Just how important is your choice of an implementation partner?
According to ServiceNow, “Your choice of an implementation partner is just as important as your choice to use the platform, but many organizations don’t put enough effort into properly vetting partner quality during the selection process. Finding and selecting the right partner is critical.”
Banking CIOs and VPs have a lot on their plates. There’s competitive pressure from established banks and up-and-coming fintechs, the challenge to reduce costs, and the pressing need to provide streamlined and secure workflows across the front- and back-offices. Your ServiceNow implementation partner shouldn’t be another challenge to juggle; it should be a simple addition that makes your life easier.
Have you chosen a partner you’re not sure about? If so, see if they have these three crucial qualities. A partner with these attributes will make your job simpler:
A Partner Helps You Plan for the Future
When it comes to partners, banks need someone who will help them plan for the future. If a partner helps implement ServiceNow ITSM solely to solve the challenges of today, that leaves CIOs and VPs high and dry when it comes time to expand the platform to ITBM or CSM or reconfigure the instance to face new challenges. Banks and their partners need to work together to create a roadmap to the ideal future.
With our deep experience in the full suite, Crossfuze approaches projects with our banking clients by starting out with a roadmap engagement. These sessions can be more strategic (dealing with the platform's capabilities) or more tactical (dealing with process areas), depending on the client’s specific needs. We decide together on a future state roadmap, give guidance on governance and process enhancement, and discover which platform capabilities and process areas would be most helpful to the bank.
One client, for example, has found that as their company changes, their Crossfuze account executives change along with it. Rather than offering a solution that fits the company at the beginning, Crossfuze makes sure they are delivering solutions that will support the company as they move towards their ideal future.
“It feels really good not only to see what we can do and accomplish in the near future, but what . . . we didn’t think about and we know that the platform [can bring] to us,” says Nathalie Pougno, the company’s director of enterprise applications. “And I’m sure that Crossfuze will help us to get where we need to get. It’s really looking for the dreams and getting after those dreams.”
Recommended Webinar: Strengthening Operational Resilience in Banking
A Partner Helps You Develop Long-Term Alignment with Business Objectives and Processes
What would you say are some of the top business goals for your bank? Whether these goals include providing streamlined and secure workflows, developing a robust security system, or anything in between, your instance should be aligned with these goals. Is it?
If you’re not sure your answer is yes, that’s okay. There are simple course corrections banks can make to ensure their instance is aligned with their business goals. It starts by zooming out to see a business-wide scope. It helps to ask these questions:
- How would the bank as a whole prioritize its business objectives?
- Do current business processes support these objectives?
- If you could make one adjustment to your instance to have it better support the bank’s priorities, what would it be?
- If you could make one adjustment to your instance to have it better support the bank’s business processes, what would it be?
Once we take a look at questions like these, we’ve found we’re able to make strategic and tactical recommendations that help with compliance and other challenges while still moving away from a highly customized instance.
Finastra, a financial software company, utilized Crossfuze’s Smart Launch for ServiceNow ITSM. They found that taking a look at their overall business objectives and processes helped them avoid a situation in which they were stuck with code that was highly customized and difficult to support.
Crossfuze “make[s] our life easier,” says Gary Collins, group leader of the ITSM Platform at Finastra. “They’re able to bring some of those solutions to the table that help us facilitate some difficult problems that we have organizationally. And we’re able to take those, work with those, and then ultimately turn those into good solutions for our organization. So it just removes some of the thinking on our side around some of those difficult problem-solving situations that we might otherwise have to do.”
A Partner Helps You Develop Long-Term Alignment with Business Objectives and Processes
Once you’ve implemented the platform and are sure that you are capturing the full value of the platform, how do you ensure that you continue to capture that value?
ServiceNow explains that “to capture full value from service delivery, the entire organization needs to reorient to a services mindset and embrace change. Robust and continuous organizational change management is needed to ensure that groups do not fall back into old ways of working, and continue to understand and advocate for the value that ServiceNow provides.”
The best partners don’t just help implement the platform and then leave CIOs and VPs to figure out the rest on their own. The best partners do stick around to help with platform advocacy. As ServiceNow implementation partners, we aim to help our banking clients manage organizational change and improve adoption and integration within their organization. We work with leaders to decide on immediately actionable phases, deliver health-check results, and provide future considerations to help them continuously improve technology infrastructure and cut costs.
How do you know if you’ve chosen the right ServiceNow implementation partner?
“You’ll have a partner who delivered a successful ServiceNow implementation that resulted in achieving all or part of your organization’s vision for transformation and desired business outcomes,” according to a ServiceNow Success Playbook about partners. “Your initial ServiceNow implementation may be the start of a long-term, strategic relationship.” The best partners help you plan for the future, develop long-term alignment with business objectives and processes, and manage organizational change. At Crossfuze, we’re here to help banks take the platform to the next level in manageable steps that make a significant impact. It can be as easy getting a little extra support through our ManagedNow offering. Reach out today to learn how we can help your bank take incremental steps to take the next step forward.
