The 2017 ServiceNow NowForum in New York is an event for innovative leaders and business owners seeking news and expert advice about transforming their companies through digital service management. Professionals from many different industries gathered to learn more about the innovative solutions ServiceNow presents and for best practices in service management. The major insights presented during the NowForum covered within this article include ITSM consolidation, ITBM connectivity, HR service automation, and Security improvement.
Consolidate and Connect IT Service Management
Companies face many IT challenges that can lead to slow, broken, or uneven services. From unsupported platforms to segmented data access, managing these services can present a host of problems for IT professionals. During the conference, Fannie Mae, a large financial services company, presented their experience using ServiceNow to transform ITSM. The company’s goal was to identify IT support needs and utilize their ServiceNow platform to solve them, which they accomplished in only a few short years. By using this automated, connected, and reliable platform, businesses can meet and deliver enterprise-wide solutions without being forced to adopt different software solutions and technologies.
Using ServiceNow, companies can:
- Manage on-premise hosting demands with better transparency
- Boost cloud-hosting capabilities through significant provision time reduction
- Improve API integrations, updates, and reduce errors and delays
- Provide fast, accurate, and expansive reporting tools.
The NowForum’s Consolidated ITSM Takeaway: It is absolutely necessary for companies to seek out and adopt reliable technology partners to create seamless transformations of their ITSM. Once a company has adopted a technology solution to improve service offerings, maintaining regular communication with customers and building proactive strategies is critical to success.
Business Management Insights and Best Practices
Business management refers to business priorities that align with IT services. IT Business Management (ITBD) can be improved through increased visibility, continual alignment with business priorities, and the velocity of management and development. During the NowForum’s “Run IT Like a Business” presentation, business owners were encouraged to think about their ITBM services as a connected and collaborative process.
The Three Aspects of ITBM:
- Visibility: managing budgets and performing service cost-analysis
- Alignment: balancing application portfolios to meet enterprise priorities, optimizing available resources, and tracking service demands
- Velocity: deployment and testing product or service automation
The NowForum’s ITBM takeaway: By connecting departments and processes, you can align every aspect of your company to meet business strategies. Through ServiceNow’s platform, every stage of business management is accomplished, from planning a business strategy all the way through managing updated. What does this mean for your business? By leveraging your ServiceNow investment, your business can utilize the entire platform to transform every enterprise need.
Transform HR Service Delivery with ServiceNow
As companies strive to meet consumer expectation goals, turning the focus inward keeps employees productive and lowers overall business costs. For many employees, finding HR information is hard. Knowledge is scattered, and delays are common; without having proper channels for employees to seek internal assistance, companies are ignoring their internal customer services. In 2016, the HR Trend Institute found that nearly 70% of HR time is spent on repetitive and routine tasks, like personnel changes and onboarding activities. During the NowForum, a presentation on “Consumerized Employee Service Experience” focused on best practices for eliminating common employee frustrations related to HR.
Top HR Service innovations to transform delivery:
- Self-service portals to give employees immediate access to HR information and processes to change personal information or manage leave
- Knowledge center for employees to find answers to questions, policy information, and more
- Automated onboarding processes to improve new employee experience
- Connected departments to improve request routing
The NowForum’s HR Service Delivery takeaway: Improving HR service boosts both HR staff’s productivity and employee satisfaction. By giving employees the tools to succeed through ServiceNow’s self-service portal and knowledge sharing platforms, and easily accessible information eliminates frustration. Adopting HR service solutions that automate routine tasks and improve workflows will ultimately lead to better business outcomes and improving overall operations.
Managing Security Risks Quickly with ServiceNow
Security is at the forefront of most business’ minds as more and more information is stored and shared digitally. During the NowForum, presentations on security focused on ways to improve, anticipate, and resolve security threats in real time and eliminate common problems. Security improvements begin with building an Enterprise security response program, creating trusted security circles, and manage risks to your business and vendors.
Ways to improve security and response through ServiceNow:
- Trusted security circles warn businesses about threats and risks, and allow for anonymous information sharing
- Vendor risk management iincreases visibility for your company and vendor
- Information connection and integration improves issue resolutions
- Built-in workflows help assign, prioritize, and resolve issues as they appear
The NowForum’s Security Improvement Takeaway: Finding security solutions for your company can be difficult. Enterprises have put a lot of effort and resources into products that claim to boost security risks. The problem is that disparate technologies do not often interact well and with security threats, this can have terrible consequences. The ServiceNow platform provides a cloud-based integration solution to solve this problem, improve visibility and threat assessment, and predict issues for better proactive responses.
The Bottom Line: ServiceNow is your Business Management Solution
You can transform every aspect of your enterprise by using ServiceNow’s integrated platform. During the NowForum, presentations on security, HR, and all areas of IT illustrated this point. Automation is the way of the future, and ServiceNow offers your business a clean and simple solution to combining your technology solutions into one integrated platform.