ServiceNow ITSM Benefits That Show Up on the P&L Twelve Months Later
An operations director at a €600m industrial group called me last week. Two years into a ServiceNow ITSM programme. The board had approved the business case on the strength of a slide that promised 30 percent MTTR reduction, 20 percent fewer P1 incidents, and a payback under eighteen months. Now the CFO wanted to know why the finance team could not find those numbers anywhere in the actuals. I have had that conversation more times than I care to count. The answer is almost always the same. The ServiceNow ITSM benefits that make it into a business case are not the same benefits that show up on a P&L twelve months later. Some of the promised numbers are real but got captured in the wrong line item. Some were measured against a baseline nobody bothered to lock down before go-live. And a handful were pure fiction from the outset, borrowed from a vendor slide that nobody in operations ever validated. If you are a CFO, an ops director, or a service owner reading this because someone is about to ask you to defend or extend a ServiceNow investment, this post is for you. I am going to walk through which ITSM benefits actually land, which ones evaporate on contact with real reporting, and...
