Insights
Notes from the work,
not the marketing team.
What we've actually run into building ServiceNow platforms, agents on Claude, and product software. Specific enough to be useful, honest enough to be worth reading.
What NCA ECC actually asks of a ServiceNow instance
Saudi Arabia's Essential Cybersecurity Controls are mandatory for government entities and critical national infrastructure. Most of the framework has nothing to do with your platform. Four control families land on it directly, and they are cheaper to design for than to retrofit.
ServiceNowMiddle EastCompliance6 min readReadThe CMDB decision that decides your ITSM programme
Incident, problem and change go live quickly and look like success. The thing that determines whether any of it still works in year two is the configuration data underneath, and the expensive choice is how much of it to build before go-live.
ServiceNowITSMCMDB5 min readReadScoped or global: why your ServiceNow app broke on upgrade
A custom application built in global scope works perfectly until the first platform upgrade, and then costs more to repair than it did to build. The choice is made in the first hour of development and is very hard to reverse afterwards.
ServiceNowApp EngineCustom Apps6 min readReadWhat an AI agent actually costs to run
Everyone quotes a build price. Almost nobody quotes the running cost, and the arithmetic is not obvious — the conversation you resend every turn is where the money goes. Here is the full calculation, including the caching setting that silently does nothing.
AI AgentsCost EngineeringClaude4 min readReadNever let the model choose the priority
A language model can read a ticket better than a keyword rule ever will. It should still not be the thing that decides P1 or P3 — because ServiceNow already derives that, deterministically, and handing it to a model breaks something your service desk depends on.
ServiceNowAI AgentsITSM4 min readReadWhat an AI agent actually does on a ServiceNow instance
"Agentic AI" gets used to mean everything and nothing. Here is the concrete version: what an agent reads, what it writes, where it must stop, and how to tell a genuinely useful one from a chatbot with a new label.
ServiceNowAI Agents4 min readReadChoosing between a ServiceNow app and a standalone product
The same requirement can be a scoped app or a separate web and mobile build. Picking wrong is expensive in both directions. Here is the decision framework we use, including the cases where the obvious answer is the wrong one.
ServiceNowWeb & MobileArchitecture4 min readRead
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