Gabriele Kahlout
Spinning Up ServiceNow
IT Service Managers’ Guide to Successful User Adoption
Gabriele Kahlout
Doha, Qatar
Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book's product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484225707 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .
ISBN 978-1-4842-2570-7
e-ISBN 978-1-4842-2571-4
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2571-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935100
© Gabriele Kahlout 2017
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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.
Printed on acid-free paper
To my wife Jasmine for enduring the writing of this book.
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Introduction
When I joined Al Jazeera in 2012, the IT department was looking to improve the way it organized itself internally, and how it was perceived in the eyes of colleagues in this international media organization.
Al Jazeera has been at the center of the Arab Spring revolutions and its influence was being felt beyond the Middle East. Hillary Clinton called it a leader providing more “real news” than its American counterparts who she said were losing the “information war.”
Inside Al Jazeera, it was easy to perceive the aura of pride felt in how Al Jazeera was challenging local and Western media establishments, and for IT this meant that internal stakeholders expected nothing less than world-class support and operations.
Analag satellite broadcast technology was extremely sharp and resilient, and as the WikiLeaks tweet below suggests, it was perceived as a core element of Al Jazeera’s success. But with users’ attention shifting to digital and the advent of Broadcast IT, expectations and dependence on IT were chaotically on the rise.
In this context, the IT department embarked on several transformational initiatives, one of which was the establishment of a Service Management function tasked to improve the processes through which the department handled its work, and the introduction of ServiceNow to aid in the transformation. So I was hired.
Figure 1. It’s widely believed that Al Jazeera and its broadcast technology played a central role in the diffusion of revolutionary sentiment across the Arab world between 2008 and 2011
What occurred since 2012 and the writing of this book was not only special for me and Al Jazeera’s digital transformation. The role that IT systems have been playing in our daily lives and in the corporate world has surged and, not coincidentally, so has ServiceNow’s share price.
Figure 2. Share price of ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) has been steadily increasing since its IPO in 2012
This is not to say that all investments in ITSM are rosy; you probably know from personal experience that it is not the case. In fact, numerous studies report on how commonly ITSM implementation projects fail to deliver on expectations, with failure rate estimates as high as 80%.
Despite false starts, ServiceNow achieved very wide adoption at Al Jazeera, and has contributed to a noticeable transformation in the way things get done here and in the relationship between IT and the wider organization. As testimony of this success, management was invited by ServiceNow to tell its story at the Knowledge14 ServiceNow conference, and I was named a Star of Al Jazeera Media Network in 2014.
In reality, credit for the transformation can only be partially attributed to the tool, best practice theories, or policy documents; the real transformation was actually in people.
As so many Service Management experts confirm: “To successfully implement ITIL is to confront human nature and succeed.” (Denis Matte) This is what I want to share with you in this book: How to facilitate change in people’s daily routines in an enterprise organization by focusing on visible returns on investment first, and staging drastic changes that typically sabotage users’ adoption.
Who this book is for
Auspicious of great success for your ServiceNow implementation, this book is written for the benefit of application managers, Service Management program directors and fellow solution architects responsible for ServiceNow in their organization.
If you have already introduced ServiceNow at your organization or for a client but you are facing user resistance and not seeing the widespread adoption that was expected, you will particularly appreciate the pragmatic advice offered in this book.
This book is different from the typical pleas that justify a lack of progress with the need for heavy-handed executive support, massive ITIL brainwashing schemes, or hiring someone to consult for you.
In this book we acknowledge the people behavior challenge, but draw on insights from research in consumer behavior, web usability, and software engineering that worked at Al Jazeera. Examples will also be provided from other world-class organizations, such as Volkswagen, Berkeley and Harvard Universities, and CERN.
Three reasons to read this book
Your organization has invested (or is planning to) in ServiceNow licenses and implementation expenses. With a few bucks more, this book will help you get a better return on the investment and avoid falling prey to vendors.
You believe that the comprehensiveness of requirements, management buy-in, or ServiceNow’s Out-Of-Box functionality will cause people to abandon their daily routines and jump on board en masse. This book may spare you disappointment!
You espouse the Agile methodology but seem to be at odds with the Waterfall arrogance of IT Service Management bureaucrats around you. You are not insane! This book will equip you with anecdotes to convince them or intervene in case they fail.
How this book is structured
The book is divided into three parts:
Part 1. ITSM in the Real World: Guiding principles and implementation strategy
Part 2. Essentials: Specific advice for the implementation phase of your project, with emphasis on email processing, on-boarding, and a front-end service portal
Part 3. After Go-live: Advice on managing development after Go-live, and dealing with scaling issues.
There are 12 chapters in this book, and at the end of each chapter is a list of concise and tweet-ready takeaways.
There also two appendices:
Appendix A: Provides checklists for assessing and monitoring customizations
Appendix B: Binds together bullet-point requirements from all chapters, for ease of reference
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thanks are due to Al Jazeera for giving me the opportunity to ride the ServiceNow wave in a corporate environment and for allowing me to share the insights acquired on the job with you. I had my first interview at Al Jazeera with Grant Franklin Totten, with whom I flew to New York a year later to launch ServiceNow at Al Jazeera America. Thank you for the trust that you have put in me.
Al Jazeera generally adopts a permissive knowledge-sharing policy, but our chief information officer Mohamed Abuagla has particularly encouraged us to be world-class in what we do and show it.
I could go on acknowledging many more colleagues at Al Jazeera, with Aamer Maqsood, Faisal Iqbal, and Imad Musa at the top of the list for facilitating the publication of this work.
Outside Al Jazeera, I thank peers in the ServiceNow community, some of who are quoted in this book, for openly and generously sharing with me their own examples and insights. Of all people, I single out Göran Lundqvist for technically reviewing this work.
My family and friends, thank you for enduring my seclusion as I worked on this book.
Finally, I thank the editing team at Apress for coming together to make this work the polished outcome that you now get, and for bearing with me through the creative process of writing. I kept on changing the table of contents, merging chapters and creating new ones. Thank you Robert Hutchinson for believing in the importance of this book from day one, Rita Fernando, and Laura Berendson.
Thank you all.
Contents
- Part I: ITSM in the real world
- Part II: Essentials
- Part III: After go-live
- Part IV: Appendices
- Index
About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer
About the Author
Gabriele Kahlout is the architect of ServiceNow at the Al Jazeera Media Network and in 2014 was recognized for outstanding achievements with the platform. Championing the transition to ServiceNow, Gabriele advises management, implements proposals, and confronts warts and wrinkles with users. Drawing on experience at start-ups and in innovative research centers, since 2012 Gabriele has brought to the revolutionary but corporate Al Jazeera his enthusiasm for change and a down-to-earth pragmatism. Gabriele attended the Freie Universität Bozen in Italy, the College of Charleston in the USA, and the University of Leeds in the UK.
About the Technical Reviewer
Göran Lundqvist is a technical consultant working for Symfoni ESM with a focus on ServiceNow.
He has a broad ITSM experience within both processes and technical areas, and brings over 15 years of knowledge in these areas. During these years he has worked as everything from first line support to third line support, team manager, process owner, and system administrator.
The last few years he has been in the ServiceNow field and is constantly looking for new things to learn about ServiceNow. He believes that sharing is the key to the future, which took him down the road to becoming a ServiceNow advocate, where he is an active community member and blog writer for ServiceNow.