Employee Experience
An example of a hyperautomation journey
Nick Borgwardt, director of IT workflow at ServiceNow, co-authored this blog.
In our personal lives, it’s easy to get the information and products we need with just a few clicks. Thanks to modern consumer websites and apps, making service requests and ordering products is simple, convenient and, often, automatic. Why shouldn’t our professional lives be just as effortless?
At ServiceNow, we’re on a mission to extend these delightful, intuitive, and automated consumer experiences to the business world so our employees can work more effectively. To get there, we started our hyperautomation journey.
To make our company an autonomous digital enterprise, we’re laser-focused on strategically automating as much day-to-day business as possible. Doing so can give all ServiceNow employees more time to focus on the aspects of their jobs they enjoy, which can, in turn, lead to innovation.
Automation vs. hyperautomation
Just a few years ago, automating manual, repetitive tasks within an enterprise was considered new and noteworthy. Today, automation has essentially become table stakes—a starting point for what comes next: hyperautomation.
Propelled by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, process mining, and more, hyperautomation is the framework for combining advanced technologies to automate as many routine business operations as possible. Think of it as attaching rocket boosters to automation.
Employees used to spend hours slogging through tedious, manual work. In a global business environment where time is incredibly valuable, we realized continuing at that pace wasn’t scalable to support our growth.
To give employees the time they need to excel at their jobs, we decided to embrace hyperautomation. We identify problems that can be automated with AI, automate them, and then measure whether that automation is effective.
How do we use hyperautomation?
We rely on the Now Platform® to automate solutions and help our employees help themselves. Our goal is to use our own technology to incrementally improve our processes through each iteration. We think about it like a racetrack, where each lap teaches us something new and makes us more efficient.
At first, we were driving slowly and erratically. As we completed each lap, we got better at honing our methods and processes, adding structure and improvements along the way.
Using tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, AI, and machine learning, we can take the menial and repetitive tasks out of loan processing or hardware allocation, for example, and automate all but the most complicated tasks.
To encourage higher employee self-service rates at ServiceNow, we follow the hyperautomation framework step by step using Now Platform features. We:
Define our business objectives using Continual Improvement Management
Analyze and optimize processes using Process Optimization
Discover automation opportunities using Process Optimization, Intent Discovery, and Automation Discovery
Design no-code/low-code apps using Virtual Agent and Flow Designer
Deploy RPA, Virtual Agent, Integration Hub, and AI using DevOps and Automation Engine
Monitor/measure against expectations using Project Portfolio Management
Govern and scale by creating ServiceNow Centers of Excellence
Continually optimize using Continual Improvement
Realize value using Performance Analytics
And we always make sure to celebrate success.
Achieving hyperautomation
Hyperautomation frees our employees to do bigger, bolder, and more interesting work. It makes work easier, more relevant, and more efficient for all of us.
In fact, hyperautomation is one of the reasons we have an 81% self-service success rate across the enterprise, which translates to employees solving their own issues four out of every five times. That means only one out of five issues isn’t currently being solved by knowledge base articles or automation.
Hyperautomation helps us save time and maximize productivity in our workdays. The best part? Every time we apply it to improve another process, we enable a better employee experience using our own technology.
Get a hyperautomation tutorial in our on-demand Knowledge presentation, Now On Now: Hyperautomation, how we're becoming an autonomous digital enterprise.
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