I wrote a book about enabling ServiceNow transformation success

After nearly a year of work, I'm incredibly proud to have co-authored the book ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders with my good friend and colleague Roy Justus .

Younger me would never have imagined that I'd have an actual book published, let alone a book for enterprise professionals. I've learned an enormous amount through the process about perseverance, overcoming writer's block (and anxiety!), and the process of reviewing, editing and publishing a manuscript. It turned out to be far more difficult a challenge than I'd expected, but the feeling of accomplishment I felt when a copy finally landed in my hands was greater than I'd ever anticipated. I'll leave my thoughts on writing this book to a later post, and for now, I want to focus on why and whom I wrote the book for.

Why write the book

While ServiceNow is the core technology used to enable transformation in this book, there is so much more to succeeding at automation, digitization and modernization than simply deploying a solution into an organization. Everyone knows that to transform, you must change "People, Process and Technology", but exactly what are the elements to prepare, solve and plan for? In my role as the Engagement Excellence pillar lead for Deloitte's ServiceNow practice, I've had the luxury of being able to work on these questions in a focused way with my team and bring it to both our engagement teams and clients to enable greater success and value realization in their implementations. After several years of applying focus in this area and nearly a decade working in this space, I felt like I had enough interesting observations and knowledge collected to release it in a format that can be consumed in detail, beyond a PowerPoint deck or one-hour presentation.

This book captures techniques and strategies great and small that can make a difference in the level of success of a transformation as well as insights on how the technologies on the platform can be leveraged to deliver value. I wrote it so that I might be able to quickly provide a reference guide for success for anyone on a digital transformation journey with ServiceNow: whether you're planning for it, are in the middle of one, or are looking for ways to build greater outcomes from what you have already achieved. Finally, I wrote it because I was curious about the book-writing process and had always wanted to be published in something. I just always thought it would've been a pulp fantasy adventure instead of a book for technology professionals.

Who is the book for

The book is targetted towards platform architects and project leaders looking to leverage ServiceNow as the core technology of a digital transformation, but will likely prove valuable and interesting for anyone who may be interested in knowing some of the following:

• How to maximize the value and ROI of the ServiceNow platform.
• How to plan and run a ServiceNow implementation, transformation, and long-term platform operations.
• How (and when) to leverage cutting-edge platform capabilities such as Predictive Intelligence and what does all this AI stuff mean anyway?
• The ingredients and prep work needed to improve the success of your transformation (and get the most value out of your implementation partners!).
• The ingredients needed to sustain the platform long term, and what to consider in right-sizing your platform investment so you don't bite off more than you can chew.

That's just a small sampling of what you will find in the book. Even so, there was so much more detail we wanted to include in there that we didn't have a chance to... maybe we'll get to it on another one someday.

If you do happen to read it, I'd love to hear your questions and comments and am greatly looking forward to having conversations and discussions on the contents. I'm also looking to release a set of commentary articles throughout the next year to provide further colour on the contents of the book with my co-author Roy.