ServiceNow – What makes it a vehicle for Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the new buzzword. Are the enterprises not already digitized? From my point of view, enterprises have already gone through three digitization phases:

1. During the 1980s, with the automation of accounts, payroll, and finance.
2. In the 1990s, with the automation of supply chain, manufacturing, HR, marketing, sales, and service functions using the ERP and CRM systems.
3. In the early 2000s, with the advent of eCommerce, Collaboration, and Content management systems.

We are now in the fourth phase of digitization. The industry gave the name "Digital Transformation" to the fourth phase. Why this new phase? The reason is that enterprises still deal with paper invoices, spreadsheets, and manual data entry. The employees log into 2 or 3 digital systems to handle multi-step business use cases like employee onboarding, employee's international transfer, goods return, parts failures. Many business workflows span multiple software applications and require human intervention to continue moving forward and get completed. Many software systems still do not digitally talk to each other. Therefore, if a work activity needs two such applications, it needs a human being to make the hop. In some cases, the workflow stops as it needs human thinking and intervention before moving forward.

During the past ten years, technology has advanced. The goods or things can now deliver digital output using IoT. We have computers making intelligent decisions using ML. Users have adopted intelligent Chatbots-based interfaces. Integration between applications has become simpler using REST services.

The question is how an enterprise can leverage this technology advancement. The answer is that we need a vehicle to enable digitization. And ServiceNow is one such compelling vehicle. ServiceNow has an advanced workflow engine to implement a complex workflow that spans over multiple systems. ServiceNow offers simple application integration mechanisms to integrate systems easily. The digital signal sent by IoT sensors can initiate ServiceNow workflows. ServiceNow has built-in ML algorithms. Organizations can leverage these algorithms to replace human thinking that stops the workflows. ServiceNow offers easy to configure intelligent chatbots. The chatbots can serve 50% of user needs.

To use ServiceNow as a digital transformation vehicle, you do not need to replace the existing application(s). You place ServiceNow in front of these applications. ServiceNow coexists with existing systems. ServiceNow implements the workflow accessing existing systems leveraging the new age IoT, ML, Chatbots, integration technologies. ServiceNow orchestrating intelligent workflows is the fastest, easiest, and most economical way to achieve Digital Transformation.

Rakesh Goel, #ServiceData, www.servicedata.com