Published on the 10/11/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

When it’s all about the experience, office applications aren’t good enough…

Finance, HR, customer service, facilities management, operations, legal, IT. What do these diverse activities have in common? Not much on the face of it. But they all require the delivery of some sort of service – and that means they can all benefit from service management.

And in providing service management which goes well beyond helping the IT department work more efficiently, ServiceNow has a pretty ambitious vision. It wants to change the way people work. It reckons spreadsheets, email and word processors have become obstacles, rather than enablers, victims of their own success and limitless flexibility which has seen massive proliferation.

Opening up ServiceNow’s NowForum in Melbourne this morning, the company’s MD David Oakley said there is a ‘service revolution’ underway and companies down under are getting into it, fast. “Australia has seen fastest adoption of ServiceNow in any mature market…in a push to better service customers and citizens,” he said.

Oakley said the reason for that is simple: “There is a big gap between service experience expectations and what is being provided.”

In an informal en passant chat, ServiceNow principal solutions consultant Peter Doherty said the first user group held by the company some four years ago attracted just 30 people. Around 1500 showed up for this event, demonstrating the growth Oakley highlighted.

Indeed, said Oakley, over 100 companies have come on board down under in a year – and notably, more than half of those are not using service management for its traditional role, IT, but instead in other areas of the business. The principles of IT service management, plainly, benefits many other areas of a business. Any area, in fact, where services are delivered, where things can break and require a fix, or where things need to be installed, moved, added to or changed.

In his keynote, Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, ServiceNow, said the world of service is changing, with ‘experience’ front and centre where ‘everything has become about feel and ease of use, with home gadgets with wonderful user experiences, car interiors and what they feel like. The focus is on how to get more immersed and deliver more satisfaction for customers.’

He said companies need to manage work across the enterprise and automate where possible. That’s precisely what ITSM has done for the tech department, but it can expand way beyond. “Most of the conversations I have today [with customers] are not IT related. People want to talk about how automate in their department, with the benefits that ITSM has given IT. They want to take existing service models and apply them across the enterprise.”

Wright put down that transversal applicability to the fact that IT has moved from its siloed beginnings to being a discipline which applies and enables across any business. “The commonality of IT means people can use those processes; IT knows how to manage service, after all, you’ve been whipped for 25 years to do just that, in complex environments with rapid changes thanks to technological evolution. Take that and give to other parts of a company, and you get a new way for how to engage at an enterprise level.”

OK, but how about that changing the way we work? What is the problem, exactly, with spreadsheets and email programmes? Wright pointed out that there is a big gap between what happens at work and what happens at home (‘it’s 1996 at work and 2016 at home’). ServiceNow’s research, he said, showed that outside work, 64 percent of service requests are mobile and automated. At work, try 26 percent.

“People don’t like change, so we tend to invent technology to do the same thing better. There was resistance moving from a typewriter to computer, so we see a lot of the same concepts, just digitized. We have inboxes and outboxes, filing cabinets, overhead projectors which have become PowerPoint, flip charts and even a trashcan. It’s a modern version of the same thing.”

And in the modern version of the same thing, we tend to get bogged down, searching for information, forgetting things and wasting time; ServiceNow reckons the average worker spends 14 hours a week on such non-productive ‘admin’

Changing the way you work, suggested Wright, starts with ‘reversing the flow of information’ to make that which is relevant to you come looking for you, instead of the other way round (by setting up alerts that arrive on any device). He said collaboration needs a look, where context and availability of information on issues and progress is available immediately. And he said reporting has to move from a view on the past to an anticipation of the future. “We need to break the email, forms and spreadsheet habits. You want information to find you. You want your work life to become more life-like.”

Donovan Jackson travelled to Melbourne as a guest of ServiceNow.