Cooperation with the Technical University of Munich: students’ creativity faces real challenges

The project originated from an initiative of German ServiceNow and was supported by the company’s NextGen team, which is responsible for international cooperation with educational institutions.

Dealing with purely academic issues in a university environment is a good thing, and it can be fun. In this respect, universities are centers of excellence for free, scientific thinking. But this is ultimately about practical, very practical challenges. However, in order to be able to intervene effectively, students usually lack two things: knowledge of the processes and challenges of real companies and corresponding digital tools.

Andreas Weber, Senior Director of ServiceNow Solution Consulting, explained: “Our NextGen team’s project is mainly to give young people the opportunity to use a professional, highly developed platform to design tomorrow’s working environment.” “Especially these young people are not only There are many ideas for designing established processes. They are usually interested in them. After all, it is young people who will be relevant to them for many years to come.”

“Two DAX companies that cooperate with DAN, Allianz and BMW Group also participated in our TUM project, with the purpose of formulating specific tasks through actual case studies.” Added Faez Ahmed, who is responsible for cooperation with ServiceNow University.

Both companies are using ServiceNow’s Now platform. “From a cost-saving perspective, Allianz Technology is also constantly striving to improve and optimize our process and tool range to improve customer satisfaction and support daily and future business, while also starting from a cost-saving perspective.” -ServiceNow Development And operating organization.

As the leading platform for topics such as ITSM and ITBM, ServiceNow has become the central platform of Allianz’s global organization and provides services to thousands of users-especially by enabling incident, problem and change management, and global standardization of ordering and billing Process and service reports. Engler said: “In addition to the self-service capabilities we have provided to our customers, we also need to maintain a strong management and governance model around the platform in order to comply with security standards and best practices.”

ServiceNow’s NextGen plans to work with the authorities to promote the training of young talents and horizontal entrants.

The worst thing this year is the changes that the Covid 19 pandemic has brought to students. Professor Helmut Krcmar, Professor of Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich: “Our goal for the 2019/20 winter semester (which is undoubtedly a challenging semester for many students) is to provide innovative virtual formats to avoid the need for Covid-19 to compensate for campus Therefore, we are very pleased to be able to provide a fully digital course on business software applications for workflow management with ServiceNow.”

Anyone who has not held a permanent position in a large company usually cannot imagine such an effort, for example, after ordering a computer mouse, commissioning a service provider, or handling a seemingly simple customer request.

In order to provide the necessary background information and make the task settings as practical as possible, the project involved representatives of two DAX companies. They described where they started and provided feedback on the progress of the work. For both companies, the main task is how to manage access requests to certain resources that were previously handled manually so that the process is largely automated and transparent, and the status can be assessed at any time.

The purpose of cooperating with corporate partners Allianz Group and BMW Group is to rethink the internal processes with the fresh ideas of the student team, while enabling them to face the actual requirements of large companies, thereby achieving a win-win situation.

For Hendrik Engler, the task at Allianz looks like this: “One of the concerns we want to convey to students is to recognize the dimension that due to the large number of existing processes, even small changes in the existing processes It can also get practical attention. Therefore, a realistic scenario-automated platform user management, governance and reporting-was introduced to the student team to make the exercise more practical.

In the NextGen project, students have the opportunity to solve the economic challenges formulated on the basis of the ServiceNow Now platform. You will also learn the basics of the platform and learn how to agilely advance the company’s digital transformation: “Our Now Platform is more than just a programming environment,” Andreas Weber explained. “It is a platform for all platforms. What we are talking about is a very powerful software platform that is used by 6,200 companies worldwide. It provides a no-code, low-code and pre-code environment, for example, for all possible terminal devices Tailor-made applications”

The Now platform provides beginners and advanced programmers the opportunity to create functional and intelligent applications. Andreas Weber continued: “The data comes from systems owned by completely different companies. These systems are usually sufficient to store and manage the data, but cannot be used in an agile way. With the Now Platform, this basic data has been integrated, which makes work Extremely flexible.”

In the first phase of the project, ServiceNow and the Technical University of Munich provided students with the opportunity to learn about Now Platform in a virtual course. “Because we have many years of experience in industry-specific design thinking courses, we were able to design a course in less than two weeks, combining instructional and self-directed learning with teamwork.” Kemar the course The program allows students to obtain certificates from Now Platform. Proprietary technology that enables them to seamlessly access the ServiceNow ecosystem.

In the second stage, the students formed a team to provide solutions for the developed business theme. A virtual weekly meeting with ServiceNow’s mentor and TUM’s Chairman of Information Systems accompanies this work. Obviously it provides students with a comprehensive production experience. The student team participating in the “BMW Challenge” reached a consensus: “Thank our mentors and mentors for their support for making a significant contribution to the success of this work.” Allianz’s student team can only agree with this: ” During the project, mentors from ServiceNow and TUM supported us with firm dedication and professionalism.”

After the final presentation by each team, the feedback round took longer than planned. Discussions about the solutions found were very active and showed the high level of commitment brought by the various teams. In cooperation with the students of the Technical University of Munich, many problems repeatedly generated new views on many detailed topics, and made the supervisors very happy to see the students’ commitment to solutions.

“Throughout the project phase, the personal point I realized was that students focused on topics such as design ideas and conceptual work; they understood the customer’s needs and requirements well, and challenged the process itself to create clarity Defined goals,” Hendrik Engler said. “Flexible working methods and regular presentation meetings allow us to ensure that the team has a unified understanding of the status, challenges and next steps. I personally want to thank the entire team, the Technical University of Munich and ServiceNow as staunch supporters of the program.”

The conclusion of the Allianz team is: “Participating in a project can greatly enrich our work, it can reduce the complexity of daily work and enable people to work more efficiently and comfortably.” The professor’s reason for Dr. Krcmar is enough to end with ServiceNow The first joint project: “I look forward to expanding our cooperation.”

Andreas Weber added: “It’s great to see how much time the students put into the project and the final presentation. The number of questions asked by our two customer representatives after each presentation is clear It clearly shows that they are deeply impressed by the team’s work. I think the possibility that both solutions can be used in practice is very high. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers BMW Group and Allianz Group for providing exciting Challenges students must solve.”

Faez Ahmed: “I thank TUM-under the excellent leadership of Professor Krcmar and his most impressive students, the ServiceNow team under the excellent leadership of Andreas Weber, and our company’s NickGenham and John Perks’ NextGen team worked tirelessly to make this project a reality.”

Due to the great success, ServiceNow and TUM plan to carry out another project in November 2020.