Maximizing ServiceNow: Is Your Enterprise Leaving Value on the Table?

ServiceNow is a transformative platform for helping IT teams extend their reach, resolve issues, and keep complex, integrated systems efficient, scalable, and secure, saving time and increasing efficiency in ways that can impact every process, team, and function across an organization. On top of that, they’re adding new features continually – so quickly that many enterprises fail to fully utilize ServiceNow for maximum ROI. According to recent reports, underutilization of ServiceNow runs as high as 40-60% in some cases, a significant reduction in potential return on investment. Over two decades of founding companies in the IT consulting and integration space, I’ve noticed a few trends in the areas that tend to get overlooked, especially with larger enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions, all of which tend to have very complex needs. If your organization is using ServiceNow, consider reviewing these three key services where you may be able to make better use of a platform you already have.  

Agentic AI-Powered Automation: Use Cases Across the Enterprise

IT teams from just about every industry looking to deploy AI across their digital infrastructures and operations face a lot of challenges in determining where, when, and how to best do that for maximum efficiency gains while streamlining the cost. ServiceNow has made overcoming these challenges faster and easier by embedding AI enhancements and Agentic AI-powered solutions into every service module. 

Generally, the larger the organization and the more legacy systems it’s carrying, the more likely that its workforce is spending a lot of time manually completing tasks that could be automated. For example, many state and local government agencies continue to rely on manual processes to deliver services to their citizens, usually resulting in prolonged service times, increased risk of human error, and poor citizen experience. IT teams across industries can utilize ServiceNow not just to eradicate manual processes with intelligent automation, but they can do it by leveraging a cloud platform that the organization has already invested in. 

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates repetitive, manual tasks such as employee onboarding, medical claims processing, compliance reporting, inventory management, and service requests. The benefits include reduced human error, improved efficiency (tasks that took hours might take mere minutes once automated), and recaptured worker hours to focus on higher-value tasks.
• AI Agents & Predictive Intelligence solutions can automate multistep, cross-functional workflows. Goal-oriented communications, Information gathering and analysis, accountability, tracking, and service delivery can be handled with ease through self-service portals and integrated communications platforms. A major reason why ServiceNow has such robust capabilities is because they’re Agentic AI powered.

The beauty of Agentic AI is its ability to manage detail-heavy, goal-oriented workflows autonomously and adaptably. It can communicate with users dynamically using natural language processing. Agentic AI can also communicate with other cloud platforms and digital infrastructures to gather data in moments, apply learning, apply real-time decision making, and drive toward a specific goal. Organizations from private enterprises to SLED (State & Local Government, Education) agencies are already making use of this technology to create self-service portals for internal AND external stakeholders, and to string together multiple automated tasks and processes that access multiple cloud platforms and data sources into streamlined, intelligently managed workflows. 

ITOM & ITAM: Maximizing Visibility and Control

Many organizations only partially utilize ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) features, frequently overlooking its more advanced functionalities. However, these features often help to identify additional opportunities for significant cost savings, efficiency gains, and greater risk mitigation. 

With department heads in both the private and public sectors being asked to work with smaller budgets, IT teams can assist by establishing a digital assets portfolio that once complete, can be leveraged to identify extraneous cloud spend, pinpoint resources and knowledge that could be shared more efficiently across the organization, reduce shadow IT, provide visibility into security weak spots, and potentially improve profit margins via efficiency gains. 

Some major functionalities that tend to go underused include:

• Cloud Discovery & Optimization: Provides real-time visibility into cloud environments, mapping infrastructure assets and identifying inefficiencies. Without full implementation, organizations may struggle with shadow IT, compliance risks, and unnecessary cloud spending.
• Service Mapping: Going beyond basic CMDB (Configuration Management Database), Service Mapping establishes service dependency models that help IT teams identify root causes of incidents faster, reducing downtime and improving operational resilience.
• Contract & Vendor Management: Many enterprises neglect ServiceNow’s ability to link contracts to IT assets. Better utilization here can prevent unplanned renewals, underutilized licenses, and missed opportunities to negotiate better vendor agreements.

It typically takes a lot of planning and investigation to accurately plot, track, manage, and continually improve the full map of an organization’s digital and cloud landscape. By fully adopting these capabilities, however, organizations can achieve a more unified and proactive approach to IT operations, potentially improving service reliability and cost-effectiveness. 

Customer Service Management: Streamline Support for Greater Impact

ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) features are often underused, because many businesses don’t fully leverage its potential to streamline customer support processes, particularly when it comes to utilizing advanced features like self-service portals, knowledge base integration, automated workflows and robust analytics.  

We discussed earlier in this article where Agentic AI, intelligent automation, and predictive analytics are allowing companies to radically save time, money, and deliver high quality experiences to stakeholders, but frequently overlooked features include:

• Self-Service Portals: While many businesses have implemented basic self-service solutions, they frequently fail to integrate them with AI-driven virtual agents, knowledge bases, and automated workflows, resulting in inefficient case resolution and increased dependency on live support teams.
• End-to-End Workflow Integration: ServiceNow allows businesses to connect CSM with IT, HR, and field service management, creating a seamless, cross-functional customer experience while eliminating redundant third-party applications.
• Advanced Analytics & Insights: Robust reporting and AI-powered analytics can help organizations identify patterns in customer inquiries, proactively address recurring issues, and refine service strategies to drive long-term efficiency and satisfaction.

By leveraging these underused features, enterprises can transform customer service from a cost center into a strategic asset that enhances both operational efficiency and customer loyalty. There’s also huge potential for companies to reduce their reliance on third party applications and make more efficient use of what they already own. 

KeenStack’s Strategy for Maximizing ServiceNow Utilization

While ServiceNow is an incredibly powerful platform and makes extensive use of low code/no code features, it is not always “plug and play” for large enterprises with complex needs. Achieving maximum ROI requires strategic implementation, optimization, and continuous improvement. This is where having an ally can help you ensure that your platform aligns to your business outcomes, achieves a high level of optimization & integration, and gains you a faster ROI. Independent third-party consultants and system integrators like KeenStack play a crucial role in ensuring organizations fully capitalize on their investment. We do this by staying with you every step of the way through your digital transformation journey with a four-phase strategy.