ServiceNow is betting on citizen developers in the latest corporate push

COVID’s erosion of informal workplace mechanisms is a boon for enterprise service management (ESM) providers. For example, if you work in a large corporate campus before the pandemic and encounter human resource problems, you can wander around the lobby to find the answer.

“That world is gone forever,” said Charles Betz, chief analyst in charge of Forrester’s infrastructure and operations. “This is why the enterprise service management provider is doing very well.”

According to Betz, the revenue of ESM vendors has increased last year because companies recognized the need to publish services in a service catalog so that employees who work from home can find them.

ServiceNow is one of the major ESM vendors profiting from this shift: In January, it announced its sixth consecutive quarter of revenue growth of more than 30% year-on-year. The company also just released an update to its Now Platform software that builds ESM products.

Workflow paradigm

The “Quebec” version of ServiceNow’s Now platform is based on the “Paris” version last September, with new tools for process and labor optimization, and a significant expansion of the development tools of the ServiceNow low-code platform.

Stephen Elliot, vice president of IDC management software and DevOps projects, sees improvements in this version in three areas: allowing companies to use ServiceNow faster; further distinguishing ServiceNow products through artificial intelligence and more automation; and focusing on continuous optimization of the team’s work And collaborative approach.

These are the questions that ServiceNow users care about. He said: “More and more customers are paying attention,’How quickly can I learn this? How many people can get in the car? How easy is it for me to work with my peers?” ‘”

He said that ServiceNow is looking to increase its role in enterprise automation: “They really want to be the platform of the platform, the thread that integrates all work processes.”

Low code is not low risk

Forester’s Betz warned that although ServiceNow makes it easier for anyone to start coding with the Quebec version, companies must think carefully before giving any end user access to the new tool.

“You can have the easiest development tool in the world, but if the person using it is not a logical thinker, then bad things will follow,” he said. This means ensuring that (low) coders have a clear understanding of the enterprise data model and how the steps in their automated processes depend on each other.

But he also made a case that software development-whether it is no code, low code or professional code-should no longer be the responsibility of the IT team and a dedicated leader.

ServiceNow’s answer is to add a new workflow category to the IT, HR, and customer workflows it already supports. The new Creator workflow is designed to support the process of automating other workflows using two new low-code development tools. The first is App Engine Studio, which is a visual development environment that guides the creation process, and App Engine templates are workflow building blocks that have already embodied some necessary logical thinking.

Betz said that more and more highly visual examples are used to teach coding, so App Engine Studio will reduce friction among new citizen developers in the enterprise.

He suggested that CIOs wait for new coders to come forward and let them develop low-risk things that they are interested in: “There are a lot of harmless workflows done in spreadsheets or emails. If someone shows that they have This talent allows them to turn to bigger and better things.”

If this sounds too arbitrary, then App Engine templates can provide ServiceNow with a way to respond to different needs: governance.

According to IDC’s Elliot, CIOs are seeking to set up fences around such development tools to ensure access and security. “ServiceNow is in an interesting position,” he said. “They can put these fences in templates out of the box, and let developers or business analysts write them immediately.”

Optimize processes and productivity

Automated processes are great, but they don’t necessarily speed up the process: there may still be bottlenecks. An enterprise may have a new employee onboarding process that takes eight weeks from start to finish. Only through investigation and analysis can it determine the safety approval, for example, the main reason for the delay.

“In the context of a process management framework, running these types of analyses is not necessarily easy,” Betz said.

To meet this demand, ServiceNow has added new visualization tools for process optimization and labor optimization, identifying bottlenecks in the workflow, and monitoring employee workload and productivity.

According to Betz, these are the most revolutionary elements of the Quebec update.

He said that modern knowledge workers are poorly managed or improperly managed, and the lack of visibility of knowledge work is still a problem faced by many enterprises. Integrating workflows on platforms such as Now opens up operational analysis to identify the possibilities of processes that need improvement and where these changes are most suitable.

“The company says that employees are their greatest asset,” he said, but “it is absolutely correct to start managing processes as corporate resources.”

In this version, ServiceNow is becoming an ERP-level solution, he said: “It is no longer an ERP for IT, but an ERP for knowledge work.”

Betz said that CIOs can also use these process management tools to ensure that software development is not derailed. Agile teams are usually hostile to internal shared services such as infrastructure and do not want to rely on them, worrying that they will take too long. If CIOs can optimize internal sharing processes to the point where developers can rely on them, they will be less likely to try to do everything on their own.

“You have to be customer-centric, because if you don’t produce development instances for them, they will go to Amazon to start the development instances, and then you will encounter various security and compliance issues,” he said. .

The Quebec software version also includes new UI builder features, employee workflow tools for HR services, more AI enhancements for predictive AIOps, personalized search and chatbot creation. It went public on March 11.