organized, with better integration of various CMDB elements.
4. Performance analytics are now integrated
Before coming to the conference, we wanted more information on performance analytics as ServiceNow had just acquired Mirror42 and we were very curious about the direction they would be taking with that product. From what we saw, we are very happy with how far they’ve come in such a short period of time. Mirror42 is now integrated, along with all the other applications, and ServiceNow has made a lot of progress in aligning it to the paradigms of the platform. The look and feel is so much more native to what everyone is used to, which will ease the learning curve on administrators and implementers needing to transition or build capability.
With the market continuing to shift toward optimized service experiences, IT is in a unique leadership position to take service management to the next level.
As a Partner of ServiceNow with a core competency in ITSM, AIM Consulting provides:
- Assessments & Roadmaps for the strategic evaluation of people, process and technology challenges and/or opportunities that exist within the organization’s current environment, with a focus on producing a short- and longer-term roadmap to achieve desired outcomes.
- Process Design & Optimization to model better, more efficient processes that reduce bottlenecks, defects, waste and lead times.
- Technology Implementation that delivers new technology or updates existing technology based on desired outcomes and objectives to be achieved through a proven, agile approach to deployment.
- Service Quality Measurement for identification and delivery of necessary controls and metrics for maintaining quality and visibility of service performance, delivering downtime, response, error, and scalability optics through visual elements such as dashboards and/or scorecards.
