ServiceNow wants to manage services outside of IT

An IT service management expert, ServiceNow has developed its SaaS platform, making it an entry point for all business participation systems and the ability to quickly create new services, not just the IT department. . The American publisher held its third user conference (600 registered people) in Paris yesterday. Through its cloud products, ITSM solution experts can not only provide IT departments that are still their main target with tools to define, organize and automate the task flow related to service provision in the company, for example, it is now also applicable to human resource development, General service or team that intervenes on site.

ServiceNow Strategy Director Dave Wright echoed the 2015 Paris NowForum’s subtitle “Everything as a Service”. He recalled that users were accustomed to making requests through a very structured process to activate the workflow. . Unlike unstructured methods (e.g. e-mail), this method does not allow prioritization of service requests, so they provide visibility into how requests are considered and processed. According to Dave Wright, the development of this field in the next two years will see the emergence of new positions, such as “Vice President of Delivery Global Business Services.” [NDLR : vice-président, responsable de la fourniture de services métiers au niveau mondial]. To illustrate his point, two pre-sales managers from ServiceNow then gave an eloquent demonstration of the implementation of the service through the Geneva version of the cloud platform, which is expected to be released in French in a few months. The speech specifically mentioned a CFO’s visit to Service 360​​ (provided with Geneva), he found all his business services from different angles: cost, employee satisfaction… his Performance Analytics dashboard enables He perceives the quality of various services. In the process, the presentation then focuses on an operations manager who must create a new service (employee portal and forms in the workflow) based on a template that guides him through the next steps. Participants of NowForum in Paris were invited in the afternoon to reproduce this experience by themselves in the framework of a “hands-on lab” seminar, showing how to create an application.

ServiceNow Express, from 10 people to IT staff

As an introduction to the conference, Christophe Bouchardeau, Director of Southern Europe at ServiceNow, presented the results of a global study on productivity decline in workflow. In France, the study covered 300 interviews. She found that executives spend an average of a day and a half on administrative tasks, and most of them indicate that this prevents them from performing strategic tasks. This represents 2.3 million hours of work per year. Nine out of 10 people also said that their productivity depends on the efficiency of the daily tasks performed by other departments (such as marketing, IT support, procurement or HRD). The French leader pointed out: “We can improve these repetitive tasks and increase work efficiency.”

The IT departments of ServiceNow customers who have chosen to solve ITSM problem solutions are now involved in other areas. “Things haven’t changed much. What has changed is the experience the customer has gained over the years. One of them recently explained to me that he can now ignore the technology and focus on his own process,” Christoph Christophe Bouchardeau told us in an interview. “In fact, we will go beyond event studies and continue to study other topics. The idea of ​​putting workflow between requesters who are looking for services and requesters who provide services is spreading and is being spread under the leadership of the IT department.” The French subsidiary of ServiceNow currently has about 100 customers, of which about 10% use solutions other than IT. Since June last year, the publisher has launched a program for medium-sized companies (1,000 to 5,000 employees) The new quotation for these companies has about ten or more people in the IT department. It is called ServiceNow Express, which is based on the same platform as the full version and can be migrated when needed. However, the process is limited to “out of the box” provision There is no customizable portal. The solution is integrated by Devoteam and Imakumo in France. According to Imakumo, its deployment time is five to ten days and the price starts at 50 Euros per user per month (plus entry Cost, equivalent to a one-year license).

Each customer has its own instance in the cloud

For the Geneva version of ServiceNow, in addition to its many functional contributions (including the possibility of inserting the same ticket through Connect), it will also enhance security through data encryption, which will be controlled by the customer. Several companies are currently testing this version in Beta mode, but France has not tested it. To run its applications, ServiceNow relies on 16 data centers (8 pairs, with redundancy) worldwide. In Europe, the first pair operates in London and Amsterdam. The other two data centers are located in Switzerland, located in Zurich and Geneva, and have premium rates. They mainly meet the needs of the Swiss banking market, which requires data to be stored in Switzerland. Christophe Bouchardeau reminds us: “On the ServiceNow cloud, each customer has his own database instance. If he has a request, we can provide him with the hardware infrastructure.” The company’s chief technology officer Allan Leinwand (Allan Leinwand) ) Yesterday, we introduced these isolation and security guarantees in detail.

At NowForum Paris in France, many clients of the French subsidiary testified, including Societe Generale. Sébastien Delautre (Sébastien Delautre) of ITEC, Global Vice President of Corporate and Investment Banking at Societe Generale introduced the Impulse 2.0 project, which is a lever for IT transformation, and emphasized that if financial professionals want to compete with it , It is necessary to develop services equivalent to financial technology. Sebastien Delautre (Sébastien Delautre) recalled: “We have stopped comparing with banks, but with Internet giants, and decided to start a continuous delivery-based Transformation plan.” Among other witnesses, the insurance company Generali established GIS, a shared IT service center with 1,200 employees, which will become a supplier for the entire group (60 countries). During each conference, Servair and ELS (versions Lefebvre and Sarrut) also explained the implementation of ServiceNow. We will discuss these topics again in future editions.