Challenge

Full lifecycle management of the company's biomedical equipment assets from request for purchase through disposition are being moved into ServiceNow.  With multiple systems and email-heavy processes existing today, moving these processes to ServiceNow will help them in a multitude of ways. It will consolidate and streamline the acquisition and decommission process while simultaneously building solid structure around every touchpoint of those assets through their usable life, including break/fix events (incidents), preventative maintenance, spares inventory, etc.

The IT team is developing a capital expenditure request form, which is currently in spreadsheets and is distributed in various versions via email. Approval flows for that request are currently 100% email driven, with the form passed from stage to stage as an attachment. The company is modernizing that process, bringing it into ServiceNow. By standardizing the request and approval process with an integration with their accounts payable system, the team can close the loop on the full request to order flow, with minimal manual intervention required.

Upon completion, the process will operate like this: Once a capital expenditure is approved and the order placed, work flows will create tasks to track order fulfillment from the vendor(s). This will alert the appropriate departments of a pending delivery so the new asset can be properly received into the CMDB for lifecycle tracking, beginning with asset tagging and initial configuration. The field team can then access and see every touch point of that device through its entire usable life.

“We heavily utilize our equipment, so there's a lot of touch points from the date of deployment to the date of retirement,” said The Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations.  

Their customers generate tens of thousands of work orders a day. With 1,700 field staff, the company operates 24/7 on three shifts. They track over 1,000 various medical devices, as well as all the other records associated with them. In total, they are using about 500 GB of consumed storage in the ServiceNow platform, with an additional 4 PB of data stored under management on premise.  

The Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations has been working with other departments to break down these silos, using various ServiceNow modules as their main tool. As more teams started building processes in ServiceNow and storing important data, like legal documents and client information, the Compliance team was committed to its protection. They wanted to make sure that in the event of a data disaster, that they would be able to retain mission-critical  data.

At that time, the IT’s in-house developer was tasked with ensuring that the organization was not completely dependent on ServiceNow for backup and recovery. With ServiceNow’s native solution, they were only able to backup up to 28 days of their data. Given the company’s unique needs, they needed to be able to retain their  data for a longer period of time. 

The Chief Compliance Officer identified that moving contract management to ServiceNow would increase data risk. In order to proceed with the project, they needed one pivotal question answered: In the event of an audit, how do we prove to regulatory bodies that our data is protected? 

The team had to weigh the options: Build something in-house or source a third party system that could move their data to a separate location, so they wouldn’t be fully dependent on ServiceNow backups. 

“That was the major requirement that we needed: tertiary storage located outside of the ServiceNow environment,” explained The Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations. “For me, being an IT infrastructure manager, knowing our data is going to grow, our storage requirements are going to change. Being able to find a cloud solution that satisfies our needs and our compliance department’s needs is so valuable.”

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Solution

At Knowledge 2022, ServiceNow’s annual conference,, the Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations met with Own representatives and learned that Own was providing the very solution they needed. They quickly recognized that Own could reduce developer workloads and help the business stay in compliance by protecting key client data in ServiceNow.

HIPAA compliance drove 95% of the search for backup and restore solutions on the market. Once the team saw that Own met the requirement, it piqued their interest to learn more.

For the Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations, “It was a no-brainer for me to really champion Own to the CIO and COO, and say, ‘This is the solution that we need.’”

With Own, the Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations has automated daily backups and configured smart alerts to alert him of any anomalous data events. While his ServiceNow admin checks daily to make sure that the backups are running without error, the team can rest easy knowing that any significant data changes will proactively trigger an alert, allowing the team to intervene and minimize impact. 

Not long after implementing Own, they got to test the backup and recovery capabilities in action.  In this instance, a scheduled clone down from production to development wiped out hundreds of assignment groups, which would have taken considerable time to recreate manually. Luckily the ServiceNow admin team had taken a pre-clone backup to protect against such a misstep. With that backup in place, they were able to recover the missing data and get their development back up and running in less than an hour. 

“Own is not just a backup solution. It's so much more. It's monitoring and alerting; it's full data protection.”

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What’s on the horizon

The company’s use of ServiceNow is set to grow exponentially over the next few years. They have a significant backlog of departments looking to use ITSM-based functionality to eliminate email as their workflow engine. 

Additionally, they partnered with ServiceNow in the past year to overhaul how they dispatch their field staff and made a significant investment in ServiceNow’s Field Service Management (FSM) solution. With the transition of mission-critical functions like dispatching moving into the ServiceNow platform, data protection via Own is going to become even more important to protect against human error and other unanticipated events.

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