Customization and replatforming in ServiceNow
Well, the ServiceNow platform has been out
for many, many years, and early on in the platform days, it was, "You can do anything
with ServiceNow," and you were encouraged to customize. And so, what’s really happened at
this point is that people took that advice, and they customized. And they built custom tables.
And they built custom scope types. And they built tons and tons of custom pieces of software. And
then ServiceNow kind of took a turn and really started iterating on future releases, growing
the platform out to expand way past just the fundamental ITSM ticketing system into, really,
kind of an ERP. For clients that had been on since those days of customization craziness,
they couldn’t even take advantage of those features. So I myself was a platform owner.
We had, I think, every module under the sun, and we had customized and customized. Every time
a new release would come out, you’d get excited, you’d go look, and you realize, "I can’t use
this." So, what ends up happening is you have to make a decision at some point to say, "Is it time
to try and go to a green field?" So there’s kind of a couple different ways you can do it. There’s
trying to unwind what you’ve customized—which is very much like a needle-in-a-haystack
kind of scenario—or starting fresh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyQSlfEhphE