Rank your progress against 900 other C-suite leaders
During the last two years, organizations have simplified, integrated, and redesigned processes—in short, optimized them—to improve their speed and resilience in the face of the pandemic.
To understand how companies and public entities are using technology to drive optimization, ServiceNow and ThoughtLab conducted a global survey of 900 C-level executives from multiple industries around the world. Based on their responses, we developed a maturity framework to measure the progress of companies in optimizing 14 functions across the enterprise.
What follows is a self-assessment that will benchmark your company’s optimization efforts against your industry peers.
Beginners are losing out on the gains leading companies are seeing from optimizing processes and functions.
The most cited challenges to optimization for beginners were high implementation costs, inadequate skills and talent, a resistance to change on the part of employees, and difficulty keeping up with customer and employee expectations for user experience.
To catch up with leaders, beginners should focus on providing training, improving coordination, setting a vision, and building an optimization culture at their organizations.
Your score:
You're an intermediate
How all organizations rank
Intermediates are reaping early benefits from optimization investments, including greater efficiencies, improved products and services, better employee engagement and morale, and higher productivity.
Intermediates find the most value in providing specific vision and objectives for optimization efforts, improving coordination among departments, and deploying low-code application development platforms. Interestingly, the value derived from low-code platforms is higher for intermediates than for any other group. Half of intermediates are also seeing significant value from digitizing and automating workflows.
At the same time, challenges persist. Intermediates cite uncertain ROI as a top challenge in convincing executives of the value of optimization. Other barriers include insufficient training and resistance to change among employees. Intermediates also cite the challenge of keeping up with customer and employee expectations for user experience.
To catch up with leaders, intermediates should focus on providing training, improving coordination, providing a vision, and building an optimization culture at their organizations.
Your score:
You're a leader!
How all organizations rank
Leaders are far ahead of intermediates and beginners when it comes to building process optimization cultures, developing systems for continuous process improvement, using roadmaps to help redesign processes, modernizing IT platforms and systems, and providing training and upskilling to workers.
Leaders understand that it’s not enough to provide staff with better technology. Leaders are well ahead of others in inspiring and motivating their workforce to embrace new tools. They are significantly more likely to provide a vision and objectives around these changes as well as reward employees who actively embrace optimization.
A warning: Some pain points become more acute with greater maturity. For example, leaders can find themselves bumping up against a persistent silo mentality as they strive to broaden the scale of optimization that seeks to lower such barriers. Finding new use cases that can drive further ROI also becomes more difficult after a firm takes the early wins.
