Your orthopedist may see your knee, but only your primary care physician sees the big picture
How Fairview Health Services found (lots of) value in taking a big-picture view of its ServiceNow platform deployment
The situation
When you find a good primary care physician, you can feel like you’ve hit the jackpot, so valuable to one’s health they can be. The human body is a complex machine, and while good health absolutely requires specialized care dedicated to specific parts or systems of the body, having a truly centralized view of the whole patient is critical. Only a primary care physician can make sure treatments and prescriptions are balanced, and that during the health care journey the entire patient is always being taken into account.
Fairview Health Services, an industry-leading, award-winning nonprofit offering a full network of health care services in the state of Minnesota, was an early adopter of the ServiceNow® digital workflow platform, and had found great value in the technology. However, over time, while the company was discovering more and more use cases for the platform, it was also starting to lose the thread when it came to maintaining governance and a robust vision of the real return on investment (ROI) potential over top of that use case expansion.
Fairview knew it needed to understand from an end-to-end perspective all the many different ways the platform was being utilized and, more importantly, all the many ways it was, was not, and could be driving value. But how to best operationalize its vision of vendor rationalization and end-to-end execution? How to best achieve that much-needed “big picture view” and expand the platform enterprisewide for a digital transformation?
Discovering the art of the possible through a clear vision and a rationalized vendor portfolio
The solve
Through several conversations with Deloitte, Fairview began to see a compelling vision of that art of the possible. By bringing our deep industry experience and the in-depth technology capabilities of the Deloitte IndustryAdvantage™ framework to help create a utilization path for the ServiceNow technology, Fairview saw a path to better fostering innovation, improving operational efficiencies, reducing backlog, and implementing new Generative AI (GenAI) solutions. And at the same time the organization would be able to continue to expand its use of the platform’s capabilities in an integrated manner with a single vendor, by embracing such new capabilities as IT Asset Management, Application Portfolio Management, GenAI, and Virtual Agent.
The first step on that journey was designed to create a consolidated, big-picture view of Fairview’s ServiceNow footprint, one that would be articulated by Deloitte and Fairview together.
One example of value uncovered through that consolidation exercise was license efficacy. The multiple vendors and use cases in play had resulted in a host of different ServiceNow licenses being used in a wide variety of ways, meaning that Fairview had licenses allowing for the use of dozens of features in instances where it was only actually using a handful of those features. A new consolidated vendor model would allow Fairview to both better focus its approach to licenses and get the full value out of the licenses it had.
While this vision of a single consolidated point of view was compelling to Fairview, the broader picture of what ServiceNow could truly make possible for the organization, and the return on investment it had the potential to deliver, was still somewhat elusive to leadership.
The turning point came at the 2023 ServiceNow Knowledge Conference, where the Fairview executive leading the organization’s ServiceNow program, alongside leaders from the Deloitte team and senior ServiceNow representatives, was able to, in various planned and ad hoc conversations with peers and IT and business leaders from other organizations, truly see the many kinds of value the platform could help Fairview realize. Catalyzed by that moment, the momentum of the project skyrocketed.
A critical early step for the project has been the rapid clearing of the large backlog of service and enhancement requests that had built up over the years. Too many users were resorting to inefficient solutions because they knew the backlog of requests to build new capabilities within ServiceNow had grown so large. As Deloitte has helped to clear the backlog, platform adoption has jumped, and with it opportunities to deliver innovative uses of the platform to Fairview.
One example of such a use case Fairview has embraced is asset management. Fairview is beginning to manage its IT assets through the ServiceNow Asset Management tool, and in the future is looking at expanding the tool to its management of such significant assets as MRI machines and robotic surgical tools, which can be worth millions of dollars per unit. This use case, given the considerable value that the ServiceNow software can help unlock, has the possibility of providing a return on investment that can self-fund future initiatives.
Additionally, Fairview has implemented GenAI and is exploring additional use cases that will unlock a much larger value proposition for driving operational efficiency across the enterprise.
More than 6,000 hours of service requests in the backlog? Cleared.
The impact
By focusing on solutions and outcomes rather than time and material constructs, Deloitte has been able to drive real impact to Fairview. While the project is ongoing, some of that value delivered includes:
- A significant reduction of technical debt, with a transformed and supportable backlog
- The addition of new, GenAI-enhanced and next-gen solutions and improvements (see example below)
- Faster ticket resolution
- More proactive and responsive problem management and solutioning
- An improved, modern end-user experience
- Rationalized license usage
- A streamlined point of contact for all ServiceNow requirements
For employees, including health care professionals serving patients and corporate users alike, the implementation has provided transparency and more reliable information on their technology requests, leading to faster resolution—and more time available for supporting programs that enhance patient care.
Leveraging the ServiceNow platform’s GenAI capabilities, Deloitte has enabled Fairview Citizen Developers (non-IT professionals) to create solutions directly in the platform, using low-code/no-code features that, not only enhance their day-to-day operations, but also allow the core ServiceNow team to focus on additional value-added activities.
In addition, benchmarks achieved to date include:
- During the first eight weeks of usage, NowAssist (GenAI) capabilities have been leveraged 16,000 times, saving approximately 1,000 hours of effort.
- Platform automations and integrations have resulted in over 30% resource efficiency.
- Platform health improvements have exceeded 10% due to reduction of technical debt and customizations, platform hardening, and proactive problem management.
- The rapid clearing of a backlog of more than 6,000 hours of unfulfilled service requests.
- An expansion of the ServiceNow platform scope and reach to additional stakeholders at Fairview within IT and the business.
A big-picture view, for big-ticket value
