What and Why ServiceNow ITOM?

Recently I was asked why a customer should care about ServiceNow ITOM and what value can it provide. Simply put, knowledge is power. 

It made me think of an infographic I came across a few years ago to try and explain the concept. It all centres around the CMDB, and how ServiceNow ITOM can take simple data and turn it into Wisdom. 

Multiple processes within IT use the CMDB to make key informed business-critical decisions, from understanding risk within Change Management to ensuring your licenses are compliant in Asset Management, to understanding what vulnerabilities need patching within SecOps.

At its rawest form, CMDB is data: a list of CIs (Configuration Items) that exist within a database and may tell you things like how many Windows 2012 servers you have within your estate so you can plan on end-of-life support.

Adding relationships to the CIs transforms Data into information. Your service desk can leverage the information within ITSM to identify dependencies and relationships between CIs in processes such as Incident, Problem and Change Management. In a CMDB, relationships matter!

ServiceNow Discovery

ServiceNow Discovery automatically integrates data into your CMDB, creating and updating CIs and their relationships OOTB, so the Information can be used within the supporting processes. All with no human touch or error.

But, how do we transform that information into Knowledge so it can be used in supporting processes like Change? ServiceNow Service Mapping takes that Information and provides a sprinkle of business context, giving you a better sense of the impact outages have on the business so you can develop strategies to prioritise remediation activities by business impact.

Wisdom in an IT organisation is usually held within those expensive bottleneck resources you can never have enough of and are never available when you need them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could bottle all that wisdom of 3-line subject matter expertise into one platform? ServiceNow allows you to put wisdom where you need it whilst allowing you to mix it with the power of Artificial Intelligence.

By integrating seamlessly with your monitoring and logging tools we can consume large amounts of data, reduce the noise, and make sense of it quickly. And in some cases, we can prevent an issue before it occurs. Combined with the integration with your ITSM data, ServiceNow ITOM can start to suggest what may be the cause of the issue. Quite simply, the knowledge and wisdom of a 3^rd line support help your 1^st line support agents solve issues quicker.

At this point, you can start to see value from your ITOM investment, when you can automatically detect and correct an issue without human touch. Fundamentally it all comes down to data and having the right data at the right time to make key decisions about running your business. It is not essential, but it certainly helps if it is automated, integrated and near real-time.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to talk about this wealth of data without discussing Data Governance. Many customers become concerned and overwhelmed with the level of automation and data that ITOM brings. However, there are tools available to you OOTB that can help manage this data. The CMDB Health Dashboard provides insight into the health and integrity of your dashboard, I would highly recommend using it regardless of if you are implementing ServiceNow ITOM. Furthermore, the Common Service Data Model provides prescriptive guidance on how to model your CMDB so you can make the most of your data.

So, next time you think of ServiceNow ITOM, think of it as a set of tools in your armoury to help build, maintain, and run your CMDB and business. Automation, Integration, AI, Best Practices.

Work with Crossfuze, a ServiceNow Elite Partner

If you’d like to see how this can all work for your organisation, reach out to my team at letstalk@crossfuze.com. As a true journey partner, we’re with you every step of the way on your digital transformation journey.

Image Source: https://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm