What’s the best strategy to negotiate favorable terms with a vendor? When it comes to ServiceNow, partnership and collaboration have emerged as the newfound keys to success.
United efforts lead to shared success
When their individual ServiceNow contracts came up for renewal, University IT (UIT), Stanford Health Care (SHC), and Stanford Children’s Hospital (SCH) opted to join forces at the table. The result? The three entities are celebrating a new enterprise-level ServiceNow agreement that lowers costs and offers better terms.
What’s the best strategy to negotiate favorable terms with a vendor? When it comes to ServiceNow, partnership and collaboration have emerged as the newfound keys to success.
The collaboration continues
While the contract negotiations have now concluded, the collaboration lives on. The three entities, buoyed by their collective accomplishments, are scheduling quarterly meetings.
“I am thrilled that technical and business representatives from UIT, SHC, and SHC met to talk about their use of ServiceNow and how we can learn from each other to improve everyone’s use of the product,” said Tara Robenalt, UIT’s senior director of Service Management and Business Relations.
Peter Ford, director of Business and Financial Systems and Services for SHC, shares Robenalt’s enthusiasm.
“It’s exciting to exchange ideas about a technology that we’ve all invested so much of our time into,” he said. “We appreciate UIT stepping up to organize the first meeting and we look forward to hosting the next.”
Although each entity uses ServiceNow in a slightly different way, the teams have found mutual benefit from sharing best practices. For example, with the evolving COVID-19 situation, all three groups are keeping teams apprised in ServiceNow of technology efforts to support new business workflows and data gathering needs.
“We came together to solve an economic need. But during the process, we’ve become a broader collaborative, solving issues that we never could have initially anticipated,” said Angelo Celeri, a UIT business analyst.
Supporting the greater mission
Equally notable are the benefits that have trickled down on a more personal level.
Doug Chalmers, a cloud vendor manager for UIT, said the project has helped him cultivate new relationships at the hospitals and to think more deeply about how the distributed IT community can work together in support of Stanford’s world-changing mission.
“Professionally, that’s important. It makes your work more meaningful when you can see the bigger picture,” said Chalmers.
