Roberto Álvarez Alonso, co-founder of SwissFlowIt, presented at SNUG Romandie #16 in Geneva on June 25th.
His talk, “Maximising ServiceNow value through integrated documentation”, shared lessons from his 15 years with ServiceNow and his experience building a TeamHub for a fast-growing platform team.
The event drew 80 participants from 43 organisations, making it one of the larger regional SNUG gatherings this year.
The documentation excuses we all make
Roberto opened with familiar excuses every ServiceNow team has heard: “We’ll stay out-of-the-box,” “We’ll only use low-code/no-code,” or the classic “Haven’t you heard about generative AI?”
These justifications for avoiding documentation sound reasonable until you’re three months into an implementation and nobody remembers why a particular script was written or a decision was made.
He shared striking statistics:
- 80% of IT workers recreate work because they can’t find existing documentation.
- Organisations with 1,000 employees waste between $2.5 million and $3.5 million annually through poor document handling.
- When knowledge leaves with departing employees, companies face a 25% productivity penalty.
The AI documentation debate resurfaces
During the Q&A, several attendees questioned whether traditional documentation still matters when AI can answer questions.
Roberto’s response was practical: AI enhancement was actually one of his seven reasons why documentation matters. Good documentation trains AI systems better, leading to more accurate responses.
He emphasised that documentation serves multiple purposes beyond feeding AI – knowledge preservation, faster onboarding, standardisation, decision recovery, error reduction, and compliance readiness.
Three barriers to documentation
Roberto identified why teams struggle with documentation despite knowing its importance. It’s hard to care (immediate work takes priority over future benefits), hard to create (time-consuming and often tedious), and hard to consume (information becomes outdated or difficult to find).
His presentation resonated because he spoke from experience rather than theory. Every challenge he described – scattered information, growing teams, tool limitations – matched what attendees faced in their own organisations.
TeamHub – A real-world experience
Roberto’s most compelling content came from his experience managing a ServiceNow environment with over 40,000 users worldwide. His team grew from 5 to 30 people in 24 months, spanning platform architecture, ITSM, ITOM, and FSM areas across 8 ServiceNow instances with 20+ integrations.
The documentation challenge was real: critical information was scattered across folders, sub-folders, and Knowledge Base articles. New team members struggled to get up to speed. Senior experts spent too much time answering the same questions repeatedly.
His TeamHub project aimed to reduce technical debt, accelerate onboarding, simplify handovers, enable faster incident resolution, and improve cross-team transparency.
The scope included everything from ServiceNow instances and integrations to team calendars, golden rules, standard processes, and technical best practices.
The tools we tried
Roberto walked through their evaluation of documentation platforms – a journey many attendees recognised.
- OneDrive offered file sharing but limited collaboration.
- ServiceNow’s Knowledge Base avoided context switching but felt rigid and offered a poor user experience.
- Confluence provided decent formatting but lacked real-time co-editing.
- OneNote was good for quick capture and sync, but search was limited, and it didn’t offer integration options.
- Coda delivered interactive documents and good collaboration, but required extra manual user and permission management.
Each tool solved some problems while creating others. The team kept asking: “Can’t we have it all?”
Can’t we have it all?
Several participants approached Roberto after his session, interested in learning more about modern documentation approaches within ServiceNow.
Some attendees mentioned they would have liked to see a live demo of Documate, so here’s a short video where Rubén Ferrero, the other co-founder of SwissFlowIt, puts some of these ideas into practice.
Community connections
A big thank you to Isabel Fernandez Gonzalez, Alexandra Stiegler, Thomas Spillard, ServiceNow and DXC Technology for organising it, and to all the speakers attending SNUG Romandie #16 for sharing their experiences.