ServiceNow is constantly improving the service delivery process and has started to evolve every business unit as a strategic business partner to deliver better cost to value. ServiceNow& has transformed IT as an active and strategic business entity with Strategic Portfolio Management (formerly ITBM) module. ServiceNow SPM elevates the IT department with a business-driven methodology to streamline efforts in line with business goals and drive overall business value and success.
IT Team Challenges Solved by ServiceNow SPM
- Understanding and mapping out ambiguous business goals
- Prioritizing business needs to maximize returns
- Channelizing business investments
- Driving business transformation
- Cross verifying investments to ensure they are generating value and meeting goals
- Making sure high costs of developing, managing and administering IT is proportional to the value created
- Projecting return on value for the costs incurred
- Understanding the total value brought to the organization from all business units
What is ServiceNow SPM?
As defined by ServiceNow, Strategic Portfolio Management helps IT demonstrate value to the organization and rationalize investments to focus more on innovation and also transforms the delivery of new products and services through lean execution methodologies.
How ServiceNow SPM Delivers Business Value
Assess, Gather and Handle Business Demands
IT teams struggle to locate, track, and assess business needs and accordingly plan and channelize business investments. This is because there is no centralized approach to manage demands from various business units. Requests can get lost and there is a lack of visibility into the overall queue. As businesses rely on IT teams to care for demands, not having a channelized approach to handle business demands will result in a communication gap between IT and business leaders. This also limits IT to enable businesses in making informed business decisions.
With ServiceNow portfolio management capabilities, SPM develops a thorough portfolio of all business applications. This includes data about every functional module’s usage and its implication to the organization. Through the portfolio management dashboard, organizations can have detailed info about various parameters like cost, risk, user satisfaction, and alignment with business goals in real-time.
Using the demand management application (refer below image) SPM provides a unified approach to gather and strategically analyze requests coming from business units. Businesses now have a quantified understanding of the business scope and can channelize accordingly or prioritize investments.
Hassle-Free Investment Funding for Informed Decisions
Demand management isn't the only responsibility of IT business management. Organizations need to methodically assess and prioritize demands, then decide on where to invest and allocate funds. Mismanagement of funds can result in failure to reach organizational goals and also affects relationships with stakeholders.
IT teams often find it hard to plan and track investment and release funds based on demands. As it requires various business teams to come together and place their respective project deliverable priorities (that would have a direct impact on the business goals and ROI). Planning investments and releasing funds to demands always has a risk factor.
ServiceNow SPM’s Investment Funding application mitigates these risks and assists IT and business teams to have conflict-free decisions on investments and funding based on the demand management data and organizational strategy and goals. To make strategic decisions, investment funding uses domain separation to isolate data, processes, and administrative tasks into small groups called domains.
SPM follows a top-level investment approach to acquire and distribute funds. Investment funding allocates requested funds to appropriate IT requests based on existing funds. Businesses can track spending and utilization status. This way IT teams provide transparency to top leadership and stakeholders and have a clear understanding of how funds are working toward growth.
Conclusion
ServiceNow SPM enables IT teams, to deliver business value by being proactive, developing strategic collaboration within business units, becoming value-driven, and proving ROI to top leadership.
