ServiceNow markets its IT Business Management (ITBM) product suite as offering "enterprise agility for better business outcomes." They do this because it's a great way to think about what can be accomplished with the product suite. For example, within healthcare, we're pursuing various outcomes--improving patient experience, improving quality of care, decreasing costs, and streamlining systems and complex processes, amongst many others. These outcomes, tightly coupled with the business capabilities offered by healthcare organizations, are competing with each other and with other needs for limited resources. However, many leaders struggle to gain visibility into what exactly those resources look like--what skill sets do I have available and across how many people and teams? How heavily allocated are people and for how long? What are they working on? What business capabilities are supported by the projects they're delivering? Are they working on what is most important to the organization?
If you're looking to drive projects with a project management solution, ServiceNow does offer an option amongst many competitors. Where you're likely to find value, however, is in the integrated nature of the platform. For example, Jeanene Genusa, Implementation Executive at Optimum, shared that she values ServiceNow's role in driving project collaboration. Whether in support of clinical application builds, revenue cycle reporting or more classic IT needs like SSO and VPN, ServiceNow brings data and resources together in a single place to support effective and efficient collaboration amongst project team members.
Track resource allocation and time across all activities
With a single platform hosting many applications that share a data model, you can track resource activities across operational and project activities and gain real insights into resource availability for high-priority project work. You can make decisions based on actual data about what should be prioritized, what shouldn't, and what should be de-prioritized.
When you track time, projects, and resource management within a single platform, you're able to leverage the data from each area as an input to the others and make more informed decisions with less data curation required to do so.
Integrate the project lifecycle into other key processes
Similarly, with a single platform for driving workflow, you're able to initiate projects from other process areas. If a user submits a request for something non-standard that merits evaluation and potential execution as a project, operating on a single platform streamlines the activities required to direct it into the proper workflow.
You can also initiate key activities from projects to move through change control processes, initiate standard service requests in support of project needs, and drive collaboration across custom application solutions driving related workflow processes.
Plan with context
Leverage the work you've done to build out your Configuration Management Database with business capabilities and application data as an input into your project planning. Within the context of a single platform, you're able to evaluate demand against resource capacity, budget, and competing needs to make informed data-backed decisions.
Leverage the power of a consolidated service portal
Embed ideation into your service portal to source ideas from your user communities ranging from everyday process improvements to blue-sky initiatives. Take advantage of the front-line perspective of your clinical, research, and academic staff--the folks who know the business challenges from a first-hand perspective--to source ideas you may not have ever considered rather than relying on IT to innovate.
Use powerful in-platform analytics
Use the in-platform performance analytics capabilities to track, visualize, and analyze your data without extracting it into an external system. Develop powerful dashboards for consumption by leaders across levels and roles.
Technology continues to evolve in healthcare rapidly. Healthcare organizations explore ways to adopt and leverage new capabilities, they must maintain increased security and compliance while executing against a strategy that effectively uses scarce resources. As a ServiceNow Partner, Optimum Healthcare IT helps clients realize the full value of the platform by accelerating their digital transformation through the thoughtful and intentional use of technology investments and the implementation of solutions to address today's dynamic operational challenges.
Robert Elliott has been helping clients to provide innovative technology solutions to business challenges using the ServiceNow platform and applications for over a decade. In addition to the IT Business Management (ITBM) product suite, Robert has experience working with ServiceNow as an application development platform and with the products within ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, and HRSD. Before returning to consulting, Robert most recently ran the ServiceNow program for a leading research hospital.
