ServiceNow bets on citizen developers in the final business impulse

ServiceNow

Covid’s erosion of informal institutions in the workplace is a boon for enterprise service management (ESM) providers. For example, if you were working in a large corporate campus before the pandemic and encountered a human resource problem, you can wander around the lobby to find the answer.

“That world is gone forever,” said Charles Betz, Forrester’s chief infrastructure and operations analyst. “This is why enterprise service management providers do so well.”

According to Betz, the revenue of all ESM providers has increased in the past year because the company recognizes the need to publish services in a service catalog so that employees at home can find them.

A sort of Serve immediately It is one of the top ESM vendors profiting from this transition: 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 launch of ServiceNow’s “Quebec” platform is now based on the “Paris” version last September, with new tools for process and labor optimization and a significant expansion of development tools for the low-code ServiceNow platform.

Stephen Elliot, vice president of IDC management software and DevOps projects, sees improvements in this version in three areas: it allows enterprises to use ServiceNow faster; further differentiates ServiceNow products through artificial intelligence and more automation; and focuses on continuously optimizing the team’s Ways of working and collaboration.

These are the questions that ServiceNow users care about. He said: “More and more customers are looking for:’How quickly can I learn this? How many people can I climb? Is it easy for me to work with my peers?'”

He said that ServiceNow is looking to increase its role in business automation: “They really want to be a platform for this platform, an industry that integrates all work processes.”

Low code is not low risk

Betz warned that while ServiceNow makes it easier for anyone to start coding with the Quebec launch, the company should 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, bad things will happen,” he said. This means ensuring that (low) coders clearly understand how the enterprise data model and the process steps they automate depend on each other.

But he also believes that software development-whether it is no code, low code or professional code-should no longer be in charge of IT teams, grouped by dedicated leaders.

ServiceNow’s answer is to add a new workflow category to the IT, HR, and customer workflows they already support. Creator’s new workflow is designed to support the use of two new low-code development tools to automate the process of other workflows. The first App Engine Studio is a visual development environment that guides the build process, and App Engine templates are workflow building blocks that already contain some necessary logical thinking.

Betz said that more and more highly visual paradigms are used to teach coding, so App Engine Studio will reduce friction for new corporate citizen developers.

He suggested that CIOs wait for new programmers to appear 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 he has this talent , Then let him do bigger and better things.”

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

According to IDC’s Elliot, the CIO is trying to set up fences around such development tools to protect access rights and security. “ServiceNow is in an interesting position,” he said. “They can immediately put these protection tracks into ready-made templates for developers or business analysts to write them down.”

Optimize processes and productivity

Automated processes are all fine, but they will not necessarily speed them up: there may still be bottlenecks. A company may develop 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 and labor optimization, identifying bottlenecks in the workflow, and monitoring workload and employee productivity.

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

He said that poor management or poor management of modern knowledge workers and lack of visibility of knowledge work is still a problem faced by many companies. Integrating workflows on platforms like Now opens up the ability to run analytics to determine the processes that need improvement and where those changes are best suited.

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

With the release of 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 trust them, worrying that they will take too long. If CIOs can optimize the internal sharing process to the point where developers can trust them, they are unlikely to try to do everything on their own.

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

The Quebec software version also includes new UI creation capabilities, employee workflow tools for HR services, more AI enhancements for predictive AIOps, custom search and chatbot creation.

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