ServiceNow Aims to Improve Employee Experiences

ServiceNow has updated its Now platform to include an Employee Center that is described as a digital command center that promises to make it simpler for employees to navigate processes and tasks from anywhere. The Rome update to the Now Platform also includes Employee Journey Management tools designed to guide employees through tasks such as onboarding and offboarding from an organization.

The goal is to make it simpler for organizations to standardize processes that have been dramatically altered since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, says Dave Wright, chief innovation officer for ServiceNow. As those processes have evolved in the wake of the pandemic it’s been challenging for organizations to make sure everyone in the organization knows how they work. “There’s a lot of new tribal knowledge that not everybody knows,” he notes.

Improving Employee Experience

Streamlining organizational processes has become a higher priority at a time when many employees are realizing they can not only work from anywhere, but also for anybody. Approximately 3.6 million Americans quit their jobs in May 2021 alone, a monthly rate that has been increasing sharply since the beginning of the year. A major factor in employee retention alongside compensation is, of course, the everyday work experience.

ServiceNow as part of that effort is also adding an Automation Discovery capability to identify the top ten opportunities for automating work across more than 180 topics using ServiceNow applications. In addition, the company has made available Customer Service Playbooks that guide organizations through how to optimize those processes.

ServiceNow is also adding Mobile App Builder, a set of tools that allow developers to rapidly build and configure mobile applications for iOS and Android devices via a single interface.

Finally, enhancements to the Health Log Analytics capability provided by ServiceNow employ machine learning algorithms to predict IT issues. Those enhancements leverage the artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) technologies that ServiceNow gained with its acquisition of Loom Systems earlier this year.

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Building IT Management on SaaS

At the core of the ServiceNow strategy is an effort to enable organizations to use a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to manage both IT operations and workflows involving everyone from human resources to sales and marketing. The goal is to reduce the total cost of implementing a wide range of processes using a platform that many IT teams already employ to manage operations, as opposed to having separate platforms for each type of workflow process.

It’s not clear to what degree organizations are embracing that philosophy but ServiceNow expects that as digital business transformation becomes the dominant business issue of the decade more organizations will look to standardize on a single platform that makes it easier to integrate processes at a lower total cost.

The challenge is that many departments within organizations tend to make their own IT platform decisions. Over time, however, each of those platforms needs to be integrated, which is a task often left to IT departments to thanklessly figure out in a way that is usually more expensive than most everyone involved appreciates.

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