For the past few weeks our team has been attending ServiceNow’s annual conference, Knowledge 2020. As with many conferences this year, ServiceNow took their event digital, allowing us the opportunity to tune in live from home or watch on demand post-event. With many great sessions to choose from, here are some of the highlights.
The smarter way to workflow
Bill McDermott, CEO, delivered an inspiring keynote about transforming in the “new world”. While presenting on ServiceNow’s response to COVID-19 he noted that digital transformation is no longer a “nice to have” and that companies who are more digitally transformed have a competitive advantage over those who are not in this challenging market. The pandemic has forced many organizations to increase their pace to transformation significantly, which is why digital transformation is such a timely topic.
In addition to the importance and growth of digital transformation that the market is experiencing right now, ServiceNow also aims to offer great customer and employee experiences. They do so by offering mobile, smart experiences through investments in AI and machine learning and frictionless communication between company and employee, which is especially important with the increase in remote workers. These experiences are all thanks to IT superheroes and complex workflows.
So what is the “next normal” going to look like, according to ServiceNow? Bill McDermott believes that choice will be the next step in work from home. With this, there will be a mix of remote workers and in-office workers, making a workplace revamp necessary in addition to technology. For this reason, ServiceNow is introducing their Safe Workplace apps, which consists of 4 apps that can be accessed on the Now platform through a single dashboard:
- Employee readiness surveys
- Employee health screening
- Workplace PPE inventory management
- Workplace safety management
With the return to work weighing heavy on many organizations and their c-suites, ServiceNow also offers guidance on some of the tough return to work decisions with their workflows and trust and sentiment reports on their safe workplace dashboard. They also have tools that can help make decisions based on some key considerations such as a safe and supportive experience for employees, helping them prepare for the return, understanding employee readiness with their virtual assistant and utilizing augmented reality for common tasks like booking meeting space. ServiceNow is constantly innovating for their customers by focusing on operational resiliency, smart experiences and spend optimization.
Building a digital culture
According to ServiceNow, the first place to start in the journey to a digital transformation is your employees. During the “building a digital culture” session, ServiceNow outlined that most failures are due to lack of employee buy in, and that the key to a digital transformation success is cultural transformation. They introduced their cultural transformation playbook, which outlines some tactics you can apply within your organization to ensure success:
- Develop a culture of change
- Collaborate across all levels of your organization
- Clarify your expectations
- Show the benefits
- Train your employees
- Focus on the mission
By taking these steps to ensure your employees are on board the likelihood of your transformation success increases significantly.
Delivering your employees the right digital experiences anywhere
In addition to building a digital culture, it is now more important than ever to deliver your employees with the right digital experiences anytime and from any device. During this session ServiceNow introduced their employee service delivery platform which provides a sole location for employees to get all their questions asked, from any interface they choose. For example, employee service delivery can assist with anything from onboarding questions, broken laptops, to payroll or benefits season questions.
One of the main benefits of ServiceNow’s employee service delivery is that they offer integration with your back-end systems, providing a unified experience for employees, and digital workflows across all departments within an organization. Some other features are self-service, their virtual agent, AI-based search and targeted campaigns, all on one platform.
In addition to digital experiences, ServiceNow employee workflows offer organizations business continuity during uncertain times, which is crucial for almost every business today.
Knowledge 2020 has had many great sessions over the last few weeks, and although the conference will be coming to an end after this week, you will still be able to review some of the sessions in their video library. If you are interested in learning more about the technologies discussed during the conference, or are looking to get started with your digital transformation, learn more here.
