Real world change stories never get old. But let’s face it: Many of them jumped off the pandemic. Browsing through Service Now’s Now at Work 2021 library (North America), a change story of a different kind quickly popped out: CDW On Now: A Platform for Commercial Success.
Why? CDW started their transformation before the pandemic hit, and they learn a lot.
Heck, presenter Tim Ancona even has ServiceNow in his job title. As VP of ServiceNow Solutions for CDW, he has been bringing ServiceNow to bear on CDW’s transformation efforts since joining the firm.
CDW Corporation is one of those companies that has a huge reach—even if you don’t read about them every day. A Fortune 200 company, CDW’s mandate is to provide technology products and services to business, government and education. But as Ancona told Now At Work attendees, there’s more to it. One day you’re providing laptops – the next you’re doing so much more. As Ancona told us:
We work with corporate clients, the public sector, you name it. We are generally providing Laptop, Desktop, Printer. If you go back 35 years when we started, that’s exactly what we did.
But CDW’s customers wanted more. Ancona said:
We have continued to grow our business as our customers have really demanded that we grow. They’ve come up to us and said, ‘We’re getting all this technology? Can you help us implement this? Can you help us manage this?’ And along the way, we started doing that.
I would say it worked. As of 2020, CDW is a $580 million professional services business.
“The way we could change, we began to see infinite possibilities”
But new business models falter on legacy technology. CDW’s history with Service Now goes back to 2013, six years before the arrival of Ancona. As Ancona explained, CDW started with a classic, ITSM-based Service Now implementation:
[CDW] Apply ServiceNow like everyone else does. They started using service catalogs, events, all those different things you’d expect. He got very good returns for the investment made by him. They had come to rely on it to manage IT.
At the time, Ancona was working in a spinoff venture of his company called Aptris. In Aptris, a big ol’ ServiceNow light bulb went off:
We already had a professional service management system which I was satisfied with. But over the course of a few years, as we started working with our customers, and implemented ServiceNow for them, we began to see that there were endless possibilities in the way we could transform their business, and Therefore: Shouldn’t we be doing the same thing in our business?
Aptris bets its ServiceNow:
Around 2015/2016, we said, ‘Hey, let’s make an investment, and transform our business so that we can serve as customers, the way we serve each other, the way we serve ourselves. work. Business.’
So what we did is we went about building ServiceNow, like we’d run our entire commercial services business on ServiceNow. We will do everything. We’ll be doing opportunity management, which is a little different in the form of a build-your-own-workflow. We will do demand management; We will do project management. We’ll handle the case… We’ll continue to manufacture and use so that we can have a single pane of glass that we can see, and understand everything that’s going on in our business.
Ancona’s approach to business changed:
From my perspective as CEO, ‘Where do we stand on the opportunities? Where do we stand on projects?’ And all the different things that go along with those matters. I can see it saying, ‘How are we doing the billing?’ – All that within one system.
CDW’s Service Now Change – Step Two
The ability to work more closely with CDW continued to emerge. In October 2019, both companies made it official and CDW acquired Aptris. From there, ServiceNow momentum spread to what Ancona calls “phase two” of ServiceNow use of CDWs.
Trigger for step two? The CDW team decided to take the Aptris approach to Service Now company-wide. This involved evaluating options, including ChangePoint, which was already in use by CDW for managing professional services. But, as Ancona points out, the changepoint was becoming obsolete for the need for CDW. After an internal demo by the Aptris team, ServiceNow got the green light:
Two hours later, after the demo, he commented on us and said, ‘You know, Tim, what you guys made meets 85-90% of our needs. We think we should go with ServiceNow.’ And then the real work started.
I’m not going to lie: Step two sounds a bit complicated. Sometimes, after a takeover, you have to clear the technical deck before proceeding. Stepping out changepoints, merging Service Now installations, reverting to standard Service Now configurations so the CDW team can scale – these are all step two jobs. Ancona gave us the bottom line:
Now we have to take what we had built for 100 people, which grew to over 250. Now we had to take him to over 3,000 engineers. So we had to take a look and say, ‘Is it ready to scale?’
Scaling up to 3,000 requires a different hardness – and a lower tolerance for manual processes.
When you support 250 people, you may have some manual processes. But for 3,000, you can’t. So this release 1.75 is about automating a lot of contract management things, like fixed fees, milestone contracts, and all these different things you need to do to scale to 3,000 peers and beyond. So it’s kind of a walk phase.
And where is CDW today?
We are in the middle of that walk phase and run phase right now. Today, we are in the final stages of preparing this release, which will be released in the next one month. This means that the entire business will move from the changepoint to the service now.
Rap – “The driver behind all this is project management”
So what will it look like when step two is completed? Ancona:
At the end of step two, we’re going to finish these things. In fact, we’re doing these things right now… we have customer support capability. So our customers can very easily go in and check the status of a project, and check the status of a case. A co-worker can go in and get support on their PC if we’re doing continuous support for them. Maybe they need to order something – whatever.
Phase three will include integration for a range of “enterprise-class applications”. But what is really driving all this change? Why this all round push? As Ancona told us, it’s about a different approach to project management:
Behind all this is project management. Today, as a comprehensive CDW, we don’t have a good view of all of our projects; We don’t have where they all stand – red light, green light, yellow light. Once we do that, it will give the whole business a view of all projects, how many projects are in demand mode, meaning they haven’t been staffed yet. How many employees are there, but maybe on-budget, maybe behind budget, maybe ahead of budget.
How many are on time, aren’t on time, and be able to do it all at the roll-up level, so that if I’m in a particular area, or branch, or line of business, I can see my share of business. is working. So those are the things we’re doing now.
That’s the thing about the Transformation game: It never happened. You’re just a bigger acquisition than an epidural pivot or another curveball. But when your tools can scale and optimize things further, you’re much better off. However, change is a discipline, and it always comes back to the people. As Ancona says:
I spent my entire career as a consultant. now i’m a consultant And Customer. I have to tell you, being a customer is hard. It’s a tough job, and I have a renewed appreciation for everyone who has a day job… are we done? Not at all Are there any changes? Absolutely. In fact, one of the things we are doing is we are implementing change management in ServiceNow.
I won’t give all the details of step three here; I recommend checking out the slides in CDW’s Now At Work presentation. Suffice it to say, it is ambitious. This comprehensive approach will expand CDW’s Service Now platform from asset and sector service management to finance automation, from ITSM to integrated risk management. Ancona ready for a thing? Extending the Service Now platform to HR service delivery: “My HR team is so excited to be able to come to the table and have a great onboarding experience“
This should keep Ancona’s team busy at work until 2022.
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