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

Automating security operations, or SecOps, is one of the most powerful strategies organizations can employ to protect themselves and their data. All too often, however, they don’t leverage it as well as they could.

Security automation pulls together data from disparate systems to make information more visible and actionable. For example, a solution may not only alert IT teams to a critical vulnerability on enterprise devices but also initiate remediation. It could spot a vulnerability that can be solved with a specific patch, so staff members can determine the best way to solve the problem.

Here are a few of the ways organizations are putting SecOps to work, delivering greater efficiencies and peace of mind to their IT teams.

Don’t buy ServiceNow for your service desk.

While this statement sounds radical, our experience shows that, often, a CIO or IT director brings ServiceNow into their organization to help manage service desk operations. There may be some consideration about additional IT processes, like change management, but in most cases the imagined usage is limited to base IT service management support operations.

This approach provides a spot solution at best that leaves your organization ripe for technology sprawl and will limit your opportunities to work more efficiently through shared data and integrations. When planning your business case for ServiceNow, look beyond your IT service desk with an enterprise architecture perspective.

While a COVID-19 vaccine is encouraging, companies are still facing a tremendous challenge to keep the wheels turning while teams work remotely. IT and Finance teams are under huge pressure to optimize IT spend in the short term while looking at the long-term effects of their decisions.

Are your IT tools, teams and processes disconnected? Is your organization struggling to keep your CMDB relevant? Do you lack visibility and decisioning insights across the IT landscape?

Digital workflows often involve many diverse apps, platforms and data. Teams that need to work together are often separated by activities performed in disparate applications and tools. Figuring out where to start and how to manage it all can be overwhelming, and that’s where CDW and ServiceNow’s IntegrationHub can help.

ServiceNow recently announced that additional capabilities have been added to its Safe Workplace app suite. This suite has already helped hundreds of businesses manage the process of getting their workforces back to the workplace as safely, quickly and seamlessly as possible.

The enhancements to the suite include a new Health and Safety Testing app, an improved Safe Workplace experience for Now Mobile, and new contact tracing capabilities with Zebra Technologies’ MotionWorks Proximity solution.