ServiceNow - A Digital Control Tower

**?The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer?**

Earlier this year right after the quarterly results got announced, in a video interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott spoke about the company’s Now Platform? that delivers workflows connecting people, functions, and systems to accelerate innovation, increase agility and enhance productivity. He went on to say “I call ServiceNow the control tower for digital transformation".

As solution consultants, we are always looking for examples that we can take to partners and customers to show the value of ServiceNow. In that sense, this Digital Control Tower reference resonated with me and I decided to get a?deeper understanding. This blog is an attempt to curate content that aided in my learning.

What is a Control Tower? As per Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a Control Tower is an elevated glass-enclosed structure that has an unobstructed view of a landing field and from which air traffic may be controlled usually by radio.

At smaller airports with less aircraft traffic, the pilots communicate with each other on common radio frequencies. This has proven to be safe at lower volume airports, however as traffic increases and greater efficiency is required an Air Traffic Control Tower is opened. These towers coordinate take-offs, landing, ground traffic, and aircraft in flight within 5 miles of the airport. Their primary purpose worldwide is to prevent collisions, organize and expedite the flow of air traffic, and provide information and other support for pilots.

Now let us understand What is a Digital Control Tower??Just try a google search on this phrase. The search results will invariably show you a bunch of references on supply chain visibility. Essentially a supply chain control tower is a means of addressing the supply chain leaders’ visibility and data challenges by helping aggregate data from different internal sources and serving the data up to a single dashboard that can be viewed by all supply chain team members and partners. This concept has been around for over a decade.

However, let us park this understanding of Control Tower and try to view it from the lens of Digital Transformation. The biggest issue that enterprises are facing in their path to digital transformation, as they try to pivot business operations, products, services, and experiences, is that they find themselves burdened by siloed systems and data complexity.

The Control Tower for Digital Transformation should have the following capabilities

• Provide visibility across silos: While an enterprise can have a plethora of ERP systems, e-commerce platforms, and enterprise apps, there is a need to see the big picture and drive collaboration across boundaries. ?
• Not just an inside-out view but also an outside-in view: ?The ability to integrate with relevant third-party data sources ensures that valuable outside-in data like risk events are factored in decision making.
• Be the System of action: The control tower should be able to drive actions by broadly correlating data from various enterprise systems. In other words, it needs to have the analytical capability to generate actionable insights and improve the business processes.?
• ?The control tower should have built-in actionable workflows that can be customized to meet unique requirements and process steps required to automate actions within source transactional systems
• A data structure and architecture that can keep pace with ever-evolving enterprise systems

Born in the cloud and built from the ground up with a single data model and a single, scalable architecture, the Now Platform enables data to flow seamlessly across applications and existing systems. The Now Platform delivers workflow automation at an enterprise scale, allowing enterprises to optimize business processes for productivity, agility, and resiliency.?

Just as how the air traffic control regulates the flow of planes in an airport, ServiceNow’s digital workflows keep work flowing seamlessly across people, systems, and data within an enterprise while providing the right level of visibility for leaders at all levels.