4 min read
How Continuous Evidence Fixes Approval Bottlenecks
ServiceNow is the system of record for change and approvals in most regulated enterprises.
And yet, for many teams, it has become the place where delivery slows to a crawl.
Not because ServiceNow is broken.
But because the evidence model underneath it is.
Developers ship fast through modern CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and security scans, only to hit a wall when changes reach approval. Tickets bounce back. Evidence is questioned. Screenshots do not tell the full story. CABs hesitate. Releases wait.
The result is a familiar kind of pain:
- Thousands of engineering hours spent chasing proof
- Approval processes that feel slower every quarter
- Audits that require retroactive reconstruction of history
- Very little confidence that what was approved actually met policy
This is not a regulation problem.
It is a manual, fragmented evidence problem.
The Hidden Cost of Ticket-Based Approvals
Most approval workflows still rely on an assumption that no longer holds.
That evidence can be assembled after the fact.
In practice, this means:
- Screenshots pasted into tickets
- PDFs attached from scanners
- Links to CI jobs that may no longer exist
- Context scattered across tools and teams
Approvers are expected to make a risk decision based on partial information, often disconnected from the system that actually shipped the change.
So approvals slow down.
Not because people are careless, but because they are cautious.
When trust in the evidence is low, the safest option is delay.
Why Evidence Becomes the Bottleneck
Modern delivery pipelines already generate everything auditors and approvers care about:
- What code changed
- How it was tested
- What vulnerabilities were found
- Who approved it
- Where it was deployed
The problem is that this evidence:
- Lives across many systems
- Is not consistently linked to the change record
- Is rarely preserved as a coherent, reviewable whole
When proof lives in tickets and screenshots, approvals become the bottleneck because no one can confidently answer a simple question:
Does this change actually meet policy?
One Change. One Link. All the Evidence.
Now imagine a different model.
Every production change gets one permanent link.
Inside it:
- Build provenance and SBOM
- Unit and integration test results
- Code coverage
- SAST and DAST findings
- Container and image scans
- Infrastructure and policy checks
- Approver identity
- Deployed artifact hash
- Target environment
This evidence is not uploaded later.
It is produced continuously, directly from the delivery pipeline.
Approvals no longer involve hunting for proof.
They involve reviewing it.
Continuous Evidence vs Audit-Time Assembly
This shift changes the approval dynamic completely.
Before
- Evidence assembled at the end
- Missing context discovered too late
- Findings disconnected from their source
- CABs reviewing screenshots
After
- Evidence created as changes happen
- Findings link directly to pipeline output
- Exceptions include full context
- CABs review facts, not artifacts
No zip files.
No last-minute reconstruction.
No approval theatre.
This is what continuous compliance looks like in practice.
ServiceNow Is Not the Problem
It is worth being explicit about this.
ServiceNow is doing exactly what it is designed to do.
It acts as a system of record for change, approval, and accountability.
The issue is that ServiceNow is often asked to compensate for an evidence model designed for a slower, more manual era.
When pipeline-generated evidence is linked directly into ServiceNow workflows, something important happens:
- Tickets stop being containers for screenshots
- Approvals stop being guesswork
- Trust returns to the process
This is not about replacing ServiceNow.
It is about fixing what feeds into it.
From Approval Bottleneck to Review Step
When evidence is continuous and provable:
- Developers stop wasting hours chasing proof
- Approvers spend time reviewing, not validating
- CABs focus on risk, not reconstruction
- Audits become a by-product, not a fire drill
Approvals no longer block releases.
Not because controls are weaker, but because they are finally visible.
The Future State: Evidence On Tap
The end state is simple, even if the journey is not.
Approvals where:
- Evidence is already there
- Findings link to their source
- Exceptions have context
- Governance scales with delivery
This is how enterprises keep moving fast without losing control.
And it is how teams finally escape ticket hell without ripping out the systems they already rely on
Want to See This in Your Environment?
If approval bottlenecks, ticket-driven evidence, or audit reconstruction are slowing your teams down, we should talk.
👉 Contact the Kosli team
https://www.kosli.com/contact/
We can walk through how continuous evidence works in real pipelines and how it integrates cleanly with ServiceNow workflows using Kosli.
