Knowledge 2020: Digital Transformation in the New World

For the past few weeks our team has been attending ServiceNow's annual conference, Knowledge 2020. As with many conferences this year, ServiceNow took their event digital, allowing us the opportunity to tune in live from home or watch on demand post-event. With many great sessions to choose from, here are some of the highlights.

The smarter way toworkflow

Bill McDermott, CEO, delivered an inspiring keynote abouttransforming in the new world. While presenting on ServiceNow's response toCOVID-19 he noted that digital transformation is no longer a nice to have andthat companies who are more digitally transformed have a competitive advantageover those who are not in this challenging market. The pandemic has forced manyorganizations to increase their pace to transformation significantly, which iswhy digital transformation is such a timely topic.

In addition to the importance and growth of digitaltransformation that the market is experiencing right now, ServiceNow also aimsto offer great customer and employee experiences. They do so by offeringmobile, smart experiences through investments in AI and machine learning andfrictionless communication between company and employee, which is especiallyimportant with the increase in remote workers. These experiences are all thanksto IT superheroes and complex workflows.

So what is the next normal going to look like, according to ServiceNow? Bill McDermott believes that choice will be the next step in work from home. With this, there will be a mix of remote workers and in-office workers, making a workplace revamp necessary in addition to technology. For this reason, ServiceNow is introducing their Safe Workplace apps, which consists of 4 apps that can be accessed on the Now platform through a single dashboard:

1. Employee readiness surveys
2. Employee health screening
3. Workplace PPE inventory management
4. Workplace safety management

With the return to work weighing heavy on many organizations and their c-suites, ServiceNow also offers guidance on some of the tough return to work decisions with their workflows and trust and sentiment reports on their safe workplace dashboard. They also have tools that can help make decisions based on some key considerations such as a safe and supportive experience for employees, helping them prepare for the return, understanding employee readiness with their virtual assistant and utilizing augmented reality for common tasks like booking meeting space. ServiceNow is constantly innovating for their customers by focusing on operational resiliency, smart experiences and spend optimization.

Building a digitalculture

According to ServiceNow, the first place to start in thejourney to a digital transformation is your employees. During the building adigital culture session, ServiceNow outlined that most failures are due tolack of employee buy in, and that the key to a digital transformation successis cultural transformation. They introduced their cultural transformationplaybook, which outlines some tactics you can apply within your organization toensure success:

1. Develop a culture of change
2. Collaborate across all levels of your organization
3. Clarify your expectations
4. Show the benefits
5. Train your employees
6. Focus on the mission

By taking these steps to ensure your employees are on board thelikelihood of your transformation success increases significantly.

Delivering your employeesthe right digital experiences anywhere

In addition to building a digital culture, it is now moreimportant than ever to deliver your employees with the right digitalexperiences anytime and from any device. During this session ServiceNow introducedtheir employee service delivery platform which provides a sole location foremployees to get all their questions asked, from any interface they choose. Forexample, employee service delivery can assist with anything from onboardingquestions, broken laptops, to payroll or benefits season questions.

One of the main benefits of ServiceNow's employee servicedelivery is that they offer integration with your back-end systems, providing aunified experience for employees, and digital workflows across all departmentswithin an organization. Some other features are self-service, their virtualagent, AI-based search and targeted campaigns, all on one platform.

In addition to digital experiences, ServiceNow employeeworkflows offer organizations business continuity during uncertain times, whichis crucial for almost every business today.

Knowledge 2020 has had many great sessions over the last few weeks, and although the conference will be coming to an end after this week, you will still be able to review some of the sessions in their video library. If you are interested in learning more about the technologies discussed during the conference, or are looking to get started with your digital transformation, learn more here.