At this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 event in San Francisco, Dave Vellante welcomed two guests who were able to share their experience with ServiceNow from the perspective of the practitioner and the client. Jason Wojahn heads the ServiceNow BU for Cloud Sherpas and Brian Kenfield is Manager of Enterprise Projects and IT Quality Assurance for the Einstein Noah Restaurant Group.

Cloud Sherpas, Vellante pointed out, works across three providers: Salesforce, Google Apps and ServiceNow. Wojahn commented that his group is one of the top five integrators in the world and they were the first US company to partner with ServiceNow in 2007.

Vellante turned the conversation to Kenfield and asked him to share with the audience the when’s and why’s for his company’s shift to ServiceNow. Kenfield replied, “We brought in ServiceNow just over a year ago. We had a legacy system that was 15 years old and not flexible. We weren’t getting what we needed out of it.” He explained how he felt they were locked into a system with such limited functionality that he referred to it as ‘snailware’. “When we moved to ServiceNow, the dynamics allowed us to make changes on the fly.”
 

 
Kenfield continued, saying the actual reason they looked to ServiceNow was to ultimately improve their customer experience. “We were spending too much time with the old system on support and not spending time with our customers.”

The switch to ServiceNow allowed for a streamlining of what were previously manual processes as well as establishing a level of accountability. “ServiceNow allowed us to transform so that our General Managers could input information and send it off and we could give them real-time information on the progress of the issue. When we resolved the issue, it wouldn’t be closed out until the General Manager signed off on it and closed it out,” said Kenfield.

Wanting to see the process from the practitioner side, Vellante asked Wojahn to detail a typical consultation with a new client. “You always start at the beginning,” Wojahn said. “The beginning with Brian was understanding that we knew what their requirements were.” He claims it is important to advise a client that the first deployment will not be the last, unlike a deploy of a legacy system. “We try to understand requirements and objectives and put the project into a context so they can see a series of improvements happening,” he said.

Wrapping up the conversation, Kenfield spoke to why he and his company are in attendance at this year’s Knowledge 2014 event. “One of the main reasons we are out here at Knowledge is because we want to know that we are as efficient as possible. If not, we want to know how to get there.”

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