You’ve done your due diligence and have already purchased or are considering investing in ServiceNow as your enterprise system of record. Maybe you’ve had ServiceNow for a while or maybe it’s a new addition to your organization. Either way, you’ve made a good decision and chosen a robust platform with multiple capabilities. But as we all know maximizing your investment is an intentional action and it starts with a solid foundation in IT best practices which we will highlight here for you. 

Often times, organizations purchase technology to solve a specific business issue without taking the time and effort necessary to assess their organizational goals. You can certainly use the Now Platform as a means to host your ticketing systems, but the platform was designed to transform your organization's business practices. In order to accomplish this, taking a step back to access well-known and widely used best practices should be the first step.

IT Best Practices Goals

IT teams must focus on clear objectives and goals to be of value to the organization they serve. 

• Maintain value creation as a critical component.
• Manage and stay aware of identifying risks associated with IT vulnerabilities. 
• Elevate the level of IT processes, performance, and satisfaction of those they serve. 
• Ensure maximum ROI is gained or measured for all technology investments.

Determine IT Effectiveness 

Take a hard look at your IT operations and ask yourself these questions:

• Have you examined how your organization operates from a best practice perspective?
• How well do your processes work?
• Do you need to improve your procedures?
• Can you configure the ServiceNow™ platform better to increase your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness in serving your customers?
• What would that look like from a business value standpoint?

Compare to Industry Best Practices

Service management frameworks and standards help organizations benchmark their operational activities against industry best practices. It is critical to ServiceNow related best practice reviews to have a deep knowledge and understanding of how to use these industry standard frameworks and standards:

• ITIL^® framework
• ISO/IEC 20000 Standard for IT Service Management
• The VeriSM^® Model

These will help your organization find potential gaps and identify opportunities for improvement. In most cases, these improvements can drive greater efficiencies in your ServiceNow instance yielding improved management of your service management activities, better reporting, and ultimately better decision making. A great path to more efficient operations and increasing your ServiceNow ROI!

What to Expect from a Best Practices Assessment 

An IT Best Practices Assessment is an objective examination of your current state of IT practices and process execution. Applying best practice principles, industry experts document your current state, record any gaps, and provide recommendations for improvement. Armed with this information, an organization can mature its service provisioning, quality, and overall efficiency.

• Interview key stake holders within your organization
• Gain an objective viewpoint
• Deliver a robust report containing gap analysis and recommendations for improvement

Benefits of an IT Best Practices Assessment

• Current state assessment
• Independent and objective insights
• Baseline for operational improvement
• Prioritized recommendations

About the Author

Greg Loftin is a former ServiceNow Manager with over 20 years of experience in the Enterprise Software consulting space. 

Based out of Denver, Colorado, Greg continues his work in helping businesses in the U.S. unlock the power of ServiceNow to improve your business and build stronger ROI for all of your technology investments.

Learn more about Greg in our recent Employee Spotlight or connect with him on Linkedin and ask him why he loves Denver so much.