For the 30-plus years I was an IT industry analyst and pundit before joining ServiceNow almost two years ago now, there were two eternal verities. One was that every good pundit is sometimes wrong, but never in doubt. The other is that pundits make predictions, especially as the current calendar year ends and the next one looms. Herewith, some predictions from me, followed by some conclusions about which I am entirely devoid of doubt.
1.Enterprise decision makers will continue to seek, find and exploit opportunities to improve agility and operational efficiency by building better processes and services, and consolidating and automating as many of these as possible. This will be especially true within IT, since CIOs and those to whom they report are all but obsessed with measuring and reducing IT costs, the largest component of which is often people. But IT's successes in reducing costs by improving process, service and service relationship management and increasing automation will spread quickly to other departments, especially those delivering shared services such as HR, finance and facilities management.
2.In response to growing user and customer demands and expectations, enterprise decision makers will continue to seek, find and exploit opportunities to deliver more "consumerized" interactions among people, processes and systems. Success here will require creation and deployment of effective, efficient, easy-to-use modern custom applications based on those improved processes, for reasons eloquently elucidated in Figure 1 below. (I must profusely thank the ever-lovely, ever-talented, ever-intellectually-dangerous Chris Dancy for tweeting this hilariously accurate depiction of how corporate apps compare with their more modern, more consumerized counterparts.)
Figure 1: the problem is obvious…
3.CIOs will increasingly seek solutions and focus on processes that blur historical distinctions that have separated IT service management (ITSM), IT asset management (ITAM) and IT operations management (ITOM). CIOs will also invest in tools and processes that do more to help them to avoid IT problems, to zero in quickly on the causes of those problems that do arise, and that focus less on devices and systems and more on services. This evolutionary trend will be a major contributor to the rise of enterprise-wide service integration and management (SIAM) and service relationship management.
There is one thing that can contribute greatly to success in coping with, taking advantage of and getting ahead of these evolutionary inevitabilities. That thing is a cloud-based, integrated platform that enables consolidation, automation and consumerization of business processes and services within and beyond IT, and easy creation of modern custom business applications. I think of that thing as "business automation and application development as a service," or "BAADaaS." And I think the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform is the best (if not only current) example of that thing.
The ServiceNow platform enables a single system of record for effective, consolidated, automated management of IT assets, services and service relationships, as well as key elements of IT operations. The ServiceNow platform includes out-of-the-box integrations with several third-party tools for service and service relationship management. It also supports numerous integration interfaces, from SOAP and REST to Web Services, that enable customers and partners to build their own integrations. The ServiceNow platform also includes a visual App Creator and full content management system, for easy creation and tailoring of custom apps. And the ServiceNow platform includes a powerful workflow engine for capture, creation and automation of business processes, within and beyond IT and ServiceNow itself.
One other important trend is likely to expand and accelerate in 2014 and beyond. Growing numbers of CIOs and other IT decision makers will increasingly own more fully the business criticality of the efforts they lead, and make that criticality more clear and obvious to their CEOs and executive colleagues. The best CIOs are already shifting from reactive, custodial modes to proactive, engaged leadership, using modern tools and strong processes to deliver and manage the services that enable business success. This trend will expand and accelerate in 2014 and beyond — and those CIOs who don't get on this bus are very, very likely to be run over by it.
So if you aren't doing so already, get on the BAADaaS bus. Check out how ServiceNow customers are succeeding with the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform and CreateNow Development Suite. (If you are one of those customers, come and tell your story at Knowledge14.) Then seek, find and exploit opportunities for the to improve and accelerate service automation, service relationship management and custom applications at your enterprise with ServiceNow.
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