Why your legacy IT tools are holding your business back

By legacy system, we mean an outdated method. At Unifii, many companies we engage with are still using legacy systems to run their IT services. When we start to explore their existing setup, a frequent occurrence is the same low maturity approaches; this means that the businesses suffer from similar limitations with high costs of ownership or delivering low business value. Examples of this include using basic incident logging tools for handling their incoming issues, using spreadsheets and manual processing for reporting, and SharePoint sites as repositories for various processes. On top of that, updates tend to be email based with limited or no self-service, whilst service owners and support groups are either stored in people’s brains or else buried in an Excel somewhere. 

So, what’s the alternative? 

ServiceNow is a joined-up single system which can literally solve and replace all of the above pains. By bringing together all your ITSM processes on one best-of-breed tool like ServiceNow, you would be able to streamline your incident processes with a clear process flow. The tool allows you to take Incident Management to a new level with the major incident workbench combined with the MS Teams integration. It’s also easy to supercharge your Change Management with change flows and change models, and your Problem Management processes with clear communication for fixes and workarounds. 

All of this is centred around a Common Service Data Model (CSDM), thus enabling your business to fully understand your services and their effectiveness. ServiceNow provides clear insight into service status across your organisation, including open Incidents, Changes, Problems and Outages, so you can define, manage, and publish a shared vision of the hierarchy of the business. Relating these services to records of all your assets and configuration items, where they are located, who they are supported by and how are they configured, provides a massive value add to your ITSM and ITOM processes. 

Okay, but what is the experience like? 

The new Next Experience UI on offer as part of the ServiceNow San Diego release works coherently alongside the highly useful Agent Workspace and new Service Operations Workspace. These fresh, modern interfaces give agents role-tailored views and hands on access to everything that is occurring in the IT environment, including outages and ongoing changes. Agents can call upon historical records, view knowledge base articles and directly interact with callers, meaning resolution of more issues, more quickly. 

If having high customer satisfaction rates is a key business goal of yours, the platform offers huge scope to take this further with features such as Virtual Agent, Agent Chat, and the Walk-up Experience. These services are all at your users’ fingertips within a self-service portal or a dedicated mobile app. Take on-call scheduling; this enables you to easily route issues to the right people at the right time, on an on-call basis (e.g. an out of hours rota). With on-tool coaching opportunities, gaps in the knowledge of your agents can be easily detected, measured, and trained. This contributes towards achieving a well-populated skills matrix, and further meeting your organisation’s needs.

What are you waiting for? 

With more advanced capabilities like Advanced Work Assignment, AIOps, Predictive intelligence, Similarity Framework, Performance Analytics, IntegrationHub and Automation Engine so many more, you’ll blast your legacy systems out of the water and wonder why you didn’t make the shift sooner! 

Everything we’ve discussed here represents just the tip of the iceberg for ServiceNow: there are so many other features and product suites available, and what is best for you will completely depend on your business model and objectives. 

At Unifii, we pride ourselves on understanding your business, your needs and working alongside you, to deliver a supercharged ServiceNow experience. To find out more, please contact one of the team here.