This is a package!With the summary of Knowledge 2020, ServiceNow is confident in its “workflow revolution” footsteps

Once the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in ServiceNow a few months ago, what was supposed to be a three-day face-to-face event in the United States quickly became a global, six-week, content-driven virtual event. Knowledge 2020 will end this week, and there are still more than 1,000 on-demand sessions available for online viewing-including everything from CEO keynotes to dozens of customer presentations and even cocktail party making courses.

However, the key theme of this year’s event (CEO Bill McDemortt has been keen on this theme) is that the company is currently undergoing a “workflow revolution” and (not surprisingly) ServiceNow is the best positioning for the seller to take advantage of this.

In an exclusive conversation with McDermott, he said that ServiceNow has benefited from the birth of cloud computing and has not made large-scale acquisitions, thus keeping the platform architecture and data model simple. This allows McDermott to position ServiceNow as a “platform platform,” where he claims it is “seamlessly integrated.” In other words, ServiceNow tells the market that it can be easily integrated into all systems of record that you claim not to bring. You really change and allow you to redesign processes for modern employees. McDermott tells us:

We are the main force of the workflow. Customers only need to rearrange the process to adapt to these modern workforces.

Since this is a revolution in workflow, you can design the process. Workers tell you how they want to use work and how to connect from one department to another. Consumers or customers tell you how they want their services, and you only need to provide them. This is a revolution.

For buyers, this will be tempting, because it is often difficult for them to connect various points in the enterprise, focusing on service-oriented, user-oriented and breaking organizational silos. These are usually the key points when we think about and talk about “digital change”, which is why ServiceNow has a compelling proposition.

Looking to the future

This is not to say that suppliers are not challenged. ServiceNow has a long history in the IT department, initially as a cloud-based ITSM tool before branching. ITSM has clear use cases and clearly defined and understood the product results.

What ServiceNow needs to do now is to bring similar results and product use cases (at least examples and educational processes around these use cases) to market. The company has done this in many ways, but I think we need to see more.

I hope that next year customers will come to the stage not to talk about air tickets and change requests, but to understand how the ServiceNow platform becomes the core of the corporate change story. How does it enable customers to break organizational barriers to provide better services to customers and/or employees. Give us examples of these services and show us how they work.

ServiceNow is moving in this direction. Especially this year, the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the solutions it brings to buyers has been particularly striking. For example, its “return to work” applications and tools (including employee health checks, workplace safety management, and employee readiness surveys) are very clearly defined. McDermott believes that the buyer’s response has been huge, with hundreds of customers choosing to use the ServiceNow platform to help employers prepare for the “future of work”. McDermott said:

We are running them on ServiceNow and can use them on a global scale. We have downloaded them from more than 200 of the largest companies in the world.

In terms of other challenges faced by ServiceNow, McDermott admitted that it needs to expand the supplier’s partner ecosystem. ServiceNow partner industry solutions (and the use case discussion above) made an announcement on Knowledge 2020. This is a new market that aims to showcase partner solutions aimed at solving specific industry workflow problems.

For example, Accenture will build telecommunications solutions. Atos’ goal is to manufacture through quality inspection tools. Deloitte will provide banks with customized complaint management solutions.

This is what is needed. Since ServiceNow and the platform can effectively mean anything to anyone, and different things to different companies (“workflow is workflow”), suppliers and their partners need to clearly provide opportunities for partners . McDermott said:

We must greatly expand the ecosystem… I do believe that the workflow revolution is still in its infancy and we must be missionaries to ensure its success. I believe that the days of investing in huge and complex recording systems will be greatly slowed down. I believe that workflow is a revolution that will close the gap and make great things happen to these customers. But we still have to convey information to them.

Customer storytelling

One of the best features of Knowledge 2020 is that ServiceNow is willing to highlight dozens of customer cases and provide them on demand. For us, there is too much​​to write it all down, so it’s worth checking it yourself.

The conferences we approached involved various use cases, including:

I take

Since McDermott took over as CEO last year, we have noticed ServiceNow’s focus. The news about process redesign and workflow revolution directly involves many key issues that companies face when considering their “change” strategies, especially in the COVID-19 era. There are many opportunities in front of ServiceNow-in the eyes of corporate buyers, the key to taking full advantage of this opportunity will be concentrated in the stories of those changes. To this end, it is necessary to clarify the possibility of using the ServiceNow platform in terms of solutions and the training process for buyers. Before Knowledge 2021, this is just a summary…