By Ryan Mullaney, Enterprise Account Executive at ServiceNow
Agencies have taken a siloed approach to deploying technology solutions to meet government digitization and modernization goals. Although this allows them to roll out rich digital experiences for citizens and employees, it’s not a scalable method—nor is it effective in terms of cost and resources.
Like many agencies, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) had several key platforms in place to drive its digitization efforts, but the management of these platforms lacked centralization. Business users were able to get the function they needed from the solutions, but the chief information officer didn’t see the expected return on investment.
The DOL wanted to implement a shared services model to move away from fragmented enterprise platform deployment. When Deputy Chief Technology Officer Michele Thomas joined the DOL in 2020, her responsibilities included investigating how to get more value out of enterprise software investments.
Assessing the situation
Thomas quickly realized five contractor teams were working on the Now Platform with no oversight or governance. Each team made changes and customizations to meet its contract without coordinating with any other group.
This led to overlaps, as well as working functionality for one team but broken functionality for another. In fact, Thomas and her team found 17,000 custom fields, 40 custom tables, and complex and unscalable workflows in their ServiceNow instance—with an ineffective configuration management database (CMDB) that held more duplicative than nonduplicative data.
Thomas knew she needed to consolidate all the work on the platform under a single team that could centrally govern and manage all operations and development. She worked with the DOL’s Office of Procurement to issue a request for proposal (RFP) for a single contract to support ServiceNow operations, maintenance, and development.
Awarded in September 2021 to Accenture Federal Services (AFS), the contract enabled the DOL to begin the next government fiscal year with a single office responsible for the redesign of the ServiceNow instance.
Starting from scratch
After a thorough analysis of the state of the platform and its use across the DOL, AFS offered three options to drive more value from the platform:
- Conduct a break/fix process on the system
- Use a phased approach to fix the existing instances in batches
- Start from scratch and reimplement ServiceNow under a single program management office with a single contractor...