ServiceNow’Rome’ emphasizes employee experience

For many years, ServiceNow has been primarily regarded as an IT Service Management (ITSM) provider. However, under the leadership of CEO Bill McDermott, the strategy has changed, and the company is developing its Now platform to increasingly support processes in other areas of the company.

At the core of this transformation is Now’s emphasis on workflow. “exist [Now’s] IDC Group Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations Stephen Elliot said: “The core is a workflow automation engine that can be used in any business process.

Because of this, Elliot and other industry analysts believe that ServiceNow is going beyond its ITSM roots into the entire enterprise. “There are increasing opportunities to consider ServiceNow in multiple business areas, especially human resources, employee workflow, customer support or service, and broader application development roles,” Elliot said.

In the early days of the pandemic, ServiceNow added workflows to Now to help companies manage their return to the office. The company expanded its focus on workflow with the “Paris” version of Now in September last year. In March 2021, the “Quebec” version of ServiceNow added support for low-code development tools, enabling companies to automate workflows. Now, with its latest version “Rome”, ServiceNow is focused on changing the employee experience.

For many companies, the employee workflow is in a web portal, which is usually a hodgepodge of pages encapsulating various applications. ServiceNow’s answer to this is Employee Center, which aims to connect all applications built on its platform into one interface, allowing employees to access HR, IT, facilities or procurement services in one place.

The options provided in the employee center can be based on roles, using personal profile information stored in ServiceNow or Active Directory, or based on “trend” requests or features that other employees need. There is also a search function that can use natural language understanding to find relevant information or processes.

Another function, employee journey management, provides the process of onboarding, leaving and other work transitions, and the HR team can customize it with code-free tools.

“The timing of ServiceNow’s focus on employee workflow is just right,” IDC’s Elliot said. “For CIOs, they should consider how their current ServiceNow investments provide value across business functions to complement their existing ServiceNow IT-specific investments.”

CIO weighs pros and cons against Rome

The city of Santa Monica, California is an organization that learned about Rome’s capabilities early on.

Joseph Cevetello has served as the city’s CIO for five years, and he introduced ServiceNow to digitize some of the city’s internal processes. “This is the most extensible workflow system I know of,” said Cevetello, who also uses Microsoft SharePoint. “We will use many additional features in Rome.”

The new employee center portal came at the right time for Cevetello: the IT department is now in charge of the city’s website, which was not managed by another department until recently.

Serve immediately

One thing he is particularly looking forward to is ServiceNow’s new Mobile App Builder, which enables ServiceNow users to develop workflows on the Now platform and package them as native mobile applications. Santa Monica’s existing 311 application has been built to integrate with the ServiceNow backend, and new front-end development tools will allow Cevetello to take advantage of this.

However, he is impatient with some other features planned for future releases, including the ability to edit complex PDF forms from mobile applications. The city has established a human resources onboarding process on ServiceNow, California requires many forms for new employees to fill out, and this still requires a PC.

Stephen Mansfield, Deloitte’s chief information officer for the Americas, also pointed out that the new employee center and onboarding tools are very important to eliminate the friction of new or existing employees returning to the office.

“The message is simple:’If you are going back to the office, go to ServiceNow. This is where you screen, register, find a place to work, and any service requests,'” Mansfield said.

As for the new Mobile App Builder, he said: “We are developing second or third generation mobile apps, and we are very excited about their investment here. They make it easier for our developers.”

Mansfield’s organization has used ServiceNow in conjunction with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for many years to handle tasks such as responding to IT requests or processing invoices.

He is concerned about Rome’s new automated discovery tool, which monitors existing processes and recommends other ServiceNow applications (such as virtual agents, automatic routing, and agent assistance) for companies to automate work opportunities.

“We are really happy to see them push this. They have the right architecture,” he said.

The CIO or business manager must still evaluate these automation proposals on their own, weighing the costs and benefits against the costs and benefits of other opportunities.

ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright said of the discovery tool: “It highlights the areas that can be deployed, but it is impossible to estimate the cost of development work. In many cases, these work are not actually development work. , It’s often the job of a subject matter expert to code someone’s knowledge or allow them to say what an agent conversation should look like.”