Make a fresh start
The biggest leaps in progress don’t come from incremental fixes. They come from starting over.
For a Fortune 50 healthcare organization, a complex postmerger environment created significant challenges. The organization’s legacy ServiceNow platform was constrained by years of overcustomization and technical debt, making it difficult to maintain, upgrade, or scale. Systems built with bespoke workarounds were slowing teams down, and a lack of standardization across business units created operational friction.
Rather than continuing to patch a platform that offered unpredictable performance, the organization made the bold decision to start fresh. Working with KPMG for a greenfield reimplementation, the organization rebuilt its core enterprise service management platform from the ground up. The goal was to simplify how employees work today while creating a trusted, scalable foundation for what comes next—including responsible, enterprise-wide artificial intelligence (AI).
Clearing complexity to unlock confidence and speed
The challenges ran deeper than just user experience. The legacy information technology (IT) service management (ITSM) system was so heavily customized that it failed to leverage core ServiceNow capabilities, like the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Instead, it relied on complex, custom-built tables with inadequate data governance, hindering automation and creating risk. This technical debt made it nearly impossible to introduce new capabilities, like ServiceNow’s Service Operations Workspace.
The greenfield approach gave the organization the opportunity for a complete reset. The project began with a crucial “Phase Zero” to establish a North Star and secure leadership alignment across all business units, ensuring buy-in for a common enterprise platform.
KPMG helped establish robust governance from day one. This included leading the overall program oversight—coordinating a dozen workstreams across KPMG, the client, ServiceNow, and another service provider—and creating a technical governance forum, or “design authority,” to maintain platform integrity. This disciplined approach cleared legacy constraints and enabled the team to redesign processes around common standards, unlocking greater confidence and speed.
Building a foundation for now and what’s next
From the start, the client viewed this rebuild as more than a technical upgrade. It was about creating a resilient and scalable platform that could evolve with the business across the entire enterprise. A primary achievement was the simplification and standardization of IT processes. By moving to more out-of-the-box ServiceNow solutions, the team unified how different business units operated within IT, making the entire environment easier to manage and maintain.
This created the perfect foundation to introduce AI-supported capabilities. With standardized data and streamlined processes, the new environment made it possible to deploy virtual agents and intelligent assistance without adding risk. Employees could resolve issues faster, while service teams could focus on higher-value work.
The company has enabled ServiceNow capabilities, including a virtual agent and AI control tower, allowing employees and service teams to work more efficiently.
