ServiceNow Change Management

System Overview

ServiceNow is a cloud-based IT Service Management (ITSM) platform founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy, originally focused on simplifying and automating IT workflows, and it has since grown into one of the world’s leading enterprise platforms for digital transformation. Today, more than 7,700 enterprise customers—including about 85% of the Fortune 500—use ServiceNow not only for IT services but also for HR, security, finance, and customer service workflows.

Within its ITSM suite, the Change Management module provides a structured, auditable process for submitting, assessing, approving, implementing, and reviewing changes to IT systems, helping organizations reduce risk, prevent outages, and comply with regulatory standards such as SOX and ISO.

Change requests are categorized into Standard (pre-approved and low-risk), Normal (requiring risk/impact assessments and approvals), and Emergency (for urgent fixes), all supported by the platform’s CMDB (Configuration Management Database), automated workflows, and built-in dashboards.

Problem Statement

We are focused on two users here: DT internal auditors and IT admins.

For Internal Audit, ServiceNow tracks every change, but digging into the details is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It’s hard to see which changes carry the most risk, whether approvals are happening on time, or if emergency fixes are consistently handled by policy. Auditors end up exporting spreadsheets and piecing data together, which slows down their ability to provide insights.

For the business, the challenge is visibility. Leaders know changes are being logged and approved, but they lack a clear picture of where delays happen, which teams struggle the most, or how failed changes impact operations. Without that lens, it’s tough to tell if change management is helping the business move faster—or quietly holding it back.

In short, both Audit and the business have the data, but not the flexible, timely view they need to turn it into action.

Expected Outcome

A solution that delivers a dynamic dashboard built on ServiceNow data that transforms how change requests are monitored. Instead of static reports, users gain a population-level view of all changes with the ability to filter, drill down, and even access individual requests directly from the dashboard.

For Internal Audit, this means faster insights into compliance, risk hotspots, and approval timeliness—freeing them from manual exports and allowing them to focus on assurance. For the business, it creates real-time visibility into delays, bottlenecks, and performance trends, enabling leaders to make quicker, better-informed decisions.

Key Challenges

I was pulled into this project by the Internal Audit DT team during planning week and right after they had held a few meetings with the SNOW IT team. The main challenges are listed below:

• 1. Tight three-week timeline, not leaving much room for testing and validation
• 2. no data dictionary was provided, so every field in ServiceNow had to be figured out and validated
• 3. API connection into Power BI worked but wasn’t the fastest, especially when handling bigger queries

Solution Architecture

Development

Data was pulled directly from ServiceNow using API endpoints across several tables: change, change_task, attachment, and sysapproval_approver. The scope was narrowed to closed change requests only, where incremental refresh was set up to grab the latest change requests added to a population saved in an extracted .csv file.

Each request in the dashboard includes a hyperlink back to ServiceNow for quick access, while attachments are also just a click away for instant download. To make things more actionable, notifications were built in to flag requests where the end date slipped past today’s date. A number of these analytics were also tied directly to internal controls, helping teams keep a closer eye on compliance and risk.

Several purpose-built analytics were developed to make the data both practical and insightful:

• SNOW CM report – a population-level view with visuals like change request counts by planned start and end date.
• Start and End Date analysis – calculates days to complete and highlights changes that started late.
• Implementation analysis – flags cases where the end date came before the implementation date.
• Missing dates – lists change requests missing either a start or end date. Same owner as approver – identifies requests where the approver was also the change owner.
• Few or no approvals – highlights requests with no approvals or only one approval, with extra focus on emergency approvals.

Impact

The dashboard has already started to change the way teams look at ServiceNow data. Internal Audit can now spot risks faster and focus more on assurance instead of pulling and cleaning data. Business leaders finally have a flexible view of where delays and bottlenecks are happening, and they can act on issues before they snowball. What used to take hours of digging through exports is now just a few clicks away. The result is more transparency, quicker decision-making, and stronger monitoring of the controls that matter most.