ServiceNow enhances the Now platform for mixed work

As the business world continues to integrate into the mixed work environment, ServiceNow pays more and more attention to human resources and employee workflow, and this mixed work environment may continue to exist after the COVID-19 pandemic that triggered it.

The company launched the latest version of Now Platform last week, mainly about IT service management and security. However, in the new Rome version, ServiceNow is creating services designed to help employees deal with areas that are usually complex as employees, from onboarding and leaving to purchasing and personal events (such as marriage and children) that have had an impact on the world of work chain reaction.

People are already under pressure to try to get the job done while adapting to this new mixed working environment, which became super-speeding and will not disappear when the pandemic began last year. In a study published earlier this year, Microsoft found that “employees want the best of both worlds: more than 70% of employees want to continue flexible remote work options, and more than 65% of employees desire more time to face-to-face with their teams comminicate.”

Simplify the employee experience

ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright (Dave Wright) said that ServiceNow is trying to make human resources and employee workflow easier and more automated in order to reduce employee fatigue that officials believe.

“What we’re doing is researching different areas where you can start to improve the experience,” Wright said Internet news.

He cited a Gartner survey that found that approximately 85% of employees were more fatigued during the pandemic. “What we want to do is to say,’If we put all these employees under pressure, what can we do to make life easier?'” Wright said. result? “We have a complete concept of employee workflow in the ServiceNow platform.”

In the Rome version, the company hopes to build on the foundation already provided by the Now platform.

As a SaaS platform, ServiceNow can also make good use of another important trend triggered by the pandemic: the company’s increasing reliance on cloud computing (see The growth in enterprise cloud adoption has not slowed down).

ServiceNow Job Center

The key to the new products on the platform is the employment center. It is essentially a digital command center that provides a single interface for office and remote workers to find their personalized information faster and easier, from completed tasks to cross-cutting Different departments request services.

It also allows organizations to extract information and services into personalized themed pages, making it easier for employees to find answers to questions. In addition, ServiceNow is integrating the Now platform with Microsoft’s Teams collaboration suite to provide employees with a familiar place to submit requests, process notifications, and chat with virtual agents.

“This is a single interface, you can enter it, and you can get all the information related to everything you need to interact with all these services, whether it’s IT or human resources facilities or legal documents or anything else,” Wright said. One thing to add is that by putting everything in one place, it helps “application fatigue”.

He said that before the Rome launch, the company had been using job centers internally.

“We have been focused for a while,” Wright said. “We use our software as much as possible within the company. We have been using it for a while. We have started adding additional elements to the product and launching it as part of the employee center.”

Manage employee journeys

Another important part of the new Now platform version is employee journey management, a service designed to guide employees through their time as employees.

“As an employee, you will do some very specific things in your career,” Wright said. “It may be company entry, it may be a transfer to a new department, it may be a departure, or it may be a personal transition, such as marriage or childbirth. A system like this usually has to interface with many other systems below. How do we start to build a management system , Enabling people to quickly put these journeys into a system that allows people to complete the entire automated process to accurately understand where they are in the cycle [and] What will happen next? It is very sensitive to the employee experience. “

The service includes tools for providing templates, allowing managers to personalize transition plans for employees, creating surveys to quickly get feedback on employee experiences, providing tailored learning opportunities, and automating life cycle events during employees’ tenure at the company.

“Usually, you connect to multiple systems directly or underneath, so as the entire concept of the control tower…we see that customers have a lot of demand for it,” he said.

Not just human resources

Wright said that the employee’s experience in the company is more than just a human resource situation, which is different from what ServiceNow did in the Rome version.

“Most people view onboarding as a human resource practice,” he said. “It’s true… but you also have work that needs to be coordinated with finances. You have a job that needs to be done in a facility, so although it looks like a human resources-centric tracker, it actually involves all these other Department… Now when you join a company, you can not only sign documents, but you can also complete a lot of work electronically. You have a roadmap and you can see what happens before you are fully ready to become an employee , You can see where you are in that process, you can see what needs to happen next and when it should happen. It allows you to fully understand the whole process.”

Automation is the key

In an increasingly fragmented world where employees, infrastructure, applications, and data are ubiquitous, automation is the key to removing the daily tasks of employees who want to focus on projects that provide business value. A new feature of the Now platform is Automation Discovery, which can identify the top 10 opportunities from a list of more than 180 topics and is used to automatically process related ServiceNow applications, including virtual agents, automatic routing, and agent assistance.

In addition, the company has enhanced its Health Log Analytics to help organizations detect problems before they become problems. It also utilizes ServiceNow’s ITOM (IT Operations Management) predictive AIOps feature to automatically solve problems. ITOM Predictive AIOps is based on the technology that ServiceNow acquired when it acquired Loom Systems earlier this year and was launched in March when the Now platform was released in Quebec.

“As a company, we have always had the concept that whenever we get a product, we will rewrite it and put it on the platform,” Wright said. “We included it in Health Log Analytics, which now means that we can perform anomaly detection at the log level. This is not focused on the employee side. This is more focused on the system aspect that can predict what will happen from an operational perspective. But… As you improve your AI predictive capabilities, eventually as more and more services and platforms begin to become more predictive, what we start in one area may begin to affect another.”

Further reading: 11 tips for building scalable enterprise applications