Who's protecting your ServiceNow investment?

I've been a Technical Account Manager at UP3 for a while now, and the question I get asked most often, usually by people who haven't come across the role before is: what do you actually do?

The honest answer is that I protect my customers' ServiceNow investment. In a practical, hands-on sense.

Platforms drift. Decisions get made under pressure. Customisations go in without proper review. Upgrades get deferred because nobody is sure what they'll break. By the time the problem surfaces, a failed audit, a project over budget before it's started, a board question nobody can answer, the root cause is months old.

My job is to make sure that doesn't happen.

ServiceNow governance: why independent oversight matters

I sit inside my customers' governance processes as a permanent member. Not as a supplier with a commercial interest in saying yes, but as an independent technical voice whose job is to ask the hard questions.

For one major government infrastructure body, I built the organisation's ServiceNow governance framework from the ground up. That meant establishing two formal governance boards and authoring the charters that defined how platform decisions would be made, who had authority to approve them, and what happened when things needed escalating. Both were signed off at Head of Service Management level and remain the backbone of how that organisation manages its platform today.

Every decision is documented and defensible. That matters when stakeholders ask questions, or when scrutiny comes from outside the organisation.

ServiceNow licence optimisation: are you using what you're paying for?

Most organisations use a fraction of what they're paying for on ServiceNow. Not because the capability isn't there, it is. But because nobody has sight of the whole picture.

Part of my role is keeping a regular eye on how much of what a customer is paying for is actually being used, and where the platform could be doing more without additional spend. I've seen organisations running a broad ServiceNow subscription but relying on a third party platform for a core workflow, simply because nobody had joined the dots. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm there to surface.

For anyone who has had to justify a technology investment at board level, that visibility matters.

ServiceNow upgrades and technical debt: what most organisations miss

Upgrades are where unmanaged platforms tend to show their weaknesses. Customisations that bypassed proper review, technical debt that was never addressed, changes that looked simple at the time but created dependencies nobody documented.

During a recent platform upgrade for a large enterprise client, I identified a series of customisations the automated upgrade process could not handle. Having that visibility early meant the risks were managed before they became problems, not discovered halfway through a production deployment.

I also work across the full capability spectrum of ServiceNow, not just ITSM, not just one application area. That breadth matters because platform risk rarely sits in one place. You need someone who can see across the whole environment and understand how decisions in one area affect another.

Why the best ServiceNow advice isn't always what you want to hear

When I came into this role from a technical architecture background, I had a concern that it might feel a bit removed from the work I loved. It doesn't. If anything, I have more impact now than I did before, because I'm operating at a strategic level across the whole platform, not just within a project scope.

The term I keep coming back to is trusted advisor. It sounds like a cliché but it means something specific to me. It means my customers know I'll tell them what they need to hear, not what's easiest to say. That's the relationship I work to build, and it's the one that delivers the most value over time.

In organisations where the consequences of getting this wrong are high, with public accountability, regulatory scrutiny and complex supplier ecosystems, that is not a support function. It is how you protect the investment, the programme and, when it matters, the reputation.

ServiceNow is a long-term investment. The organisations that get the most from it treat it that way, with the right governance, the right oversight, and the right people asking the right questions. That's what I do, and it's what I'd want for every organisation running the platform.

UP3 is a 100% dedicated ServiceNow partner. To find out more about our Technical Account Manager service, get in touch.