We’ve all been there: a customer is looking for documentation that you just don’t have readily at hand. Then the idea strikes that you can simply reuse some documentation created for a previous project or repurpose vendor product documentation to your customer’s specific needs. But as someone who has sat on both sides of that table as a consultant and a customer, I can promise you that customers can tell when you’ve copied and pasted that PowerPoint.

This will make customers take your presentation and your recommendations as a professional less seriously. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being served reheated leftovers, and our customers are no different.

I had an IT Project Manager as a client who confided in me that he was quite familiar with our products’ documentation and would cast aside any documents provided to him that were similar in broad strokes to documents he had already seen. Many of our customers in ServiceNow Solutions do plenty of research on their own about ServiceNow as a platform before we ever talk to them. It’s our job as IT Consultants to ensure that the documents we provide bring value that’s specific to their unique needs, beyond what a visit to any internal wiki or a google search can offer.

But how can they tell? They know because of the inherent inconsistency in written voice that occurs when documentation is compiled from multiple primary and secondary sources. This blog post will describe what a written voice is and how to maximize the impact of both business and technical writing by using a consistent written voice

A lot of attention gets paid in the press to “zero-day” threats — attacks that wreak havoc on organizations while they’re still completely unknown to the cybersecurity community. But the truth is that 60 percent of breaches are the result of known vulnerabilities that have been left unpatched.

The problem is that patching practices in many organizations are slow and disorganized. Too many teams are in charge of patching too many different systems, and security leaders typically lack visibility into who is staying on top of patching and who isn’t. The good news is that many organizations already have a powerful tool to help streamline vulnerability management — the service management platform ServiceNow. Although some organizations use the platform primarily to manage help desk tickets, it’s capable of much more. The solution can also help organizations shore up vulnerabilities across their IT environments.

Here’s how.

ServiceNow offers organizations a powerful platform, integrating the framework of the IT Infrastructure Library into a user-friendly tool with powerful management and reporting capabilities.

Organizations use ServiceNow to track incidents, share knowledge with users, manage assets and automate call centers. The breadth of features available within ServiceNow can be overwhelming to administrators, and the reality is that many organizations simply don’t have the resources available to optimize their use of this powerful platform.

But CDW’s SmartAdmin solution helps organizations leverage our team of experts to overcome the hurdles of managing the complex and ever-expanding ServiceNow platform.

The promises of the CMDB have been around a long time. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) popularized the concept back in the 1980s and 1990s as a foundational element of IT service management.

The benefits are clear: having a trusted data source with a rich set of relational information provides organizations with decision-making capabilities to support more efficient operations, better user experiences and proactive mitigation of risk. The marketplace has no shortage of services, technologies and service management platforms that support and rely on the CMDB. A CMDB, and by extension, the capabilities it enables, continues to be an important goal for organizations, even more so now considering the impact of digital transformation.

ServiceNow recently announced four return-to-work applications focused on helping customers prepare and manage their employees for a safe return to the workplace. From employee readiness surveys to health screening to PPE inventory management and more, these apps and the complimentary management dashboard will help ensure that the workforce transition from home back to the office is seamless and safe.

In its bid to help organizations return to the workplace in a safe manner, ServiceNow is doing what it does best, helping companies manage the complex workflows that are integral part of keeping employees healthy. The ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite is engineered with that in mind.

For many organizations, the ServiceNow Service Portal is the primary way that approvers interact with the records they approve. It is also often a major way that managers, directors and VPs interact with the system when introducing ServiceNow’s functionality to other departments. First impressions matter; providing an optimal user experience right off the bat can go a long way toward long-term adoption within an organization. Here are a few things you may want to do to improve the Portal experience for your approvers.