How Harley-Davidson chose ServiceNow over IBM or BMC and 'liberated IT'

'The flexibility and ease of use of the ServiceNow platform stood out,' Harley-Davidson systems manager Jim Keene tells Computing at Knowledge 15

Harley-Davidson selected ServiceNow for IT asset management over IBM and BMC because it was the only option with out-of-the-box flexibility, something that since deployment last year has "liberated" the iconic motorcycle manufacturer's IT department.

That's what Jim Keene, systems manager for global information services at Harley-Davidson, told Computing during an interview at the ServiceNow Knowledge 15 conference in Las Vegas.

The search for a new IT asset management solution began in mid-2013 because, according to Keene, the iconic motorcycle company "didn't have a lot of data in place for us to effectively manage the IT estate. We had a set of tools and spreadsheets which weren't integrated and didn't give line of sight to great decision support when it came to our IT assets".

"We got it done, but it was difficult. It just took us a lot of time and effort to gather that data and it was difficult for us to do impact analysis when it came to change management because the data lived in different spots and wasn't high quality."

Harley-Davidson therefore opted to move to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) asset management solution and shortlisted IBM, BMC and ServiceNow. Keene said that it was "the breadth of the ServiceNow platform that stood out" against the less flexible IBM and BMC products.

"The other two solutions were more tightly sculpted around a certain set of IT asset and configuration processes and they didn't by default give you these 20 other ITIL processes," said Keene. "You could add those in and link in other products, but they didn't give you that in the platform.

"The flexibility and ease of use of the ServiceNow platform stood out," he added, before going on to explain how adoption of the tool has benefited Harley-Davidson.

"We now have a better real-time view of all the laptops, PCs, servers it takes to run our business and we're able to do better counting on the service management side.

"Also, when it comes to planning life cycle refreshes or new capacity or modernising business services these IT components support, we're able to cycle through that much faster," said Keene.

The reason for that, he continued, is that "the data's there, it's integrated, I can tell this server supports this business application and if I need to refresh it, what the impact is going to look like," Keene said.

That enables Harley-Davidson's global information services to "do a better job of IT planning".

The self-service catalogue also allows all of the organisation's 6,000-plus employees "to be more productive, more efficient in their work, because they have real transparency on a daily basis of the requests they make to IT," Keene explained, describing how it enables Harley-Davidson to focus on the most important thing: producing bikes.

"The bottom line is we're in the business of making motorcycles, not IT. So the more information we can give staff to plan their work, to know what to expect when they raise an issue, the more productive and efficient they are. It enables them to do their real job better," he said.

Keene told Computing how ServiceNow is "simple, easy and reliable" to use, and that in the year since it went live, "we haven't had a minute of downtime", adding that this in turn had "liberated our time from running the guts of the IT".

"Our incumbent systems of spreadsheets and databases, we've replaced them with ServiceNow and we've liberated that time from muscling around running the IT infrastructure," said Keene.

"Our team can spend more time on the business processes and providing more value to the business through the catalogue."