ServiceNow just again provided good quarterly data. IT Service Management (ITSM) is still a great business, or should you also attribute this growth to service management in areas such as human resources and customer service?
Picture: ServiceNow
Donajo: Let me take a step back and answer this question again. Let me tell you what drives our overall business. The world is currently undergoing digital transformation. This is not a buzzword, but a central strategic development. Currently, every company is making disruptive changes through software.
Since I entered ServiceNow two years ago, I have definitely met 600 or 700 CIOs all over the world. They all said the same thing: software disrupted every industry, every company in every region. Digital transformation is a top priority.
What do you mean when you talk about digital transformation?
Donajo: About how the company digitally connects with customers, how to create a better digital experience for its employees, and how to use digital technology to improve efficiency and productivity. Companies need to concentrate their scarce talents and resources and use them mainly to innovate for customers. In global enterprises, the complexity of maintaining the business is too much and takes up too many resources.
In your opinion, what role does CIO play in digital transformation?
Donajo: Today, CEOs looked at their C-level employees very carefully and asked themselves: Who can lead us to the digital future. The right person is the chief information officer.
|
Who is John Donahoe? The 58-year-old ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe has an impressive career. Before taking over the management of ServiceNow two years ago, he served as the CEO and President of Ebay from 2008 to 2015. Prior to that, he worked for Bain & Co., a global consulting company, for 20 years, and became CEO and President in 1999. Graduates of Stanford Business School are members of the supervisory boards of Ebay, Intel and PayPal. |
Not without controversy, some companies have appointed chief digital officers (CDO)…
Donajo: But it depends on the CIO or Chief Technology Officer (CTO). CDO does not always have the necessary basic technical knowledge. The CIO is in great demand, and he must define his role as a cross-functional task. IT is no longer a pure background function.
Do CIOs play this role in their organization?
Donajo: The whole thing reminds me of the role of chief financial officer (CFO) 20 years ago. He is a respected manager, responsible for cost control. Finance is a bit tired, back office functions. But this has fundamentally changed. The focus today is business value, not just cost. Finance now plays a strategic role, far beyond cost, audit and taxation.
The CIO and CFO at the time were in a similar situation: We were in a transitional period in which technology affected all departments of the company. It is no longer related to back-end IT, but is now related to technical authorization and technical support. For those who know it, these are natural tasks: the CIO and its IT organization. Most CIOs are prepared for this, but of course some people are not prepared for it.
When you talk about the cross-functional role of IT, is this still the central task? Not every department (human resources, finance, marketing or production) needs its own level of IT capabilities?
Donajo: For example, the history of software in a company allows us to keep marketing, finance, human resources or production software relatively separate. All these solutions cannot communicate with each other, which makes it difficult for companies to create the best user experience for their customers and employees. You don’t have the kind of impulse to change customer experience or productivity that you really need.
Take a look at the consumer world: Customers don’t care whether Ebay, PayPal or Amazon can control their marketing, sales, and financial systems. But they care about their customer experience. If that’s not good, go somewhere else. The same is true for company employees: they want their software to provide a good user experience. They are not interested in the independent systems behind them, such as human resources, law, IT, and finance.
In digital transformation, company employees’ expectations of customer experience are similar to those of the private sector. Leading companies around the world know this. You have this cross-functional way of thinking.
Picture: ServiceNow
The leading companies are mainly Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook-more or less born on the Internet. Do traditional companies with a long history even have the opportunity to position themselves cross-functionally?
Donajo: ServiceNow provides services to 75% of Fortune 500 companies. Large companies, such as FedEx, JPMorgan Chase or Wal-Mart, are doing their best to achieve seamless cross-functional processes that are customer-centric. They do exactly the same things for their employees so that they can do their jobs as efficiently as possible.
Let me give an example, the onboarding of new employees. This is a classic unstructured workflow. After joining the company, you will receive a badge from the security department, a desk from the facility management department, a laptop and smartphone from the IT department, email access and applications from another part of IT, personal information from HR and Health information, salary information from Finance and Hehe…
ServiceNow has written a starter application that seamlessly merges and unifies all these functions in one mobile application. The application is connected to all support systems, but hides the complexity from employees. Our role is to implement such a digital workflow. We want to improve the experience of customers and employers while increasing productivity advantages. This is just one example of a cross-functional process, and there are many of them. Organizations have all these systems, but they lack an application that can put all the functions together and hide their complexity. This is what we provide.
#Interview #CEO #John #Donahoe #ServiceNow #platform #company
More from Source