Making every dollar count: creating business value with ServiceNow

The ability to generate consistent, evolving business value is what keeps organizations alive. And in an era of peaking uncertainty, followed by the desire to build back smarter, it’s vital to ensure every investment pulls its weight.

Now, there’s no silver bullet. But gaining true understanding of what you’re using, what you’re spending and — crucially — what you’re risking and wasting in your IT ecosystem is about as close to one as you can get. 

Here, we’ll take a look at five ways that accurately assessing, streamlining and evolving your IT landscape can generate significant business value, and how ServiceNow’s adaptable application toolbox can make that happen.  

1. Optimizing what you provide your employees with, when with ServiceNow

In a digital work environment, you can better control what services, programs and applications you make available to your workforce, and precisely when. Some baseline functionalities may need to run continuously, such as room bookings, email, login portals, digital employee knowledge bases, and so on. But many organizations are able to save by only utilizing the costlier, more complex functionalities required ad hoc. Fully functional only when required, they can lie dormant for the rest of the time. 

Adjusting the availability of the full range of capabilities on offer to your workforce is a crucial way to limit unnecessary background expenditure. This can lead to quick-win savings and free up capital to invest in enhancements. With ServiceNow, organizations can achieve this level of knowledge and adaptability, cutting wastage and channeling uptime into where it counts. 

2. Mitigate risk, and save money as a result 

Large-scale organizations do a lot of things right. In the most basic of terms, clear-cut thinking is how they grew to such a scale in the first place. However, being in the business game for a good long while can bring a lot of baggage with it. 

Over the years, enterprise organizations commonly build up irrelevant or duplicate applications, expired licenses, and even unintentionally pirate software. This, of course, can lead to uncomfortable audit findings, fines, sanctions and avoidable reputational damage. With ServiceNow’s ability to scan, sanitize and streamline your IT ecosystem, these recurrent headaches can simply disappear.  

What’s more, accurate, comprehensive knowledge that your organization's full range of IT capabilities are 100% above board and watertight is a money-saver in itself. “If you know you’re in the clear, the funding pot allocated to cover potential unforeseen risks can be redirected into enhancing existing IT security systems, or optimizing data management, for example,” explains DXC ServiceNow expert Rik Burgering. By enabling this shift from reactive to proactive, ServiceNow can generate a further dimension of value creation.   

3. Leverage ServiceNow to strategically redirect investments

Building on the reactive-to-proactive theme, gaining in-depth knowledge of the entire IT landscape allows your organization to create increased value without upping investments. It’s simply a question of redirecting existing budgets. 

A prime example of this is the band aid approach to fixing sporadic issues. All too often, breaches and outages are treated with quick, patch-up actions, rather than long-term solutions. But there’s a way out. When your IT ecosystem reaches a level of maturity where you’re able to predict and prevent these sporadic issues, the time and capital spent sticking on those band aids can be intelligently invested elsewhere. Think biometric hand scanning or facial recognition to expedite the login process and eliminate the time-consuming ‘forgot password’ routines, and simultaneously increase your organizational security. 

In general, this move from reactive to proactive is encapsulated in the Detect to Correct value stream of the IT4IT™ methodology we work with at DXC, in tandem with ServiceNow. You can find out more here. 

4. Identify new investments — and gain the buy-in you need

If you’re going to fund, create and sustain a certain IT service, each dollar invested needs to generate suitable ROI. Without careful thought, there’s a real risk of sending money down the drain. A new portal can appear great aesthetically, but what if it doesn’t deliver the improved functionalities it’s advertising? Then it’s all shiny shell, and no substance.

First, it’s vital to map out the services your organization currently relies on and offers, to assess the current state of play across functionalities and costs. “In many large organizations, this awareness is only partly in place,” says DXC ServiceNow expert Rik Burgering. “Actual usage, and actual spend, are often vague. What’s more, the IT maturity required to achieve such an overview has often remained a pipe dream for a while.”

These days, it’s achievable with ServiceNow. From this matured IT basis, it’s clearer what a strategic investment would look like, and what it would bring to the table for the organization as a whole. ServiceNow also allows you to drill down into the granular details: is 4KHD a must, or can video call bandwidth and cost be saved there? With such in-depth insights and justifications, generating buy-in for necessary investments becomes a far easier task.  

5. Calibrating consumptio

Identifying all the subscriptions and licenses currently within your organization’s IT ecosystem (both actively used and forgotten in the background) enables a further value creation pathway. It facilitates accurately gauging usage and determining whether you’re providing the right functionalities for your various work areas. 

As a result, you can increase your subscription capacity in areas where it’s needed and cut it down where it isn’t. “This often saves money up front,” explains DXC ServiceNow expert Rik Burgering, “as well as avoiding the added expense of post-consumption payment for exceeding your contracted service agreements.” 

From savings to success with ServiceNow

Gaining in-depth insights into your IT ecosystem is indispensable for allowing your organization to perform at its full potential. From security to productivity and cost-cutting to investing, all roads to business value creation start at this accurate overview.

Working with ServiceNow, our experts have enabled this change in enterprise organizations across a wide range of industries. To find out what ServiceNow can achieve in your organization, don’t hesitate to contact the DXC team.

^[1] IT4IT is developed by The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum, with participation from consumer organizations, IT vendors and academic institutions.