ServiceNow Problem Validation
Note: This is a summary of previous work done, some of which was internal-only._
What’s this issue all about?
Firms that use ServiceNow for change management processes struggle to integrate those processes with GitLab. As these types of compliance regime needs are often hard requirements for their business processes, this fully blocks many firms from adopting GitLab for CD (which, in turn, potentially blocks them from adopting entirely.)
Who is the target user of the feature?
This particular problem exclusively affects customers who are using ServiceNow. These firms tend to be large, mature enterprises with large workforces and many departments that have complex workflows between them.
Current requests for this feature come from companies that:
- Are almost exclusively over 10B in annual revenue, with some in the 100s of billions.
- Typically over 20,000 employees, and never less than 1000
- Were founded at least 20 years ago, and typically are over 50 years old
- Typically use around 500 seats...
- But could grow to an average of 5,000 seats
- Almost exclusively use self-hosted GitLab
- Are typically Premium customers or prospects
Findings
Use cases
Through discussions with both ServiceNow directly and customers using our two products, Change Management was identified as the most important usecase by a large margin. This is for a variety of reasons:
- Change Management is typically driven by core requirements of the business, wether that's a particular security posture, a compliance need, or simply the mission-criticality of the underlying systems. Being able to prevent bad code from making it to production is a hard requirement for many companies, and Change Management is one approach to solving this.
- Firms using ServiceNow that have already integrated it for Change Management have invested large sums on this integration from a variety of fronts, and are unlikely to move away from this model (even ignoring the first point)
- Firm using ServiceNow are also likely integrating it in a variety of other workflows, meaning that this particular tooling may have impact to more than just their DevOps toolchain. Change Management logs may be shipped to entirely other parts of the business, making this integration critical for reporting.
Changes/new features required
By working directly with ServiceNow, we identified the best path forward to be changes directly to their DevOps module that are able to read the payload sent from a Project Webhook and control the pipeline from there. This allows zero changes on the GitLab side (for now), while addressing the customer need.
Financial Impact
There were previously 21 direct customer requests (counted from this epic) that represent an opportunity for over 30,000 seats of growth. Additionally, there are over 90 other customers in our CRM who may be potentially interested in this functionality as well (unqualified).
Further, direct numbers are provided in this issue and on this spreadsheet (Internal-only).
Next Steps
The updates to the ServiceNow DevOps module will drop around our 13.1 Milestone. From there, the path forward is:
- Document how to use the ServiceNow integration in our docs
- Post something on our Blog talking about the integration
- Socialize these resources to customers who have voiced interest
- Work closely with ~3 customers on getting the integration running
- Based on that feedback, gather potential requirements for a next iteration
There are to possible paths forward from that point:
If this solution is sufficient, we may simply work with ServiceNow to make sure it's well documented and provides a great UX on their side, continuing to socialize this new functionality among our customers and driving it's usage.
Alternately, we could consider making this a first-class integration, adding it directly to the list of things that Integrate Natively with our Projects. This could allow us to extend this functionality by making it enforced across a Group, allow for setting more fine-grained access controls around it, and integrating it with our Audit Events.
Links
- Original Problem Validation Issue
- ServiceNow Epic
- Opportunity Canvas (Internal-only)
- Opportunity Canvas review recording (Internal-only)
- Integration Interest spreadsheet