Summary

ServiceNow held its first Knowledge event in EMEA where it sold out to nearly 2,000 customers. The event enabled ServiceNow to update its wider customer base, and the assembled analysts and press on recent company strategy updates in person for the first time in two years. ServiceNow is known for its ITSM platform and its ability to automate the workflows in the service desk. However, it has matured rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now a platform for digital business.

ServiceNow has more offerings beyond its core IT audience

ServiceNow was expanding beyond its core IT customer based before the pandemic, but the events of the past two-years saw its relevance and adoption become more needed by the wider business customer. One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic was to demonstrate to CEOs, that technology was a key driver of business, particularly as the organizations needed to become digital businesses rapidly. ServiceNow announced its San Diego release that was GA in Q1 2022. In this release it included a number of key enhancements that will help organizations on their transformation journey to become digital businesses.  What was particularly relevant was the expansion of market vertical solutions, improvements in employee experience particularly with its simple to use low-code/no-code capabilities and making the CMDB more relevant to a cloud and as-a-service world.

The key industry capabilities widened the potential customer base and addressable market for ServiceNow. In financial services banking, San Diego offer two key new capabilities connected to delivering synchronization of customer account activity such as deposit operations and client lifecycle. ServiceNow has also expanded its financial services reach by providing capabilities specifically for the insurance sector, with capabilities such as complaint management that can identify root cause of any customer complaints and avoid the negative impact of reputation damage. However, it is the insurance data model that is an industry specific extension of the core platform data model that is the key feature of San Diego for the insurance vertical. Another industry vertical that gets specific enhancements in San Diego is the telecommunications sector. The inclusion of an order management for telecommunications module that enables complex orders to be captured through a single user interface. Automated workflows for quantity-based order decomposition and staggered order decomposition eliminate repetitive tasks involved in dealing with orders in this way. The final industry enhancement of note is manufacturing where operational technology management allows customers to manage operational technology (OT) vulnerabilities and risks in a single view. Omdia considers the Operational Technology Management (OTM) capability as significant, because the convergence of OT and IT in manufacturing is a slow transformation that will take many years. This OTM capability provides the OT teams with a solution to handle incident resolution using built-in machine learning and contextual help designed to reduce any bottlenecks. The second-order benefit of this is to bring the IT and OT processes closer aligned so as to help with the transformation of the manufacturing sectors use of technology. In another announcement of the widening of its market ServiceNow announce a public sector digital foundation that will enable it to deliver consumer‑grade experiences from request to resolution.

Citizen developers are the innovation engine of the organization

ServiceNow believes that within the next few years it will witness more than 750 million citizen developed applications on its platform. These citizen developers are the frontline employees that according to Nonaka and Takeuchi  are the fulcrum of where innovation can be found in companies. The ability to put tools in the hands of these employees is critical to generating the innovation culture. However, while this has been talked about for many years it has taken until now when the technology has evolved to the point that front-line employees can impact the ‘what and how’ they conduct business. The low-code/no-code development platforms, such as ServiceNow, are offering employees the ability to put into action ideas they have for process improvement, or redesign. ServiceNow has redesigned its UI and included additional automation, RPA and governance capabilities so that these citizen developers can build more comprehensive solutions as being a platform all the difficult data integration aspects have been resolved.