“Rounding Up The DevOps Cowboys”

I was thinking back to our annual Knowledge event a couple of weeks ago and a particular moment keeps coming back to me.

Our Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright asked the audience, “Why did you go into IT in the first place? You wanted to change the world, right? But you ended up patching, fixing frozen PCs, resetting passwords, running upgrade programmes and rewiring servers for the most part, right?”

Although there are a lot of those undeniable realities in the outside world, we do have a better and brighter future to look forward to and it’s just around the corner.

Four pillars for IT change

Looking at the major changes we will experience in IT over the next five years, Wright has proposed the following four, all of which are now emerging:

·      Rigid controls will be broken down – We know that IT works in silos and disconnected groups. But we can now move to a point where we experience ‘agility beyond DevOps’ and prevent IT failures by creating self-healing systems.

·      Manual systems training will cease - We must now move past ‘basic’ levels of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and get to a point beyond insight with predictive intelligence. At this point, IT people will become trusted advisors to the business.

·      Automation beyond level 1 tickets - The ticket spin cycle exists every day as incidents are created in an interminable cycle. We must now apply digital workflows to provide automation at a deeper and more granular level right across the business.

·      New experiences – IT will spend less time on the basic care and feeding of our tech infrastructure. This means it will be able to focus more on emerging technologies such as VR and AR, voice and gesture-based interfaces.

Pablo rounds up the cowboys

The second part of the keynote was delivered by our own Pablo Stern, SVP, IT Workflow Products.

Pablo described what he called the IT Friction State, a point at which companies realise they are on a path to systems change but they don’t have people, product and process strategy aligned correctly.

Development teams that falter at this point can fall into the ‘Dev Cowboy State’ where they panic, deploy anywhere and everywhere and fail to progress productively. But there is another route to a third state – the state of Stability.

In the midst of change, teams can use ServiceNow’s new DevOps functionalities to create rules so that change requests are automatically approved if they are within the defined risk threshold. When an enterprise IT strategy is structured like this and is well-aligned, it can then start to iterate and advance quickly.

Real HR transformation at HSBC

So how does all of this innovation help employees in real world working environments? The audience was given a chance to examine a very real and very large implementation during the Employee Workflows keynote, presented by Blake McConnell, our SVP of Employee Workflow Products.

McConnell introduced Erica Peters, who is Head of HR Customer Experience at HSBC and Sean McCann, CIO of Corporate Functions at HSBC. As a global financial services organisation, HSBC has 275,000 workers around the world, but the company had previously experienced a huge amount of regional variation in terms of the way HR was carried out. This translated onwards to very different levels of customer experience.

Peters explained that an internal HR survey had found employees wanted simpler and faster HR that mirrored the way applications and services worked in the rest of their lives. The company had also found that HR admin was a productivity blocker in and of itself.

McCann and Peters detailed HSBC’s transformation work to use ServiceNow as its portal and SAP SuccessFactors as its HCM function. The migration saw 66 countries turned on live in one day back in August 2018.

HSBC has used the ServiceNow migration to do a lot of work on the standardisation of organisational procedures. It has developed a new employee experience layer, which acts as a one-stop-shop for all employees to be able to communicate with HR.

The organisation now sees 190,000 logins per day at peak levels and 50% of requests are being carried out as self-service functions. Employees say that they experience 88% percent satisfaction and there has been a dramatic decline in email.

It was great to hear success stories like this presented by our customers live on stage. The speakers really showed the extent of their efforts and emotional input into the projects they described, and they were genuinely elated to be able to share the results of their work. That of course is what ServiceNow Knowledge is all about.