ServiceNow and the challenge of going broad
ServiceNow wants to be an enabler of business transformation. But that’s a hard challenge when you’re known as a tool for IT.
At the recent Cloud Field Days event, I spent a couple of hours visiting with ServiceNow at their lush new executive briefing center. While there we talked to a variety of different people and got a deep dive on ServiceNow’s vision of the future. The company has come a long way from its San Diego roots. it is now firmly ensconced in across the globe, claims 40% of the Global 2,000 companies as customers and is moving in on the 6,000 employee count. And if that wasn’t enough, ServiceNow was proud of the fact that in the greater than $1 Billion revenue category, ServiceNow is the fastest growing enterprise software company. (Somewhat hilariously, of the dozen or so companies presenting at Cloud Field Days, at least two of them claimed to be the fastest growing enterprise company in the $1 billion club — oh well.)
Which is interesting since, historically at least, ServiceNow has been seen as a vendor who offered an IT helpdesk system. The growth they have enjoyed, however, isn’t all driven by IT service management (ITSM) rather, ServiceNow has been actively pursuing its aims to become a vendor that offers tools to enable organizations to digitize their more general enterprise workflows. Instead of simply being a helpdesk application, ServiceNow wants to be the platform that enables their customers to build their own custom applications on top of ServiceNow’s technology stack and platform.
If that idea reminds you of another vendor, that would be because it is very much the strategy that Salesforce is following. Salesforce started off as a CRM vendor but quickly grew, via its Force.com development platform, to be a more general digital platform. But arguably (and this will become the crux of this post) Salesforce has an easier job of telling this broader story. You see Salesforce’s bread and butter, CRM, lies very much at the heart of the business side of organizations — sales and marketing are the domain of the CMO and, as the argument goes, the CMO is increasingly becoming the person who commands the lion’s share of new IT budget.
ServiceNow, on the other hand, comes from a history of being very much an IT tool. IT practitioners loved (and still love) the flexibility that ServiceNow gives them as a service desk tool but also as a tool to enable IT-related processes. Things like getting a new employee set up with organizational user credentials, a laptop, and software access, for example. This is different from core business processes, and especially different from customer-facing ones, so there is a significant challenge here.
This is a problem that isn’t a technological one. There is no functional reason why the ServiceNow platform can’t be used to run all manner of business processes. After all, the company was founded with a vision of not making the mistakes of the past. One of the more successful IT service products on the market is BMC Remedy, something of a legacy piece of monolithic software. Indeed, Remedy has been the target of much industry derision. It is generally accepted as being an abomination when it comes to usability. While it has all the audit and control mechanisms that appeal to auditors and organizational bureaucrats, it lacks any focus on making it easy for an end user to actually achieve something. It is the epitome of all that is wrong with enterprise software.