James Fitzgerald, Global Vice President of Services at ServiceNow, talked service strategy, business value measurement and stimulating the growth of the company’s ecosystem with theCube co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante, live at ServiceNow Knowledge.

“We break it down into two distinct areas we focus on: time to value and amount of value,” Fitzgerald said, explaining the company’s approach to services. Customers buying a ServiceNow product or solution get value faster than they would with other solutions. “We push our custoemers to think of 90 day cycles” and what they can implement in such a time frame.  Acceleration aroundtime to value is a key interest.

As far as the amount of value across the applicaiton suite is concerned, the company focuses on educating and enabling customers to start to think about use cases that help leverage more of its platform.

SericeNow is focusing on the ecosystem through its great partners, Fitzgerald said. How to bring value partners to the ecosystem is a key area of focus, as the company aims to enable an ecosystem that lives up to its values. Thus it is targeting “partenrs that do rapid implementations that are high-value to our customers.”

“We deliberately want to be focused on enabling the ecosystem and being a well-respected partner.” Fitzgerald  added. “If a partner aims at an account, we won’t touch it,” other than enabling the partner to be successful. “We’ve also looked at what we’re good at and what we’re not good at.” Success for customers requires strategy, governance, people, processes and technology  he explained. “We want to provide world class training to the techmical team,” Fitzgerald exemplified, while also aiming to provide training to the process users and end users of its platform. On the other hand,  when it comes to organizational change, that is not a field ServiceNow excells in, as “it’s not a competence that we bring to the table,” and it relies on its partners to provide the needed support.

Asked how customers cume up with business use cases, Fitzgerald  explained that some customers implement partner-driven business cases. On the other hand, many customes “come to us with a toothache,” which is a great way to get an account, as it’s usualy around a need to change their platform, and then the business case is simple: “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of cost.” ServiceNow makes implementation easier and focuses on lowering the TCO.

Trying to showcase how customers can quantify value, Fitzgerald  mentions an instance where a customer doubled their customer satisfaction measure, reduced response time and reduced its helpdesk staff after implementing the platform.

The ServiceNow automation suite has a lot of applications. “Customers usually start with a subset,” Fitzgerald  said. When they begin to understand the platform is truly powerful, they expand their use of the provided applications. The goals ServicesNow targets with each customer implementation are consolidation, automation and consumerization.

Speaking about leveraging knowledge across their partner network and among employees, Fitzgerald  stressed the fact that “people want to be rewarded for when they do special work.” Thus the company awards innovation among employees on a regular basis as a means to  stimulate employees to generate value and bring it back into the ecosystem. As far as partners are concerned,  the company encourages its partners to adopt its implementation methodology, follow its best practices and put their IP around its methodology.