Knowledge17: what are your takeaways?

I was lucky to take part to the K17 conference in Orlando, together with 15 of my Devoteam colleagues this week and 15,000 clients and partners from all over the world. The event was full of interesting sessions and announcements and enthusiast customers who took the stage to share their experiences. Here are my key takeaways from the conference to help you get the gist out of it!

The right CEO at the right place and the right time. 

K17 was the opportunity for John Donahoe, the new ServiceNow CEO since April 1st, to introduce himself to the community. With his 20 years experience at Bain Consulting as Managing Partner and former CEO of ebay, he has the perfect CV to take ServiceNow to the next level in terms of both moving from a pure IT player into a business partner to reinvent the way enterprises work and growing the company from current USD 1 Billion+ into a 4 Billion business by 2020.

New Product announcements

Machine Learning is here! Probably one of the key highlights of the conference: just after 4 months it acquired DxContinuum, a company that develops algorithms for machine learning and predictive analytics software, ServiceNow announced at K17 the Intelligent Automation Engine. IAE will be baked in the Nowplatform to boost the efficiency across the different domains it addresses (IT, HR, CSM, Security, Business apps) by automating the categorization and routing of requests, preventing future issues or benchmarking against peers.

Software asset management: a long awaited capability by existing ServiceNow customers since it can leverage all other existing components of the Nowplatform that come into play for SAM ie a CMDB, hardware asset management, software discovery, and Application Portfolio management. Given the fact that Software license and maintenance costs account for nearly one-third of IT budgets and software audits are common practice by vendors, there is no doubt that this SAM solution will encounter great success.

Customer Service Management:

CSM is a relatively new kid on the block but it already is being enhanced with a new major application, the Customer Service Communities allowing customers to engage with peers and experts and companies to reduce the number of cases. Communities include core capabilities such as managed forums, curated topics, support for multiple content types, moderation, and granular permissions. 

In addition to Communities, ServiceNow is enhancing its Customer Service Management solution in two other strategic areas:

• Dynamic Scheduling for Field Service optimizes technician assignments to reduce travel times, cut costs, and to ensure the best utilization.
• Cost Management helps customer service leaders to understand the true costs of the services their companies deliver. Customer Service Management is integrated with the ServiceNow ITBM Cost Transparency application enabling monitoring and analysis of service costs by customer account, channel, product version, product line, contracts, and more.

Security:

ServiceNow announced Trusted Security Circles, a new cloud-based application that gives enterprises the ability to share and receive hyper-relevant threat intelligence in near real-time. Security teams have been fighting threats in isolation. Sharing information about threats would expose to the world that they were under attack. Now, security teams can ask trusted peers, suppliers and partners about threats and how dangerous they are. Organizations can control the way they share, what they share and whom they share with — including being fully anonymous. Enterprises can be forewarned of targeted attacks and can contribute to the safety of the community.

At K17, ServiceNow also announced Vendor Risk Management, a new cloud-based application enterprises can use to automate third party risk, onboard new vendors more quickly and gain visibility of their overall risk posture. 

With Vendor Risk Management, organizations can now automate the third party risk management process, ensuring quality and effectiveness of assessment controls. They can onboard new vendors much more quickly, allowing them to get value from their vendors more quickly. And finally, when combined with a broader risk management program, an organization can get a complete view of their overall risk and a systematic way to take action to reduce it.

HR:

ServiceNow announced the Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions for Human Resources. The new application orchestrates and automates employee onboarding, offboarding, relocation, leaves of absence and other processes that begin in HR but span multiple systems and departments such as IT, facilities, finance and legal. The efficiency of onboarding and lifecycle processes is drastically improved, and fast, consumer-like service makes it easy for employees to be employees.

“The new hire onboarding experience is a critical first impression for incoming employees,” said Deepak Rammohan Bharadwaj, General Manager of Human Resources Product Line, ServiceNow. “ServiceNow provides a system of action for organizations to streamline and automate the complex services needed from multiple departments beyond just HR to give employees the onboarding experience they deserve.”

Jakarta enhancements

And of course, there are many other products upgrades as part of the Jakarta release planned in June on ITOM (enhanced Cloud Management) and ITSM (Upgrade of the SLM module with visual SLA timelines, a guided setup to configure the processes, an improved service catalogue etc).

To get a full rundown of the products enhancements coming with the Jakarta release, watch the full keynote here:

K17 was a fantastic event filled with innovations and very engaged experts and I am really excited to continue to work with our customers on this transformation journey to enable their enterprise to "work at the lightspeed"!

I would love to hear your main takeaways from the conference. So don't be shy and feel free to leave a comment!

Yours,