Coforge’s Catalog Builder, automates the build of Service Catalogs in ServiceNow

Due to the IT Service Catalog’s importance in providing user self-service, it is sometimes confused with a self-service portal. But the reality is that the two terms describe different things. While an IT service catalog functions as a database of available services and relevant supporting information, a self-service portal is an interface that allows users to navigate knowledge bases, raise support tickets, and otherwise connect with the organization’s IT department. Often, a self-service portal may incorporate an IT service catalog.

One of our key customers, a hospitality giant in UK, was facing challenges in managing their product enhancements and improvement initiatives because of the lack of management. For all previous implementations, due to the non-streamlined process, all the new enhancements requests and deliveries were stuck in pipelines. Coforge utilized a ServiceNow product, Agile Development V2, to address the problem by successfully clearing the backlogs so the customer could create their stories and manage them in a more efficient way.

Streamlining the project management process, saw an increased zeal and participation from the business users and new initiatives started pouring in, touching multiple areas. In ServiceNow as well, our Customer started an initiative to revamp its IT Service Catalog. To this effect, around 60 new/revamped IT Technical Service catalogs were to be built and Coforge was engaged for the same.

The timeframe was aggressive, as was the budget. Coforge took this as a challenge and our approach was two-pronged. First, we focused on Catalog Consolidation and reduced the number of Catalogs to almost half. This way of combining the Catalog items with similar form fields, approval workflows and fulfilment workflows also gave a clean and crisper Catalog to the customer. Second approach we took was to utilize Coforge's in-house Catalog Builder product to create all catalogs which gave us another 50% effort reduction overall.

We successfully delivered those 60-catalog requirement including requirement gathering, development, UAT and final go live of the standard IT Technical Service catalogs in less than 10 weeks.

Significant Benefits:

• End-user experience
  • Optimized customer experience and process efficiency.
  • Drives greater self-service by fulfilling requests through an intuitive interface
• Efficiency
  • A robust catalog structure to improve search and set the right expectations.
  • Streamlined fulfillment workflows for faster delivery time and issue diagnosis.
  • Increases operational efficiency and reduces duplicate effort.
• Maintenance
  • Provides flexibility to make changes to the catalog for relevance.
  • Defines the right measures of success and predictive metrics to identify performance gaps.
• Faster Build using Coforge's Catalog builder
  • Catalog Builder for low, medium and high complexity Catalogs, automates the Creation of variable sets/questions, Approval workflow, RITM & Tasks creation, and Unit Testing.

This is just one of our products, but Coforge is continuously evolving it’s ServiceNow Delivery with Industrialization and Innovation. Each of those products help fast-pace the most-common development activities in ServiceNow. Many of our Customers are already benefited.