CEO Bill McDermott-“ServiceNow will become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century”

This is a bold statement. But Bill McDermott believes that ServiceNow is in a unique position to become “the enterprise software company that defines the 21st century.” why? Well, he thinks that ServiceNow can take advantage of the many changes that have occurred in the corporate market, especially in the post-COVID-19 world.

These include: the simplicity of the ServiceNow platform; the historical failure of the enterprise software industry; the drive to promote “everything as a service”; and the needs of customers to allow them to define the appearance of the process without complexity.

This is not to say that ServiceNow will not face challenges. McDermott said frankly that the company needs to build an effective partner ecosystem and needs to appropriately expand its moderate ITSM roots. But he saw an opportunity in the enterprise, and he believed that the record seller’s system failed to promote real change.

As the former CEO of SAP, he served for many years, which is a bullish position.

We have the opportunity to give a keynote speech with McDermott at ServiceNow’s Virtual Knowledge 2020 event this week, which you can visit here. For all the reports of diginomica since 2020, please check our dedicated resource center.

It is worth mentioning that I conducted a background analysis of ServiceNow, and outlined its maturity from becoming an ITSM cloud provider to a company focused on process redesign across multiple service use cases in the enterprise. The advantage of ServiceNow is that it does not intend to replace the existing systems of record throughout the enterprise, but instead asks: what does the service look like? It then utilizes existing systems and allows customers to define workflows to reduce friction. McDermott said in his own words:

How is this going? Any big idea? This is the idea. I believe that with everything I have, we are in a workflow revolution. I believe that the workflow revolution in modern enterprises is happening for the following reasons. First, it is difficult for most companies to give their employees a mobile, Web-based, conversation-based, tool-based, consumer-driven user experience. All of this is based on a consumer-driven user experience.

Okay, what should you do? Why can’t everyone do it? This is why. You must remember one thing about ServiceNow-this is the only software company in the history of the world that has an architecture, a platform, and a data model with a market value of $75 billion. We have never made a large-scale acquisition. The platform has no complexity. What does this do? This allows us to seamlessly integrate into more than 500 major systems that exist today, including Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Workday.

McDermott’s comments clearly and unambiguously mentioned most other vendors in the market that have adopted cloud computing. But I think, more importantly, McDermott’s views reflect a more interesting trend we see in enterprises-a trend around service design. Companies are increasingly realizing that “user experience” is often not just driven by implementing new cloud tools.

Instead, it requires organizations to consider their processes and how to simplify, optimize, and redesign these processes to drive true operational change throughout the company. McDermott seems to understand this, and his proposition for ServiceNow largely stems from the growing need for companies to truly change the way things are done. He said:

We are the main force of the workflow. Customers only need to rearrange processes to adapt to these modern workforces. what does that mean? This means that in the past, companies usually made software, shrunk it, put it on the market, and then said “this is best practice.” Then, consultants usually follow up later, customize it according to the client’s needs, and then spend millions of dollars in hours, days, weeks, months, and years. This appears in the cloud as a service on demand.

Since this is a revolution in workflow, you can design the process. Workers tell you how they want to use work and how to connect from one department to another. Consumers or customers tell you how they want their services, and you only need to provide them. This is a revolution.

McDermott provides many examples of this, including using the Now platform to help a company with 500,000 employees work from home overnight, or to increase the software utilization rate of another customer by 25%. McDermott also believes that ServiceNow can quickly provide buyers with this value. He said:

What makes ServiceNow unique and why I am so optimistic is that you will get 5 to 6 times the return on investment in the first 12 months. In many cases less than a few months. Who else can say? Who else can get there quickly? The answer is no one. This is why I think in the enterprise we will become the company that defines enterprise software in the 21st century. I said I support it.

Opportunity in crisis

ServiceNow is one of the vendors that quickly responded to the current COVID-19 pandemic by releasing a set of applications that can help organizations manage employees and operations as they move to a distributed workforce. According to ServiceNow, these emergency response applications have been used by more than 6,000 customers. However, as lock-in eases, suppliers are now considering how to use their “workflow engine” to help companies manage the transition to the workplace. McDermott explained:

When I say “return to the workplace”, this is a world “visible everywhere”. However, we must understand that many workers have dual-income families. Some of them have young children. Some of them have elderly care problems. Some of these houses are tight now, with a very tight workload per square foot.

Therefore, people want a branch, and one of them is an office. So in terms of returning to the office, we announced four main applications-compared to other announced releases, we actually have these applications. We are running them on ServiceNow and can use them on a global scale. We have downloaded them from more than 200 of the world’s largest companies.

You can read about these applications in our article, but they include:

• Workforce is ready-are people ready to work again in this environment? Are they mentally, emotionally and physically ready to return to the workplace? McDermott said that only about one-third of employees currently answer “yes” to these questions, which poses a challenge to workforce management.

• Health Check-When the company does bring people back to the office, they will have to follow the inspection procedures, temperature checks, drug swabs and other testing mechanisms.

• Workplace Safety Management-Companies must understand through departments, floors and buildings that they have properly configured offices to achieve social distancing and safety.

• PPE inventory management-this will help the company ensure that the necessary equipment is available in each location and ensure that the office is clean to the highest standards.

McDermott said the company needs to handle these things properly, because if they don’t, they are likely to face legal proceedings. He said:

Some companies are actively doing this, but others must be aware that if they do not, there will be liability issues. I can tell you that if the company cannot keep up, it will be a huge liability issue.

Challenges and opportunities

As mentioned above, although McDermott is strong in ServiceNow’s ambitions, the work that needs to be done to realize these ambitions is also quite pragmatic.

One point is that McDermott recognizes that ServiceNow needs to improve its messaging for specific industries-he pointed out that retail behavior is different from financial services, manufacturing, utilities, etc. However, his current main focus is to enhance ServiceNow’s partner ecosystem. He said:

We must greatly expand the ecosystem. When I say ecosystem, I don’t just mean the people who implement the Now platform. I’m also talking about business partners, consulting companies, these consulting companies discuss digital transformation with C-level executives. We hope they all get a note about ServiceNow features. We also hope that all C-level executives in all roles in the company will understand the capabilities of the Now platform.

I do believe that the workflow revolution is still in its infancy and we must be missionaries to ensure the success of our work. I believe that the days of investing in huge and complex recording systems will be greatly slowed down. I believe that workflow is a revolution that will close the gap and make great things happen to these customers. But we still have to convey information to them.

I take

McDermott (McDermott) is a charismatic leader. But he is also a person who has worked in this industry for a long time, and he knows the most about the complex struggles companies face. I don’t know if ServiceNow will become the leading enterprise software supplier in 10 years, but I do think that this is a supplier that is directly responding to a specific challenge that the company is dealing with-the need to change how they operate and redesign their processes.

Companies don’t believe so much in the huge system of record upgrades. They want to use tools that have a real impact on engagement and experience. I think ServiceNow needs to redouble its efforts to show the art of possible. I have said before, but “experience” and “participation” are very objective. Customers need help and guidance to understand the results that can be achieved. I think the COVID-19 apps recently used by ServiceNow do exactly that-they provide clear use cases for the current challenges facing most businesses worldwide. It would be great for ServiceNow to think about how these learnings can be applied to other use cases.

Having said that, as long as redesigning services is always the primary consideration for buyers, ServiceNow has a great opportunity to lead the trend.