Change Management on ServiceNow Fails at the CAB, Not at the Form
An infrastructure lead at a European insurer called me last month with what he thought was a workflow problem. His team's change request form on ServiceNow had grown to sixty-two fields. The approval routing had eleven conditional branches. Emergency changes were sitting in the queue for two days waiting for a rubber-stamp signature. His CIO had asked him to fix the form. The form was not the problem. The form was the last place anyone looked for a problem that started in the change advisory board eighteen months earlier. This is the pattern I see in most mid-market change management ServiceNow deployments. The platform is doing exactly what it was configured to do. The configuration reflects a set of decisions the CAB made, or failed to make, over years of drift. And by the time someone escalates, the diagnosis has already been misdirected at the tool.
