Don’t Poke the Bear – Hug the Bear

About half way through the year last year, we had a bit of a focus change. And an attitude change. We decided bear hugs were probably better than bear pokes.

For years I had poked holes in the ServiceNow architecture, highlighting their weaknesses in hopes of educating people that the system is not the be-all-end-all that it is marketed to be.

The reality is - it’s a perfectly fine system. It has its pluses and minuses. It really does.

And it certainly has built a developer community that can make it sing and dance where it needs to.

Over the last few years, we approached companies with a bit of a “Kinetic Platform OR ServiceNow Platform” strategy for handling service portals and self service systems.

It turns out that it’s better to take the approach of a “ServiceNow AND Kinetic Platform” framework.

ServiceNow has its strengths:

• ITSM ITOM products
• Its vision marketing and sales efforts 
• Partner network
• Its user community 
• Its annual party
• (And others)

ServiceNow also has its own ”non-strengths” (see how I don’t say weaknesses) in these areas:

• User Interface
• Multi-tenant scenarios
• Upgrades
• Licensing complexity and cost

But it has a lot of strengths - which should be maximized within an organization.

So, again, halfway through the year we started talking with organizations using ServiceNow about how they could increase system adoption, simplify long-term management, and avoid some costs as they expanded their user base.

We’ve found it’s hard to talk to somebody who has just started out with ServiceNow about any change in approach. However, after three years and a license renewal period — it gets much easier.

It’s taken a while for companies to go down the ServiceNow path and to better understand its strengths and weaknesses from a reality perspective versus the sales/marketing perspective.

Once an organization has some real experience, they are more open to consider engaging with Kinetic Data to fill in some of the gaps, by integrating with and expanding the usability of ServiceNow.

It turns out it’s all psychology— we just need to figure out a way to help companies and people running projects to reach their goals.

To move forward together.

So, we’ll hug the bear. There’s no need to poke the bear.

Party on.

-John

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