I started my ServiceNow journey in 2009. Since 2010 I’ve had ServiceNow clients asking if IAM processes could be implemented on the ServiceNow platform. This article explains what the visionary ServiceNow system owners were thinking when they reached out to us with the question “Does ServiceNow have IAM application?”.
First, the question if IAM could be operated on ServiceNow was raised by a technical wholesale company, then a telecom operator, and after that a facility management company. What we learned here is that this is not an industry-specific target state (running IAM next to ITSM), but instead serves all customers that want to consolidate operating IT processes on a workflow platform.
Improving the experience for employees
You might wonder why customers are specifically asking for IAM on ServiceNow. We haven’t asked that question from the customers, but what we have identified is that quite often the customers have already made significant investments in the self-service portal and ITSM processes running on ServiceNow. After all, who wouldn’t like to have a single self-service portal for requesting ITSM stuff such as laptops and IAM stuff such as user accounts for IT systems? Nowadays even the stand-alone IAM solutions have ServiceNow connectors, however, based on our experience this cannot be recommended as the implementation time and cost far exceeds using a single platform for both ITSM and IAM.
In addition to being able to order all the IT requests from one portal, there are two other significant usability benefits – one for the personnel approving IT requests and another one for the personnel delivering the IT services:
– Roughly 1 in 10 employees of an organization are supervisors, so this is quite a significant portion of the employees. Would you prefer to have separate tools for the managers to receive approval requests or a single platform?
– For the service desk or service provider, wouldn’t it be nice if the specialists that create or update user accounts and other requests, would not need to hop between systems when they manage IT tickets? Instead of hopping between the systems, ITSM and IAM tickets are within one queue in ServiceNow which makes life easier for the IT specialists.
Another thing that we have identified is that the visionary ServiceNow system owners want to consolidate processes on ServiceNow. Based on the one-to-one discussions, the main reasons are the power of ServiceNow technology and eco-system as well as the opportunity for improving the return-on-investment on the ServiceNow investment.
Power of the NowPlatform
As we see it, ServiceNow is a future-proof platform. As of today, ServiceNow has over 17000 employees committed to enabling organizations to work better through the digital experiences of ServiceNow. What are the digital experiences in practice? Continuously developed and improved user interfaces for browsers, mobile apps, etc. Tools for building workflows such as flow designer. Reporting capabilities such as AI-based predictive reporting, and enablement courses for your employees such as citizen developer. To learn more about the power of ServiceNow technology we recommend you get familiar with the hyper-automation capabilities as well as AI capabilities available on the NowPlatform. Based on the latest figures ServiceNow had Q2 2022 total revenues of $1752 million, representing 24% yearoveryear growth. This is a huge figure for any cloud company, whether it is Amazon or Microsoft.
What does this mean from the money perspective?
Since 2017 we’ve had our ServiceNow IAM application available. Based on our experience customers can achieve significant savings as well as productivity improvements by consolidating ITSM and IAM operations on a single workflow platform. We are happy to assist you to estimate the total cost of running IAM on a stand-alone solution vs. the ServiceNow platform.
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