CoreX has extensive experience guiding ServiceNow environments through mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. One of the most instructive examples involved a long-term engagement where a client went through both an acquisition and, later, a divestiture, requiring CoreX to lead the integration of two ServiceNow instances and then a subsequent separation.
A longstanding CoreX customer acquired another company while in the middle of implementing ServiceNow’s Integrated Risk Management (IRM) and Third-Party Risk Management (TRM) modules. It came into the merger with a decade-old, highly customized ServiceNow instance that had been tailored to its own processes.
Bringing these environments together created both technical and governance challenges. Risk management was particularly difficult: although there were many stakeholders, there were no clear process owners, and the two organizations had been managing risk in very different ways.
Because there was no consensus on common standards or requirements, CoreX recommended implementing risk management completely out-of-the-box. This provided a neutral foundation and a clear starting point for the newly combined organization.
The CoreX team analyzed both instances to identify gaps and redundancies, then conducted a series of workshops with all stakeholders. These workshops aligned business and IT leaders on the way forward and clarified how ServiceNow’s capabilities would address their needs. Ultimately, the team built the new implementation from the ground up.
The new instance was far more than a risk-management solution. It encompassed IT Service Management (ITSM), Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), IT Business Management (ITBM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and additional modules, making it a highly complex implementation.
A critical element was the migration of 450 legacy (“grandfathered”) tables along with a wide range of custom applications. Each application had to be reviewed to determine whether it could be replaced with ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box capabilities or needed to be re-implemented.
In some cases, antiquated technologies required complete redevelopment rather than a straightforward export-import migration.
The full effort to build the new post-acquisition instance, while maintaining alignment with concrete business requirements, took approximately 18 months.
Later, the acquired business was sold, and CoreX was called upon once again, this time to lead the separation project. The same team that had unified the environments now had to disentangle them, ensuring that each organization had the ServiceNow capabilities it needed while maintaining data integrity and compliance.
What could have been only a technically demanding project became a strategic transformation. The integration process served as an opportunity to revamp and streamline core business processes, reducing redundancies and modernizing practices.
The result was not only a stable, unified ServiceNow instance during the combined phase but also smoother, more efficient operations for both organizations after the divestiture.