The Three ServiceNow ITSM Benefits a CFO Actually Buys
A CFO at a European industrial group rang me last month, two weeks before her board meeting. She had approved a ServiceNow programme a year earlier, the platform was live, IT was telling her it was working, and she needed to stand up in front of the board and say something defensible about the money. Her problem was not that the programme had failed. Her problem was that the benefits tracker her PMO had built told her almost nothing she could take to the board with a straight face. It listed licence savings that had not yet materialised, productivity gains measured in hours per engineer per week, and a general sense that things were better. None of that survives a board meeting. I asked her what she had actually been sold twelve months earlier. She read the executive summary of the business case back to me. It was well written and it was the wrong document to be measuring against, because it had been written to be approved, not to be verified. That is the pattern I see in eight out of ten mid-market ServiceNow programmes. The people who wrote the case are not the same people who now need to defend it, and the benefits that were promised are not the benefits that show up first,...
