Culture
Overall conference + week 6 highlights from Knowledge 2020
The first five weeks of Knowledge 2020 covered a succession of core themes—Accelerate, Build, Succeed, Connect, and Dream. The theme of the sixth and final week of this epic virtual experience is an appropriate one: Act. As in, put all this Knowledge know-how to work with our employees, our customers, and in our jobs.
Week 6 covered this ground in style. Kim Felix, president of enterprise technologies at UPS, showed how the global logistics giant pulled off a massive IT consolidation effort using ITOM, ITSM and the Now Platform. We also heard from another Fortune 100 company, Lowe’s, on how the retailer partnered with ServiceNow to implement a mobile solution for hundreds of Lowes’ IT field technicians.
ServiceNow has “acted” in big ways as well, notably in our own use of the Now Platform. . “We all use the same ServiceNow products that you do,” said our CIO Chris Bedi, “so it’s important to share all of the lessons learned. How did we derive value? What was a transformation like? What were the kinks we had to work out of our software?”
How does the Now Platform work for ServiceNow’s own employees? As Bedi explained, it more than lives up to its promise. Continual measurement, he said, reveals that $9 million invested in internal Now implementations yields a $100 million return in value.
As week 6 and all of Knowledge 2020 come to a close, it’s worth taking a look-back at some of the highlights.
Week 1: Pandemic heroics
In Pablo Stern’s IT Workflows keynote, our SVP of IT workflow products showed how the right digital tools can help companies meet huge challenges.. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, Stern said, “We had to take 10,000 employees remote almost overnight. IT was really the hero of that transformation.”
In the Customer Workflows keynote, customer workflows SVP Farrell Hope described our collaboration with the state of Tennessee. ServiceNow helped take citizens’ food assistance applications digital—achieving a 10x improvement in processing times. And when the state imposed shelter-in-place restrictions in March, Tennessee officials used these new capabilities to handle a surge of unemployment applications in record time.
Check out the full recap of week 1 highlights.
Week 2: Operations and IT turnarounds
At first, Walmart employees viewed the Now Platform as “just another IT ticketing tool,” explained Lisa Baremore, ServiceNow product owner at the retail giant. In less than two years, Walmart completed a Now-powered IT turnaround. Today, the IT system that spit out 5,000 tickets per month in 2018 has achieved the magic number: 0.
At global telecom giant Swiss Re, VP of product management Mark Hull explained how ServiceNow paved the way for a similar kind of turnaround in operations. A journey that began in 2008 has come full circle: ServiceNow helps Swiss Re manage a $1 billion-plus operations budget across IT, finance, sourcing, legal, HR, and more.
Week 3: Return to work? We have apps for that
Among week 3 highlights was a top-of-mind issue for everyone—returning to the workplace. As organizations navigate many challenges over the coming months, returning employees to the workplace requires careful planning and execution. Jeffrey Gore, senior director of product management at ServiceNow, explained how our suite of new “safe workplace” apps support two critical objectives—workplace readiness and workforce safety.
Check out the full recap of week 3 highlights.
Week 4: Reducing risks of risk management
DNB, Norway’s largest financial services group, faces increasing regulatory requirements due to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. DNB has struggled to balance increasing dependence on third party vendors and partners with the risks they present, including security breaches. Today, the Now Platform gives DNB a 360-degree tool to digitally manage vendor contract management and signing. It allows risk managers to run VRM processes through a new third-party risk portal.
Week 5: Get ready for a ‘workflow revolution’
“Behind every great work experience is a great workflow,” said CEO Bill McDermott in his week 5 Dream keynote session. McDermott explained that across the enterprise, “value chains are splitting apart and being reassembled by customers to take advantage of new technological options.” All these trends, he said, are “pointing to a workflow revolution.” As a result, companies that invest heavily in digitizing customer and employee workflows will have a real advantage over their peer groups. “If you look at results, they’re already gaining market share,” he said.
Check out the full recap of week 5 highlights.
On to the future
The workflow revolution is just getting started. All the more reason to watch this space for the latest trends and insights on digital transformation and the future of work.
Register to view the full Knowledge 2020 experience—hundreds of keynotes and sessions on demand, all free.
