3 Key Takeaways from the 2020 ServiceNow NowBox Event

By Lewis Martin – lewis.martin@ka2.io

 

Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending NowBox, which focuses on the ServiceNow platform for customers and business in Scotland. The event took place in Edinburgh and brought together ServiceNow customers and partners from across Scotland and northern England to discuss key areas that the platform covers. Martin McKenna did a wonderful job organising the event, which was at capacity and offered a full day of engaging and educational ideas and conversations.  

Throughout the day, speakers covered an array of topics, including ITSM, DevOps, Operational Resilience, ITOM and service portals. It is the first real event that has gone beyond the realm of the ITSM stack and highlighted the importance of an integrated, automated, and aligned approach.  

I left the event inspired, informed, and connected. There was a ton of great content and conversations throughout the day, but my key takeaways from the event were as follows: 

1) Driving integration and automation

A common theme across the presentations by VirginMoney, Thames Water, Lloyds Banking Group and Standard Life was the importance of integrating processes, implementing automation and aligning technologies to leverage full value from the ServiceNow platform. While many organisations continue to implement processes and technologies in isolation due to various constraints – budgetary, resourcing and conflicting project demands – taking a holistic and joined-up approach to adoption provides a pathway towards continuous improvement and greater benefits.  

At KA2, we know that it is not just about aligning the processes and technology, but also ensuring that the requirements of security, risk and control are managed within that automation lifecycle. The ServiceNow GRC application is a great starting point for this type of integration activity and has provided KA2 clients a range of tangible benefits in managing these essential elements when we have implemented the application as part of their enhanced platform capability.    

KA2’s Smarter Framework supports organisations to build a future state model allowing processes and technologies to be integrated in a strategic rather than random manner and drive adoption of automation and orchestration.  The key KA2 principle is to establish a clear line of sight of the required transformation outcomes from the outset to ensure that the pathway to the future state can be identified, measured and managed. 

2) Cultural Transformation

Another recurrent topic at the event was how businesses can improve service delivery and value by considering cultural transformation and adoption. It was clear that today’s IT leaders need to radically rethink how they integrate people, processes and technologies to fundamentally change the way services are delivered.  

Reshaping the collective mindset is key to ensuring successful adoption. It’s also a subject that we will be exploring in detail at KA2’s upcoming Smarter Forum: Enterprise Service Management – Technology Meets Culture in March at the iconic Lloyds of London building, where we’ll discuss at our round table event how IT leaders can deliver a modern, customer-driven experience.  

3) Seamless Service = Customer Centric

In the afternoon session Johann Diaz, Executive Advisor to ServiceNow CXOs presented some interesting points about the importance of getting the customer experience right.  He spoke about delivering seamless end-to-end customer service, whether internal or external. However, to do so, teams and organisations need to move away from siloed operating models and collaborate with key stakeholders across the business.  

Overall, the day was full of engaging discussion, interesting perspectives, and valuable takeaways. I enjoyed the opportunity to hear from the event speakers and was impressed by some of the other vendor use case presentations, which demonstrated a real step change in the development of automation tools to further enhance the already capability rich ServiceNow platform.  It was particularly great to listen to David Loo who was ServiceNow’s #1 employee and how he has used his experiences and learnings from being a founder member of the start-up to build his own successful business, Perspectium.   

Most notably though, I was pleased to see a lot of discussion around the importance of taking an integrated and aligned approach. KA2 knows that it is key to transformation and end user experience to break free from siloed thinking and organisational constructs. Our clients have benefited from this approach when we have delivered their ServiceNow projects ranging from new or re-implementations of the platform to enhanced capability centered on CMDB, ITOM, GRC and Sec Ops, in addition to the ITSM stack.  

If you are interested to learn how our Smarter Framework has helped drive enhanced user experience and ESM project success for our customers, and how this can add real benefit to your planned or existing ServiceNow project, contact me at lewis.martin@ka2.io.