Week 2 highlights from Knowledge 2020

Week 2 at Knowledge 2020 covered a lot of ground—from Marcus Torres’ CreatorCon keynote to eye-opening sessions from customers, including Chevron (with an ITSM turnaround tale) and Under Armour (with a PPM success story).

Here are just a handful of the week’s highlights. Be sure to register or sign in to get access to everything below.
 

Walmart’s makeover with ServiceNow performance analytics
Lisa Baremore, service product owner at Walmart, walked the Knowledge 2020 audience through a major IT turnaround at the retail giant. In November 2018, Baremore took over what she described as a “free-for-all” IT environment with 17,000 admin user accounts, more than 5,000 incidents per month, and overlapping analytics reports that dragged down user performance. Performance analytics, she said, were nearly impossible to manage under the circumstances.

Enter ServiceNow. At first, Baremore recalled, Walmart employees considered the Now platform “just another IT ticketing tool.” Baremore had to work hard to win their trust and show them what the Now Platform could do. Baremore started building a user library of go-to knowledge articles, holding platform-analytics training sessions, and building new teams and assigning roles.

Less than two years later, the IT system that produced over 5,000 tickets per month in 2018 now produces—zero. The group of 17,000 admins has been whittled down to 114. Analytics itself has been the biggest winner: When Baremore started, the system produced just 300 IT governance reports, many of which overlapped and caused production glitches. Today, the system has over 2,300 reports—and none of them drag down user performance.

Watch the full session: Performance Analytics and reporting at the scale of Walmart

Knocking down your technical debt
Technical debt is a problem that can handicap any large IT enterprise. Patrick Dietzel, configuration manager at Huntington National Bank, explained how the bank reduced its future tech debt risk by up to 90% using  ServiceNow.

Three types of technical debt must be managed carefully, Dietzel explained: security risk, financial risk, and vendor risk. Vendor risk, for example, arises when groups of assets like servers run out of contracted technical support. If they break down after those expiration dates, costs can skyrocket—raising risk levels for managers.

Two main challenges have to be solved with technical debt, said Dietzel: First, how do you accurately identify your technical debt. Second, how do you share data once you have identified it, so you can take action to mitigate risk?

Dietzel explained how Huntington National Bank used real-time data visualizations in ServiceNow to manage “asset refresh,” dramatically reducing tech debt risk. The bank  also used CMDB data to confirm budget line items, all while reclaiming five days of manual reporting time per month.

Watch the full session: Tackling the terror of tech debt
 

‘Operations Inc.’ yields big results at Swiss Re
Five years ago, Swiss Re launched an initiative called “Operations Inc.” Its aim was to “run group operations as a whole, like a business,” said Mark Hull, Swiss Re vice president of product management, who shared the company’s decade-long success journey with ServiceNow.

Back in 2009,  Swiss Re started using ServiceNow as an IT ticketing solution. As Hull explained, that was just the beginning. “Ten years has passed,” said Hull. “We’re still using ServiceNow in IT, but also expansively in other divisions,” Those include enterprise service management, task fulfillment, procurement, and other functions.

ServiceNow helps Swiss Re budget planners, Hull explained, by streamlining new digital workflows that allow them to manage procurement orders that pass through multiple software applications, from purchase orders to vendor payments.  “Although we had these cool systems in place,” Hull said, planners “had to go to three places to do the same work. What a waste of time.”

With challenges like that solved, ServiceNow now helps Swiss Re manage a $1 billion-plus operations budget across IT, finance, sourcing, legal, HR, and more.

Watch the session: Swiss Re: Trailblazing cross-enterprise digital workflows with IntegrationHub

Register today for hundreds of free sessions at Knowledge 2020