Summary
Cask demonstrates a strong knowledge of the ServiceNow platform along with in-depth business process expertise through dedicated practices serving department and industry-specific workflows. Its focus on technology-business hybrid talent is a critical success factor for clients requiring consulting services.
Cask Overview
As an industry recognized leader and pure-play ServiceNow Elite partner, Cask designs, enables, and sustains digital transformation for enterprise clients across both private and public sectors. Cask is a multi-award-winning firm, having earned ServiceNow’s “Creator Workflow” award, “Americas Elite Partner of the Year” and “Global Elite Partner of the Year” awards. Cask’s end-to-end solutions enable organizations to make the most of their ServiceNow investments, reducing cost, and improving quality of services across the enterprise. Their portfolio includes strategy, implementation, modernization, digital transformation, and cloud managed services that span across ServiceNow’s Technology, Customer, Employee and Creator workflows.
Briefing Note and Perspective
Jason Rosenfeld, SVP of Growth and Strategy, gave us an engaging briefing on Cask Reserve–a disruptively innovative, industry-first talent cloud solution to the current biggest ServiceNow challenge–bridging talent demand with relevant supply. The briefing provided a lens into the Cask Reserve platform, the why’s, what’s and how’s of it, specifically emphasizing through example client stories how it helps solve the gaps around talent to support and enhance a ServiceNow environment of typical complexity.
1. Why CASK Reserve: The Big ServiceNow Talent Problem
Many large enterprises are struggling to realize the targeted strategic value from their long-term investment in the ServiceNow platform. A key reason for this inefficiency lies in the extreme lack of available skilled talent, both in terms of technical skills and consultative skills (i.e., domain or functional know-how).
With every new release, ServiceNow increases the depth and breadth of its platform, by integrating and enabling critical enterprise functions and strengthening the technical capabilities of the underlying platform. However, the talent ecosystem has not kept pace. As emphasized in the latest analyst briefing on ServiceNow’s Tokyo release, the talent problem is a difficult one to overcome, as relevant ServiceNow talent is hard to find, expensive, and difficult to retain.
This talent demand-supply gap is the root cause of the lack of agility and speed of value realization in enterprise implementations of the platform.
Cask Reserve provides an innovative solution to this problem, by aligning a talent-optimized, dynamic roadmap to enterprise ServiceNow strategy. The flexible talent model enables clients to enhance solutions to better meet the organizations’ unique needs. It also helps clients optimize the platform through continuous improvement and streamlined operations and support.
2. What is Cask Reserve
Cask Reserve provides an innovative solution to the most critical challenge in the ServiceNow ecosystem–quality and quantity of relevant technical and functional talent. Clients have flexible access to relevant and certified talent, aligned to their roadmap and prioritized backlog. Targeted access to specific skillsets for the duration they are needed, offers greater flexibility and cost efficiency. A flexible but managed construct also helps speed up access to day-to-day operational support (e.g., incidents, defects and bugs resolutions and remediations).
Cask Reserve goes beyond vanilla administration and operations, to the support strategic value realization in ServiceNow. The offering emphasizes quality, flexibility and range of expertise available on-demand, in an agile, need-based manner, ensuring measurable results and outcomes within planned value timelines.
Cask Reserve supports clients ability to take a predictable and assured route to targeted value realization from their strategic investments in ServiceNow as the enterprise platform of platforms. This is achieved through right-sizing ServiceNow support and reduced risk of wasted and additional, unplanned expenditure.
3. How ServiceNow Platform Owners Are Using Cask Reserve
Enterprise ServiceNow customers are using Cask Reserve to support:
- Ongoing Development & Enhancement: Managing backlogs, platform and solutions enhancement, solution design blueprinting, faster and more effective release cycles
- Consulting: Process advisory and best practice guidance for continuous improvement, process innovations based on platform strategy and roadmap, adopting emerging tech standards, platform adoption, training and organizational change management
- Technical support: Troubleshooting and diagnostics, incident remediation, request fulfillment and user support
- Proactive Operations: Managing changes, upgrades, reviews and patch delivery, more efficiently and optimally
Example Client Story:
How Cask Reserve Helps Clients Rebuild Trust in ServiceNow Platform
A well-known Fintech and business services organization prominent in the U.S. health sector, invested in the ServiceNow platform, but had struggled to realize value. They tried multiple modes of implementation: starting with a small internal team, then partnering with vendor teams. But they still found business value lacking significantly, hence satisfaction with the tool was waning.
Ultimately, the company decided to work with Cask, for access not only to technical expertise, but also platform best practice and strategic guidance. Cask brought a completely different approach than traditional piecemeal, tech-first implementation, focusing instead on process outcomes and business value realization through solutions implemented on the ServiceNow platform. The Cask team enabled the client to achieve successful ServiceNow value realization, by revamping processes and fixing configurations that have plagued their user base for months and years.
Prior to engaging Cask, the client was facing multiple challenges with their platform. Business requests were implemented as solutions on the platform in a reactive manner and were not properly analyzed, vetted, designed, or configured consistently. These knee-jerk practices resulted in unpredictable disruptions, constant firefighting, rising technical debt, and an unmanageable tangle of customizations. As a result, business stakeholders were not keen on continuing investment in the ServiceNow platform.
In partnering with Cask and leveraging Cask Reserve, the client was able to access the required expertise for their business-specific needs and take advantage of best practice guides. The experienced resources available on-demand from Cask Reserve, enabled the client teams to make the right decisions on the platform and to accomplish their business goals without sacrificing platform health or causing unnecessary maintenance overhead.
Cask started by understanding the client’s ServiceNow environment and unique platform configurations. They then performed analysis to identify root causes of the ongoing problems. The Cask team provided technical and functional advice to improve the platform and worked with the client to compile and prioritize a backlog of work. One top priority was providing technical support for issues affecting end users. User satisfaction with ServiceNow solutions improved almost immediately. The client was impressed by the level of detail, expertise, communication, and quality of the team. Cask teams proactively invested additional effort in validating requirements, discussing details, and making recommendations before running with a request. They were also responsive when it came to supporting ad hoc and urgent requests.
The client team’s confidence in Cask’s ability grew exponentially and they were asked to refactor and redesign configurations of more complex workflows and functions. These innovations reestablished trust from the end user community in the ServiceNow platform. For the first time in months, the platform was working effectively and was now intuitive and easy to use. With critical trust in the platform restored, other business units began also asking for help, and the client is now looking to implement several new applications, such as GRC and HRSD.
Net Impact
Why Clients Are Selecting Cask as Their ServiceNow Partner and Leveraging Cask Reserve:
- Flexible, dynamic, demand-driven skills pricing: Agility of the Cask Reserve model to dynamically provide the right talent for the right job at the right time and price
- Scalability, availability and stability of relevant qualified resources: The Cask Reserve model solves the biggest problem in the ServiceNow ecosystem– availability of relevant talent and skills, by combining technical and domain knowledge in a dynamic demand-driven manner
- Outcomes-driven service delivery oversight and accountability: Focus on outcomes tied to ‘Always working’ support requirements of business-critical ServiceNow platform and solution implementations
- Range of relevant skills: Availability of quality skills on-demand, from any aspect of ServiceNow support in any client landscape, from strategic platform consulting to opportunity assessment and roadmapping, to administration and operations, development and enhancement, support and maintenance
- Support for ESG innovations and platform health with less downtime: Ability to manage and support migrations, upgrades, innovations, and priority ESG-related interventions on the ServiceNow platform, without sacrificing operational and health metrics
Summary Facts
- Cask is a global ServiceNow partner with headquarters in San Diego, CA, and remote offices throughout the U.S. Cask has most recently expanded to South America with offices in Brazil.
- The company’s portfolio includes top ServiceNow partnership capabilities including consulting, implementation, integration, and managed services.
- Competitors include global service providers with ServiceNow practices (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte, TCS, Wipro etc.)
In the U.S. market, Cask already differentiates itself in terms of the quality, depth, and breadth of its talent pool, beyond just certified resource numbers:
- Cask focuses on user adoption and business value realization. This is a key enabler for large enterprise transformation scenarios.
- Cask’s consulting services focus on the following areas: IT, Employee, Customer, Security and Risk, and Application Services Management.
- Cask has developed a multi-faceted consulting team bringing unique design capabilities, technical skills and dedicated domain and industry expertise.
Author: Tapati Bandopadhyay
ISG Lead Analyst
tapati.bandopadhyay@isg-one.com
Dr. Tapati Bandopadhyay has been an inventor, builder, practitioner and researcher in AI, intelligent automation and related domains, for more than 25 years. She has been a global practice leader and executive-level advisor and consultant, in AI-automation-cloud and services management, covering MLOps, AIOps, CloudOps, DataOps, ModelOps & DevOps metrics-driven practices and data and AI story-building and story-telling practices and tools. As an ISG Lead Analyst on AWS and in AI-ML, consulting and managed services, she is responsible for defining and leading the ISG Provider Lens™branded research projects, for the U.S. market.
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