Driving Innovation Success with xtype

Innovation is crucial for companies to stay competitive, yet most innovations fail. As a Harvard Business Review article explained, only 10-30% of innovations succeed despite massive investments in incubators, data analytics, and more. Why the abysmal success rate?  

The Pattern of Innovation Success

The key insight from the HBR piece is that the most successful innovations reinforce the company's purpose and create mutual value for multiple stakeholders. Innovations flounder when they over-focus on one stakeholder, like investors, at the expense of others, such as customers, employees, suppliers, and communities. Failed innovations can disappoint at least one group of stakeholders, leading to conflicts that can spread to other stakeholders and products, potentially putting the entire company at risk.

Build vs. Buy

One of the propensities for IT departments is to build a solution rather than buy one. The HBR article hints at why this is counterproductive. 

Rather than dedicating precious developer resources to building and maintaining a custom-built internal tool, companies are better served buying solutions tailored to their needs. As the HBR article emphasized, innovations should reinforce the company's purpose and create mutual value for stakeholders. But custom-built internal software diverts focus from those objectives. 

Software teams end up in the weeds maintaining these custom systems running rather than advancing high-impact innovations aligned with their company's purpose. Their specialized skills are better leveraged on projects central to the business. Purchasing commercial solutions like xtype enables rapid innovation because ServiceNow developers stay focused on core products. Opting for purpose-built solutions over distracting internal builds allows companies to align talent with strategic goals.

Driving Purpose Aligned Innovation With xtype

xtype streamlines ServiceNow innovation workflows and aligns teams across your business by seamlessly connecting multiple ServiceNow instances. With xtype, your ServiceNow teams gain the visibility and speed to ensure their ideas create expansive value. 

Controlled Synchronization

xtype's Controlled Synchronization automatically migrates downstream update sets to upstream instances, which resolves inconsistencies across instances before they happen. Now, ServiceNow pros develop and innovate in a production-like environment with a high level of confidence that their work will work in production. There's no need to rework updates or features downstream because all instances look alike or as nearly as possible. What works in a developer instance has an extremely high probability of working in production. Development velocity increases.

Multi-Environment Visibility

xtype's Multi-Environment Visibility provides a unified view of all your instances in real-time — no more manually building spreadsheets. ServiceNow pros access a panoramic view of their instance landscape in real-time without having to build point-in-time spreadsheets — time wasted as the spreadsheets are out of date the moment they are done. Production releases can instantly identify inconsistencies that may lead to errors before deployment or even development.

xtype Release Packages

Automation through xtype Release Packages is another game changer. Production releases frequently require bouncing between spreadsheets and multiple browser tabs. But manual production releases squander productivity. xtype automates releases across your Now landscape on schedule or by change request. Instead of spreadsheets and death by a dozen tabs, xtype Release Packages lets you pick-n-click deployable assets such as update sets, XML, records, plugins, apps, and more and then drag and drop them in the correct order.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that game-changing innovation necessitates connecting the disparate ServiceNow instances of your business into a cohesive whole. ServiceNow pros need multiple instance visibility and production-like instances to develop in and promote to in order to accelerate the delivery of your innovation efforts.

That's what xtype delivers through its game-changing visibility of ServiceNow instances and automation of cross-instance synchronization. xtype transforms silos into ecosystems, enabling innovation teams to create breakthroughs that benefit all stakeholders efficiently. If innovation success is a priority, be sure to check out xtype!