At the three recent EMEA NowForums ServiceNow founder and Chief Product Officer Fred Luddy spoke of "The Future of Now." A mix of the future of IT and the future of ServiceNow — two futures that are inextricably linked, with ServiceNow's future in many ways being where our customers need us to be.
Fred started by saying that people say that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn anything from history; but there have been undeniable patterns:
- Expect the unexpected
- The hype cycle is real — irrational exuberance and the plateau of productivity
- Unless companies stay agile, and adopt and adapt at the right time they may quickly become irrelevant.
The IT "hot topics" of social, mobile, "big data," and cloud are still front and center
The "nexus of forces" — as defined by global analyst firm Gartner — of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud will help define the future of IT (and business). But so will the expectations and needs of employees and customers.
And looking at cloud in particular:
Cloud from a Core perspective can provide competitive differentiation and business value (Sales, Marketing, Development). But there is also a Context perspective which supports Core that is focused on operational efficiency. Quoting Geoffrey Moore, while an organization will get no credit for doing Context well if "you screw it up you will be in deep doo doo."
ServiceNow's continued evolution
There's the scalability evolution:
- Multiple app nodes
- Sharding and archiving
- Read replicas.
And the platform evolution:
- High availability and disaster recovery mirrors
- NoSQL with MongoDB.
Then there is the "use case" evolution
Fred spoke of how the ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite and platform are being used in non-IT situations — to support the management of service relationships in the enterprise. More information can be found in a previous blog — A Future Role for IT: Managing Service Relationships in the Enterprise — with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a great example of sharing what the IT organization has learned about managing service delivery to benefit other business functions, their customers, and ultimately the enterprise.
CERN has taken the "IT" out of "ITSM" to apply service management best practices to waste, fire services, people, transport, and green space management — the infographic shows the activity in the first 12 weeks of 2013. With enterprise service relationships improved through the use of best practices, service automation, and a single system of record. All in pursuance of improved performance and customer experience. More information on CERN may be found here.
And of course no presentation by Fred would be complete without him creating a bespoke application on the ServiceNow platform live on stage — and in just a matter of minutes.
To get a copy of Fred's full presentation please see here.
Or if you want to hear more from ServiceNow customers, partners, employees, and senior leaders then Knowledge 14, the annual ServiceNow customer event, is for you. Where from April 27 - May 1 2014 circa 6000 IT service management (ITSM) and cloud professionals will descend upon San Francisco for a great learning and networking experience.
