Analyst Perspectives

The role of the chief information officer has evolved from managing IT to maximizing technology for business value. Many organizations launch digital transformation programs to identify and deliver the desired value but discover that digital transformation is a complex, lengthy process. Budgets and resources can be quickly exhausted with little to show for the investment. Yet business objectives remain.

The reality of staying within budget while achieving business objectives has led to a focus on digital modernization programs that seek business value from existing systems and resources. Technology remains a critical element to drive business change and accelerate innovation. But with efficiencies, teams can use current tools to address key performance indicators and create new channels to improve the customer experience.

Organizations are exploring different forms of automation to improve operational productivity. Workflow automation can increase process and workforce efficiency, decrease operational expenses, reduce data entry errors to improve the accuracy of work and enhance decision-making through consistent, data-driven execution. There are several workflow automation technologies available that deliver these efficiencies.

ServiceNow develops customer support and internal IT service management systems. It earned a Vendor of Merit rating in the Ventana Research Customer Experience Value Index, received the overall Digital Innovation Award in 2020 and earned the 2022 Digital Innovation Award for Digital Business for its strategic portfolio management offering. The company maximized those applications as a jumping-off point to build workflow platforms for IT, worker and customer processes. More recently, ServiceNow has found success with workflow automation. Its mission is to digitize and automate siloed processes within an organization and create optimal experiences for the workforce.

With the Now Platform, workers access purpose-built tools to increase team productivity. The platform offers no-code automation, chatbots for self-service issue resolution and artificial intelligence-enabled search for the workforce and customers. Analytics generate insights from data patterns and predict resource availability, utilization and allocation.

Automating repetitive, low-value tasks enables the workforce to dedicate more time to strategic, creative and subjective activities that contribute to innovation and growth. The platform provides a centralized employee portal for service delivery and managing service-level commitments with providers and customers. It also allows for automating the discovery of workflows and processes.

Lack of uniformity limits the ability to develop consistent processes across a variety of systems and tools with a common experience for creation or use. Vendors like ServiceNow enable a unified process for workflow automation to remove the burden of building separate workflows and processes for all of the organization’s systems. Ventana Research asserts that by 2025, the need to manage repetitive activities in two-thirds of organizations will drive workload automation to advance efficiency through robotic technologies.

Workflow automation adoption is taking hold in the line of business (LOB) with customer and employee workflows. Repetitive and time-consuming workflows are ideal candidates for automation. Through automation, organizations free up the workforce to focus on more creative, complex and subjective tasks that require human intervention. Automation is expected to expand beyond the LOB and include workflows for the supply chain and procurement in addition to accounting functions. This will help organizations streamline operations and reduce costs by automating repetitive tasks and eliminating manual errors.

Organizations are seeking ways to optimize productivity while working within existing budgets and limited resources. This requires levels of automation not previously seen. The CIO’s use of intelligent automation is necessary to unlock the full potential of technology for workforce benefits and aid in creating business value. Digital modernization of the organization requires rethinking how we work and make mission-critical decisions. AI technologies play a significant role in enhanced efficiency from advanced automation.

ServiceNow has expanded its addressable market beyond LOB to include accounting, procurement and supply chain processes. Incorporating best practices from disparate automation technologies – from robotic process automation (RPA) to application programming interfaces (APIs) to microservices and connectors – within a single pane of glass for development and workforce utilization enhances ServiceNow’s positioning to compete in the next generation of intelligent automation platforms. I recommend that any organization considering the unification of processes across systems include ServiceNow in the evaluation.

Regards,

Jeff Orr