ServiceNow is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), offering a selection of digital workflows for IT, Project Management Office, HR, finance and more. The platform was developed by an American company ServiceNow in 2004. Throughout years, the core and essence of the technology has remained the same, but the functionality and solutions on offer have expanded and improved.
This article will give you a snapshot of what things look like in Q2, 2019.
ServiceNow value proposition
With the vision “We make the world of work, work better for people”, ServiceNow digitizes manual workflows. Thus you’re able to unlock the real productivity and cover for the main areas of the general business landscape.
ServiceNow Platform is a scalable cloud that offers a range of applications, workflows and processes. Sharing common architecture and data, the platform incorporates a variety of ready-made suites catering for specific business areas:
- IT Service Management (ITSM)
- HR Service Delivery (HRSD)
- IT Operations Management (ITOM)
- Customer Service Management (CSM)
- IT Business Management (ITBM)
- And build their own, custom applications to support business needs.
The foundation – ServiceNow ITSM
ITSM has been the staple of the ServiceNow Platform from the very beginning. The company’s been driving ITSM sphere, taking the lead position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the past 5 years! (Get the full Gartner’s report here). In 2018 ServiceNow was marked as High-Productivity Application Platform as a service, which cemented the company’s success as a platform provider.
The company founder – Fred Luddy, initially started with a much broader vision:
As a natural effect, ServiceNow expands the platform functionality by the next business areas, outside of IT.
ServiceNow journey & features
Customers can start their ServiceNow journey from many points. Regardless of where they first start, they have the ability to follow a flexible road-map to bring continued success within the organization. Using ServiceNow, an organization can:
- Implement,
- Extend,
- Expand.
This approach allows organizations to make the most and best value from the investment they have made implementing ServiceNow.
Let’s review a selection of the main areas available in the recent releases.
Service Portal
An organization can provide services and applications to users via a sleek, modern, and intuitive self-service experience. The technology used in the Service Portal is meant to resemble the look and feel similar to the platforms users, people, engage with outside of work.
Native Mobile Apps
Using ServiceNow means organizations are able to build native mobile apps, allowing users to consume products and services on any device. By taking advantage of Maps, Calendars, Lists, Forms, the applications provide a fantastic user experience. Offline mode enables users to even carry on working whenever they’re offline.
Flow Designer
Create workflows, simply with natural language. The flow designer is ideal for process analysts and less technical members of an organization to effectively produce useful workflows to drive processes. Technical members of the team can also develop reusable elements to be leveraged by colleagues in other departments.
Integration Hub
This integration solution offers a way for people to connect with other systems at certain steps of a process. As with the flow designer, certain elements can be easily leveraged by non-technical resources, while coding wizards are able to set up a complete range of integration possibilities.
Performance Analytics
Take control of service delivery by gaining full visibility into the measures and metrics of the processes that drive them. Performance Analytics is perfect for looking to prioritize resources, improve resolution times, and deliver even better self-service by discovering automation opportunities.
Agent Intelligence
Support agent delivery services with supervised machine learning. Using Agent Intelligence you can efficiently assign and prioritize tickets and tasks with learnings taken directly from your own data.
Virtual Agent
Take chat from conversation to resolution. Virtual Agent includes an automated conversational Agent to respond to users’ questions in real-time. Virtual Agent works as standard with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and both Android and iOS operating systems.
The Virtual Agent incorporates a simple but powerful no-code drag and drop designer, great for building quick conversation examples. There are also many pre-built conversations for ITSM, CSM & HRSD.
Time to Value a key focus of ServiceNow
As alluded to a couple of times already, the ServiceNow Platform is configured to maximize the time to value for Businesses. The approach of No Code / Low Code / Pro Code, which allows a full range of people to deliver solutions on the platform means businesses are able to roll-out applications and solutions quickly to align to changing needs. The longer-term strategic growth plans can be managed with more complex solutions prepared with the assistance of professional ServiceNow partners.
Bringing all these items together helps us understand the economic impact of ServiceNow use. In 2017 the neutral advisory firm, Forrester, produced a report showing the ‘Total Economic Impact’ of the platform. The figures included (see the full report here):
- 195%
ROI for new customers, with a payback period of only 9 months, - 30%
Increase in dev resources via low code tools, - 290%
Accelerated development efforts, - 57%
Increase in employee productivity.
