How many times a day do you ask, or hear the questions, "Where does this person sit?" or "Where is this conference room?" or "Where is that printer?" As your company grows, looking for anything too long becomes a waste of time, affects productivity, and generally irritates your employees. Everyone in your company needs to be able find the people and equipment they need to do their job. Meetings start on time when your employees know where to go rather than wandering the halls or asking people for directions along the way. The effort of organizing and using your spaces effectively is called space management, which is usually handled by your organization's facilities team. Typically, a company's second largest budget item is space and cost of occupancy, making effective space management an important contributor to your company's bottom line.
ServiceNow is introducing the concept of space management in the Geneva release. With space management comes interactive floor plans that will help employees find other people, locate equipment, and see how spaces and things geospatially relate to one another.
Interactive floor plans
People are visual. We understand maps and can use maps to find things. By far the biggest addition to the Facilities Service Management application is adding a visual component to space. This visual component is the interactive floor plan. In the past, we have all relied on static, printed floor plan that became out of date the second it was taped to the wall. By contrast, the interactive floor plan provides a digital, always-up-to-date visual representation of your spaces. Every space is clickable, giving users a drill-down ability to view all the details about the space. Any item in the system is assigned a location and with the press of a button a user is shown the physical indication of that item on the floor plan. Now it is possible to see immediately where anyone sits or where any equipment (asset or CI) is located. All changes are reflected immediately on the floor plan.
Most importantly, this floor plan is available to everyone using a web browser or mobile device. This equates to fewer questions and confusion at meeting time. Employees find the info they need quickly and easily. Groups that service your organization, such as HR and the IT help desk, also greatly benefit from the floor plan because those groups routinely need to find people and spaces.
Space Management
With the Geneva release, your facilities management team is able to understand, track, and anticipate needs about the space that is being managed.
If you are part of the facilities team then you know that the role of the facilities group is to manage the physical space and all the assets within that space. They need to know where every desk, fire extinguisher, and electrical room is located. Facilities teams need to understand details about any space and how it's being used. This means tracking types of spaces, understanding the area for each space, current occupancy for a space (if it's occupiable), and the maximum occupancy for a space. Additional details, such as department assignment and cost centers, may also be assigned. Data attributes, like occupancy, can be aggregated providing the facility manager a view of occupancy for a given floor or building.
Spaces can also be classified by the way they are used. Typical space types are conference rooms, offices, cubicles, kitchens, bathrooms, and elevators, but an area like a parking stall, can also be a space. Every space type can have it's own set of attributes. Once everything is modeled and tracked, the facilities team has a more complete understanding of space usage, utilizing the data and tools necessary to keep the cost of occupancy to a minimum.
Move Management
Employee movement is common within large organizations. People come and go, change roles, and your organization may change buildings or floors. Managing the moves and tracking where people end up is difficult. With the Geneva release, a move management application is being introduced. Employees can request moves and the facilities team will have the means to track and coordinate those employee movements. The interactive floor plan can be used to find and select open seats. A configurable workflow generates tasks for any team that may need to be involved with the move. For example, the facilities team may need to deliver boxes, security may have to update badge access, while IT has to enable Ethernet ports. When the move is complete, the workflow updates the location of the employee and any assets that were moved. This ensures that the ServiceNow system of record is kept up to date with employee movement and that data is immediately available to all users of the floor plan.
Conclusion
The concept of space and location is very fundamental to the physical world in which we live. With the Geneva release space and location will become a visual aspect of ServiceNow. Every record within the system can be given a specific location, which can be located on the floor plan making it easier to find people, places, and things. Your employees will appreciate seeing where room 110 is in relation to other parts of the building, much more than simply knowing that room 110 exists.
Besides locating people, places, and things, the CFO and facilities team will be able to better manage space and the costs associated with that space.
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