roy i'm live just waiting for this to go through the stream so this comes through and there it is and so welcome to another workflow wednesday glad to have you here uh you can type in comments in the chat either on youtube you had did subscribe right uh or linkedin or on twitter i've been on twitter i've looked at this morning since 2008 man time flies but anyway on workflow wednesday today one of the things i wanted to talk about is if you're using or considering using servicenow it is a platform of platforms that stretches across the enterprise and one of the questions that i've encountered throughout the years is how do i keep this platform healthy what are some things that i need to put in place to really maintain the servicenow platform well and i would say it really comes down to four things and so we're going to talk about that what are the four things to keep servicenow healthy and we'll talk about a little yeah each of them a little bit deeper but to keep it healthy first you need some governance you need a governance structure in place that can look at this ever-growing pipeline if you don't have a growing pipeline we also need to talk but what's a governance structure look like for servicenow and then beyond that you need to look at how you provide best practice coding guidelines so for your in-house development team as well as any partners that you bring in and hopefully you're considering third era as you look at your partners if you haven't heard about us let's talk um and then beyond that having a good change management process again if you're using servicenow or considering servicenow itil and and change manage should be front of mind for you but having servicenow go through that change management process also gives you those checks and balances to make sure that you really maintain the platform well and then the fourth one is have some type of regular health check and we'll talk a little bit more about the service you know what we do at third era for that but really those are the four things so let's dig into it a little bit more governance what do i mean by that it's not grc is part of irm right so it's acronyms integrated risk management servicenow is a great platform to look at that so you can have really a single system that can look at your vulnerabilities understand your risk exposure and look at security incidents and really have case management to pass that information resolve it but that's not the governance we're talking about here to really be successful with the now platform it's important to have a governance structure some would call it a servicenow steering committee uh in an advocacy committee or an advocacy group but really an organization or a structure that's looking at what are the business processes that we need to automate improve the flow of work on who owns those those processes and really the fulfillment of of the needs across the organization and then as you dive deeper into the technology stack underneath it how do we understand those capabilities and make sure that we're enhancing it appropriately that org structure is is something that in our third era is roadmap engagement we spend some time looking at how are you structured and how do we recommend that you shape your governance structure around servicenow having that in place gives visibility across the platform and also helps you prioritize across the platform i've said in the past you don't need a servicenow roadmap you need a servicenow community development plan it's really a family of road maps and sometimes it's important to at least in our intellectual space separate that and say i need a road map for itsm i.t service management but i also need a roadmap for irm and grc i need a roadmap for hr i need a road map for where our employees go for content servicenow is an amazing platform to use for content and so if you think about the different users that you have you essentially have a roadmap that's going to work at their pace to solve their business problems and that fits into that governance structure to really be able to manage it well so that was that was option one the second one is really looking at best practices servicenow publishes some best practices if you don't have something in place in your organization i highly recommend that you start that um it's just coding guidelines development guidelines expectations in your organization if you touch our instance what should you follow what are some recommendations as third arrow we can help you know craft that and share our best practice expertise with you know collectively over 20 years of experience on the platform um we've been around the platform for a long while but as you work more with servicenow take their best practice advice from directly from servicenow add your own and also get wisdom from the partners that you're engaged with build out those best practices so as you're developing on the platform you're encouraging that peer review your insur encouraging review so you're really upleveling the game as you use the platform and as you find issues go back and make sure that your best practices are recommending against that right that you can learn and improve that continual service improvement fits into that best practice document all right so we talked about governance we talked about a best practice guide the third one is itil change management some people might say why why is that important for you know really maintaining servicenow i'll admit there's organizations that i've worked with in the past that are using servicenow for their change management but kind of didn't eat their own dog food they for the changes that were done on servicenow it's like they made updates and they pushed the update set use your change management process for anything that's that's touching a configuration item that you care about so that is as you're updating production for servicenow that you have those checks and balances for visibility for time and and that you're following through in your process and in having that in place for servicenow is important and it's a key to making sure that you're maintaining servicenow well as well as the rest of your technology landscape right all right so that's that's the first three the last one is having some way to do a health check having some way to do a health scan at third era we've produced many applications we've helped organizations craft their own applications to be able to put on the servicenow store and one of ours is the third era instance analyzer used to be the evergreen instance analyzer if you knew evergreen systems one of our companies that third air was formed from but this is a document that's based on a lot of the best practices that servicenow recommends as well as best practices that we've developed over time looking at the platform to say what are security risks what are upgrade risks what are other things that can impact your capability of servicenow performing well over time there's no cost to getting the instance analyzer installed on a non-production environment and running it in your instance and you can see the number of different findings if you do that or when you do that don't be overwhelmed by the number of things it finds there's many cases where there's a lot in there and it's important to be able to look at that and prioritize there's likely a handful of things that should be looked at there's other things that it's it's more informs what are your best practices so you can correct it over time and so you know take a look at the third ins your instance analyzer let me turn on my desktop so you can see if you go to the servicenow store or if you're in your own servicenow instance and you look at store available apps you can find it by searching for instance analyzer or searching for third era you'll see our different different apps that are available take a look at it you can install it on your platform and get help is as you run it reach out to me if you'd like some one of our experts to sit down with you to do an uh a readout right to just kind of show you here's how you use this tool here's how you can leverage it more and here's some of the exact findings based on our experience we'd recommend you look at as soon as you can and so again take a look at that it's easy to download and you know i hope those four things have a governance structure build a best practice set of recommendations for developing on your platform in your instance do include servicenow in your change management process and then also run some type of health scan whether it's a third error instance analyzer hell scan from servicenow or another another tool but have something that you're regularly looking at the health of your instance so that when upgrades come because we know they come every six months that you're ready to make those upgrades a seamless process that each upgrade doesn't take multiple months if anything if you have other questions reach out to me on linkedin i'm easy to find and glad to talk through servicenow with you as we look at how can servicenow improve the flow of work in your organization one workflow at a time thanks for joining my live stream for workflow wednesday and look forward to talking with you thanks bye you