A ServiceNow-powered portal and service catalogue reside at the core of a New South Wales Government plan to transform ICT procurement. This project highlights the role of ServiceNow service management in boosting public sector performance and efficiency. We sat down with Derek Paterson, Director GovDC and Marketplace Services, to obtain his perspective on the benefits of service management.

From a Public Sector perspective, can you share your thoughts on the positive impact service management can have?

The main trend that I’m seeing is that everything is delivered as a service, which is game changing, because a lot of the time public service CIOs or CTOs were used to running very top heavy teams with top heavy systems and top heavy reporting.

Now when it comes to ICT, they are being asked who is doing what, how efficient they are in moving from A to B and whether they are saving money buying their own infrastructure. They’re all taking the very positive step that their agencies don’t need to do it all themselves and that ICT can be delivered via client service type organisations.

How mature is the Public Sector in understanding the concept and potential of service management and in actually deploying service management to address its challenges?

Some agencies are very mature and for them it is a cultural shift. They’ve been going down this path for some time now, whether they’re doing it themselves or they’re outsourcing ICT. Then you have the agencies who are large and cumbersome, which creates a lot of hurdles. But, that said, as they transform into the world of cloud, service management is the tool that underpins it for them. So by natural force, they’re pushed into looking at service management in their end-to-end delivery journey.

What are the key areas where service management can really expand into to really improve service delivery, particularly from the GovDC perspective?

Improvements come primarily through having less human intervention and more automation. Exposing APIs between different technology vendors and products allows for that unification of end-to-end system implementations. ServiceNow talks to a number of other products from firewall providers, storage providers and other platform providers. By simply hitting a button, all of that can be managed, from human intervention in ticket management, scripting and API management all the way through to the delivery of a service.

What future developments are you seeing in service management e.g. AI? Is there a role for those in service management and if so, where do you see it?

I do potentially see a role for AI, or an artificial component. Consider where the world is going to and the amount of data captured that can be processed and analysed using anything from AI to machine learning. Then imagine what you can do with that data,  in context of the service management world. To be able to pick trends around who is doing what and when they’re doing it – Can we do it quicker? Can it make itself do it quicker? That’s the world I want to be in.

What are your views on service management being delivered from the cloud as opposed to on-premise environments?

The less human intervention the better! The more technology can manage and maintain itself based on cost, capacity, and security – that’s where I think it’s at.