Healthcare
ESM: How we break down silos, boost productivity, and reduce costs
Nick Borgwardt, director of ITx workflows at ServiceNow, co-wrote this blog.
How do I reset my password?
How do I add someone to a distribution list?
How do I request ergonomic home office equipment?
At many companies, when employees have questions like these or need help, they face the complexity of threading together siloed processes. Sometimes a task can require getting in touch with multiple departments, creating friction and frustration. Other times, it’s not even clear where to start. Seemingly simple requests such as submitting a name change are actually fraught with complexity because they involve multiple teams across HR, IT, finance, and workplace services, among others.
When departments deliver services separately with different portals, systems, and processes, employees get a fragmented and inconsistent experience. The burden is on the employees to figure out the right tools, learn to use them, and coordinate between different functions.
Hide the complexity
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) improves productivity and performance through the application of IT service management across the business. By using automated workflows on a common platform, ESM helps remove friction and accelerate innovation.
ServiceNow has been on an IT digital transformation journey for three years. We use the Now Platform® to bring together numerous processes across many different functions, ranging from legal to procurement to IT to finance.
Most of our employees may not even notice how complex the service delivery is. That’s the whole point of ESM: to hide complexity and create delightful experiences for employees—all while digitizing workflows to grow at scale.
Grow the ratio, not the budget
ServiceNow is growing at around 30% per year. But we haven’t increased our IT budget at the same rate. Last year’s unprecedented world events saw a worldwide decrease in IT spending by 3.2%, according to Gartner, just as enterprises needed more—not fewer—resources to keep the business going.
We were lucky that we could use the Now Platform to drive speed, efficiency, and productivity. By doing so, we supported the company’s ever-increasing workforce with a nominal growth of IT support staff. In fact, over the last three years, our headcount has been flat. That means we’ve steadily increased our employee-to-IT-support ratio during a time of continued growth.
Also noteworthy is that the 2020 figure of 336 employees per one IT support staff member only takes into account full-time employees. When we consider the contractors that IT supports, the actual ratio is even higher.
Meeting employee expectations
When we set out to transform the employee experience, we quickly identified three key expectations from employees that were going unmet:
- Round-the-clock self-service capability
- Digital experience across multiple channels
- Consumer-like experience
In response, we made it easy to use self-service and Virtual Agent, leveraging machine learning and AI. Today, we count more than half of ServiceNow employees as monthly active users of chat-based self-service, automating common requests such as Okta multifactor reset, deleted email recovery, and HR case status check—all on Virtual Agent without human intervention.
Learn more about our journey, as well as results and specific use cases, in our Knowledge 2021 session, Now on Now: Scale enterprise service management. See for yourself how we use ESM to grow and innovate.
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