Case Study: Howard County achieves streamlined IT and business workflows with ServiceNow

Howard County uses an IT management platform to create a services portal and streamline IT and business workflows

Howard County, Md.’s IT department set out to replace a patchwork of on‑premises applications, spreadsheets and documents to improve IT support and service delivery—and quickly discovered a bigger challenge: many manual, paper‑based business processes (including contract approvals that took four to six weeks) and no single way for employees or citizens to request services. Leadership wanted a unified platform that could both standardize IT operations and extend automation across departments and to the public.

The county implemented cloud‑based ServiceNow, built a configuration management database, automated core IT workflows (access, password resets, equipment requests), and launched the SNAP employee portal, with digital signature integration for contract approvals and planned citizen-facing services. The changes cut contract approvals from weeks to a single afternoon, produced major productivity gains and SLA improvements, captured institutional knowledge, and put Howard County on track to automate hundreds more processes for ~3,500 employees.

Howard County

Tom Yeatts

Deputy CIO