How can businesses translate IT investment into ongoing value and innovation? It starts with a shift in perspective toward their platforms.

Businesses across the world have adopted cloud-based platform ServiceNow to centralize, automate, and streamline digital workflows. This enterprise-wide transformation spans IT, HR, customer service, and security. In embracing a single platform for managing tasks, organizations improve efficiency, boost employee and customer satisfaction, and gain better operational visibility through data and AI.

However, organizations can take this one step further by treating the platform not as a supporting tool, but a business. This approach, rooted in a separate profit and loss (P&L) model, enables a better understanding of a business’s holistic needs, which in turn leads to better asset allocation.

In creating a Center of Excellence and Innovation (CoEI), organizations can shrink cost-to-serve and grow return on investment (ROI) on ServiceNow. This will help you orient your IT spend for the most benefit, and reduce spend on non-essential licenses.

The challenge

Organizations need to find new ways to avoid hidden P&L. Many overspend on maintenance, while under-delivering on outcomes. The gap lies in platform management.

There is a reason this has happened to date. Enterprises often overspend on ServiceNow maintenance due to complex licensing models, a lack of visibility into actual usage, and the need for extensive, costly technical expertise for configuration and ongoing management. Recent research supports this, indicating that 40% of IT budgets are tied up in legacy systems and technical debt.

In addition to this, enterprises often under-deliver on ServiceNow outcomes due to a combination of strategic missteps, inadequate governance, poor change management, and technical pitfalls. The platform itself is a powerful enabler, but its potential is often limited by how it’s implemented and adopted within the organization. In fact, 68% of purchased ServiceNow products remain undeployed after 180 days.

Organizations need to treat ServiceNow like a platform business

Treating a platform like ServiceNow as a business, with its own P&L, aligns it more closely with strategic enterprise objectives, ensuring it operates efficiently, is accountable for its performance, and delivers measurable value to stakeholders. Achieving this requires a shift in operating model, focusing on value realization, robust financial management, and strategic governance. It also requires a specialized skill set.

A ServiceNow Center of Excellence and Innovation (CoEI) is a strategic team that centralizes expertise (architecture, support, innovation, delivery) to maximize the platform’s value, align it with business goals, improve collaboration, and drive digital transformation by setting standards, overseeing governance, and fostering innovation across the enterprise, beyond just basic support. The comprehensive governance provided by a CoEI reduces cost-to-serve, while compounding value through standardized delivery and continuous innovation.

Structure your team for success

To get the most impact and visibility from ServiceNow operations, we recommend using a CoEI as the cost and value engine. This business center standardizes intake, design, build, and operational processes, ensuring quality across the board, while driving unit costs down and predictability up.

Capgemini has pioneered Adaptive Platform Innovation & Management (API&M) as our CoEI framework. We offer this to clients to boost ServiceNow investment ROI and value delivery across the entire enterprise.

API&M can be structured in a hybrid model that is most effective to your organization, making use of a client-embedded team, global expertise, and a Global Delivery Center (GDC) execution arm. This shifts profit and loss by increasing revenue streams and substantially reducing operational costs, leading to improved efficiency, faster innovation, and enhanced agility. This results in:

Better economics

ServiceNow’s innovations, when paired with an effective CoEI model like API&M, can significantly improve departmental performance. For example, Capgemini’s API&M specialists analyzed the employee onboarding process and calculated the downtime associated with onboarding a new employee. By implementing targeted innovations across various ServiceNow workflows and coordinating efforts among departments, they cut new-hire downtime by 90%. This improvement meant that new employees could contribute value much sooner, leading to a full return on investment in just four months.

Capgemini’s CoEI model offers Orchestration and Custodian layers to set, and then maintain, the path forward. We map the resources and budget to customer needs, optimize for cost, and utilize accelerators. The platform is treated as its own efficiency engine for the entire enterprise, making technical decisions for maximum benefit. This is felt through how we approach capital and operational expenditure (CapEx and OpEx).

CapEx

Our initial investment in platform setup prioritizes use of best practice through CoEI design, and accelerators. This results in:

  • Faster time-to-value (e.g., reduce deployment cycle by 30–40%)
  • Lower technical debt (cut legacy maintenance by up to 20%)
  • Increased adoption → higher license utilization (from 60% to 90%)

OpEx

The CoEI’s intelligence continues after deployment, helping to improve spend in real time and ensuring that everything is tied together in a well-oiled machine. This results in:

  • Predictable cost-to-serve through standardized delivery
  • Continuous innovation without budget spikes
  • Improved productivity (measured in hours saved per workflow)

In conclusion, organizations need to treat their IT platform as a business to get the best return on investment and distribute value equally. A CoEI can be the difference between your ServiceNow platform’s sustainability or failure. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about Capgemini’s API&M solution.