With the new “Rome”, ServiceNow emphasizes the 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 change is Now’s emphasis on workflow. “At the core [do agora], There is a workflow automation engine that can be used for any business process,” said Stephen Elliot, vice president of IDC Infrastructure and Operations Group.

Therefore, Elliot and other industry analysts believe that ServiceNow will extend beyond its ITSM roots to the entire company. “There are more and more opportunities to consider ServiceNow in multiple business areas-mainly human resources, employee workflow, customer support or service, and broader application development roles,” Elliott said.

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

For many companies, employee workflows find their home in a web portal, which is usually a mix of pages encapsulating multiple applications. ServiceNow’s answer to this is Employee Center, which aims to integrate all the applications built on its platform into one interface so that employees can access HR, IT, facilities or procurement services in one place.

The options provided in the Employee Center can be based on roles, based on profile information maintained in ServiceNow or Active Directory, or on “trend” roles based on requests or other employee requests. There is also a search function that can use natural language understanding to find relevant information or processes.

Another function, employee journey management, provides processes for onboarding, leaving and other work transitions. Human resources teams can customize these processes using code-free tools.

“It’s time for ServiceNow to focus on employee workflows,” IDC’s Elliot said. “For CIOs, they should consider how their current investment in ServiceNow can provide value to all business functions, thereby complementing their existing ServiceNow-specific IT investments.”

CIO assesses Rome

The city of Santa Monica, California, prejudged the capabilities of New Rome. Joseph Cevetello, who has served as the city’s CIO for five years, 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 coincided with the emergence of Cevetello: the IT department is now in charge of the city’s website, which was not managed by another department until recently.

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

He is impatient with some of the other features planned for future releases, including the ability to edit complex PDF forms from mobile applications. The city has established a human resources integration 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 important to eliminate friction between new employees or existing employees returning to the office.

“The message is very simple:’If you want to return to the office, please go to ServiceNow. This is where you are screened, where you register, where you can find work, and where any service requests are made,” Mansfield said .

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

The Mansfield 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 focusing on Rome’s new automated discovery tool, which can monitor existing processes and recommend opportunities for the company to automate work with other ServiceNow applications such as Virtual Agent, Auto Routing, and Agent Assist.

“We are very happy to see them launch this product. They have the right architecture,” he said.

CIOs or business managers must still evaluate these automation proposals themselves, weighing the costs and benefits of other opportunities.

Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s Director of Innovation, said of the discovery tool: “It highlights the areas where it can be deployed, but it’s not possible to estimate the cost of the development work. In many cases, this work is not really development. Work, it’s often the job of a subject matter expert to compile someone’s knowledge or let them tell you what an agent’s conversation should look like.”