The Connected Enterprise

Contents

• Introduction
• Context
• Challenges
• Playbook
• Connected Enterprise Model
• ServiceNow as platform of Connected Enterprises
• Connected Enterprise Transformation Journey
• Conclusion

Primary Author:

• Ron de Jong, Principal Strategist, ServiceNow

Contributors:

• Tasker O. Generes Jr. MCPM, Chief Innovation Office Global Head, ServiceNow
• Yves Wullaert, Principal Architect, ServiceNow
•  Michelle Supper, Senior Executive Architect, ServiceNow

Introduction

Every industry, and every company, is embarking on a journey to become a digital enterprise. This disruption is radically changing demand for products and services in all sectors and driving organizations to alter their future operating models.

We expect digital technology to be at the core of the next-normal; enabling organizations to meet the new needs of their customers and improving agility and the responsiveness of operations without increasing costs.

It has become increasingly clear that legacy enterprise applications with related technology stacks, software, processes are struggling to keep up with change. To prepare for the future, transformation projects need to be bold and they must consider the complete range of dependencies and cross-functional workflows that integrate systems, people, and processes across the business.

Our vision of Connected Enterprise is to align people, processes, technology and information to create value through the delivery of interconnected services with integrated operations and strong security. The connected enterprise represents an evolution of digital transformation. While digital transformation digitizes processes and workflows but allows operational silos to remain, the connected enterprise eliminates the constraints of silos by linking workflows and enabling a single pane-of-glass view into an organization’s environment. With the Now Platform as its engine, a connected enterprise is agile, adaptable, and intelligent; seeing around corners, automatically adjusting to changing market conditions, and optimizing operations to maximize business outcomes for the people it serves.

Context

Organizational dynamics are heavily impacted by external developments. Political discussions, on topics like globalization, economic openness and social rights, and catastrophes like the COVID-19 pandemic, strongly impact the environment within which organizations operate.

Organizations recognize that flexibility and agility are the key to prospering in an uncertain and fast-changing world. Combining automation with flexible cloud platforms will drive a step change in productivity for our clients and partners.

Populations are ageing and the “knowledge” workforce is shrinking, leading to talent shortages on current systems and environments. The availability of intelligent technology can provide some relief, but the need to harvest the experience from people is required. New jobs require advanced technical skills, which remain in short supply. In the US, 1.4 million computer specialist roles will have been created by 2020, yet more than 70% of vacancies will go unfilled. A new approach to education, and especially upskilling and reskilling, must be embraced if the economy and society are to prosper.

Challenges

Before the coronavirus hit, most companies were already accelerating the digital transformation of their customer journeys and value chains. However, the abrupt and extreme shift caused by the COVID-19 shutdown caught many industries off guard, while at the same time, exposing the common challenges that companies face in driving change:

• Fragmented and siloed service delivery with duplicative functions, processes, and technology
• Finding and attracting skilled and motivated people; inspiring them to grow by providing meaningful employment and lifelong development
• Building enduring, collaborative, and mutually beneficial relationships with customers, partners and governments
• Developing new innovative digital services and products to build competitive advantage and fuel our future growth
• Building digital capabilities require overhaul of current legacy technology to overcome limitations
• Generating strong cash flow and maintaining a strong balance sheet to support the growth of business
• Securing assets and complying with regulations and protect organizations reputation. A recent example is Garmin having its digital platform disconnected in a Ransomware attack.

Playbook

Every organization’s starting point is different, and it is therefore not our intention to write a one-size fits all playbook for digital transformation. However, based on learnings from the field, there are several guiding objectives that should be part of any organization’s playbook:

Building operational resilience

Increase operational excellence by fully digitizing your value chain. Eliminate low value-add avoidable tasks and use intelligent workflows to automate repetitive unavoidable tasks. Agile organization and adaptive business models can quickly adapt to market velocity.

Digital talent

Scale digital savvy talent by developing digital competencies in-house and source talent to flex the organizations workforce based on business and transformation needs. There will also be strong demand for technical skills like programming and application development, along with skills such as design-thinking, UX design that computers cannot easily deliver. Create ecosystems with business partners, R&D organizations, technology incubators and startups to gain access to technology, resources and knowledge to increase the ability to improve, innovate and grow.

Future of work experience

Deliver a seamless and engaging experience to customers, suppliers and employees with persona-based information. Automate workflows that make the most of human and ML/AI capabilities to achieve faster and better outcomes.

Digital products

Aggregate and monetize siloed, underutilized data by embedding it into products, services and operations to increase insights, efficiency, revenue growth and customer engagement. Develop digital products and integrate E2E services based on platforms that balance flexibility and security with the agility to adapt to business demand. What product or service could your organization offer to occupy the makerspace or even disrupt your industry? 

Mitigation of risk

Risk is controlled and managed from the brand level to the individual component level, and concerns compliance, threat and vulnerability.

Connected Enterprise Model

According to Gartner, over 80% of organizations have a digital transformation program underway. The connected enterprise represents an evolution of digital transformation, and comprises three connected services:

Connected Operations

Phase 1 of Connected Operations is to ensure resilience for critical business operations. The integration of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) is creating new opportunities. For example, by applying intelligence into workflows, large data sets can be mined for insights that will increase operational resilience. This will require sensors, such as Internet of Things (IoT) enabled smart objects, to collect data from the physical world and analytics that can make sense of the data, ideally in an automated, real-time and intelligent way.

An example from the manufacturing sector might be to connect assembly lines and operations to optimize production, and hence increase on-time delivery and production tolerances and reduce quality issues. Closer to home, your next new car may not yet be self-driving, but it could be a sensor-laden mobile Internet of Things device, with considerable on-board computing power and communication systems devoted to vehicle location, driver behavior, engine diagnostics and vehicle activity.     

Connected Human

Deliver the right digital experience with the right resources from anywhere. Consumers, partners and employees now have high expectations for simplicity and convenience that are of a similar level to consumer-grade technology. This process of enterprise technology being changed or influenced by new technologies emerging from consumer markets into professional arenas is known ‘Consumerization of the Enterprise.’

Many companies are at the early adoption stage of consumerization as they fit the technology to existing technology structure. And consumer experiences are still far superior to any experience at work , despite increasing expectations from employees for work to be as easy as home life . This is particularly true as Millennial and Gen Z employees drive the enterprise towards establishing a digital-first mentality at work. However, as consumer and enterprise tech continue to converge, our work life will start feeling more natural and less restrictive. Productivity will be built into our everyday lives, and as a result, every tool used by employees must provide a world-class user experience to compete. This will have a material impact on a company’s bottom-line because user experience affects employee productivity. Easy use of tech and integrated access to data and analytics enables increased agility of business, better decisions and achievement of digital transformation. Ultimately, a better internal employee experience drives a better consumer experience. With enterprise consumerization and connection, you enable your employees to better serve customers. In order to deliver these great experiences you need to not just know your employees and customers but also source the right skills for the right work and consumption. Creating an ecosystem that leverages the “Gig” economy and expand on and off-balance sheet capabilities of an organization. These experiences will continuously evolve creating both fierce customer loyalty with improved productivity and agility.

In healthcare, using wearables, care teams can collect numerous data points about the patient’s sleep patterns, activity, heart rate, temperature, etc…. These wearables can offer real-time information to caregivers and patients. Think of a situation in which a heart patient has an elevated heart rate. The wearable will immediately transmit the signal to the nursing staff and allow them to provide immediate and timely assistance to the patient.

Connected Security

Protecting all assets from People, to devices, to products and even workflows. Cyberattacks are among the largest threats to business in today’s digital age and growing because the attack surface is growing. Despite the magnitude of the threat, organizations are failing to respond cohesively and effectively. Faced with an increasing number of assets, from people, to devices, to products and even workflows and ever-increasing connectivity lead to a growing attack surface, organization need to address this holistic. Because they lack a single pane of glass view into the entirety of security operations, rapid response and mitigation is challenging, if not impossible. Meanwhile, the sheer number of assets deployed, many of which are not integrated or only loosely connected to each other, leads to alert fatigue from frequent false positives. Add here compliance risks across industry verticals and it almost becomes too large of an issue to handle. In response, organizations must move to a connected system that provides clear visibility into risk and security exposure with its positioning. In a connected enterprise, all assets—from traditional ones like smartphones and laptops to connected technology like sensors or whole machinery lines in factories as well as people are visible and manageable. That allows risk & security teams to efficiently prioritize and respond to threats, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues using workflows and automation.

Automation and in particular AI and possibly blockchain, are important pieces in moving towards an always-on risk & security fabric and will eventually lead to connected security that automates detection of and response to incidents in real-time. In highly regulated environments such as agriculture, people can get sick when their produce has been contaminated. Connected security can pinpoint the risk, threat or vulnerability as the produce proceeds through the preparation process prior to delivery to the wider public.

Connected Service

Drive measurable business outcomes with digital products and services across ecosystems. By understanding the needs for service continuity, business priority, asset requirements and any threat or vulnerabilities to anticipate on how best to combine sourcing and delivery opportunities to deliver the right quality at the right time for the right money. Ultimately organizations dynamically can adjust outcomes based on current conditions for efficiency across their supply chains and partnerships. With growing connectivity, the exponential creation of data, and more sophisticated AI will eventually enable an enterprise that reacts in near-real time to factors both inside and outside. From supply chain issues to geopolitical considerations, the future connected enterprise thinks proactively about changes to its environment and automates its response to these changes as needed. Connected services is about understanding that no one enterprise delivers a service or product holistically and relies on partners, suppliers, govts, it is an ecosystem and ServiceNow is enabling that cohesive workflow

In the new age of cars and car delivery you see Tesla presenting a new model. Removing dealerships, owning supply chains, and simplifying compliance with government regulations for efficiency and safety. The challenge is in a world of global trade and finite resources it is difficult for any company to own all the supply chain as well as all the parts manufacturing. Even Tesla leverages partners for components needed for their cars. This reality shows that no one company truly delivers a complete product. It requires an ecosystem of partners and enterprises to deliver the product while also making the customer journey to consume that product one that engenders fierce loyalty.

ServiceNow as platform of Connected Enterprises

In a digital world everything is connected. The Now Platform is a workflow workhorse that routes tasks effectively through the organization using predictive and analytical technology to identify areas in need of attention. With the Now Platform as its engine, it is agile, adaptable, and intelligent to anticipate, automatically adjusting to changing market conditions, and optimizing the entirety of operations to maximize business outcomes, for the human it serves. The result is better understanding how work gets done and the opportunity to automate these into custom apps and workflows. This will lead to the true connected enterprise, and it’s the cultivates the technologies we see emerging today and able people and organizations to thrive in a ever changing world. At ServiceNow we look to the future with the use of AI, connected assets, advanced automation, consumerization of the enterprise, low code/no code, DevOps and cyber in order organizations to advance their value.

Connected Enterprise Transformation Journey

At most companies becoming a Connect Enterprise requires a transformation which requires major changes across highly entangled functions. The transformation will impact ultimately the whole of the organization. Beside strong vison and leadership its important to define intermediate goals along the journey to ensure continuous value created. We have defined three maturity stages to guide the journey.

Foundation

Digitizing the organization is fundamental requirement and most companies have embarked on this but still have a long way to go. Single-function shared services organizations focused on achieving function-specific value. Initially, these capabilities are foundational. The Now Platform is a workflow workhorse that routes tasks effectively throughout the organization while using predictive and analytical technology to identify areas in need of attention. The result: employees better understand how work gets done and can utilize a LEAN approached to make work more efficient by reducing friction.

Experience

Integrated multiple function’s shared services organizations to create more value through end-to-end process management. With growing connectivity, the exponential creation of data, and more sophisticated AI will eventually enable an enterprise that reacts in near-real time to factors both inside and out. From supply chain issues to geopolitical considerations, the future connected enterprise thinks proactively about changes to its environment and automates its response to these changes as needed.

Innovation

Advanced digital operating model which integrates business services and supply chain and enables enterprise strategy. This is the true connected enterprise, and it’s the culmination of the technologies we see emerging today that deepens our understanding of events and sharpening decision-making. We look to the future as technology provides more opportunities to advance organizations position

Conclusion

Since every company is embarking on a journey to become a connected enterprise, we are positioning the Now Platform to deliver workflows across any organization, and between any silos and systems, creating a seamless enterprise system of action that can unlock productivity and enable great employee and customer experiences.

The Now platform can be used as a digital Rosetta Stone that can connect departments, translate mismatched datasets, and align applications and systems in the unified language of modern digital business.

Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ServiceNow.