We’re happy to announce that we have a new managing partner on board – Rami Wazni. With over two decades of experience in the software development industry, Wazni will be responsible for overseeing Appstronauts’ North American division and helping to increase our presence in the region.
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Spreadsheets are a great way to start tracking IT assets. They are a terrible way to keep tracking them once a company runs teams on several continents.
When we started working with Cisco’s teams in the US and the UK, IT assets and service processes lived in Excel files. Around 90,000 incidents had been reported worldwide with no proper process to handle them. Nobody could say with confidence what assets existed, who owned them or what state they were in.
Nine months later, a team of three of our engineers had implemented ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) end to end, written a custom integrator to keep data in sync with other systems, and replaced the spreadsheets with one platform. Here is how we approached it, and what we would tell anyone about to do the same.
Excel does not fail on day one. It fails slowly, and that is what makes it dangerous:
The 90,000 unhandled incidents were not a sign that people did not care. They were a sign that the tools could no longer carry the scale of the organisation.
Before configuring anything, we mapped how assets and service requests were actually handled: which spreadsheets existed, who updated them, how requests arrived and where they got stuck. The official process and the real one are rarely the same, and you need to build for the real one.
Importing messy spreadsheets into ServiceNow only gives you messy data in a more expensive tool. We consolidated the files, removed duplicates, resolved conflicts and agreed on what each field means before a single record was migrated.
We implemented the full IT Asset Management scope: asset records with an owner, a state and a lifecycle, from request to retirement. Once every asset has an owner and a history, most of the “where is it and who has it?” questions disappear.
Requests, incidents and approvals moved from email and files into ServiceNow ITSM workflows, with a service catalog where employees can ask for a laptop, a licence or access in one place. Incidents that used to disappear now have an owner and a status.
Off-the-shelf connectors did not cover everything the client needed, so we wrote our own integrator to connect ServiceNow with the client’s other systems and keep the data in sync. Without it, the new platform would have quickly become one more place with outdated data.
The platform went live for teams in the US and the UK. A tool only works if people use it, so rollout is part of the project, not an afterthought.
A few questions to ask yourself:
If the honest answer to any of these is no, it is worth talking. You can read the full story in our Cisco case study, or see how our engineers join client teams in Team Extension.
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