With the release of the Rome platform focusing on mixed work support, ServiceNow expands Microsoft’s partnership

Workflow cloud provider ServiceNow today announced its latest version of the Now platform-Rome-designed to help customers transition to a permanent hybrid working model in the vaccine economy.

As employees shuttle between remote and office locations for a long time, employee service and system stability have become the company’s top priority. These two are obviously the priorities in the latest Now platform version.

With this in mind, ServiceNow stated that Rome’s goal is to focus on “important moments” and use artificial intelligence and personalization to combine cross-functional services into a new “employee center” to provide services to employees. There is also a new AIOps function to support system stability.

The supplier also announced today that it will expand its partnership with Microsoft and integrate Microsoft Teams into the employee center, with the goal of allowing users to complete their work in one place.

Let’s take a look at the main announcements included in the Roman version, which include:

• Employee center -A new “digital command center/for mixed workforce”. ServiceNow said that this is a single connection interface, and employees can quickly and easily find personalized information, complete tasks, get help and request services across departments (including IT, human resources, facilities, procurement, and legal) in one place. The goal is to reduce the time required for employees to seek help and reduce “application fatigue” by integrating the necessary information into one place. Organizations will be able to organize information and services into “dynamic and personalized themed pages” so that employees can easily find the answers they need.

• Employee journey management -ServiceNow said that this will guide employees through the “important moments” of the cross-department journey, such as onboarding, job transitions and leaving. It also claims to enable HR teams and managers to personalize resources, plans, and needs in one place.

• Automated discovery -Identify ten opportunities for automated work from more than 180 topics through ServiceNow applications (such as virtual agents, automatic routing, and agent assistance).

• Health log analysis enhancements -Aims to help detect problems and automatically solve them by using ITOM Predictive AIOps before they occur and affect users. This extends the ServiceNow ITOM Predictive AIOps-previously launched with the Now Platform Quebec version-and builds on the recently acquired Loom Systems technology.

• Mobile app builder -Developers will be allowed to use a single interface, enhanced features, and guided experience to build and configure mobile applications for iOS and Android.

We had the opportunity to talk to Nerys Mutlow, the evangelist in the Chief Innovation Office of ServiceNow, where she talked about the role of the employee center in the company’s long-term adaptation to these mixed work models. she says:

We obviously have HR portals, ITportals, and we also have employee service centers before, but this is about creating a unified front-end. Whether it is IT, HR, facilities or law, you have a single management platform.

I think the important part around this is that it is not a static Intranet type thing, but provides personalized and contextual content so that you can do your work better.

To use things like machine learning, which we use as the standard on the platform, focus not only on that person, but also on the content of interest to other people with the same role. Provide active content.

As mentioned above, ServiceNow also expanded its partnership with Microsoft this week, part of which includes integrating Teams into the employee center. Mutello added:

In the past 18 months, we have seen many customers use Microsoft as a digital workplace, where they spend a lot of day. So how can we really meet where people are? We want to provide them with the same experience they get when they enter the service employee center through a browser, but bring it into Teams. Therefore, we ensure that this feature is also accessible in Teams so that you can make a choice without having to leave.

The cooperation with Microsoft will also enable the two companies to carry out dual investments, innovative projects and go-to-market efforts to more closely integrate ServiceNow workflows and teams.

My point of view

As we all know, cloud providers update their platforms regularly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ServiceNow has become very attractive to buyers because companies have redoubled their efforts to repair processes and improve “work processes” through their companies, which are now often highly fragmented. We look forward to discussing with some customers how to use the new employee center in practice. Considering that it can reduce any friction between where and how employees complete their work, the integration with Teams makes sense. Although it will be interesting to see if ServiceNow expands these efforts from the Microsoft ecosystem to other collaboration vendors.