What is ServiceNow?

Well, the Thing is, It is for Everyone

Every time I’m asked, “What is ServiceNow?” I hesitate because it’s not just another cloud app or help-desk system. Over the last decade, it has quietly stitched itself into nearly every function of the enterprise. At its core, ServiceNow has evolved into something far bigger. It is the orchestration engine that brings people, processes and systems together under one roof.

The real difficulty in defining it has not been a lack of technical terminology but our insistence on hunting through tech taxonomies and historical references. The true answer has been staring us in the face all along: we should define it by the people who use it every day.

So, if I had to sum it up in one phrase, I’d call it a Multi-Persona Orchestration Suite. In familiar company, and short on time, MPOS for short.

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Why suite rather than platform or workflow engine? Because ServiceNow does more than automate tasks or offer a low-code canvas. It delivers a coherent bundle of capabilities designed to serve every role in every suite in the business, from IT and HR through to customer service, legal and finance. It bundles those capabilities into a unified experience that feels less like a collection of modules and more like one living, breathing system. Besides, there seems to be some wariness around the word platform. Too amorphous for some apparently.

That’s because when you think of traditional platforms, you imagine an empty shell that customer organisations must fill with custom code, plugins and integrations before they become useful (think early 2000’s SharePoint…aargghh).

By contrast ServiceNow arrives already rich with best-practice processes, embedded data models, compliance guardrails and role-specific workspaces. The Now Platform gives you the low-code tools to reshape those assets, but it doesn’t leave you staring at a blank canvas. It hands you ready-made galleries.

Yet the real magic lies in what happens when you unlock those galleries for every persona in your enterprise. You can grant your HR team self-service onboarding without forcing them into an IT request catalogue.

You can let your facilities managers automate workplace safety checks without sending tickets to the service desk. You can equip customer-facing teams with unified dashboards that pull live incident, support-case and billing data into a single view.

All those pieces were once scattered across distinct point solutions that didn’t talk to each other. ServiceNow reunifies them under one data model.

Calling that “just a workflow platform” or a workflow engine undersells the depth of what ServiceNow provides. Yes, its Flow Designer and IntegrationHub make it easy to build and manage event-driven workflows. But it also embeds compliance, auditing, change-management, analytics and governance into every workflow artifact.

It layers in AI-driven recommendations and prescriptive playbooks. It even offers turnkey governance frameworks for emerging domains like vendor risk and ESG reporting. Those aren’t mere bolt-on services. They sit in the fabric of the suite, ready for every persona to leverage.

Some critics will point to gaps. Those areas where ServiceNow hasn’t yet caught up to specialist vendors or lacks maturity. Fair enough. But those gaps exist on the fringes of the suite, not at its heart. And as ServiceNow continues to acquire capabilities like process mining, AI-powered operational intelligence and industry-specific frameworks, its identity as an orchestration suite only grows stronger.

I remember sitting nervously in a room at Knowledge 25 when Nick Tzitzon threw me that classic question in front of a live camera. I think I shouted something like “Well it’s not ERP!” before going on a five minute ramble. But that hardly does justice to where ServiceNow has taken itself.

It isn’t IT service management plus a handful of adjacent modules. It is certainly not ERP. It’s a platform that lets you treat the enterprise as the single organism it is meant to be, rather than a patchwork of siloed applications.

So yes, MPOS captures the proposition I think. It signals that ServiceNow isn’t just another technology vendor vying for head-to-head battles. It stakes a claim to being the foundational suite on which you orchestrate your entire business, persona by persona.

In the coming months I’ll continue to watch how ServiceNow talks about itself. Will it embrace its mantle as the persona-orchestration-platform-suite or retreat to safer ground?

Either way, I think there is now a ground swell of customers that already know the truth. That when you need a coherent, role-centric, multi-persona, multi-system orchestration solution that spans the enterprise end to end, you call ServiceNow. And that, more than any flashy feature set, is what truly defines it.