How to Build the Business Case to Switch Your ServiceNow Partner Before the Audit Committee
A CIO at a listed European retailer sent me a two-line email last month. "We know we need to switch ServiceNow partner. The CFO wants a business case. Can you help me build one that survives the audit committee?" That is the question I get most often now. Not "should we switch" but "how do we defend the switch in a boardroom where the incumbent has a fifteen-year relationship with the CEO and the audit chair remembers signing the master services agreement in 2019." The technical case for switching is usually the easy part. Any competent platform owner can list the defects, the slippage and the OOTB literacy gaps. What breaks in the boardroom is the financial narrative. When the current partner is a globally recognised name, the CFO's default position is that a switch introduces risk, not that staying does. Reversing that intuition requires numbers, not adjectives. This piece is the framework I use with clients who need to build the case for a switch that will hold up under adversarial scrutiny from a procurement director, a group auditor and a non-executive with a long memory.
