If you spend enough years in this ecosystem, you start to recognize a pattern. Companies don't fail with ServiceNow because the platform is weak, but rather because somewhere along the line, the platform stopped reflecting the organization it was supposed to serve.
They accumulate a decade of customizations, each one perfectly reasonable at the time, naturally. They stitch together workarounds that made sense during some long-forgotten fire drill (probably at 2am on a Saturday). They defer cleanup and modernization because "it still works." And without ever deciding to, they wake up one day running their business on a foundation built for a world that no longer exists.
I meet customers every week who are living this story. Not because they lack vision. Not because they're behind the curve. But because they've been doing real work, at real scale, inside real operational constraints, and modernization always felt like something they'd get to once things "calmed down."
Of course, things never calmed down. (And do they ever?)
That's why we're launching this series. Because most organizations don't need another abstract conversation about transformation. They need clarity, honesty, and a path forward. They need to understand not only what outcomes they could achieve, but what obstacles stand between them and those outcomes, and how to move past them without blowing up their day-to-day operations.
And the truth is this: driving outcomes doesn't begin with building. It begins with unlearning. (Our editor, Brad, is NOT happy with this word choice, but we're going to use it anyway.)
What actually works is much simpler.
When we start working with customers, the starting point is almost always the same. Their ServiceNow environment is still technically alive (emphasis on technically), but it's been pulled so far away from stock that scaling it, upgrading it, or even trusting it has become an uphill battle. The platform ends up doing what it can, not what the business needs.
You see this most clearly in the symptoms: manual processes that should have been retired years ago, fractured data models, CMDBs no one trusts, workflows that rely on tribal knowledge instead of governance, and modern capabilities left dormant simply because no one has the foundation to support them. These systems don't reflect a lack of effort as much as they show a lack of alignment.
And the business feels the weight of every gap. Operations slow. Visibility disappears. Incidents pile up. Employees lose confidence not only in the platform but in IT itself. Meanwhile, leadership is rightly asking why the company isn't getting the return it expected on the investment it made.
(It's a fair question, honestly.)
The uncomfortable truth is that outcomes aren't achieved at the edges. They're achieved at the foundation. A dysfunctional foundation makes even the best automation brittle. It turns AI into expensive noise. It turns strategic goals into operational friction.
Until you stabilize, standardize, and simplify, you're essentially trying to run a marathon on a sprained ankle, while also being chased by quarterly business reviews.
But none of this means you need to slow down. In fact, when you modernize the right way, you speed up dramatically.
One of the things we always say in the halls of CoreX headquarters: "Perfection is the enemy of great."
If you insist on solving every edge case up front, you will never ship anything valuable. You'll just have really detailed documentation about the thing you were going to ship.
If every decision has to be revisited, renegotiated, and re-blessed by seven different stakeholder groups (each with its own PowerPoint deck), you create the illusion of progress without ever delivering any. It's like being in a meeting about scheduling a meeting to discuss the agenda for the real meeting.
Customers get stuck because they're trying to build the final version of a process before they've validated the basic version. They want to automate before anyone has ever used the workflow. They want AI to replace manual work before the underlying data is accurate or structured.
But the organizations that win? They adopt first. Then they automate. They stabilize before they optimize.
Real transformation is a momentum game. When you show people visible improvements, like cleaner workflows, faster ticket resolution, and a portal that finally feels human, they start believing again. And when they believe, they adopt. And that’s when the data starts telling you exactly where to go next.
What we're really talking about isn't software. It's trust. It's confidence. It's proving that the platform can finally keep up with the business it's powering, instead of being the thing people complain about in the break room.
That's the philosophy behind every modernization we do. It's why we rebuild and activate underused capabilities and create a governance model that accelerates decisions rather than slows them. It's why quick wins matter so much, because they rebuild the credibility required to tackle bigger phases successfully.
This is the introduction, but it's far from the whole story. In the posts that follow, we're going to get painfully honest about the obstacles that keep organizations from realizing value on ServiceNow.
We'll walk through real scenarios, some from customers who have been live for a decade and still operate like it's day one. Others from organizations rushing toward automation without first stabilizing the basics. Both groups are equally frustrated, just in different ways.
More importantly, we'll talk about how to pull out of that spiral, seeing what it looks like to rebuild trust in the platform, and what it takes to modernize without disrupting operations.
This isn't theory. It's the work we do daily, because it's the work customers are asking for. And it's the work that sets the stage for AI, automation, and every strategic goal companies want to hit in 2026 and beyond.
If you've ever felt like your ServiceNow instance is holding your business back, or if you've been meaning to modernize "once things calm down," this series is for you.
I’ll leave with one promise: it's possible to turn things around. You just have to start with the right foundation and let outcomes, not the quest for perfection, lead the way.