OneOffice™ experiences must drive how you scale digital workflows

When you scale digital workflows across the enterprise, focus on delivering OneOffice™ experiences for the greatest impact. That’s the advice enterprise ServiceNow and iOPEX leaders had when they joined an HFS Digital Roundtable (DRT) exploring the tools and change agents of transformation in sales, revenue, and product operations.

The DRT heard how working with the right service provider offers a fast track to bringing best practices in applying the benefits of ServiceNow software’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), Business Process Management (BPM), Customer Service Management (CSM), and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) modules.

The group discussed how the framework for scaling digital workflows using ServiceNow should focus on the experiences you want to deliver as outcomes rather than a narrow and tech-led systems integration approach. Expert partners can also help you identify the best use cases and the low-hanging opportunities in product operations.

OneOffice is even more important when service agents work from home

The context for scaling those workflows has changed dramatically. Transforming organizations’ operations remains challenging. The shock of the pandemic placed that challenge under a magnifying glass. First and foremost, organizations are looking for the ability to deliver goods and services digitally with compressed time windows. The old world of year-long transformation projects is over. Employers can’t assume their service agents will work from their physical service and delivery centers. Providing the service experience that makes leading brands successful requires new approaches.

ServiceNow’s technology offers solutions with which organizations can provide service experiences by designing workflows in the cloud. By leveraging a single data model, workflows can run across different domains and even through disparate functions to deliver end-to-end business outcomes. It is, therefore, little surprise that half of ServiceNow’s revenue growth is coming from outside its traditional home—the IT function.

A great platform experience translates into greater CX and EX

Connecting workflows in the cloud and across domains strongly aligns with the HFS OneOffice mindset. That mindset conceptualizes applied transformation by understanding the role of key change agents ranging from technology agents such as automation and AI to more human factors such as cultural change. The journey toward that OneOffice aims to deliver experience-led outcomes for employees, customers, and partners.

Naga Chakravarthy, Chief Digital Officer, iOPEX Technologies, summed up, “The next five years will see us using new platforms for interaction experience. It is all about simplifying and standardizing processes and applications to provide a great platform experience, which will directly translate into greater employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).”

Process and application optimization must place people at its heart

Operations management, whether for the front, middle, or back office, is often a conglomeration of manual processes with divergent monitoring and delivery systems. The goal of optimizing the processes and the applications required should be to place customer, employee, and partner experiences at heart. Ideally, we should rip out old systems and upgrade to modern digital fabric solutions, weaving together automation, workflow, AI, and insight technologies in one suite. In most cases, this would significantly reduce the number of applications and drive simplification of their management, but core system upgrades of this kind are lengthy and expensive.

Instead, a first step to modernizing the delivery infrastructure is to take a leaf from Vodafone’s playbook. The DRT heard how it kickstarted this journey by using off-the-shelf automation tools to provide self-service capabilities for customers and employees. Other routes discussed by the group include applying change agents such as runbooks and AIOps, supplementing using third-party tools such as Adobe for single sign-in, and using service management platforms such as ServiceNow running on existing legacy stacks.

Scaling up ServiceNow results in 30% greater efficiency at AT&T

Implementing ServiceNow for service management has been a trend among our DRT attendees in the last 12 to 18 months, driving smarter workflows and more efficient application management. When we asked an AT&T executive what efficiency they gained from using ServiceNow on a scaled basis (they have 18,000 customer service employees), the answer was 30%.

This new level of efficiency is built on the OneOffice mindset, linking front-, middle-, and back-office processes. This framework in Exhibit 1 can be a roadmap for sales and product operations workflow touching all parts of an organization.

Exhibit 1: Connect the front, middle, and back offices in the OneOffice to deliver employee and customer experience

Source: HFS Research, 2022

AT&T Business supports a wide range of small, mid-market, and enterprise customers, from 20-employee companies to Fortune 500 enterprises. A key question for AT&T is, “How do you provide automation solutions across all these varied environments?”

AT&T started this journey by providing APIs and microservices on legacy platforms, allowing integration with ServiceNow. All the focus is on leveraging those assets for improved user experience. The operations and post-sales transformations are where ServiceNow plays the greater part.

ServiceNow digitizes its manual processes; Vodafone starts simple

ServiceNow shared how optimizing product launch operations for them meant taking manual processes and digitizing them. It quickly identified which processes to automate and standardize. It then progressed from wireframe to execution and go-live in just three-and-a-half months, which was possible because ServiceNow did not have an extensive legacy to deal with.

DRT contributor Vodafone is on a journey to transform sales operations and has focused on simplifying what it does. Vodafone started by assessing all its activities end-to-end and identifying which they should stop, which they should continue, and which new activities they should start to close gaps and plan for the future. The assessment uncovered a lot of needless activity and processes. One major goal has been to facilitate self-service for the sales team using automation tools and platforms, but it had to start with simplifying the business.

Operational optimization can deliver much more than mere efficiencies

Many enterprises joining our DRT recognize that tech platforms deliver efficiencies but that the greater win comes from new sources of value those efficiencies allow them to pursue.

• Service Now predicts a 50%-plus increase in efficiency in its internal functions. But it also expects to benefit from the greater operational rigor that defining and implementing digital workflows demands, leading to better quality and self-management of applications like chatbots and driving new opportunities for customer interaction.
• iOPEX sees an “at least 30%” increase in speed or efficiency in its enterprise engagements. But it says that what is more important is the numerous other things that get done that those efficiencies allow room for.
• Vodafone did some internal work recently in reducing sales desk effort, and it believes as much as 50% of the work lends itself to automation.
• AT&T anticipates a 30% reduction in effort, but it says the main benefit will be from how ServiceNow allows value-adding process management and automation activities such as scaled chatbot workflow orchestration.

iOPEX advocates a holistic OneOffice approach to operations

As iOPEX’ highlights in its transformation playbook in Exhibit 2, it intends to operationalize the OneOffice. To deliver insight-led experiences, it ingests structured data, such as documents, and highly unstructured data, such as telemetry data, to glean an end-to-end process view. The underlying platforms go beyond the customer and employee experience that ServiceNow champions—and beyond a narrow view of the OneOffice.

The product experience platform helps clients prepare their operational setup for the strategic shift toward cloud-native enablement. One of the biggest cultural changes of the cloud-native paradigm is the shift from a project to a product mindset. The days of plan–build–run of multi-year transformation projects are numbered as cloud transformation forces IT leaders to act fast, think outside the norm, and embrace the blurring boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. Horizontal technology teams that focus almost exclusively on optimizing costs and providing resiliency are giving way to product-oriented teams focusing on driving responsiveness and agility. The central element of this new mindset lies in aligning IT operations with an entire product life cycle rather than being tied to a project’s start and end date. Thus, IT and, ultimately, OneOffice operations will align with business objectives.

For iOPEX, ServiceNow is one of the key change agents enabling this fundamental change. The client journeys have highlighted important lessons learned. Just like cloud-native transformation, the journey toward the OneOffice has no end state. Rather, it is a permanent state of transformation. The insights shared here should help articulate the North Star for this journey.

Exhibit 2: iOPEX’ transformation playbook adds product experience to the OneOffice mindset

Source: iOPEX, 2022

The Bottom Line: Digital platforms drive efficiencies, but look to experience outcomes to deliver new value.

Enterprises recognize they must make the leap from operational expense optimization to become innovation leaders driving improved operation experiences. They may save time and money without that leap, but they won’t create new value. Partners such as iOPEX must help them by bringing the HFS OneOffice to life by applying tools such as ServiceNow to create digital workflows with new and differentiated operating experiences for a range of people extending far beyond IT Service Management (ITSM)/IT Operations Management (ITOM).

DRT participants

• Phani Sridhar, iOPEX – Click here, to watch the video clip
• Rajesh Sharma, ServiceNow – Click here, to watch the video clip
• Sapna Jain, ATT – Click here, to watch the video clip
• Nigel Loughlin, Vodafone Business – Click here, to watch the video clip
• Nagarajan Chakravarthy, iOPEX – Click here, to watch the video clip