Larger companies which manage complex workflows, teams of people and global views in terms of management consider it an ongoing effort to be efficient and agile. Thus, ServiceNow became the platform of choice for digital transformation as it connects business processes, automates service delivery, and brings a singular cloud-based environment to logical operations. However, deploying ServiceNow at scale is far more complicated than deploying ServiceNow in a smaller environment. Large companies have size, amount of data and different systems in place that need to be completely planned and executed.
In-calling ServiceNow Implementation Services adds great value. A strategic approach to implementation, aligns the capabilities of the platform to the goals of the enterprise. Additionally, by implementing based on industry best-practices you will uncover any technical, operational and cultural barriers to achieving a measurable increase in performance, collaboration and service quality.
Understanding the Complexity of Large-Scale Implementations
Implementing ServiceNow for larger enterprises creates a much higher level of complexity due to the scale of the organization and the established IT landscape. Most larger enterprises will have many legacy systems, workflows tailored to particular regions, and complex approval chains. Bringing all of these elements together while ensuring business continuity requires advanced planning and execution.
In such environments, one implementation phase will impact hundreds or even thousands of users across departments (IT, HR, finance, and facilities). This means that an error in configuration, a bad data record, or an oversight in training can have systemic impacts on productivity. Large-scale implementations require strict governance structures, an org chart with defined roles, and a risk management framework. If there is no clearly articulated roadmap, enterprises can suffer from scope creep, miscommunication, and stagnant ROI.
Thus, the path to success is a defined, structured, scalable, and phased approach with thoughtful leadership and appropriate expert guidance along the journey.
ServiceNow Implementation Best Practices for Large Enterprises
1. Start with Clear Strategic Objectives
The foundation of every successful implementation rests on a clear vision. Large organizations should define their vision for ServiceNow implementation specifically, whether it is for reducing IT service costs, creating transparency of workflow, enabling collaboration, or responding faster. This step includes undertaking strategic workshops to translate corporate goals into success measures that can be articulated and measured. Without articulated goals, implementations run the risk of veering away from business needs, and creating disconnection with outcomes. A clearly articulated business case will also assist in obtaining executive buy-in, and will further legitimize advocacy for financial support for long-term, sustained organizational support.
2. Establish a Dedicated Implementation Team
ServiceNow implementation, for a large organization requires a team from various disciplines that collectively can define how to best manage the technical complexity and organizational change. This should include project managers, developers, administrators, process owners and business analysts, all of whom understand technical capabilities and know the challenges specific to their technical domain. Establishing a dedicated steering committee helps to ensure consistency of decision-making, assists to resolve escalations quickly, and can address internal processes and challenges early on. Additionally, having concentrated internal ownership develops accountability and drills teams to manage risk.
3. Conduct a Comprehensive Readiness Assessment
Before beginning any configuration, organizations should assess their current environment, process maturity, and capabilities of the workforce. Readiness assessments reveal where gaps exist in IT systems, process documentation means, and available resources. Large organizations will often operate across multiple regions, each with its own compliance considerations, so knowing what capabilities currently exist is important. Utilizing expertise from those that provide ServiceNow Consulting Services during this assessment can also help to identify potential constraints and foster development of mitigation strategies.
4. Standardize and Simplify Business Processes
In their evolution, large organizations often accumulate duplicated workflows across departments. Launching ServiceNow for the organization and doing nothing to eliminate current inefficiencies may result in automated wastes, and therefore, a modest accumulation of benefits. The critical point is that all operations should be standardized and simplified before configuration begins. This means mapping existing current processes, identifying duplications, and building standardized, combined workflows that meet ServiceNow’s capabilities. Standardization allows for easier integration, governance, and scalability.
5. Take a Phased Implementation Approach
The larger the implementation, the more impractical it becomes to have all functionalities implemented during the same time period, which can stress teams and create significant project timeframes. A phased approach supports an organized implementation, identifies and minimizes risks, and increases user buy-in with each phase. For example, for larger organizations, IT Service Management can be the first target to implement, then other target areas, such as HR Service Delivery or IT Operations Management. Allowing each module to stabilize and build user confidence in the process of down the adoption included in the broader enterprise strategy will help to ensure success to each module in the series.
6. Collaborate with Certified ServiceNow Experts
Working with certified ServiceNow professionals guarantees that your platform configuration, integration, and workflow design will be overseen by experienced specialists. Certified partners bring documented processes and implementation experience that minimizes your overall risk and increases quality of project execution. ServiceNow teams will also ensure alignment of the project to best practice measures for ServiceNow, regulatory mandates, and enterprise level goals. Certified partners leverage frameworks and accelerators to realize efficiencies during delivery while maintaining full transparency at each lifecycle phase of deployment.
7. Achieve a Balance
Large enterprises tend to be responsible for a variety of functions, which can easily lead teams to over-customize the platform. However, support for too much customization can complicate your strategy for upgrades, degrade performance and increase maintenance costs. The best practice is to achieve a good balance understanding that customization provides an advantage, but has limits. ServiceNow will have a suite of applications that have been developed to support the policies and procedures that are out-of-the-box. Custom application due to functional differences only allows the application to come close to what is already readily available in the application “As Designed” for the enterprise.
8. Emphasize Data Quality and Data Integration
Ultimately, data integrity drives the ServiceNow application performance. In large enterprises, data related to work products typically resides in functional silos. To add to the complexity, the ServiceNow platform can also be implemented in silos. While ServiceNow will provide the ability to move data that is either inconsistent or outdated, errors will inevitably occur in ServiceNow and impair in-depth analytics will be developed. As such, the enterprise must complete a data auditing process, clean up any previous records, and define the policies and processes for master data management prior to migration into ServiceNow.
9. Prioritize Change Management and User Adoption
Successful technology implementations depend on the human acceptance of technology. In large organizations with thousands of employees, solid change management is equal to the technology implementation. To change management strategy, there are clear communications, training opportunities, and ongoing support. Moreover, organizations pledge higher leadership involvement in adoption, highlighting how ServiceNow simplifies daily activities and provides better visibility into processes. Organizations also should identify internal champions or “Super Users” to disseminate instruction and knowledge within departments and measure overall process adoption and action on user feedback to build trust along the adoption and engagement continuum.
10. Institutionalize Strong Governance and Accountability
Many organizations operate under complex regulatory standards and strong governance and accountability are key implementation factors. A strong governance framework should include ownership, decision-making processes, performance monitoring, and risk mitigation practices. Governance is responsible for creating system uptime, data safety, and compliance with legislative compliance requirements like GDPR or ISO. In addition to governance, institutions should institute a process for audit trails, approval hierarchy processes, transparency, and accountability in the governance and compliance framework. Strong governance leads to accountability for process transactions, ensuring that every department is compliant and follows an identical set of processes to prevent operational and process misalignment, and to keep departments un-siloed.
11. Test Rigorously Before Go-Live
Comprehensive testing safeguards against implementation operational disruptions post-go-live. The enterprise will need an extensive testing plan that incorporates functional testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing. This ensures that all configured modules operate properly under real-world scenarios. As larger enterprises will operate in multiple environments, testing is an effective way to demonstrate performance consistency across all regions and user communities. User acceptance testing is especially critical to extract feedback and validate that workflows are aligned with business needs. It is always easier to resolve issues in the testing phase versus after go-live.
12. Measure, Monitor, and Optimize Continuously
After go-live, implementation success must be measured against clearly defined KPIs. Enterprises should be continuously monitoring and assessing measures that include incident response time, automation efficiency, and end-users’ satisfaction. Monitoring the performance of the platform will reveal optimization opportunities and assists when processes must evolve with the dynamic business landscape. The enterprise should be regularly auditing and assessing performance to help establish operational consistency. A culture of continuous improvement will ensure ServiceNow is developed from a static platform built to manage cases to an active solution for driving innovation and excellence in service delivery.
13. Plan for Scalability and Future Growth
As companies grow, ServiceNow should grow along with them. Scalability planning ensures the architecture of the platform can manage future growth without degrading performance. In part, this is about ensuring that future integrations and workflows will work together seamlessly, and in part this is about creating workflow modules that can accommodate new business functions. Cloud capacity, network performance, and security all need to be considered to ensure global scalability. If you take the time to plan for scalability from the outset, then you will not have to back-track into costly reconfiguration when your organization expands.
14. Make Support and Maintenance Ongoing
Success in implementation should not stop at deployment. Ongoing support, monitoring, and improvement will extend platform performance over time. Very large organizations should start with a structured support model as part of ServiceNow Managed Services, often done by teams inside ServiceNow. A managed services team will handle updates and install fixes, performance tuning, patch security vulnerabilities to keep the system aligned with the objectives of the business and take care of ongoing support. They allow the organization to focus on strategic innovation instead of solving day-to-day technical problems. Managed support is sustainable in the long-term as it reduces transactional costs, holds more accountability, and assists with ongoing optimization.
Final Thoughts
For large enterprises, ServiceNow acts as a platform for a broader digital transformation. However, success is contingent upon disciplined execution, teamwork and continuous improvement. By adhering to established best practices including defining strategic goals, establishing a dedicated team, standardizing processes, and ensuring transparent governance, ServiceNow will continue to produce sustainable business value. By engaging specialized ServiceNow Implementation Services, a common implementation pattern is established, while engaging ServiceNow Consulting Services to provide specialized implementation depth and expertise. ServiceNow Managed Services ensures long-term sustainability through continuous ongoing innovation, scaling the platform and continual operational alignment.
By thinking of ServiceNow as a strategic asset, rather than the deployment of a software solution, large enterprises are able to recognize enterprise wide agility, improve service management and drive competitive advantage in their digital transformation journey.