okay and let's begin our session today good morning good afternoon good evening wherever whichever part of the world you're joining from welcome everyone to today's servicenow impact Academy session our topic of discussion is stand up servicenow center of excellence and innovation this is our omnipresent Safe Harbor slide which states that you should not be making any purchasing decisions on what we're going to be discussing today thank you and today's session is a part of the live on servicenow this is a curated event series to connect you with service now experts and peers that can help you deploy your products and Achieve value from servicenow faster and we hope that you are able to join us again at another webinar or Meetup you can see the schedule by scanning the QR code which is there on S3 or using the link in the chat which is also getting provided couple of housekeeping things we do have time at the end of the session for question and answers please use the Q a button at the bottom of your screen along the way not the chat button that ways we can keep a track of all the question and answers and if something gets is an answer today we can track it later as well today's presentation is being recorded and this will be shared on servicenow community after the event he will be prompted to fill out a short survey thank you for your feedback my name is Ashish Sethi I am a director for servicenow platform Innovation and enablement being with servicenow for or more than a year but been working on the platform for more than a decade now and I've helped many customers during their implementation journey and helping them realize value from servicenow platform faster we have worked with our customers to stand up our servicenow center of excellence and Innovation and make sure that in their Journey and with me today I have hi greetings for the day I am Hussein Merchant senior manager platform Innovation and enablement we are part of now on our team we use our own servicenow Solutions as customer zero to get it work faster smarter and better so hopefully we will be able to give you some more examples of how we have our internal serviceness center of excellence and Innovation and how we are able to use our services and get value internally let's start with a polling question do you currently have a servicenow focused center of excellence and innovation and your answers could be no I'm hearing it for the first time and I have discussed it we are planning we're on our way to plan that it's exists somewhat but maybe not that robust and we don't follow it consistently yes we have a running coei and we are looking to make it more efficient and better we will give around 45 seconds for folks to answer this please feel free to click on any of the four choices which is relevant to your environment foreign and once you guys have replied we will be able to see the polling results as well okay so good to hear that 50 percent of our participants are hearing it for the first time I'm sure this will be a very relevant session for you 23 believe they have discussed they have heard about it they are on their way to planning it 17 believe that yes in some way shape or form it does exist in their environment obviously they want to make it more better and robust and nine percent which is a small percentage today they are running their coei and they want to make it much more efficient and faster I'm sure we will go through a lot of things in today's discussion which will help you in planning your coer and if you're already running there will be some tips and tricks on how to continue making it better okay okay so I was thinking about this session and over dinner with my family I was telling my kids I have a five-year-old boy and a nine-year-old daughter I was talking to them that you know I have this webinar on Thursday Center of Excellence on servicenow and uh I am excited about it and obviously a bit nervous as well they said great dad what is center of excellence in Innovation and I said yes happy to explain that that will give me a prep session as well and I gave them some technical words value driven and all those things and after five minutes of discussion they said we didn't get even a single word what you said and then I said it I felt little you know failed that you know I'm not able to explain it to my kids why then I said give me a few minutes I thought about what has happened how can I explain it to these children and then I thought about the over the summer entire summer it's almost over we had a good time with my parents obviously their grandparents and I told them what grandparents are in the family that is what servicenow center of excellence and Innovation is in service now your grandparents have a lot of experience they will teach you life skills so they will give you that vision and roadmap they will give you the family values right how do you engage how do you interact with your entire family how do you keep in touch how why it is important then they will they will also tell you how to care and support you might be busy but they will always be there to support you in difficult times and that is a very very crucial element in the family how do you support each other and the last one is most important this is how this is the one I link to Innovation you are so rush in your day-to-day Affair you sometimes Overlook certain things right they give you a completely new and fresh perspective to your life and once I you know um had gone through these four points explained that to my kids they were happy yes we understand it and I have felt that I have achieved something and I am will be able to successfully conduct this webinar moving further uh top three challenges so in my past nine ten years of experience I have met a lot of customers where they are in their implementation Journey they have implemented certain products capabilities itsm HR or they are in their implementation journey to implement CSM or trying to improve their cmdb with csdm typically they are looking challenges around how do I get Roi from all the Investments which I've made on the platform how do I grow and innovate making sure I'm able to uh innovate with business priorities and how do I make sure that whatever I work on the platform it aligns with my business objectives those are the top three majority of their challenges boiled onto these three today we're going to be talking about what is servicenow center of excellence and Innovation why is it worth investing in one Jose will also give us a deep dive on the five steps how do you stand up a servicenow center of excellence in Innovation how do you run it and then we have certain things some action items takeaways call to action at the end what you should be doing next after this webinar so let's dig in by defining servicenow center of excellence and innovation it is an organization model that we recommend customers to stand up to optimize strategic value which they get from servicenow platform coei is not only about platform support or architecture it goes much beyond that it helps you in consolidating teams making sure those teams are able to work together for the long term vision and roadmap which is our strategy piece then you have your business engagement and delivery which is another function within your COI which helps you in setting up your priorities whenever any demands comes up whenever you are delivering new capabilities or apps they are aligned with your business objectives then you have your platform architecture and support piece which means that you are you have listed down your development best practices your user experience your platform performance your instance upgrades everything is of top notch quality and the fourth function is around Innovation which means identify and spotting opportunities within your entire Enterprise and then you give a human-centric design thinking touch to all of those so your COI helps in removing your organization silos and make sure that you are able to realize value faster from the platform and you have all these functions should we have all the functions to begin with OR focus on anything specific so if you're beginning your journey good question and often customers have also asked me this question uh I would say business engagement and delivery the way you're interacting with your business partners and platform architecture and support team those functions would already be there in your organization and strategy and Innovation is a team where you will have to have additional resources pull in it's not necessary to have a full-fledged running four functions initially but in some way shape or form you should have at least some bandwidth allocated to strategy and Innovation as well to make sure at least you have some measurable outcomes in those areas as well so start small but have a long term Vision where you can beef up these as you mature in your service no joint so why should you invest and your time your resources and SEO AI first point is that it will improves your velocity by making sure your teams are able to work together to deliver the required value effective cuis improve in strategic enterprise-wide value you deliver because they can promote workflows across your organization they can provide unified experiences across business lines and departments because you take an effort through the COI to make sure everybody realizes the power of the platform so you can Inspire folks that there is a capability such as low code no code where you can build apps and move away from manual processes once you do this you are able to find out opportunities to innovate on the platform as you partner with business and make them understand how the platform Works how workflows work on servicenow then you are able to identify those opportunities proactively and able to innovate more on the platform in short you are proactive and not you know sitting and waiting for requirements to happen to you but you are reaching out to the teams and making sure that the power of the platform is aware and they it helps in achieving the maximum value from the platform in this particular case the COI success will be determined by the value we are able to provide back to the business because I think business is the most crucial and important piece of your entire organization employ employee productivity csat improvements and new value creation through app these are some of the ways through which you can highlight the improvements and value through servicenow is there an example within now and now within internally where we have seen where we have worked across different teams and been able to deliver a value yeah of course there is one let me share like RCI was able to identify uh the opportunity to improve processes which Cuts over multiple teams uh and it involves multiple personas related to sales organization like seller deal disk order management and collection specialist and couple of others and it was bringing a lot of manual work for this personas let's take an example of a use case with the seller Persona where seller generally deals with opportunity and a code and if a seller have a very significant day within let's say million dollar deal and they want to have certain level of execution executive engagement uh to happen during the opportunity cycle then they can create the request on servicenow platform which is connected to that particular opportunity so when they create a request for executive engagement it has got required attributes like what kind of executive they want or what is the background of this opportunity and why they want that executive to be involved and kind of help the executive is expected to give and when there are executive sponsor engaged in that particular opportunity they can capture notes for themselves into that opportunity directly so if we don't have all these things it will be in the emails and all managed manually so load of reduction in manual tasks and seamless process with workflow driven approvals and other things as an outcome we saw productivity gain almost zero error and complete disease digitization using now platform okay good example so we were able to use app engine we were able to collaborate between multiple departments and identify opportunities to make sure we are able to seamlessly have digital workflow around that order to cash process okay foreign gave a very good example of how we were able to digitize our order to cash process I'm going to be talking about an opportunity which your Innovation team could find out and then how that particular opportunity was prioritized and then worked helped to deliver the value from the platform let's take this example of your Innovation team was able to identify that there is a better and efficient way for your field workers to report issues from the field the initially design a proof of concept to build a servicenow mobile app once that is done they hand that over to the strategy team which assesses the potential value of the app why it is important why it is crucial what kind of issues will be reported by it and then it will assign a priority for that app to be built on the servicenow roadmap then your business engagement and delivery team will support the rollout at scale not just by delivering the new capability by ensuring that there is adequate training as well as chain management to ensure there is high adoption across the field workers then at the last year platform architecture and support team will play a role make sure you have a support plan for the rollout of that particular app and the new capability is deployed effectively so all these functions work together cohesively within your COI and then that's how they bring Enterprise Value to life so in this particular case you spotted an opportunity and made sure that you are able to build that on servicenow platform and deliver value to your business think of onboarding also as an example where it cuts across multiple functions your HR team your security team your facilities team Itt and then we internally also are able to onboard employees or and make them working right from day one and this is one of the areas which is you know majority of the organizations struggle with how to make sure that my teams and my new joiners have a great experience and are able to effective effectively work right from day one itself so what we recommend is five steps to standing up a service now center of excellence and innovation step one is about setting up your foundation so in this particular step you have to make sure that your you position your servicenow coei as Innovation Hub for digital transformation then you have step two which means here you define your COI Charter and structure you make sure that whatever measurable outcomes you will deliver through COI those are listed it's a strategic platform for delivering in Innovation across your Enterprise then step three will be defining your engagement and delivery model when these new demands will come in how do you assess those demands from Priority perspective from a you know technical governance standpoint and then how do you assign that priority how that overall interaction happens then Define your resourcing model who all will be uh the key resources what all will be their roles responsibilities and how your value management strategy will work across those resources then the last step is around operationalizing your COI which means that you publish your training calendar you publish your communication calendar platform support and upgrade calendar so that everybody is aware about coei and then how you're able to tie the new functionality with the upgrades and I'm sure many of you would be upgrading and later during Q4 as we will have the Vancouver released General availability around September end so you can start planning for it and make sure whatever new capabilities are there that can be tied to Value driven through platform so I'll ask Hussein to give us a walkthrough of all the five steps and a detailed View yep thank you Ashish for helping us to understand about what is servicenow coei and why to inverse to invest in the coei I said if we can go to the next slide please thank you so to begin with step one let's talk about the prerequisites and when to start the foundation for the center of excellence and Innovation as an outcome of this step we will have the necessary prerequisites in place now how do we achieve this outcome well we need to Define an Enterprise vision for servicenow coei let's say you have a vision to build and deliver a world-class digital service experience for your employees once we have the vision then we need the Strategic drivers to this vision for example reducing the time employees spend on low value and administrative tasks here we can leverage RPA capabilities to automate the mundane task and let the employee or focus on more strategic tasks with the help of strategic drivers we can achieve the desired outcomes like improved employee experience satisfaction and productivity once you have the vision strategic drivers and outcomes Define it needs to be made visible to the executive sponsors executive sponsors are the one who can help Advance the adoption of servicenow across the Enterprise and encourage new demands now the question comes up how do I get the right executive sponsors in place to articulate and support the vision for servicenow and in that manner for the coei for that evaluate and identify the right level of executive sponsorship to advance your strategic vision for servicenow across Enterprise leadership team execute sponsors like cios who spend the majority of their time with business partners or customers are better positioned to support the coei they can influence and articulate the Strategic vision and they can help in allocating appropriate budget if we go a little Beyond and have an executive sponsor with Innovation experience this will more likely help to position servicenow coei as a potential engine for innovation in digitizing workflows for a quick request here you I see on the slide that you have mentioned that you should start your coei no later than 80 percent on your way to go live any particular reason why 80 percent that is a really good case assertion if we delay it's like changing the tire on a moving car rather than getting your tire pressure checked before prior to the start of the drive follow the concept of sooner the better it is it helps to drive engagement with the help of executive sponsor to identify Innovation opportunities and plan for implementation and Adoption of those opportunities so if we start at the earlier stage it helps us to provide those opportunities opportunity to work on them and overall that helps in bringing higher value of outcome and for a quick recap of step one to achieve the outcome of foundation step we need a vision and to support the vision we created as strategic drivers and with the help of the Strategic drivers we can achieve the outcome and the outcome should be made available to the executive sponsors now as we have set up the foundation let's move to the next step to define a charter and structure of coei as the outcome of step two we need a clearly defined COI activities and deliverables and how we can measure the success this is where the build come into picture and the rubber meets the road here the build is nothing but the business functions let's take a common example of platform upgrades asish mentioned in Q4 we are getting when core upgrade right so a platform of grid let's take that as an example and go through these different functions mentioned here as part of strategy function the platform owner who owns the strategy function defines the roadmap budget and resources for the platform upgrade and realize the value with latest features and Technologies coming as part of this upgrade business and engagement delivery function is owned by the development lead and product owners they own the demand management from platform upgrade and measure the success with timely and within budget upgrade deliverables the third function which is about the platform architecture and support function is owned by the platform architect and Lead system admins who plans for the deployment evaluate if there is an impact with the instance upgrade and maintains the technical standards and they are also ensuring that the platform performance security upgradability maintainability is not impacting any business processes this function is also responsible for enabling with the latest features coming as part of the upgrade and other into organizational change management process which helps the next function which is about the Innovation function it is the last function for the most important one which is owned by The Experience architect and we have discussed in the previous slider if we have the experience Circle it helps us to get either write in The Innovation opportunity they identify the opportunities to innovate strategize on experience and design improvements here the success is measured based on the adaption of the future and how the opportunities are captured and taken forward from ideation to completion now moving to the step 3 how we Define our engagement and delivery model we receive a new Demand on the demand dashboard demand boards would be different for each product and it goes the review process aligned to their product team product streams so the below of the slide consists of multiple product like itsm another and each product team is comprised of product owner project manager process analyst developers and product architect there are two types of requests raised for the technical governance product for review one coming from the demand board requesting for the solution review and second coming from the product stream for customization review and approval technical governance product reviews the request and the technical standards and tracks on technical depth so far we talked about the governance and product streams now let's dive a little deeper with the coei and their function and how it helps in engagement and delivery model coei receives the demands for sequencing and it takes helps from the executive steering board to build a roadmap when we say about the responsibility of the coei from the accountability of your governance function the coei strategy team can build the roadmap for deploying the servicenow capabilities but the approval should rest with your governance function coei business engagement and delivery team can build the demand backlog but they don't own the demand boards and final prioritization Authority should rest with your demand board the product owners on Business Delivery team are the ones who should help the stakeholders vet and prioritize the demands especially the local demands that business line teams can handle are kept at the local level and not moved into the coei's demand funnel the coei's platform architecture and support team should be responsible for defining technical standards and best practices n6 for approval by your technical governance function with governance function in place the coei helps in developing the roadmap managing the demand backlog and defining the technical standards however the approval decision Authority and prioritization remains with the governance function and we will discuss more about this governance function in the next session as well yes please go ahead Ashish I could understand technical governance manage the technical part demand board addresses the demands and then at the top is your strategic governance which is make sure that all your demands everything is aligned with the roadmap but where does the development happen does it happen inside the coei or is it in a specific business function and what is the recommended approach to overtech yeah that was some initial question even when we started we got it so very real realistic question initially you will most likely perform the in-house development activities inside the coeai and support them with partner resources as needed based on your experience and skills with service now as demand and business familiarity grows you can Leverage The no Code and low code capability capabilities to start moving the development activities to business line development teams and as you mature further your development lead should take on more of a governance advisory and Leadership kind of a role that remain directly response for the development here note that the testing should be centralized development lead defines the testing standards and best practices to include unit and user acceptance testing and we can use here the servicenow ATM framework to Define our testing or the centralized place now let's move to the step four which is about defining the right resourcing model researching resourcing model is divided into two parts the project-based funding in the line item budgets project-based funding is owned by and governed by the platform owners however the line item budget are owned by the coei with project-based funding we need to work with the pmo finance and procurement teams for defining the project-based funding and sourcing model the project-based funding helps to kick off the program manage the demand growth and decentralize the development once we start working with the partners since demand will require the most head count growth as in developers business analysis and system administrator make sure you have right contracts in place and with certified Partners to allow your development and support efforts to scale quickly this can also provide Clarity into how should set you should set the Project based on funding requests as you see the level of effort and head count required for different kinds of the demand now when it comes to the line item budget you allocate a line atom budget to stand up your coeis that is aligned with the scope of your servicenow implementation you need to establish your initial head count and funding estimates for your coei function and that is based on multiple criterias like the number of applications you have implemented and plan to implement the maturity of the process and the services you are planned to migrate to servicenow the volume and the diversity of the demand which you are anticipating which you should correlate to your usage the complexity of demand based on your rate of organizational change the complexity of system integration customization requirement you can plan for your line item budgets and I think this will be the most contention where the most contention happens how many resources or people do you need in the cui model what do you recommend yeah another excellent question uh is like the total head count for your COI depends on several factors as I said right including uh some of the things but it may not be limited to this it all depends on what type of volume and complexity of Demands uh you want with your servicenow capabilities how many end users you have and what geographies you are going to support your organizational experience with servicenow and the maturity with the current processes and workflows so this all comprise to identify the total head count of your cui and when you grow organizational expertise with servicenow you should be able to shift more resources to business lines or Partners to manage the demands the most significant part is to have the right people's identified for platform owner platform architect development lead and the experience architect roles these are all the lead roles who leads and supports each functions outlined earlier moving to the Let's uh Next Step which is the last step step five which is about operationalize your coei and Advance your vision for digital transformation as servicenow becomes an Enterprise plot platform your operating model will need to evolve it's equivalent to how a business operating model would change as a business enters to a new market servicenow operating model defines how work gets done on the now platform to create value the definition should focus on three Essentials planning planning the upgrades training and communication and success with an eye toward keeping it simple and flexible so you can adapt to changing business needs with planned upgrade revisit your demand valuation evaluation criteria to ensure that you can apply them consistently to upgrade the demands for the newer capabilities across the Enterprise you should educate new customer on this criteria and you want to consider representation from across the Enterprise on your demand Broad we need this across the Enterprises because we need to cater the demand for every business functions products then if we move to the training part the key to scale is to shift configuration and development business lines and departments where feasible using servicenow no code low code and application scope capabilities note that as you are operating model scales to include more product owners and stakeholders your governance structure should evolve to ensure you have continued Clarity around decision making processes as the scale and mature many customer transition from a platform support team to a center of excellence and Innovation if you haven't yet implemented service now we can we recommend starting with this model so you are operating model can scale and mature this ensures that organization seems don't get in the way as you take to new Enterprise demands and deliver value the essential behind a Cy is to ensure that you remove friction in the organization relationship and handoffs between these functions and the activities they lead servicenow Champions are people from different teams and roles they are team leads or they can be the process users or the end users and and some somebody else who are affected by the servicenow implementation and who are willing to help make your servicenow project more successful Champions are important because they help inform implementation planning communication and training and they can help in go live preparation with an understanding of what people in the organization need to be able to adopt service now effectively training is followed by communication promote channels for stakeholders to nominate and quickly pilot opportunities for innovation consider assigning an experienced architect to focus on adoption and opportunity cap they can capture identifying additional executive sponsors or Champions who can communicate success and help stakeholder Envision the new new opportunities your strategy and business engagement and delivery teams should determine the audience the Cadence and messaging that will align with your organizational change management strategy and last comes the success determine the metrics and the kpis you will provide to each stakeholder consistently and the Cadence you will provide to them you can use servicenow performance analytics or dashboard and reports to support this measuring your approach to measurement is not a matter of just adding more metrics but your effort should instead focus on scaling metrics such a way that metrics can lead to allow the sponsors and others to take decision making effectively work with your process and service owner to develop metrics and reporting that connect to the business outcomes they want with this I will hand it over back to Ashish for three takeaways thank you son for walking us through all the five steps and answering some of the questions on the way as well so I think towards the end I would like to end this with three key takeaways so when you start defining and building your coei you should not only look at the organization model but look at how you will interact holistically within the entire Enterprise when you are building your cue AI aim at the Enterprise whether you start with itsm whether you start with HR you should look at the entire Enterprise how my interaction with my business partner is going to happen or I am going to communicate My Success how I will be driving towards business priorities and once you do that you set up your cui to make sure you're able to identify Innovation opportunities easily across various business lines and teams so the way you set up the cui will form the foundation and the success of it foreign should be what actions can you take next first time to review the resources you have on customer success Center so you have an entire more than 50 pages success playbook for servicenow coei and then there are multiple other materials there that will help you getting insights from experts on how to build your servicenow cue AI second take what you have learned there and have a discussion with your exec sponsor how can I see you I help you improve the velocity and scale the value you deliver with servicenow this is where your insights and experts tips from our Playbook will be very helpful and make sure that your servicenow will deliver Enterprise workflow transformation not just ID transformation so think and dream big when you're building your coei and for folks who have already cui in some way shape or form or already running it smoothly but want to make it better they should continue to invest heavily in communicating the value realization and success stories particularly with respect to Innovation on the platform that demonstrates servicenow role as an Enterprise strategic platform make your scorecard Central to your strategic governance meetings along with your service now vision and roadmap so a skilled team member can help you achieve your business goals faster review our Technical Training guide to see how you can use your learning credits and with service now impact you already have multiple learning credits included in that on-demand courses live classes Hands-On Labs experts Services guides your service to implementation with some of the leading practices to accelerate time to Value while reducing the risk and we can lead your implementation or collaborate with your implementation partner in a co-delivery engagement model to the to boost your implementation as well as help you realize value check out the solution brief to see how you can help set up the implementation path for long term vision and success thank you everyone for joining in today's session we hope to see you next month in the next servicenow impact Academy session thank you foreign