The ServiceNow ITSM Benefits That Actually Survive Year Two
A CIO at a regional insurer called me in June, twenty months after their ITSM go-live. The steering committee had voted to cut the ServiceNow budget by eighteen percent. Not because the platform had failed. Because nobody could point at what it was still doing. The year-one deck had been beautiful. Twenty-three slides of before-and-after: incident volume down, MTTR down, first-call resolution up, CSAT up. The programme director who ran the implementation had left in month fourteen. His replacement inherited the platform, not the story. When the CFO asked in the June review "so what are we still getting for the licence renewal", nobody in the room could answer with a number that came out of the platform itself. They answered with adjectives. This is the pattern I see in almost every year-two ITSM conversation. The benefits case that justified the buy is not the benefits case that justifies the renewal. And most of the numbers a partner puts on the go-live scorecard evaporate by month eighteen because the operational discipline that produced them was never handed over. If you are looking at ServiceNow ITSM benefits with a two-year lens rather than a launch-week lens, three things...