Workflow everything with ServiceNow and AIOps

Companies of all sizes are continually seeking technologies to increase productivity, improve customer and employee experience, and ultimately drive business growth. This desire applies across functions of customer service, IT support, employee service as well as business-specific processes. Today, leading companies are turning to their vast data stores, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and process automation to achieve these outcomes. 

ServiceNow, once solely focused on IT service management (ITSM) and workflows, is increasingly enabling digital workflows across the enterprise. And, many organizations are expanding their initial ITSM investment to leverage ServiceNow as the platform where work gets done. Today, almost half of ServiceNow’s growth goes beyond IT to customer service, employee service, industry-specific processes, and 'bring your own workflow' low-code development. 

How does ServiceNow drive productivity and business growth, especially in today's remote and hybrid world?

ServiceNow is the glue between data and productivity

ServiceNow deeply understands that work without data is work in a vacuum. Outside of work that produces physical goods, most work today is about the input and output of information. From its legacy of making the notoriously complex IT configuration management databases (CMDB) successful for many companies, ServiceNow built the NOW platform with an emphasis on taming data that supports workflows. 

The platform pulls and leverages both discovery data to model services and technologies, and monitoring data to understand their behavior. With its ability to store, integrate or federate all of this data, the NOW platform can facilitate an informed workflow, whether human-performed, machine-assisted or completely automated. End-to-end automation in data retrieval allows teams to spend less time pulling the information they need and more time producing outcomes for customers, employees or partners.

ServiceNow’s workflow is further optimized with AIOps capabilities through artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applied to its data. Whether it’s a virtual agent determining the best response to a request, the clustering of events (or symptoms) into a common or probable cause, or the automated availability of data related to the task at hand, ServiceNow acts as a coordinator that empowers business, organizations and people.

ServiceNow simplifies complex workflows

As the world shifted and moved to a predominantly remote and now hybrid work structure, reliable workflows became even more important. And, in many cases, traditional workflow challenges became more evident: certain employees needed access to certain data and tools while others didn’t, internal silos were created preventing cross team collaboration, gaps in data and systems decreased productivity, and resultant security issues arose.

Organizations that had invested in ServiceNow going into this shift benefited from a number of features that simplify complex workflows. As a predominately all-cloud, SaaS solution with integrations across most enterprise software, ServiceNow has made it easy to consolidate work that depends on multiple systems.   

ServiceNow has also demonstrated that it can tackle the full spectrum of related processes through its ITSM workflows. With its full-fledged CMDB, service catalog, service portal, virtual agent, low-code tools and wealth of out-of-the box processes, there is little a company is not able to workflow. While customizing out-of-box workflows is a traditional challenge, ServiceNow’s pace of innovation, work design and low-code capabilities has made adapting to customers’ work much easier. 

Once a company invests in a foundational platform across domains, it starts to see a network and compounding effect as more processes come on board. This is due to the enterprise being more and more connected and working from the same data and workflow.

Automation of Definable Tasks

In the world before information technologies, workflow was largely invisible and often included unnecessary and inefficient work. Today’s workflow design should be formed by asking ‘why do that,’  incorporating feedback to eliminate unneeded tasks, optimize decisions and outcomes, and determine repeatability. 

This process of continuous pruning and improving workflow definition should result in work that can be either completely automated, machine-assisted or necessarily human performed. The introduction of AIOps further accelerates this trend towards automation through its data-driven determination of best information or course of action. As AIOps and the data it relies on advances, business and IT professionals will be freed from definable, and often tedious, tasks that don’t drive strategic initiatives or delight the way only human performed service can. 

AIOps is the future of enterprise operations as it supports seamlessly harnessing insights from data, maximizing productivity in workflows, and informing and freeing teams to act as drivers in critical business initiatives. These are becoming key competitive advantages, especially as remote and hybrid work isn’t going away; and ServiceNow is at the advantage forefront for many leading companies.  

Photo credit: VLADGRIN/ Shutterstock

Bill Driscoll is the co-host of AIOps Evolution Weekly and Consulting Director at Windward Consulting. He leads the AIOps practice at Windward and covers business development, project delivery, partner management, and team leadership for select clients. Bill acts as a strategic advocate for customers, utilizing his extensive background in AIOps along with 20 years of experience leading professional services teams at SevOne, Capgemini, the U.S Air Force, and Windward.