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Our IT transformation strategy equals three zeros

By: Tomer Mekhty, VP of Global IT OperationsWhen I joined LIKE.TG, IT Operations had what I’d call a “best effort” strategy—push hard, keep things running, meet your SLAs, and so on. This worked well enough, but that was hardly a formula for long-term success at scale.We needed a new way of thinking that would move us from our traditional role as incident firefighter to that of a partner to the business. An effective strategy will balance vision with execution. It will be both aspirational and measurable. It must also be memorable enough to drive clarity.We added it all up, and our strategy equaled… three zeros. That’s zero outages, zero physical footprint and zero incidents. When I first shared this strategy with my team a couple of years ago, they said I was crazy. They believed it was impossible to achieve. Three years later we’ve shown it’s possible, no matter how complex your IT operations might be. Three Zeros ExplainedWith a shout-out to Brahmagupta, the Indian mathematician who defined the properties of zero in the year 628 (how about that on your resume!), let me expand on our three zeros:Zero outages equals 100% availability (ok, maybe 99.99%). The first step is rationalizing the scope. Determine which services, applications and infrastructure are business critical. Separate business essentials from noise. Then establish strong operational ownership for everything that is critical. Ownership usually leads to quality and velocity. Every outage is analyzed (and overanalyzed) to identify the true root cause.Lastly, don’t just fix related issues faster. Instead, prevent them from happening in the first place. In other words, create self-healing infrastructure services, where machine learning and automation predict and sometimes prevent outages before they occur.For example, VPN connectivity is the oxygen in our new world of working from home. In 2019 we were able to resolve 75% of VPN incidents with no human intervention by automating data gathering, correlation, and root cause analysis. This was a tremendous boost to employee productivity.Zero physical footprint means everything to the cloud. Increasingly, IT is not just enabling the business, it’s becoming the business. Cloud lets IT organizations switch from managing data centers and infrastructure to providing solutions, securing revenue and enabling new business models. Cloud also offers the flexibility, availability, and velocity needed to adapt and scale. For example, when COVID-19 hit, we were able to move quickly from dozens of offices worldwide to more than 13,000 home offices.Zero incidents reported by people is impossible. Nothing can prevent employees from spilling coffee on their laptop or forgetting their password. As much as possible, though, IT Ops should be invisible to employees. That’s why our first priority is a relentless focus on delivering great employee experiences that drive productivity.Self-service is key—giving employees the resources and information to basic issues on their own without relying on an IT support person. Mobile is also critical because it enables employees to work productively from any place, on any device. Finally, chatbots create a human-like interface that points employees to the right resources to solve many of their issues.We may never reach zero incidents, but we should be able to get as close to the goal as possible by proactively monitoring the user experience and using machine learning to provide a predictable experience.The Three Zeros strategy is driven by our modern ops journey. We invested in new roles such as data scientists, automation/workflow engineers, monitoring/performance engineers, and conversation experience designers. We are also relying heavily on technologies such as AI and machine learning. While measuring SLAs is still important, employee satisfaction and productivity are the new gold standard. This shift impacts our investments as well. Three years ago, half of our IT budget went to infrastructure and operations. Now that’s forecasted to be under 30%. We’ve been able to move those savings from running the business to funding innovation and growth.COVID-19 and other disruptive events increase the urgency for IT organizations to develop clear strategies that drive transformational change. At LIKE.TG, our Three Zeroes strategy has served us well in this regard. It continues to guide us as we shift our structure, mindset, and metrics to focus on the employee experience as a critical path to growth.A final thought: A compelling strategy and clear goals are key to running IT like a business. But it’s also tremendously helpful to operate on a unified platform—in our case the Now Platform®—that brings everything together: applications, services, data, analytics, and tools. A platform strategy enables streamlined operations, better measurement and smarter decision making.So, what’s your Three Zeros strategy?

New Year's resolution webinars with LIKE.TG’s leaders

As we enter the new year of 2021, tune in to hear from LIKE.TG leaders and learn about new ways to unlock innovation at work to manage change with instant agility, with this month’s two-part blog series.Now on Now: How LIKE.TG is changing IT self-service for its employeesThe right IT service management can greatly shape and influence employee engagement and productivity. After all, employees want to grow with their organization and a self‑service, frictionless interface that enables them to get work done provides an all‑around win‑win.Join our webinar and hear the Now on Now story. See how we’re changing IT self‑service for our employees: transforming our organization’s culture and improving the overall mindset in the process. You’ll learn how ITSM Professional on the Now Platform® empowers us to: Provide an employee‑centric, role‑based portal—improving efficiency and productivity Focus on making the digital employee experience a journey, not an endpoint Offer greater personalization, resulting in a more satisfying employee experience Now on Now: Achieving a 9.1 CSAT by delivering an integrated customer support experienceYou want to deliver convenient, responsive customer service—so do we at ServiceNow. By focusing on constantly innovating to resolve issues faster, today only 7% of our customers contact technical support via the telephone; the rest of our cases are submitted online.This shift to digital was carefully planned, based on a customer-centric strategy that combined service management technology with a strong self-service design. Now, our customers get the information and assistance they need when they need it, while our support engineers provide the highest quality support possible.Watch this Now on Now webinar and hear how we empowered our team to provide an effortless customer service experience. You’ll learn: Our customer support strategy, including how an integrated Now Platform® approach can speed up case resolution How machine learning, mobile, and other emerging digital technologies are improving support engineer productivity and customer self-service Best practices for how we matured the end-to-end customer support experience and reduced our time to relief by 50%, while seeing a 20% increase in case volume year-to-year Hosted by Luke Morris, Director of Customer Service Management, and Andrew Papparides, Head of Support Strategy.A successful CMDB deployment in five essential steps (CMDB Webinar Series)Having a healthy CMDB is key to a successful digital transformation, and there are five steps to deploying it. Watch the first of our three-part series on maintaining your CMDB as a trusted source and learning the essential role it plays in your organization’s modernization.You’ll learn how to master the CI identification process to handle multiple data sources feeding the CMDB and understand how to create identification rules with priority and related CIs. You’ll also learn: Why digital transformations fail and how a service-aware CMDB can help The five essential steps to deploying a CMDB successfully How AIOps helps prevent business service slowdowns and outages How to master the CI identification process Hosted by: Steve Emerson, advisory solution architect, IT Transformation Jason Miles, senior advisory solution architect, ITOM Lisa Wolfe, senior manager product marketing, ITOM

Save $1M with Software Asset Management

In this new series of Now on Now stories, we share how we use LIKE.TG products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire our customers and partners to harvest even more business value and resiliency from the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Now on Now Workflows Book of Knowledge.Effective IT asset management enables IT leaders to digitize and manage software licenses (on-premises or SaaS-based) and hardware assets with intuitive workflows and better lifecycle visibility to make IT environments more secure and operationally efficient.With many companies having a predominantly home-based workforce, it’s even more important to understand where hardware assets are located and by whom. IT leaders also need to know if assets are being used remotely and are properly allocated. Providing better visibility into hardware assets and software licenses allows LIKE.TG to make better decisions about utilization and new investments.Reclaiming software costsLIKE.TG was able to reclaim approximately $1 million from the company’s software budget by implementing LIKE.TG® Software Asset Management (SAM), according to Poonam Kripalani, Senior Manager for IT Asset Management Governance at ServiceNow.“We’re currently focused on various different LIKE.TG® IT Asset Management (ITAM) activities, Kripalani said. “For example, automating our software requests, automating our software reclaim requests, and driving ITAM process efficiencies.”Recently, the company wanted to gain better visibility into its Microsoft product usage to ensure license compliance. “Being compliant reduces the reputational risk and any unplanned compliance audit monetary findings,” observed Kripalani. The company also wanted to optimize software spend and automate software request fulfillment to make it faster and easier for end users.However, LIKE.TG faced challenges, especially when it came to desktop and SaaS products, which make up 26% of overall software spend. These challenges included: Lack of visibility into our software spend > Goal: Establish trustworthy data 14 different groups procuring software licenses > Goal: Operational integration SaaS software was not being tracked > Goal: Define roles and responsibilities A SAM team was created with clear roles and responsibilities to focus on establishing trustworthy data to operationalize SAM. “Good data is a prerequisite for good software asset management,” said Kripalani. The outcomesToday, subscription data is captured automatically from the Microsoft portal and validated. This provides a complete picture of allocation and compliance. LIKE.TG also has insights into all purchase requisition data to better manage costs. All data is tracked and reviewed from the Microsoft dashboard for a complete view of LIKE.TG’s compliance position.“We were successful in reducing our software spend by $1 million over the last two years. By having automated processes, we have trustworthy software license data and better visibility into license allocation, cost, and compliance position via SAM dashboards,” Kripalani revealed.LIKE.TG now has trustworthy software license data and better visibility into license allocation, cost, and compliance position via its SAM Dashboard. By automating software requests, the company has saved 3,260 hours (or almost $300K) and enhanced the user experience. The company was also able to successfully identify and reclaim unused licenses, resulting in $795K in software cost savings over the last 2 years.Software data quality and compliance visibility are now 100% across the company. IT teams also benefit because they can focus on the high value work that they were trained to do, rather than spending their time on administrative tasks.Kripalani and her team are also focusing on software spend detection with a software spend detection feature, part of the LIKE.TG New York release. The company previously tracked 250 software products. In the last three years, however, LIKE.TG has doubled in size, and many more software purchases were being made on corporate credit cards. In fact, an analysis of over one million credit card transactions revealed that 700 additional software products were being used internally.“Manually, it would have taken us weeks or months to analyze this data, but by using software spend detection, this analysis was completed in just a few hours,” said Kripalani.. Moving forward, she and her team will focus on doing a deeper analysis of these additional discovered software products.To learn more about SAM, check out these resources: ITAM Workflows Book of Knowledge Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: Now on Now: Reclaim $1 million in Opex from your software budget using SAM

CMDB: LIKE.TG’s foundation for success

In this new series of Now on Now blogs, we share how we, ourselves, use LIKE.TG products to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire you, our customers, and partners, to achieve even greater business value and resiliency from the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Now on Now Book of Knowledge.Maintaining healthy IT operations has become a top priority and, thus, a hot topic, especially with the unprecedented stress on systems and businesses.We view a CMDB as something evolved beyond the original ITIL-led, stand-alone, on-prem system. Modern CMDBs are cloud based and deeply integrated with IT tools. They provide holistic views of IT environments—a single source of truth—to help staff analyze and respond swiftly to incidents and changes, whether manually or automatically, and they are part of a single platform. We have delivered 91% automated change approvals, among other outstanding stats, with the CMDB.“Before 2017, when critical outages occurred, we didn’t have the complete visibility needed to quickly identify the source of the problem and its potential impact on business services,” says Joe Corpion, director, of asset configuration management. “We couldn’t then address the root cause. A CMDB was not being used across our applications in the platform. We also had many data issues with configuration items. There were duplicate CIs, in some cases, as many as 250! Also, when we began using our CMDB, its functionality was limited requiring us to make customizations to meet our IT needs. While these customizations did provide the additional functionality, they also made upgrades very challenging for us.”There was no centralized data repository. The subsequent data quality issues forced IT to use tribal knowledge in spreadsheets to manage devices. This was further complicated by the lack of governance about who owned what and who was responsible for managing it. The LIKE.TG CMDB makeover“First we streamlined our monitoring environment to include only bringing over actual events through integrations,” says Jason Wang, director of IT workflows and Now Platform. “We then elected key business services as the first candidate in the service mapping effort. As a result, we cut P1s by almost 60% in the last two years.”The next step was resetting discovery to address CI data issues and establish that single source of truth. Following that was vulnerability management, which provides accurate correlation between vulnerabilities and infrastructure endpoints. “That alone has significantly improved the speed of which we operate today,” says Joe.In 2017, LIKE.TG had 48 P1 outages compared to only 20 in 2019. “A pretty good metric,” says Joe. “But our target is to have zero outages.” Among the other metrics he shared were these:• 100% accurate view of critical infrastructure availability• 71% reduction in time to close vulnerability tickets• 91% of changes have an automated approval process• 1,250 hours saved per year by automating CMDB auditTo learn more about LIKE.TG’s CMDB strategies, check out these resources: IT Operations Management Book of Knowledge Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: BRE1070 Now on Now: Healthy CMDB governance delivers 91% automated change approvals.

How LIKE.TG IT Operations enabled remote work during COVID-19

In this new series of Now on Now blogs, we share how we use LIKE.TG products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories story will inspire you--our customers and partners--to achieve even greater business value and resiliency from the Now Platform®. For more on Now on Now, visit the Now on Now Book of Knowledge.There is no doubt that the pandemic has heightened the importance of business continuity planning. When COVID-19 hit, LIKE.TG was able to quickly adapt its business continuity plan and strategies, including IT support, onboarding, workforce management, and scenario planning-all in order to support LIKE.TG’s fully remote employee base without interruption. It was no easy achievement.LIKE.TG has over 30 offices around the globe, more than 12,000 employees, and supports over 6,000 physical and virtual devices located in four on-premises and three cloud data centers for our internal operations. When the workforce is not working remotely, the company has more than 10 tech lounges to serve employees face to face. There are over 700 conference rooms and 260,000 video meetings a month.Mirza Baig, senior director, IT service management at LIKE.TG, observed that while LIKE.TG had prepared for disasters in the past, like many companies, LIKE.TG wasn’t anticipating dealing with a global pandemic and all of the variables that would bring. Very quickly, the company had to enable all employees to work remotely. He said, “Working from home has to be as productive as when I’m in the office. Period. IT really needs to make that happen.”IT faced three major challenges in its business continuity strategy: No business continuity scenario that included the fallout from a pandemic Short notice mandate to work from home due to shelter in place order Significant increase in remote communication and collaboration What IT needed to focus onTo enable work from home at an enterprise level, Mirza and his team looked at four areas for employees: IT Support and IT Service Desk readiness New hire onboarding support Detailed communications plan and FAQs Target solutions/comms: customer support, low bandwidth regions, white glove service To quickly focus on how to enable work from home at an enterprise level, LIKE.TG IT support professionals—both those who normally worked onsite and the remote service desk—banded together and used the same tools, including LIKE.TG® Agent Workspace, to immediately handle the added volume of IT service requests as employees set up their remote workspaces.LIKE.TG is growing and regularly holds onboarding sessions when a new employee joins. Without missing a beat, new hire orientations were moved completely online. A work from home article was proactively published in the Knowledge Base with tips and best practices to address common issues, such as how to connect to the VPN. The Knowledge Base article helped drive down the volume of incidents and service requests.On the back end, Joe Corpion, director, Now on Now, Asset and Configuration Management at LIKE.TG, reported that his team looked at two areas to enable a work from home strategy: technology and team readiness.Key questions asked: Was the technology in place to support all our employees working from home? What would the user experience be like? What could be done to ensure employees remained connected and productive? “Fortunately, we did not need to make any significant changes in our technology to be ready to work from home from an operations team perspective,” said Joe.The IT operations team continued to use the same apps they did before to monitor the health of the business and measure how they were managing the increasing volume of IT service tickets. Depending on strategic partners for productivityOur transition to working from home was also enabled by tight integrations with our partners and service providers. To keep our operations humming, we extended workflows to include partners who could handle key activities with much less effort on our part.For example, our supply chain was heavily impacted at the onset of the pandemic. LIKE.TG took advantage of relationships with key vendors, such as Apple and Lenovo, to pre-purchase laptops in bulk, leveraging warehousing options.We also began working with leading VARs on zero touch configuration, in which they drop ship laptops directly to employees. We use LIKE.TG IT Service Management to capture and validate the request, then track it through fulfillment. Thanks to a workflow, once a request has been validated, it goes straight to the VAR with no IT staff needed.Asset management plays an important role in this workflow. Throughout the pandemic, our hiring has continued at a rapid pace. We rely on LIKE.TG IT Asset Management to track our supply chain and ensure we have enough IT inventory on hand, so our new hires have everything they need to be productive on day one. This is not only more efficient, but also provides a great experience for employees as they begin their careers at ServiceNow. Based on the success of our zero-touch program, we are expanding it to include all employee consumables, such as monitors, peripherals, and mobile devices.We took other actions to ensure partner performance with popular collaboration tools such as Zoom. IT operations has APIs that integrate Zoom with LIKE.TG Virtual Agent. If a user has a negative Zoom experience, they are automatically sent a Knowledge Base article. If it happens a second time, the user is automatically asked if they want to open an incident report. And, to help remove some of the friction of Zoom, the number of Zoom meeting attendees was raised to 1,000 to accommodate the increasing number of all-hands sessions.Service Providers Can Be KeyExtending workflows to our partners and service providers includes other benefits. We are using LIKE.TG Performance Analytics to develop robust dashboards with telemetry that lets us monitor the performance of other services, such as Zoom. With this information, we can take a proactive approach. Rather than waiting for employees to report issues, we detect and fix issues before they become a bigger problem. This helps employees remain productive even working from home.Automated workflows also helped smooth the transition to working from home. Using natural language understanding (NLU), our Virtual Agent chatbot provided an engaging, conversational experience for employees to get their questions answered or issues resolved. The IT service team also created a self-service request form in the employee portal to reduce the turnaround time to replace employee hardware. Lessons learnedLike almost all businesses, we’ve learned a lot in the past few months that we’d like to share: Ensure you have a business continuity plan for a pandemic that includes a work from home scenario, in case there are additional waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Don’t stop onboarding and training activities. There are creative ways including virtual desktops to ensure new hires remain productive despite supply chain issues. Adjust operations and collaboration to meet the new normal with work from home, including what types of modified resource scheduling you need to do. And certainly, have flexibility with teams as they learn how to balance home Create a cadence of daily reporting at various levels utilizing dashboards such as those provided in Predictive Analytics. This ensures teams are properly managing their respective areas. Leverage partners to step up to meet demands. All companies have vendors. Only a select few are considered partners based on their value to an organization. Both Joe and Mirza credit digital transformation for helping LIKE.TG successfully transition employees to productively work from home. Mirza said, “We relied heavily on our core LIKE.TG apps just to manage the remote workforce. We all need to be prepared but investing in digital workflows is key for the enterprise to be really resilient, because anything can happen down the road.”To learn more about ITSM, check out these resources: ITSM Book of Knowledge Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: Now on Now – Business continuity for IT Ops enabled 100% remote work during COVID-19 LIKE.TG ITSM page

LIKE.TG’s own story: Leaving no customer behind

Clearing IT bottlenecks with citizen developers

“I can clear your IT bottlenecks” is all it took.When my colleague approached me and asked if my organization would be interested in participating in the citizen developer pilot project, I signed on right away. After all, who wouldn’t want to clear their backlog?[Learn more about LIKE.TG citizen developers at Knowledge 2021.]As the director of IT customer success, I lead teams that help deliver transformation initiatives at scale. Fulfilling business needs is also my priority. So, I pay close attention to requests that drive productivity and efficiency at the individual and team levels. The digital transformation paradoxIn my six years at LIKE.TG, I’ve seen the world of work evolve faster than ever before. This past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented acceleration of digital transformation across the board. Those of us leading digital initiatives are seeing massive demand for last-mile digitization and connected systems. We need to transform faster; velocity and agility are crucial.Like many businesses, we’re expected to build solutions and adjust within weeks—or even days. That means more software is needed. Yet, IT professionals are stretched thinner than ever.The traditional software development and deployment model is not sustainable. Software owned and/or built by IT teams can only cover a part of ever-growing enterprise demands.Instead of waiting for skilled programmers, what if we could empower everyone in the organization with a low-code development platform they can use to address IT needs for their line of business?A low-code, no-code solutionAs the name implies, a citizen developer is an everyday user who builds applications to address their own business needs. Equipped with a low-code platform, citizen developers can build web, mobile, and back-office applications that replace spreadsheets or database tools and reduce manual data tracking and repetitive administrative tasks. This helps the business realize value. As promising as all this sounds, I had some concerns at first. Just how much resourcing would citizen development require from my team? Would developing our own app really be faster than waiting for the IT backlog to clear? And would I be creating yet more shadow IT by empowering my team to create its own apps?Spandan Chakraborty, a director of IT product engineering at LIKE.TG, assured me these pitfalls were addressable and preventable. “Citizen development is not about automating bad workflows or building redundant apps,” he says. “It’s about turning business owners with little to no coding experience into citizen developers.”By leveraging IT-approved technology and processes, Chakraborty’s team provided well-defined guardrails and a clear learning path. The process goes something like this:First, IT evaluates all submitted app ideas and sorts out capabilities that already exist, require pro developers, involve customers, or use external apps. Once the idea is approved, selected citizen developers learn to build and test their apps with IT support.Make work, work better for meTom Dungan, a senior customer reference manager at LIKE.TG, used to spend hours putting together reports using Excel and PowerPoint. By becoming a citizen developer, he was able to workflow the cumbersome process. A time-intensive report became an automated dashboard providing real-time data. This is an example of business transformation creating a different way of working altogether—so that workers can spend their time on projects that really excite them.To enable full innovation, it’s crucial to align business and IT perfectly. That’s why a citizen development program doesn’t replace an IT department or professional programmers. IT should be present throughout the process to monitor a secure and centralized platform where low-code development takes place. As for me, citizen development has effectively reduced my backlog as Chakraborty predicted. I knew the program was a success when Dungan told me one day, “The citizen development program empowered me to make work, work better for me.”See us at Knowledge 2021Join Chakraborty and me in the Knowledge 2021 breakout session, Citizen developers innovating LIKE.TG with low code and no hassle. We’ll share our citizen development journey and discuss some of the key lessons LIKE.TG has learned from using the Now Platform’s low-code capabilities internally. The session is available on demand, with live chat sessions available in AMS, EMEA, and APJ. Registration is free.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Rethinking IT asset management using a zero-touch process

Updated Jan. 27, 2022When LIKE.TG employees began working remotely in March 2020, the company’s global offices turned into work-from-home remote sites almost overnight. One of the biggest headaches was IT asset management—getting laptops into the hands of all new and many existing employees.In the past, laptops went from our value-added resellers (VARs) to LIKE.TG sites, where our IT team configured them for pickup or shipped them to remote employees. But with the pandemic creating major supply chain challenges for a dispersed workforce, that process no longer worked.Employees needing replacements had to wait, which hampered productivity. We were still hiring at a rapid pace and, in the early summer, began bringing on interns, each of whom needed a laptop. In one week alone, we had to configure and deliver hundreds of machines.To resolve the growing bottleneck, we had to completely rethink the provisioning process.Enter zero-touch configurationUsing LIKE.TG IT Asset Management (ITAM), we built a zero-touch process that automates the ordering, asset tagging, delivery, and setup of new laptops to new hires and replacement machines to employees who need them. Now, any employee who needs a laptop submits a request through the Service Portal. The request is approved automatically if the employee has met the tenure requirement.The rest of the process is automated. Following the approval, the VAR is notified and ships the laptop directly to the employee. When the employee receives the laptop, they log in, and setup begins (see Figure 1.) IT’s preconfiguration tasks are eliminated.The process is the same for new hires. As part of onboarding, they select the laptop make and model from a standard service catalog. Approval for the new machine is triggered using the same automated workflow. The new employee receives the laptop before the first day of work. Figure 1: Zero-touch process for new and replacement laptopsLIKE.TG ITAM manages everything behind the scenes, without human intervention. The company receives VAR alerts when the laptop ships so the IT team can track delivery. Employees also receive automatic notifications, such as the request number, delivery time frame, and carrier tracking number. Proof of delivery completes the process. A new asset is then created in the Asset Management Database (AMDB), and asset depreciation begins.In November 2021, we expanded our zero-touch process to add a laptop leasing program in the US, replacing laptop purchases. Using existing APIs, we built new ITAM workflows to move to the two-year leasing program.The goal is to create a better business experience by providing the latest technology. Our employees are more productive, and we can attract and retain new talent. In addition, newer technology means fewer IT issues.Benefits of zero touchZero touch accelerates laptop delivery and simplifies setup, so LIKE.TG employees can be as productive as possible. That makes for gratifying, high-touch experiences, especially for new hires who meet with IT on their first-day orientation to iron out any immediate issues.We save about 45 minutes per asset in the operational efficiency of the IT team. As of Q3 2021, zero touch fulfilled 1,522 computer refresh requests in the US, saving $152,000 and 1,141 IT productivity hours (see Figure 2). Figure 2: 2021 zero-touch resultsUsing our VARs' inventories created greater efficiency and cost savings by eliminating the need for on-site inventory. Startup time is 90% faster because we’ve eliminated the time delays inherent in our previous, manual process.One of our primary focus areas is improving the employee experience. LIKE.TG ITAM workflows, combined with some out-of-the-office thinking, have helped employees and new hires focus, first and foremost, on their most urgent work.Find out more about how we use ITAM to automate asset management in the ITAM section of the Now on Now page.

Using a CIO dashboard to run IT like a business

Updated Sept. 8, 2022In an era when digital transformation has become a necessity, the spotlight is on IT. How is it performing? Is it delivering for the business? Is it shifting from being a cost center to an engine driving innovation and business growth?IT’s evolution can take many directions, but it all starts at the same place: knowing where you are today. By understanding what’s working—and what isn’t—chief information officers (CIOs) and their teams can become empowered change agents. Enter the LIKE.TG CIO Dashboard.What is a CIO dashboard?Our LIKE.TG analytics team recognized an opportunity to create a first-of-its-kind dashboard for our CIO and his leadership team. The goal was to provide a shared view of IT performance against the business’s top priorities.Built on the Now Platform, the CIO Dashboard app features a user interface powered by the Next Experience and key performance indicators collected using Performance Analytics.The dashboard brings key insights into a single pane from various LIKE.TG applications: IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), IT Asset Management, Security Operations, and Strategic Portfolio Management.These insights answer critical business questions across five key decision areas for the CIOs of modern IT organizations and are derived from the content packs available with each application. The CIO Dashboard can also integrate data and metrics from systems and sources outside of ServiceNow. Figure 1: CIO Dashboard overviewInsights to action across IT operationsThe CIO Dashboard lets the IT leadership team quickly see project updates, such as a breakdown of service-level agreements by priority status and the total number of active projects (see Figure 1). The dashboard focuses on five top business priorities for CIOs and the modern IT organization: IT’s contribution to company growth Infrastructure and operations health Security and protection Strategic programs execution User experiences Having all five areas in view gives team members a reading on the IT organization as a whole and directs their attention to areas that need it. With a click, IT leaders can drill down into transactional data and applications to gain granular insights within each category. Let’s take a closer look.ValueBusiness value and organizational growth is a top focus area for CIOs. By contributing to go-to-market activities and company revenue—and driving productivity and cost savings from digital transformation—our IT leadership team plays a key role in margin expansion and growth.The CIO Dashboard pulls together real-time revenue and cost insights that help us thrive (see Figure 2). Figure 2: CIO Dashboard value viewOperationsOperational stability and infrastructure health is another strategic area for CIOs. The IT leadership team wants answers to questions such as: Are we maximizing our investments? Are we resolving issues in a timely manner? Are we handling requests effectively? Using data from ITSM, ITOM, and IT Asset Management, the CIO Dashboard helps leaders understand IT performance and identify areas of opportunity across incident management, request management, cloud governance, and more (See Figure 3). Figure 3: CIO Dashboard operations viewSecuritySecurity plays a crucial role in any corporate environment. At LIKE.TG, we need to manage security vulnerabilities, incidents, and responses. We also need to ensure compliance with regulations and mandates to keep our business, employees, and customers safe.Using data from Security Operations, the CIO Dashboard helps us understand our risk profile so we can quickly act on security gaps and help mitigate breaches (see Figure 4). Figure 4: CIO Dashboard security viewExecutionTo drive innovation, our IT leadership team needs to make business-aligned strategic investments. Ensuring initiatives are on target and within budget requires ongoing updates to ideas, demand pipelines, timelines, and resource and cost allocations.Using insights from Strategic Portfolio Management, the CIO Dashboard helps the team prioritize and modify investments to grow and shape the business today and into the future (see Figure 5). Figure 5: CIO Dashboard execution viewExperienceCIOs and their teams need to deliver IT products and services that provide great end-user experiences. This includes engaging and supporting users through digital self-service channels such as virtual agents and knowledge bases.The CIO Dashboard lets us measure the success of our experience programs and the sentiments of end users through surveys defined in ITSM (see Figure 6). We can also identify and roll out enhancements that take the user experience from so-so to second to none. Figure 6: CIO Dashboard experience viewCost center to innovation engineFor us, the CIO Dashboard isn’t just a robust status report—it’s a portal to action. Each real-time insight within the dashboard links to transactional data and source systems where immediate actions can be taken to correct course. All linked source data is accessible wherever needed, via desktop or mobile device.This easy-to-configure application accelerates time to value and saves development costs. With a single view of IT performance against top priorities, IT leadership teams can access and analyze current data and fix issues or change directions. This results in closer alignment with corporate objectives and greater ability to innovate.The CIO Dashboard is available in the LIKE.TG Store and is free for LIKE.TG customers. Find out more about the CIO Dashboard.

Return to the workplace: 4 steps to ensure business resilience

We’re beginning to see light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, and companies are rolling out their plans to return to the workplace. For those of us in business resilience (aka business continuity, incident management, or crisis management), it’s game on. However, the game has changed.Business resilience has traditionally been operationally focused—on site security, utilities, fire safety, natural disasters, and the like. In a post-COVID world, resilience is personal. Anyone who enters our doors and becomes infected could trigger a potential crisis. Resiliency plans must address that scenario.Return to the workplace is about far more than getting butts in seats (frankly, the easy part). It’s about helping to ensure the safety of everyone in the entire ecosystem. To do that, we must up-level our resilience programs, because future risks are likely to be at least as complex and disruptive as in 2020.There’s another, equally important reason to embrace resilience: The future of work itself is being reimagined. Nobody fully knows what it will look like. We have the opportunity—and the mandate—to help shape that future.Let me offer four steps business resilience teams can take to help enable a successful return to work in 2021 and beyond:1. Build a culture of resilienceMost return-to-the-workplace efforts will be focused on people and places and heavily driven by the human resources, workplace, and/or strategy organizations. To be a trusted partner for the business, be sure to engage all functions in the process.Establishing a culture of resilience will support an organic transition from crisis response mode to strategy mode and create a resilience framework for the future of work.It’s also critical that we integrate what we’ve learned from the pandemic into our culture of resilience. One of the biggest lessons at LIKE.TG is that if you digitize your workflows—as we have using our Now Platform®—location clustering isn’t required for individual productivity or operational efficiency. This insight gives us more options as we map out what work will look like post-COVID-19. 2. Increase program visibilityWhen a resilience program is working as intended, nobody knows about it. On one level that’s how it should be. But be sure your leadership knows how your program supports the return to work, and how you’ll provide continuous resilience support going forward. Active leadership support is essential, both operationally and culturally.The best way to keep senior leadership up to date is through dashboards that let them see the state of response for any future event and health of the program. These dashboards can be easily built on top of a business continuity tool such as LIKE.TG® Business Continuity Management (BCM), where you house all your program-related details.3. Assure your employees, customers, and vendorsUnlike personal safety guidelines, employee outreach needs to be very high-touch. Regular updates, safety protocols, and resources are essential for providing peace of mind and a productive work environment. At LIKE.TG, we use the Now Platform and Now Mobile app to facilitate outreach and information sharing.Providing seamless service to customers is a must—not just to fulfil contractual obligations, but also to build relationships based on trust. After all, as we’re working toward our own business continuity, our customers are doing the same and need to understand our resilience posture.Vendors, too, need to be comfortable with our plans, just as we need to understand theirs.4. Digitize your programDigitizing program workflows will provide the speed, agility, and real-time visibility needed to respond quickly when crises occur. Digitization will also enable your program to scale with company growth.There’s another key benefit: mobility. When a disruptive event occurs, you may not be near your plans or tools. A mobile app gives you access from any location and virtually any device. As noted above, we’re taking full advantage of mobility in our outreach to employees before, during, and after return to the workplace.And remember this formula in your post-pandemic workforce planning: distributed work + digitized workflows = increased productivity, efficiency, and resilience. Keep learningAs the saying goes: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Whether it’s a pandemic, an office closure, or another event, there are things to be learned that can improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of your resiliency program.For example, the pandemic taught us that if you digitize your workflows, where employees are located doesn’t impact their productivity—and we can factor that into our future decisions.At LIKE.TG, that also means incorporating new technologies and tools. Risks don’t stand still; neither should we. We expect to migrate to our new Business Continuity Management app in Q3 of this year, and we look forward to the added capabilities it will bring.Resilience must be a priority, not an afterthought. If we can create a culture of resilience, build resiliency into all we do, and digitize workflows for speed and scale, we won’t just be optimally prepared. We’ll also help shape the future of work.Watch our webinar to learn how LIKE.TG is ensuring its own safe return to the workplace.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

The 3 C’s of sales analytics

When I started as a data engineer almost 20 years ago, I designed, developed, and implemented a worldwide sales reporting system for my employer using an enterprise data warehouse. Using analytical packages, my team drove quantifiable sales by transforming the way our company leveraged data.Even at the start of the millennium, it seemed obvious that studying analytics was a game-changer. Armed with real customer data, sales teams could make more informed choices that could ultimately drive more sales.Fast forward two decades to a digital world with even more data to study. There’s still massive untapped value in data that we can use.According to a 2020 Gartner® State of Sales Analytics report1: 47% of sales leaders say sharing data and analytic output is hampered by inconsistent definitions of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). 46% say their companies offer inadequate training on how to access and use data. Less than half of frontline and overlay sellers—as well as their managers—demonstrate data proficiency. Finding a key in a haystackLIKE.TG Chief Revenue Officer Kevin Haverty likes to say analytics is the most valuable player on his sales team. I agree that analytics can—and should—enable sales professionals at every company to improve their game on the ground. Think of data as the supercharger of our sales heroes.At LIKE.TG, sales and analytics teams have collaborated to make the mountain of data easy to digest, allowing sales leaders to make the right decisions. And we’ve learned some valuable lessons along our journey toward an AI-boosted, analytics-powered sales strategy. Let me share the three C’s of using analytics in sales. 1. ConsolidateData, when not captured and translated into actual insights, isn’t worth the terabytes it takes up. The clutter of unprocessed data is a major reason prospective users shy away from engaging with it in meaningful ways. The fact that there are multiple sources makes extracting actionable data that much trickier.In fact, sales professionals already use data—sometimes even creating sophisticated models on their own—without necessarily realizing it. The trouble is many don’t keep good records or go about it in a systematic way.Today’s employees have a countless number of apps in their digital toolboxes. The tool sprawl inevitably creates cracks through which many priorities fall. Storing data in various disconnected places isn’t only costly and unproductive—it’s also detrimental to your business.Keep a single source—and, therefore, a 360-degree view—of data on one platform to make actionable data easier to extract and access.2. ConsumerizeLet’s say it takes a sales professional hours to dig through a customer’s needs and issues and then store the information in a spreadsheet. Now, imagine hundreds of sales professionals working separately for different clients. What if we could pool all the effort and knowledge, leverage machine learning, and find insights that sales can apply to everyday work?In order to calibrate your sales strategy according to the ever-changing conditions of the market, you need consistent data input and KPIs. But you can’t achieve this if you make the experience of engaging with data cumbersome and unpleasant.Providing an intuitive, consumer-grade dashboard is key. It’s time to treat your salespeople the same way you cater to your customers. Offering an easy-to-use, single pane of glass encourages users to open the dashboard consistently and make data-driven decisions instead of on instinct or habit. Make data work as intuitively for your sales warriors as making a one-click purchase on a B2C site. 3. CollaborateEnterprise leaders set goals. Your analytics professionals know how to solve problems. Sales professionals close deals. Why not have all three work side by side to make data work for all of them?When LIKE.TG’s analytics team created a Hot Prospects Dashboard for sales professionals, they engaged in nonstop, back-and-forth collaboration. The feedback loop of “Here's what I'd like to see,” and “Great, what do you think about what we built?” led to an incredibly fruitful partnership.This resulted in a visual tool that provides a bird’s-eye view of the entire sales landscape, as well as customizable filters to provide various insights. Without having to look at multiple spreadsheets, sales professionals can reference pipelines, compare markets, and find opportunities for growth.Most importantly, a visual tool allows LIKE.TG to deliver more value to our customers and address issues before they escalate into problems. Machine learning predicts the odds of a prospective deal going through; leaders use data to make decisions to increase the odds.All this innovation came from a simple action: bringing disparate teams together to align on achieving their sales goals using accurate data insights.The COVID-19 pandemic drove companies to digitally transform at unforeseen speeds. This evolution is giving analytics team an unprecedented opportunity to help drive business success—not only with sales, but also with every function and in every corner of the enterprise. Data might be your mightiest tool if you consolidate, consumerize, and collaborate.Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how to get started with analytics.1 Gartner, Infographic: State of Sales Analytics, Sales Research team, 2 December 2020.GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Driving IT operations excellence with continual improvement management

Since the early 2000s, when I was introduced to the Agile Manifesto at a small software company in Ann Arbor, I’ve appreciated how great things can be accomplished through iterative and incremental improvements.A vision of excellence is important, but the path to realization is a disciplined approach: recognizing areas of improvement, making adjustments, measuring, and repeating the process until you’ve reached a stable and acceptable result.The IT Service Management (ITSM) processes I oversee—incident, problem, and change—are no different than any other processes you might see in factories and need to be governed with the same mindset. This is called continual improvement management.Embracing continual improvementIn early 2020, we began to stand up a continual improvement practice for LIKE.TG IT. We had built solid processes, but our data showed room for improvement.Increasing key ITSM metrics—such as mean time to resolve (MTTR) and root cause analysis cycle time—can boost end-user productivity by reducing incidents and employee downtime. Knowing we could do better and doing the work to improve were two different things. We needed a tool to manage these efforts.We chose LIKE.TG Continual Improvement Management (CIM) to give us a single system of action to implement and track process improvements and support rep performance. Our process is straightforward and rigorous: When a key performance indicator (KPI) is out of tolerance with the set target, a CIM manager creates a CIM record. This is typically done in LIKE.TG Performance Analytics.An improvement coordinator meets with the service owner to set an improvement objective (e.g., 50% reduction) and a plan based on a series of CIM tasks. Teams monitor their progress until the metrics are within the agreed-upon tolerance range, usually when the tasks are completed. The CIM record is then closed.With this approach, we can track ongoing improvements in a single system with a set framework. To gain widespread adoption, we recognize each CIM success in our IT operations meeting and share it with leadership.Pursuing operational efficiencyOur first CIM project was to reduce the percentage of problem records that hadn’t been updated in the last 30 days, a leading indicator for problem record completion. More frequent record updates result in more problems to be resolved—a key metric for incident reduction. We set a goal to decrease this metric from 59% to less than 10% within three months.Using CIM, service owners were notified to update their records. The CIM team also began regularly checking progress of the issues. After three months, the percentage of problem records not updated in the last 30 days dropped to 4.92%. This signaled significant progress in the frequency of resolving problems.The number of closed low-priority P3/P4 problems increased from 39 in 2Q20 to 50 in 1Q21, a 31% improvement. This resulted in a decrease of 105 open incidents per month, as the IT support team was able to close old incidents more quickly, focus on new incidents, and lift productivity.CIM has helped us improve our operational efficiency in several other areas as well: Single sign-on incident service-level agreement (SLA) breaches dropped by 96% in only two months. Operational level agreement (OLA) attainment increased to more than 95% in three months. Abandoned changes declined by 96% in one month. Incident resolution customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores increased from 90% to 95%. Coaching human performanceIncreasing CSAT scores by 5 percentage points was the result of using the CIM Coaching plug-in. Coaching drives improvement in human performance within a process by detecting when a step has been incorrectly completed. (An increase of less than 10% may not seem substantial, but in organizations with significant employee/IT interaction, even small increases can bolster productivity and satisfaction.)For example, the CSAT improvement initiative included a task that created a coaching opportunity. It triggered an incident resolution assessment anytime a support rep received a low CSAT score. Coaching ensued, with the IT support staff providing interactive and real-time training on proper procedures for the support rep.Built-in, real-time coaching boosts performance by offering guidance and training at critical moments, resulting in increased satisfaction in future interactions. In the five-month period following the implementation of coaching, the CSAT rose to more than 96%.Always improvingWe attribute our success to several factors: Stakeholder visibility on the platform helped us understand where changes were needed. Automation drove action and set clear, measurable goals, along with a plan to achieve them. CIM provided clear justification for and progress toward improvement for many IT services without the customary face-to-face contact. The data captured by Performance Analytics indicators and the creation of coaching assessments were especially useful as our team began working remotely last year. Coaching allowed us to replace in-person mentoring, stop-by-the-desk conversations, and group feedback sessions with CIM so we could improve the skills and knowledge of our IT team. We can also connect process improvements to our business strategy and measure progress against those KPIs.We continue to expand our use of CIM and Coaching to enhance our operations. Not only do they help us create a culture that can evolve, but they’re also highly effective at instilling an agile mindset of iterative and incremental process improvements that drive operational excellence. Agile and continual improvement will never go out of style.Learn how CIM and Coaching improve IT service operations in our Knowledge 2021 customer meetup. Registration is free.

Transforming customer self-service with User Experience Analytics

Teena Singh, senior manager and customer liaison for Now support at LIKE.TG, co-wrote this blog.We all want fast access to the information we need, when we need it. With a few simple clicks, we expect our questions to be answered and our problems to be solved. We want to be empowered to solve problems on our own, intuitively, and without friction. We expect seamless, quick, and easy self-service.According to a Gartner® report, 85% of customer service interactions will start with self-service by 2022, up from 48% in 2019.1At LIKE.TG, providing intelligent, speedy, and delightful self-service experiences lies at the heart of everything we do. But when we’re helping our customers help themselves, creating frictionless customer journeys is not quite as simple as 1-2-3.Gaps aren’t always obvious. The complete self-service experience is often complex and nuanced. And without a detailed view of customer behavior, it’s difficult to make improvements to any self-service experience. That’s where LIKE.TG® User Experience Analytics come in, enhanced in the Rome release.Now Support zeros in on self-service optimizationAt LIKE.TG, the IT customer engagement team is obsessed with improving self-service on Now Support—our portal that offers customer support—no matter what the question or issue.Our customers want to feel empowered to solve their own issues so they can be productive in their daily jobs. They want to get the most out of their LIKE.TG investment, and they don’t want to spend time troubleshooting issues.Now Support is designed on the belief that effective self-service is the key to great experiences that provide fast time to relief for customers, whether they’re using a desktop or a mobile app.When our IT customer engagement team set out to perfect our customers’ click-by-click, self-service experience, the team faced three challenges. We needed to: Understand customer behavior in order to deliver fully optimized experiences and help customers achieve a faster time to resolution. Clearly trace a customer’s click-by-click journey to identify specific stumbling points that resulted in a negative experience. Aggregate data to glean insights into customer behavior trends over time. User Experience Analytics to the rescueWe pulled back the curtain on previously invisible data by integrating LIKE.TG User Experience Analytics into the Now Support portal and app. We can now see exactly how our customers interact with our self-service portal, including a treasure trove of user experience data to guide our future decisions about the customer journey, resource investment, and prioritization.User Experience Analytics provides the features most usage analytics applications offer, such as user flows, click paths, page views, retention, and other behavioral metrics. But because it runs as part of the Now Platform®, we’re able to combine behavioral data with operational data from instance tables to generate really powerful actionable insights. This enables an end-to-end, streamlined user experience. 5 benefits of User Experience AnalyticsHere are five of the benefits we’ve seen:1. Personalization and intelligent automationApplying platform machine learning algorithms on user journeys helps us understand user context and identify friction points. We can then add personalized recommendations, in-context help, or automated resolutions.For example, when we launched our Help Center module, we initially didn’t see high adoption. User Experience Analytics insights helped us determine that personalization was the key to improving adoption.2. Bridging self-service gapsWe can see critical decision points where customers successfully resolve an issue or submit a case. These can help us determine the actions needed to optimize our self-service.For example, we can now identify Knowledge Base articles and searches that don’t lead to self-service success. We then use this data to fill content gaps or improve content effectiveness.3. Visibility into how customers interact with the portalMore than 80% of our customers don’t log in when using self-service. With User Experience Analytics, we’re able to understand which experiences are important to unauthenticated users. This insight helps us make more relevant content available so we can reduce time to self-serve.4. Lower abandon ratesWe can pinpoint where a customer abandoned a search or a catalog item. With that knowledge, we can find ways to bridge the gap by adding knowledge content, optimizing a form, or offering options, such as a Virtual Agent topic or Community forum.5. Targeted localized contentOur localization strategy was previously guided by experience, not data. We can use a customer’s language preference to analyze and address gaps in local content usage, driving higher self-service rates with global customers. What we’ve learnedWe started by spending time understanding our customers’ self-service journey. What were our self-service goals? What are the desired actions? How do we measure value and impact?LIKE.TG User Experience Analytics has been a vital part of understanding customer behavior to help customers solve issues and concentrate on other tasks. That translates to a better customer experience and happier customers. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any customer service and support organization?Learn more about self-service design.1 Gartner, “Delivering Relevant Content and Knowledge to Customers Is Key to Great Customer Service,” Gene Phifer, Brian Manusama, Drew Kraus, Olive Huang, Irina Guseva, Mick MacComascaigh, Jim Davies, 5 December 2019.

Meeting Recordings app: Overcome Zoom fatigue and FOMO

ESM: How we break down silos, boost productivity, and reduce costs

Nick Borgwardt, director of ITx workflows at LIKE.TG, co-wrote this blog.How do I reset my password?How do I add someone to a distribution list?How do I request ergonomic home office equipment?At many companies, when employees have questions like these or need help, they face the complexity of threading together siloed processes. Sometimes a task can require getting in touch with multiple departments, creating friction and frustration. Other times, it’s not even clear where to start. Seemingly simple requests such as submitting a name change are actually fraught with complexity because they involve multiple teams across HR, IT, finance, and workplace services, among others.When departments deliver services separately with different portals, systems, and processes, employees get a fragmented and inconsistent experience. The burden is on the employees to figure out the right tools, learn to use them, and coordinate between different functions.Hide the complexityEnterprise Service Management (ESM) improves productivity and performance through the application of IT service management across the business. By using automated workflows on a common platform, ESM helps remove friction and accelerate innovation.LIKE.TG has been on an IT digital transformation journey for three years. We use the Now Platform® to bring together numerous processes across many different functions, ranging from legal to procurement to IT to finance.Most of our employees may not even notice how complex the service delivery is. That’s the whole point of ESM: to hide complexity and create delightful experiences for employees—all while digitizing workflows to grow at scale.Grow the ratio, not the budgetLIKE.TG is growing at around 30% per year. But we haven’t increased our IT budget at the same rate. Last year’s unprecedented world events saw a worldwide decrease in IT spending by 3.2%, according to Gartner, just as enterprises needed more—not fewer—resources to keep the business going.We were lucky that we could use the Now Platform to drive speed, efficiency, and productivity. By doing so, we supported the company’s ever-increasing workforce with a nominal growth of IT support staff. In fact, over the last three years, our headcount has been flat. That means we’ve steadily increased our employee-to-IT-support ratio during a time of continued growth. Also noteworthy is that the 2020 figure of 336 employees per one IT support staff member only takes into account full-time employees. When we consider the contractors that IT supports, the actual ratio is even higher.Meeting employee expectationsWhen we set out to transform the employee experience, we quickly identified three key expectations from employees that were going unmet: Round-the-clock self-service capability Digital experience across multiple channels Consumer-like experience In response, we made it easy to use self-service and Virtual Agent, leveraging machine learning and AI. Today, we count more than half of LIKE.TG employees as monthly active users of chat-based self-service, automating common requests such as Okta multifactor reset, deleted email recovery, and HR case status check—all on Virtual Agent without human intervention.Learn more about our journey, as well as results and specific use cases, in our Knowledge 2021 session, Now on Now: Scale enterprise service management. See for yourself how we use ESM to grow and innovate.

The journey to AIOps begins with an automation-first mindset

Abhishek Gupta, manager of application development at LIKE.TG, contributed to this blog.AIOps isn’t an IT magic wand, but it sometimes works like one.One day last fall, our IT ops team was heads down on a major cloud migration project. Meanwhile, LIKE.TG Event Management detected a high volume of alerts from the monitoring system—600% more than usual. That typically means a lot of unplanned work for our IT team, not to mention a delay in our cloud migration schedule.[Learn more about the promise of AIOps at Knowledge 2021.]The new AIOps capabilities in LIKE.TG® IT Operations Management (ITOM) were our magic wand. Using historical data and text-based correlation (included in the Paris release of the Now Platform), our AIOps solution combined the noisy alerts into a single incident. The magic wand part was the fact that the system did all of this automatically; we didn't have to manually comb through an avalanche of alerts.To date, AIOps has reduced our IT support and IT ops incidents by 39,000, saved 13,000 hours, and helped us realize $397,000 in savings. Those are some pretty big wins, and we’re just getting started.Those wins only happened by taking a systematic approach. Here’s what we learned in our journey to deliver on the promise of AIOps:Cultivate an automation-first mindsetIT’s traditional role is reactive: Something breaks, and we fix it fast. An automation-first mindset is proactive: anticipating and helping prevent things from breaking in the first place or, if there is an issue, addressing it quickly.To do this, we had to make data-driven decisions, which required a single source of truth for data. We also needed to make changes to drive self-healing. This meant addressing gaps such as implementing major incident management, improving our problem management process, and revamping change management. Use AIOps to enable the strategyAIOps is just a bunch of technologies unless it’s part of an overall strategy with clear outcomes. At LIKE.TG, we call it our three zero strategy: Zero outages – Use AIOps, predictive analytics, and other technologies to create a self-healing infrastructure to help ensure100% service availability. Zero physical footprint – Move everything to software as a service and the cloud. Zero incidents reported – Although we can never prevent someone from spilling coffee on their laptop, we’re all in on virtual agent, AI, and self-service workflows to get as close to zero incidents as possible. Sure, it’s bold, but that’s how you tap into everyone’s—and everything’s—full potential and push boundaries.Plan the journeyStart with a self-assessment to understand where your ops maturity is with respect to people, processes, and technology. Identify use cases that align with your strategy and prioritize them—for example, by return on investment, cost savings, strategic benefit, or user productivity gains.It’s also critical that you evaluate your staff—both roles and skill sets—to determine where you need to train and grow.Integrate, integrate, integrateBroaden the Now Platform® integrations to include SaaS solutions—for example, how logs flow in from Zoom phone to LIKE.TG Event Management. This is crucial for voice call quality and can proactively identify issues.Integrations are also helpful in smoothing the IT staff transition to AIOps by putting everything in one pane of glass.Map next steps with dataData is the fuel that drives IT decision-making, so make data quality an investment priority. That way, you’ll be able to prioritize use cases that deliver maximum business value.Data also helps surface new focus areas for AIOps, such as personas. What capabilities and services can IT deliver to make a salesperson—or product engineer or software developer—more productive? The power of AIOpsLet’s close with another example. As part of a data center migration to the cloud, we temporarily shut down a primary VPN authentication server at 10 pm.As we streamed the VPN logs to Health Log Analytics (HLA, based on Loom Systems technology), LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps detected an anomaly and proactively notified the operations team, which fixed the issue within 30 minutes. A worst-case scenario—3,600 users losing VPN connectivity—was averted with zero impact to users.AIOps is a hot trend in IT, and LIKE.TG IT is all in. But it’s important to get on board for the right reasons. If you stay focused on your goals—in our case, three zeros—AIOps will open opportunities to innovate, deliver game-changing solutions, and take you from incident firefighter to strategic business partner.See us at Knowledge 2021Join us at the Knowledge 2021 session, Delivering on the promise of predictive AIOps using ITOM, where we share our AIOps journey and the key lessons we learned during our implementation. The session is available on demand, and registration is free.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

The Rome release starts at home—a customer zero story

Now is truly the digital age. In a world where operations are increasingly powered by code, there’s enormous potential for changing the way people work. But you need to know how to code to create this change…right? Wrong.Using LIKE.TG App Engine Studio, LIKE.TG’s citizen developer program empowers anyone with little to no coding experience to innovate and create the apps they need, when they need them.[We’re hiring. Visit our careers page.]Streamlining work, boosting efficiencyFrom interns to managers, employees across LIKE.TG have taken the initiative to build applications that change the way their teams work. These low-code apps mean precious time saved and the ability to take matters into their own hands to solve problems for their teams. Citizen developers found opportunities to streamline tedious work through automation and increase efficiency. Britt B. has been developing applications and workflows on the Now Platform for 10 years. “It seemed like a no-brainer to come back to our own platform and get this automated in such a way that we could continue delivering at the same level with far fewer resources,” she says.Mara Z. created an app that collects and stores best practices so that she and fellow success architects don’t have to hunt for them. Courtney D. and John P. co-developed an app that mitigates the need to copy and paste information from one tool to another—with no errors.The power of low-code developmentAs the world of work continues to evolve, LIKE.TG’s citizen development program shows the revolutionary power of low-code development. John agrees, adding, “To be able to create these applications with very low code is just—it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it at any other company that I’ve worked for.”Learn more about how these four citizen developers transformed the way their teams work in this video:

Low code, high impact: Empowering citizen developers

Project management for non-project managers

When the pandemic hit, the pressure to adapt LIKE.TG training offerings grew exponentially. An increasing number of customers from the Americas, Europe, India, and Australia wanted more virtual classes, more flexibility in scheduling, and more customization.Answering basic project planning questions in a timely manner became more difficult for the LIKE.TG custom training and adoption team. With the rising demand, our team resources—spread across the globe—had to scale.To effectively manage custom training projects from inception through project close and post-implementation review, we needed a standard project management approach. We wanted to be able to answer questions such as: What projects are in the pipeline? What is our resource capacity against our future needs? How do we see a project’s progress, risks, and issues? Can we see our key business metrics in one dashboard? A standardized approachWe knew a single system of record could capture the demand and resource pipeline for delivering customer projects across the team’s global portfolio and help us scale using real-time, centralized reporting. It could also help us provide a consistent customer experience.Our team had very little experience in project management. Although unfamiliar with concepts such as project plans, risk registers, and resource plans, we were very familiar with the Now Platform®.We decided to try Project Portfolio Management (PPM), a LIKE.TG solution that provides project, program, portfolio, resource, demand, and timecard management capabilities. It’s part of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which helps organizations drive business outcomes by aligning their strategy with their work across different methodologies and structures. We chose Performance Analytics, another Now Platform solution, to track our progress over time.Adopting a feature-rich package such as PPM could have easily overwhelmed us. But we were able to start with the features we needed straight out of the box. Project management out of the boxLike many customers, we were keen to avoid a long development cycle. We wanted to reap the benefits of PPM as quickly as possible. So, we started with some basic guidelines for adoption: Stick rigorously to the concept of a minimum viable product. We wanted to track projects and resources and then continue to iterate after our initial migration and go-live. Remain true to out-of-the-box features and zero customization. In this way, the solution could be rapidly implemented, easily upgraded with each release, and used by other teams in the future. Streamline processes to drive adoption and simplify reporting. Templates would give us a way to set up standard reports. Postpone complex integrations such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM that support the seamless handover of customer data between sales and training delivery teams. We needed to get our bearings with PPM first before taking on complex integrations. 3 areas of positive impactPPM has been a game-changer for our team. It has greatly increased our productivity and efficiency and helped us sharpen our project management skills. Here are three areas where PPM has had a positive impact:1. Project managementWe dramatically improved how we track and manage demands, customer projects, and resource usage. We can now create and manage a wide range of demands and projects, whether they involve a few small tasks or a large portfolio of projects with complex relationships and dependencies.Tracking and managing all work from a single system of record ensures all project activities are captured and underlying financial data is instantly available. Separately, this has improved our processes for learning credit consumption and pricing. Mobile features are next on our wish list for adoption.2. Resource managementWe’re now allocating our staff more effectively by analyzing workloads and distributing tasks appropriately. Little automations, such as resource plans that autoskip scheduling someone during planned holiday time, make life much easier.Timecards ensure we know where resources are spending their time, and we can compare that against our plan. As our program matures, we also plan to adopt a skills matrix. 3. Real-time reportingWe use dashboards to make better informed investment decisions about training initiatives. Leadership dashboards offer visibility into key business metrics such as project financials. With this information, leaders can plan for the future, create roadmaps, and make smart investment decisions.Sales team leads can review customer training portfolios and provide proactive, targeted advice. This improves both our customer experience and sales pipeline. By aggregating customer data, we can make smarter decisions about our market offerings and price points.To make the transition as seamless as possible, we assigned a dedicated change enablement leader to manage communications and stakeholder engagement, and to gather feedback at every step of our implementation.On-demand training on the Now Learning platform allowed team members to familiarize themselves with PPM early in the process. We also ran process user training for different personas that included both instructor-led sessions and demo videos.The best decision we ever madeMore than a year later, our team adoption of PPM has been a greater success than we anticipated. Implementing the base functionality has drastically improved our understanding of our daily operations. We’re easily managing scope through our templated project deliverables, and a project-on-a-page dashboard drives our post-implementation review process with zero effort.LIKE.TG customers are choosing to invest in their people and processes as part of their digital transformation. With our adoption of PPM, we’re doing the same. Armed with it, the custom training and adoption team is ready and able to scale to meet customer demands more efficiently and productively to improve the customer experience.Find out more about our internal adoption of PPM in the case study.

Behind the scenes: Tips from a LIKE.TG upgrade expert

The Now Platform® San Diego release is generally available (GA) with many new enhancements to help people work fast, easier, and more efficiently. I’m excited that GA day is here, knowing my team helped deliver another great release.In my career as a LIKE.TG upgrade program manager, I’ve managed upgrades for 13 releases—three as a customer and 10 within ServiceNow. Generally, on GA day, my team’s work is complete, and we’re already preparing for the next release. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes in the months leading up to GA.What it means to be customer zeroAt LIKE.TG, we pride ourselves in using our own products internally, a program we refer to as Now on Now. As customer zero for our products, LIKE.TG internal teams—including IT operations, product engineering, cloud operations, and Now Support—upgrade to the new platform release in the sub-production and production environments during the six months prior to GA.Being customer zero gives our teams the opportunity to provide feedback to the product team during the development process. Our testing includes areas such as performance, reporting, user experience, and upgrade times to help improve the release.This approach gives the development team time to rectify many of the issues prior to GA so that customers don’t encounter them. The result? Our customers get the best possible experience.On to the San Diego upgradeFor the San Diego release, two internal instances, Now Support and product engineering, were upgraded in September/October 2021. Four upgrade teams conducted a total of 23 planned upgrades in the past six months. Click the image to see a detailed infographic.Accessibility note: The infographic is transcribed at the end of this blog. My team, Now Support, has been running on the San Diego release for six months. We’ve performed more than 11,000 automated tests and completed four rounds of testing, identifying several issues that were fixed prior to GA.The Now Support upgrade process is 2.5 weeks from build to production. This involves creating the build, testing it in sub-prod, fixing issues, validating the fixes, and upgrading our production instance.Tips for a better upgrade experienceHaving completed 10 upgrade cycles in my tenure at LIKE.TG, I’ve learned quite a few lessons to help things go smoothly. Here are a few tips for anyone wanting to improve the upgrade experience. Treat each upgrade as a separate project with a detailed plan that includes resourcing, scheduling, and communications. Be sure to identify any new features you want to implement as part of the upgrade. Reduce testing time by using automated tests. We reward our testers with treats—chocolate and ice cream are favorites on my team. Schedule upgrades for slow traffic times to minimize user impact. Schedule retrospectives after each upgrade to identify and implement process improvements. Seek support if you have questions. There may be a related knowledge base article or community forum discussion on the topic. If not, log a case. Upgrades can be easy and funWith an average of three to four pre-GA upgrades per release, my team has successfully completed more than 40 upgrades on Now Support and consumed many boxes of chocolate.As we celebrate the San Diego GA, we're getting ready to test the Tokyo release, targeted for September GA.I realize my excitement on GA day isn’t really about the release availability. It’s about knowing we’ve done everything we can to make our customers’ experience better. That alone is worth it.Get your upgrade kit and other resources.Transcript of infographicNow Platform® San Diego release:Drinking our own champagne to connect people and systems across the companyLIKE.TG upgraded to the San Diego release starting in late Q3 2021, before it was available to customers. Our upgrade teams offer ongoing feedback to the product development teams so they can deliver stronger, more reliable product capabilities and enable faster, easier upgrades for our customers and partners.205 bugs found before general availability1,2,3,4First upgrade was on Sept. 1 in the engineering sub-prod environmentDays on San Diego release Now Support – 179 sub-prod, 160 production Engineering – 203 sub-prod, 190 production Global Cloud Ops – 75 sub-prod, 0 production IT Ops – 87 sub-prod, 18 production 23 total planned upgrades1,2,3,49% faster upgrade time compared to Rome3~79K automated tests over 25 rounds1,2,3,41 Now Support2 Global Cloud Ops3 Engineering4 IT OpsLearn more about Now on Now at www.servicenow.com/nowonnow

Collaboration: The key to a reimagined employee experience

The LIKE.TG product team had a clear goal: Reimagine the employee experience on the Now Platform. That meant designing a solution that would deliver a unified and proactive experience personalized for each user.The team started by talking with customers around the world—of all sizes and across many industries. They also turned to the LIKE.TG IT team. IT provided firsthand knowledge of what it means to deliver an exceptional employee experience on the platform. During these meetings, no topic was off limits, whether technical, functional, or design- or deployment-related.The result was Employee Center—a new solution unveiled in the Rome release of the Now Platform. The features in Employee Center provide the single, unified portal experience the product team was after.Employee Center offers a modern interface where employees can find information and take action across applications. Popular features include dynamic topic pages that curate catalog requests, knowledge base articles, links, apps, videos, and points of contact. Topic pages are designed and organized for fast self-service and intuitive navigation.The power of many voicesEmployee Center was released to the public in September. Just 25 days later, we launched our own version inside LIKE.TG—a perfect example of CEO Bill McDermott’s directive to “innovate quickly and deliver fast time to value.”According to Aarti S., an IT product manager at LIKE.TG, this project perfectly illustrates the power of cross-functional collaboration in creating the best product possible for both employees and customers. We call this customer zero, where product and IT work closely to shape products before their release to customers.“We have the privilege of seeing and using our solutions while they’re still a work in progress and giving our product team feedback early on,” Aarti says. She adds that close collaboration allows the product team to incorporate IT feedback in near-real time.“All new products come with their own limitations initially,” says Sunil S., a UI/UX developer in IT at ServiceNow. “Using our own products allows each of us to say, ‘OK, this is what we are looking to add. This is what needs to change.’” Sancho P., a senior director for the product team, says putting our products through the paces internally ensures they’re ready for prime time from the very beginning. This enables us to gather valuable feedback that we can share with customers, an incredibly important step in the process.“Customers always ask, ‘What’s the best practice for deploying this solution?’” Sancho says. “While we can cite other customer examples, ultimately, they want to know how LIKE.TG deploys it. We show our Employee Portal [Employee Center] as the starting point for what best-in-class looks like. Collaboration between our product and IT teams doesn’t just benefit the product; it also benefits customers who want to know how to best implement the product.”Serving as customer zero continues to be a source of pride for employees.“I think it’s important for us to drink our own champagne and experience firsthand what we’re rolling out to the market,” says Reema S., a senior business systems analyst in IT. “It feels great to be part of the bigger vision and deliver value for our customers.”Consensus: Collaboration drives successAccording to Sunil, the amount of testing—and changes—to implement this type of solution can typically take four months. How did they do it in 25 days? Through constant contact and collaboration.“This was one of the best examples of collaboration between teams that I can recall,” Reema says. “We had so many cross-functional dependencies on the business, technical, and product sides—and everyone worked together to make it happen.”She adds, “I’m so proud to be part of a team where everyone relies on each other so that if one person is not there, the others will pick it up and get the job done.”We’re hiring. Explore careers at ServiceNow.

AI Search: The secret to better customer self-service

Hari Vats, senior knowledge manager of global technical support at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.Who wouldn’t want a faster, more relevant search on their knowledge base? Improving search results is tricky. Organizations can spend a lot of time and money making small improvements to very complex, dynamic environments of information.When LIKE.TG acquired an AI search technology company in 2020, we were thrilled to see an immediate return. Since we adopted AI Search, we’ve seen our search results delivered 3.5 times faster than with our previous search engine—from an average of 10.3 seconds down to 2.3 seconds. Perhaps even more important, relevancy improved, with results now 2.9 times more relevant.How did we achieve these results? AI plays a big role. But AI is just a technology in service of a business goal. Our goal was simple: Deliver the right content from our knowledge bases to our customers at the time they request it. We knew we had a lot of useful content on our Now Support portal. But if our customers couldn’t find the right content at the right time, all the AI in the world wouldn’t help. Improving search relevancy and resultsAI Search connects employees and customers to the answers they need in a simple search experience with personalized, relevant results. It uses machine learning to identify user intent and deliver results users can act on from within the search results window.In the past, our legacy search engine used keyword searches to match words or phrases within a query. AI Search delivers a very different user experience. It can interpret contextual cues to identify user intent and produce highly relevant information.To see how AI search worked, we conducted extensive user acceptance testing in global technical support for more than six weeks. We engaged subject matter experts from 13 different teams who tested more than 50 functionalities in only two weeks. Using these suggestions, our development team improved relevancy and performance prior to the go-live date.Our favorite AI Search featuresHere are a few of the AI Search features we found especially useful: Auto suggest: We refine the list of popular keywords by analyzing what users click and search. AI Search doesn’t yet support an index-based auto-suggest, but we look forward to that in a future release. Spellcheck: The spellcheck function can find multiple spelling mistakes in each query and use AI to correct them and deliver more relevant results. Search as a service: We can now index once and create relevancy models across applications. Once implemented, this solution can help make operations more agile and maintenance more streamlined. Powering multiple channels with a single search solution means users can access quick, relevant information regardless of whether they use a desktop or mobile device. Attachment search: Our engine can search attachments as well as articles, a feature that was unavailable in the past. Promoted result: One major challenge of any search engine is to surface relevant content around generic queries, which make up about a third of all queries. Subject matter experts decide which answers are the best match for these queries. This has significantly improved our relevancy, as well as how people engage with the results. Personalized query rules: We can now personalize search results for different user roles and user groups. Gone is the black box relevancy algorithm that didn’t recognize different needs for different user types. Content security: Following a content security enhancement in the Rome release, users can now search external content securely using a single search application across all data sources, providing a more cohesive experience. Other new features included integrated support for five languages, fast setup and integration, and easily configurable synonyms and stop words. Impact of AI SearchThe power of AI lies in its ability to constantly learn and to improve relevancy through machine learning. For example, if users consistently click on the third entry in the list, the system recognizes it to be the most relevant and changes rankings. AI learns from users’ behavior to predict the best answers. This is called automatic tuning.The impact of AI Search is proven by our metrics: A 3.6 average click rank indicates the user clicked one of the top five results. 80% of users click on one of the top five results, compared to 52% previously. 92% of the time a search automation request does not lead to a case submission. Although we’ve seen dramatic improvements in our search functionality, we’re working on further improvements to both time and relevancy. It’s all about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. AI is just one way we can give customers the tools they need to self-serve answers quickly and move on to their next task.Learn more in our Now at Work 2021 session, Migrating to AI Search—a customer zero story. Registration is free. Take a deeper dive into how AI is transforming work.

3 simple steps to rejuvenate your IT learning program

How proactive support operations can reduce customer escalations

Minesh Patel, senior manager of support account management at LIKE.TG, and JP Renaud, senior director of support management at LIKE.TG, contributed to this blog.As part of our customer service and support team, the LIKE.TG support account management (SAM) and customer escalations (CE) teams are committed to averting situations where performance affects customers’ ability to operate their business.Our job is to focus on customer health—in other words, keep LIKE.TG customers out of harm’s way. Our teams are responsible for preventing and mitigating P1 outages and major performance issues.Many of the issues our customers experience are performance-related, due to poor maintenance or variations from best practices. To provide the highest level of support operations, our focus extends beyond LIKE.TG to issues our customers may inadvertently create.Scaling prevention effortsAs the company has grown, we realized reactive problem-solving in the SAM and CE functions couldn’t scale. We were efficiently monitoring our customers’ cloud infrastructure from different angles, but we needed a way to resolve issues more rapidly.We wanted a coordinated approach that could quickly identify and communicate indicators of issues. Detecting these anomalies early would mean we could begin mitigation efforts at these first signs, sometimes before the customer even knew about them.After surveying 6,004 customers throughout six different countries, Gartner® found that 42% prefer proactive service, compared to 21% who prefer reactive service.1 Intercepting issues promptly would enable us to move to a proactive investigative approach integrated across both teams.Our SAM team had a siloed view of overall customer health. It was focused on individual alerts relevant to its specific accounts in the areas of networking, capacity, and database management. The team wasn’t looking for broader problems that could potentially turn into a customer escalation for the CE team to address. The CE team entered the picture when customer issues had the potential to make a large-scale impact. Often, the issue was spiraling out of control before the CE team knew about it.Reducing issues and escalationsThe SAM and CE teams adopted a unified, proactive approach, tapping into the power of the Now Platform®.CE developed two models to help predict and prevent issues. The models monitor and analyze a selection of alerts that have been identified as early indicators for major performance problems or outages. The team is notified so team members can intervene before a significant impact. The models include: Predictive Performance Alerting – identifies customer instances at risk using monitoring alerts Top Transaction Trending – identifies customer instances at risk using transactional response times With these models, the CE team is seeing fewer performance issues and escalations.The proactive mindset has shifted the dynamic. Now, we often approach customers and recommend actions instead of waiting for the account team to alert us. This creates a partnership to solve the issue. (Read more about predictive modeling on the Now Platform.)To complement this partnership, the SAM team developed a Predictive Analysis Dashboard (PAD). It gives support account managers a view into customer health so they can: View specific customer alerts in aggregate to identify early indicators of trouble. Zero in on important metrics and act accordingly based on shifts. Approach monitoring with a forward-thinking mindset. Support account managers log in to the dashboard to spot anomalies in aggregate. They can then try to prevent or mitigate issues before they cause real trouble. This visibility has boosted customers’ trust as they see the value we provide in helping to avoid or substantially reduce the impact of performance issues.Just as important is the feedback from SAM team members who live and breathe customer support. Making a positive impactOne of the most noticeable outcomes has been a sense of relief. Instead of being blindsided by issues, both the SAM and CE teams have visibility into customer health earlier in the support process. The number of proactive actions and recommendations to our customers are trending up, creating a positive impact.The result is a better end-to-end experience for both our customers and our support teams. And that goes a long way toward alleviating some big-time pressure.Find out more about how LIKE.TG uses its own products to run its internal operations.1 Gartner, Proactive Customer Service Is Valued by Customers, Despite What They Say, https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3985773/proactive-customer-service-is-valued-by-customers-despit, Customer Service and Support Research Team, 29 May 2020.GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

4 ways IT support can scale and deliver exceptional service

LIKE.TG IT support prides itself on providing world-class support services for employees. Because of the company’s hypergrowth, our previous model of 24/7 IT support couldn’t scale.We needed a better way to deal with the exponential increase in support case volume while maintaining a lean IT support team that continues to deliver exceptional support services.Here are four changes we’re undertaking to meet this challenge:1. Embrace an automation-first, stewardship mindsetAs a team, we’re radically restructuring our thinking to view obstacles from longer-term stewardship and automation-first perspectives. Instead of reactively solving one-off support requests and being satisfied with a reduction in mean time to resolution, we’re expanding our responsibilities to include strategic work that traditionally falls outside the scope of IT support.For example, it was IT support’s responsibility to replace every out-of-date laptop at LIKE.TG with a new one. The increase in support case volume caused by aging laptops added unnecessary incidents to the IT support caseload.We identified areas within the laptop refresh process that were ripe for automation. We collaborated with the IT engineering and IT Asset Management teams to build out a zero-touch initiative, which automated the entire end-to-end laptop distribution process. For our end users, zero touch means quicker time to productivity when unboxing a new machine. John Lee, a content analyst at LIKE.TG, filled out a zero-touch hardware refresh request. A few days later, he opened his new laptop, placed his old PC into the same shipping box, and scheduled it for pickup.After Lee input his credentials, automation took care of the rest. The same applications, files, and experience of his previous PC were recreated in the new laptop without any manual configuration required.“Getting a new computer was seamless. I didn’t need to leave my house. I loved unboxing a new computer. I had to fill in my username and password, and I was back working on my files within 30 minutes,” he says.Collective zero-touch efforts in 2021 resulted in 1,522 completed requests and $152,000 in cost savings, equaling 1,141 IT productivity hours saved. By taking an automation-first perspective, we were able to use out-of-the-box thinking to solve a long-term issue for our team.2. Dive into Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®)KCS is a framework that helps effectively capture and continuously improve and deliver IT knowledge so employees can solve IT issues themselves. The framework is central to our strategy to increase employee self-service and reduce overall support caseloads.One of our key measurements of progress is attach rate, or how often an IT support team member documents their knowledge from a case. This knowledge is shared with employees through knowledge base (KB) articles. Employees can self-diagnose issues, and IT support can shorten resolution times because issues are solved only once.LIKE.TG IT is early in its KCS journey. Since January 2021, our L2 attach rates increased by more than 30%. Our highest-performing L2 team had an attach rate of approximately 69%, just short of our 85% goal. Here are some hard-earned lessons from our ongoing KCS implementation: Be ready to shift team culture and mindset.We knew KCS was a permanent behavioral change for IT support and would require a concerted organizational change management effort. KCS best practices, such as creating and attaching KB articles to incidents and managing knowledge to increase employee self-service, are baseline responsibilities for our team. We’ll continue to expand our expectations over time. People are core to KCS success.In the beginning, KCS adoption was uneven. For example, we knew the initial time commitment required for IT support engineers to create and attach KB articles would add more workload but would lead to overall time savings for the IT support team. We brought in resources such as KCS coaches to drive confidence and success and, more importantly, shift the team mindset. The overall work experience of our IT support agents and advisers has improved. Future support cases can be solved faster by simply attaching a KB article. Employees are empowered to self-solve. IT support can resolve challenges in minutes, not hours. That means we get to spend more time on complex and exciting projects instead of getting bogged down on redundant cases.3. Use technology to multiply impact and eliminate toilWe use the Now Platform® to operationalize and magnify IT support’s transformation. For example, we built dynamic KB search into incident search for our engineers who handle incidents. KB articles are automatically recommended to engineers, reducing the manual steps to search for a relevant KB.We also added the ability to create, publish, and check for article quality within the incident record itself to make the entire KCS experience frictionless. To make KCS fun, we’re adding gamification elements that award points for attaching and creating articles. We also use dashboards to track the real-time value and progress of our adoption, so we can celebrate our progress over time. 4. Automate the boring stuffWe investigate every nook and cranny of IT support to find automation opportunities that make human intervention optional instead of not mandatory. For example, a large portion of our inbound IT support cases consisted of access requests related to cloud VPN, RSA tokens, and Okta Verify.Each incident required a three- to five-minute phone conversation and a lot of toil for IT support, which delayed work on more complex incidents. Never mind the frustration factor when our customers wanted to work but couldn’t.IT support partnered with engineering to set up automated workflows that redirect employee requests to KB articles detailing a solution for each of these requests. We took this a step further. Now employees can use the LIKE.TG Virtual Agent chatbot solution, NowBot, to resolve common issues such as RSA unlock and PIN reset without human interaction.From January 2021 to the present, NowBot has completely handled—or deflected using KB articles—12,432 tickets for RSA token requests, resets, installation, and login issues. Plus, 60.8% of all RSA-related issues are solved without human intervention.One of LIKE.TG’s biggest priorities is improving the employee experience so our people can be productive and focus on the more challenging aspects of their work. Our implementation of IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows and analytics dashboards have helped us improve how we work, whether in IT support or reporting an IT issue.The mindset shifts may be challenging, but the end results are happier employees and, in most cases, customers.Learn more about our internal adoption of ITSM, IT Operations Management, and other ITx products.