Page 7 - FCW, June/July 2021

CONTRACT LEADERSHIP
Enhanced Efficiency
An expanded ServiceNow deployment supports greater government agility
The COVID crisis brought to the fore the need for greater agility in federal systems. While many agencies were able to support a rapid shift to remote work, others stumbled in their efforts to shift on the fly. Governance and security, scalability and manageability—all suffered, at times, as the government moved to adjust its workflows.
“Did you get the right assets to the right person in a reasonable amount of time, and was it done within the compliance framework?” said Jack Nichols, CDW·G’s CTO for Federal- Civilian. “In many cases, people were able to work from home, but it wasn’t done in accordance with the security posture of the agency.”
How to make government more efficient and responsive? Many agencies have turned to the workflow optimization platform ServiceNow.
By expanding their ServiceNow implementations, they could potentially drive further-reaching improvements in efficiency and agility.
What it does
ServiceNow delivers cross-enterprise digital workflows that connect people, functions and systems in order to enhance productivity which aids in
accelerated innovation. It enables federal agencies to create a modern, compelling IT service experience.
In the midst of the pandemic, for example, agencies had to deploy thousands of laptops for remote work. ServiceNow’s asset management capabilities help to streamline that effort.
“Agencies had to make sure that
the configurations and the images on those laptops were going to be set up so people could tunnel and VPN, and the security was going to be there,”
said John Manna, a CDW·G senior manager on the ServiceNow team. “ServiceNow enabled them to manage that process so that it was standardized, and so that it also minimized risk.”
Enhanced service
In terms of IT Service Management, or ITSM, ServiceNow ensures coherent and consistent workflows
in support of effective IT service engagements. “A key focus is always on improving how we deliver services to the business, and an important part of that is minimizing outages and reducing impact on users, keeping the teams productive,” Manna said.
“With workflow automation,
you can improve how work moves through the organization. That means,
for example, that federal employees can request a new laptop, and we’re actually getting it imaged and spun up and shipped out to them with very few touch points. Everything happens faster and more smoothly,” he said.
With support for IT services, “people can come to a ServiceNow portal and either ask for help or search the knowledge base to help themselves,” Manna said. “And once
a request is logged, the workflows behind it will automatically move that work to the right people.”
Robust operations
Operations management, likewise, can benefit from enhanced and automated workflows. In the effort to ensure the health of the IT backbone, ServiceNow’s support for the configuration management database, or CMDB, plays a central role.
Robust CMDB support helps
to automate fixes, with network monitoring to support IT in its effort to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture.
“ServiceNow helps to ensure an agency has an intelligent and accurate CMDB. That means we’re going to have an asset repository that’s reliable and also automatically updated. The
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