Spinning Up ServiceNow: IT Service Managers' Guide to Successful User Adoption

244 Pages·2017·1.2 MB·English

by  Gabriele Kahlout (auth.)

Spinning Up
ServiceNow
IT Service Managers’ Guide to
Successful User Adoption
—
Gabriele Kahlout
SPINNING UP SERVICENOW
IT SERVICE MANAGERS’ GUIDE TO
SUCCESSFUL USER ADOPTION
Gabriele Kahlout
Spinning Up ServiceNow: IT Service Managers' Guide to Successful User Adoption
Gabriele Kahlout
Doha, Qatar
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-2570-7 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-2571-4
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2571-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935100
Copyright © 2017 by Gabriele Kahlout
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To my wife Jasmine for
enduring the writing of this book.
Contents
About the Author                                             ix
About the Technical Reviewer                                   xi
Acknowledgments                                            xiii
Introduction                                                  xv
Part I: ITSM in the real world                        1
Chapter 1: Pragmatic or Tragic ITSM                           3
Chapter 2: Innovators’ ITSM strategy                          25
Part II: Essentials                                  39
Chapter 3: User access                                      41
Chapter 4: Email Support                                    57
Chapter 5: Elegant Notifications                              69
Chapter 6: Request Portal                                   89
Chapter 7: Reporting                                       105
Part III: After go-live                             123
Chapter 8: Customization Process                           125
Chapter 9: Confidentiality                                  145
Chapter 10: Fluid collaboration                               161
Chapter 11: Examples                                      173
Chapter 12: ServiceNow jargon                              201
Part IV: Appendices…                            217
Appendix A: Checks and Monitors                            219
Appendix B: Access Requirements                            229
Index                                                      237
About the Author
Gabriele Kahlout is the architect of ServiceNow
at the Al Jazeera Media Network and in 2014
was recognized for outstanding achievements
with the platform. Championing the transition
to ServiceNow, Gabriele advises management,
implements proposals, and confronts warts and
wrinkles with users. Drawing on experience at
start-ups and in innovative research centers,
since 2012 Gabriele has brought to the revolu-
tionary but corporate Al Jazeera his enthusiasm
for change and a down-to-earth pragmatism.
Gabriele attended the Freie Universität Bozen in
Italy, the College of Charleston in the USA, and
the University of Leeds in the UK.
About the Technical
Reviewer
Göran Lundqvist is a technical consul-
tant working for Symfoni ESM with a focus on
ServiceNow.
He has a broad ITSM experience within both
processes and technical areas, and brings over 15
years of knowledge in these areas. During these
years he has worked as everything from first
line support to third line support, team manager,
process owner, and system administrator.
The last few years he has been in the ServiceNow
field and is constantly looking for new things to learn about ServiceNow. He
believes that sharing is the key to the future, which took him down the road to
becoming a ServiceNow advocate, where he is an active community member
and blog writer for ServiceNow.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thanks are due to Al Jazeera for giving me the opportunity
to ride the ServiceNow wave in a corporate environment and for allowing me
to share the insights acquired on the job with you. I had my first interview at
Al Jazeera with Grant Franklin Totten, with whom I flew to New York a year
later to launch ServiceNow at Al Jazeera America. Thank you for the trust
that you have put in me.
Al Jazeera generally adopts a permissive knowledge-sharing policy, but our
chief information officer Mohamed Abuagla has particularly encouraged us to
be world-class in what we do and show it.
I could go on acknowledging many more colleagues at Al Jazeera, with Aamer
Maqsood, Faisal Iqbal, and Imad Musa at the top of the list for facilitating the
publication of this work.
Outside Al Jazeera, I thank peers in the ServiceNow community, some of
who are quoted in this book, for openly and generously sharing with me their
own examples and insights. Of all people, I single out Göran Lundqvist for
technically reviewing this work.
My family and friends, thank you for enduring my seclusion as I worked on
this book.
Finally, I thank the editing team at Apress for coming together to make this
work the polished outcome that you now get, and for bearing with me through
the creative process of writing. I kept on changing the table of contents,
merging chapters and creating new ones. Thank you Robert Hutchinson for
believing in the importance of this book from day one, Rita Fernando, and
Laura Berendson.
Thank you all.
Introduction
When I joined Al Jazeera in 2012, the IT department was looking to improve
the way it organized itself internally, and how it was perceived in the eyes of
colleagues in this international media organization.
Al Jazeera has been at the center of the Arab Spring revolutions and its
influence was being felt beyond the Middle East. Hillary Clinton called it a
leader providing more “real news” than its American counterparts who she
said were losing the “information war.”
Inside Al Jazeera, it was easy to perceive the aura of pride felt in how Al
Jazeera was challenging local and Western media establishments, and for IT
this meant that internal stakeholders expected nothing less than world-class
support and operations.
Analag satellite broadcast technology was extremely sharp and resilient, and as
the WikiLeaks tweet below suggests, it was perceived as a core element of Al
Jazeera’s success. But with users’ attention shifting to digital and the advent of
Broadcast IT, expectations and dependence on IT were chaotically on the rise.
In this context, the IT department embarked on several transformational
initiatives, one of which was the establishment of a Service Management function
tasked to improve the processes through which the department handled its
work, and the introduction of ServiceNow to aid in the transformation. So I
was hired.
Figure 1 It’s widely believed that Al Jazeera and its broadcast technology played a central
role in the diffusion of revolutionary sentiment across the Arab world between 2008 and 2011