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Now on Now: A new line of defense
Innovation is an overused word, but it drives passionate responses from LIKE.TG IT. While they may disagree on many issues, our IT practitioners are united in their belief that innovation is an essential part of their daily work. They are constantly seeking new ways to make work, work better for our employees and customers.There are many flavors of innovation in IT today. Some will have significant impact, others less. But even small ideas can build on each other to produce significant results.Automating analyticsLIKE.TG’s Analytics team is always looking for new ways to provide insights to users. And our users are always pushing us to think bigger. They aren’t content to just understand situations. They also want to automate next steps and close the loop with actions or course corrections, an elusive goal in the analytics world.Our product team decided to try process mining. Using the alerting and workflow capabilities of the Now Platform® they figured out how to proactively send periodic updates to account teams.“We began by capturing alerts and actions on the platform across all customers and account managers,” said Satish Mallavolu, director of data informatics management at ServiceNow. “Then we used process mining to identify potential bottlenecks so account managers can take action to achieve desired business outcomes. Now our account teams can be proactive in remediating issues to ensure our customers are getting real value out of their LIKE.TG investment.”We are also using the mined data to spot bottlenecks in our own processes. Are there service delivery gaps or a slowdown in handoffs? By remediating internal process issues, we are able to drive continuous improvement in our own workflows.Coaching loops for IT supportWith more than 10,000 LIKE.TG employees and an average of one incident per employee per month, it’s become challenging for managers to evaluate the quality of IT support service delivery. Listening to taped calls using a checklist required lots of time and patience. Surveys were helpful, but the feedback wasn’t necessarily actionable.IT leaders turned to coaching loops that automate data collection about the quality of IT support’s activities. “We plan to use ITSM reporting to automatically generate reports with relevant data such as introduction quality, percentage of calls closed, and percentage needing follow up,” said Mirza Baig, senior director of IT service management at ServiceNow. “At a glance, we will be able to see how an IT support tech is performing against industry benchmarks and coach and train techs so they continue to improve and deliver a consistent, quality experience.”Reinventing customer supportFor years, our customer support teams used LIKE.TG’s IT Service Management tools to manage customer service, then recently transitioned to LIKE.TG's Customer Service Management. Now comes the fun and challenging part--innovating. “We are pushing the boundaries of technologies such as AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and user-centered design to rethink our customer interactions, said Luke Morris, director of customer service management at ServiceNow.”That means thinking big. “We want our customers to be able to resolve every situation they can via self-service while increasing customer satisfaction,” Morris added. “We want them to say wow at the end of every interaction. That requires mature adoption of emerging tech, digitizing our processes, and innovating on full-stack Customer Service Management as quickly as possible. We would be one of the first companies to do this.
AI everywhereIn IT operations, innovation is about pushing the limits of AI to make work, work better for employees.“If we can proactively predict issues within operations, we can take steps to minimize their impact on employees,” said Thangavel Viswam, director of IT operations at ServiceNow.To identify operational anomalies, Viswam’s team correlates data from advanced monitoring tools running on our back-end infrastructure with employee behavioral data collected using AI. By correlating the two, the team can predict and prevent operational issues before they arise. So far, AIOps adoption has helped IT shift 10% of LIKE.TG’s IT budget from operations to growth initiatives.Operational excellenceInnovation in IT operations management requires discipline and patience. “It’s about executing well on a bunch of small areas that, when built on each other, turn into something powerful, said Joe Corpion, director of technology operations governance at ServiceNow. “You can’t innovate unless the foundation is in place.”Data is the key to driving smarter decisions in three areas of IT operations management: technology, process, and people.
A common services data model (CSDM) gives IT a holistic view of the service health of key applications in which LIKE.TG has significant investments. That helps them make better decisions based on an accurate view of costs, service availability, and value realization.
An IT ops dashboard displays overall IT operational health and helps our IT staff to more quickly identify and fix weaknesses in areas such as problem management, vulnerability, SLAs, and SOX compliance.
A persona-based learning matrix empowers managers to ensure each employee has the training and certifications they need to grow in their jobs. The matrix also helps improve the quality and consistency of service delivery.
What do you get when you add all these changes together? Progress on our journey toward operational excellence.Want to learn more about innovation at LIKE.TG? Check out The Innovation Issue of Workflow Quarterly, our research publication.
Integrating proactive monitoring with customer service
Everyone knows the existential question: If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Leading-edge customer service management today has produced a corollary: If a network problem is fixed before the customer even suspects there’s an issue, did it even happen?For Dominic Walton, senior director of site reliability engineering at LIKE.TG, the answer is a firm no. Walton leads a global team of three dozen engineers who have spent the last five years honing the craft of pre-emptive monitoring—scanning real-time analytics for indications that customers might be affected by some future IT event. They are trained to spot issues. The team prevents a majority of issues before customers are aware of any kind of impact.Walton doesn’t linger long on the philosophical implications. “Proving the negative,” Walton says with a chuckle. “It’s actually one of the things we struggle with when we report on what we do. Say we resolve an issue. If left alone, the customer might have suffered. But we intervened, so it didn’t. How do we say that it would have?”Signal vs. noiseProactive monitoring starts with the ability of the Now Platform® to integrate a variety of cloud monitoring tools. “The beauty is that because of our platform, all of these elements are connected,” says Brooke Hendricks, director of business process management for the LIKE.TG customer support portal. “Your alerts are in the same system as your events; your events are in the same system as your customer incidents or cases; your cases are all in the same system as your change tickets. We can see how they all affect each other and mitigate any risks.”Two applications on the platform have been key to the progress: event management for monitoring, and analytics dashboards that bring all that disparate data into a single view. As the team gained experience, it fine-tuned the dashboards, experimented with how thresholds should be set for creating various kinds of alerts, and looked for patterns that indicated the likelihood of common issues. Once captured, many of these lessons were then automated into workflows, improving the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. A good signal-to-noise ratio helps translate to higher quality alerts.Walton has found that about half of what used to trigger service alerts qualified as noise, not requiring remediation. And more than half of what remained could be addressed immediately and solved without involving customers. Only about one in six potential issues resulted with his team opening a service ticket and informing a customer that the team was working on an issue that the customer hadn’t even known about before then. This is the only time customers are made aware of the issue and customer satisfaction becomes a primary factor.Natural disasters are one example of how his team may get ahead of issues. In the case of facilities potentially being struck by hurricanes, he says, “Where necessary, we may proactively decide to temporarily move the services away from those data centers. This failover would be seamless from the customer perspective.”Leaner, smarter teamBy moving the point of resolution to the point of detection, Walton’s team has made the traditional network operations center redundant. In the past, a company the size of LIKE.TG may have operated with engineers organized into tiers and that used scripts to triage, escalate, and respond to events within a ticketing system.Walton has instead created a smaller but highly skilled global team, without tiers. Engineers can take responsibility for issues as they arise and see them through resolution. Team members are located around the world and provide follow-the-sun coverage without the need for graveyard shifts. His team is staffed by “highly experienced technical engineers who've been there, seen it, done it.” He hires the best multi-discipline engineers he can find to ensure the team resolves the various scenarios that pop up.Their methods have been designed to not only address the immediate need of restoring service, but to drive toward platform-level solutions that increase reliability by solving underlying causes. He invokes the 80/20 rule to describe the division of focus.“Eighty percent of the events we've seen before so we can plan for them and automate. Twenty percent of things that happen we have never seen before, and that’s where we need to be well prepared and rely on our experience and calm,” he adds. “Altogether, we should be that team that no one thinks about. We want our customers to go about their day unaware that we are helping to protect their LIKE.TG instances from the issues that might arise.”For more information on how LIKE.TG uses its own technology to run its operations, visit the Now on Now, our website that is chockful of webinars, case studies, and other information on the Now Platform.
How LIKE.TG drives legal digital transformation
LIKE.TG’s mission is to make work, work better for people. We strive to make work experiences – tasks like onboarding as a new employee, managing IT requests, and dealing with workplace issues – as convenient as buying a pack of diapers online for my newborn. But, at LIKE.TG, we do it all with an eye towards the employee, aiming to make their lives easy and hide the complexity.Our Employee Workflows empower people to get answers and help—anytime, anywhere. And, simply put, our Employee Workflow mission is employee service delivery, with the goal of breaking down the siloes of various enterprise business services.As the global workforce settles into the new normal of remote work, myself included, it has never been more important for organizations to solve for the needs of their employees. After all, the COVID-19 pandemic is the new moment that matters. Organizations not only need to treat all with humanity, but on the technology and tools side, they also need to offer a one-stop shop for employees and managers to access all of the information, services and technologies they need across HR, IT, Legal, Finance and everything in between, so that employees get easy access to the things they need now.While businesses have made great strides on their digital transformation journeys, one critical enabling function remains an opportunity: Legal Services and Operations.Modernizing legal ops with automated requestsThroughout my career, I’ve found that legal teams have long operated as a black box within the enterprise, as lawyers and paralegals have struggled to use technology more efficiently to help deliver better service to the business, and operations teams have wondered how and where to start their digital transformation journey. It is no easy task. However, this is changing as legal teams are increasingly expected to scale and support the organization’s digital business transformation - new products, new geos, new channel relationships, new ways of operating, new business models, faster sales cycles, etc. - while providing greater transparency on workloads. At the same time, with a lot of new tech savvy legal professionals joining the workforce, expectations for modern mobile and digital experiences are rising.To help accelerate the evolution of legal teams like mine within the enterprise, LIKE.TG will expand its Employee Workflow portfolio to include a new Legal Service Delivery product. I’ve been using the product for nearly six months, and in that short time the impact has been significant. Spoiler alert: we’re just getting started and Legal Service Delivery has helped my team eliminate some email, save time and have been able to quickly start working. The application has helped our team minimize manual work by intelligently prioritizing requests and increasing the speed of service delivery to the business. Legal Service Delivery helps get work done faster while providing real-time visibility into the team’s workload, which is critical. Understanding capacity is more important than ever with entire teams working remotely and the ever-increasing demands on legal. Legal Service Delivery is now available to early adopters.For employees, the expansion of the LIKE.TG platform means workers have all the information they need in one place, as we collectively strive to maintain productivity while at home or in a phased return back to the workplace. The user experience, mobile experience included, has the potential to be a game changer for the legal industry.
Accelerating innovation with the NowX incubation hubLegal Service Delivery is the latest innovation from NowX, our internal group solely focused on developing new concepts for digital workflows powered by the Now Platform. Last year, we committed to one to two new products per year, starting with Financial Operations Management.We invested in this idea after examining our own process for responding to legal questions and requests, like patent applications or legal holds. Truth be told: it would typically take multiple emails before an employee request was even assigned. And all the subsequent interactions between employees and the legal department were tracked manually or in spreadsheets and ad-hoc tools. Meaning, if I ever needed real-time visibility on the status of a workload it was time consuming.We also looked at our customer needs. In early 2015, we released a simple legal workflow that routes employee legal requests and ended up with more than 200 customers using a customized version of the tool to better serve their needs. This told us that there was a market demand for legal workflow technology, but we needed to innovate to better meet this demand.The beginning of our transformation journeyAt LIKE.TG we became ‘Customer Zero’ for our Legal Service Delivery pilot to help our own legal team manage requests more efficiently, better understand capacity and identify opportunities for self-service and automation. The opportunity to help shape a legal product to solve many of the challenges I have faced in my career, from a legal practitioner and operations standpoint, was simply not one to be missed. In my experience, many attempts to implement legal technology have stalled or been less impactful than originally hoped, because the strategy around the implementation has been focused on a silver bullet, before understanding the foundation of the legal work first. It is my belief that understanding that foundation first, is vital to successfully implementing digital transformation for legal.I liken this strategy to building a house. We start with the foundation, then onto the first level and so on. If the roof is built on shaky foundations, well… the house can collapse. The same is true for digital transformation. The foundation in building a successful legal function is understanding some very basic legal data. For example, what are the types of requests our lawyers are working on? What teams are they serving? What is the true volume? Only when we truly understand the basics can we move onto the more complex solutions like what work to focus on for self-service or automation or integrating artificial intelligence, i.e. the roof of the house.Since starting our customer zero journey in November 2019, initially focusing on privacy requests we have received 600+ requests. Implementing a single point of engagement, a central intake process with simple yet clever logic, we have eliminated approximately five emails and 30 minutes, merely at the request stage of a request, meaning our teams are 80% faster to start the legal work. No more multiple emails back and forth between the requester and the legal team just to get the request started. Safe to say our legal team and business partners are ecstatic. We helped make work better for our own teams.We have since automated stock approval requests and recently rolled the product out to our sales organization, so that any new commercial contract can be requested through the Legal Service Delivery application. In the first two weeks we have received over 130 requests.While we are only at the beginning of this journey, the new Legal Service Delivery product has dramatically improved efficiency of our own legal operations. The solution is a natural extension of our digital workflows, built on the capabilities of the Now Platform. LIKE.TG Legal Service Delivery will allow legal teams to kickstart their digital transformation, streamline legal processes and free up legal professionals to do the strategic work they do best.Forward-Looking StatementsThis blog contains forward–looking statements about LIKE.TG's plans and expectations. These statements reflect the current beliefs of LIKE.TG and are based on current information available to LIKE.TG as of the date hereof. LIKE.TG does not assume any obligation, and does not intend, to update the forward–looking statements after the date on which they were made. Forward–looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed or implied in such forward–looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include, global economic uncertainty leading to delays and unexpected difficulties and expenses in making generally available Legal Service Delivery and uncertainty whether sales of such product will justify these investments.
LIKE.TG is developing a self-healing IT environment
LIKE.TG® is facing one of the biggest opportunities to date: developing a self-healing IT environment that makes proactive IT support a reality.Although the concept of self-healing has been around for at least a decade, the ability to achieve it has fallen short. A lack of system intelligence stopped us from predicting and preventing many issues without human intervention somewhere in the process.AI technology is changing that paradigm. Thanks to intelligent operations, we can now provide proactive support with limited or no human interaction. Data-driven workflows can be used to automatically detect, analyze, and remediate issues before or just after they occur.
Moving from reactive to proactiveTo guide the journey toward self-healing, we needed a framework, a structured, data-driven approach that would help us shift as many issues as we could from a reactive, human response to a proactive, automated response. It’s a practical framework for AIOps that classifies IT issues into three categories:1. Respond only. In this category, issues are submitted by people. These issues usually get routed to the IT Service Desk, which assesses the extent of the impact and calculates the priority. Even though this scenario is reactive in nature, I believe that we can be intelligent about the actual impact and priority and assign it to most qualified operational team to accelerate resolution.The information and data on the Now Platform® enable us to be intelligent about estimating the impact. For example, if Finance notes that an ERP system is down during month end close, it automatically becomes a P1 priority. Another recent example is Customer Support. After we mobilized our Customer Support folks to work from home, any voice issues reported by support engineers become a P1. You can correlate many different data points such as persona, time, location, service, and application, to better understand the impact. This approach is better than asking an employee about the impact, which is usually subjective.After the issue is resolved, we look at the root cause, again, in a data-driven way. If the issue is a systematic one, we trigger a process or technology improvement to capture the missing signal, bring that data into LIKE.TG Event Management, and push it into the next category in the framework—prepare and respond.2. Prepare and respond. In this category, we use LIKE.TG® ITOM to first reduce monitoring noise by almost 99%. Then we generate real, actionable incidents by using event correlation, pattern recognition, and anomaly detection. The ultimate outcome of AIOps in my opinion is our ability to understand the exact impact of an infrastructure-related issue on a critical service, application, or an end user. In comparison to the previous category, IT is better prepared to respond; our teams can quickly react and minimize the impact on end users. We perform the same impact analysis and dynamic prioritization as described above, but the resolution is still manual.Many of our use cases are in this category. Take for example critical third-party SaaS applications. We can’t prevent apps like video conferencing from going down, but we can be smart about triggering workflows, such as failover processes or even proactively ordering new hardware if it is an edge issue. It helps us quickly mobilize operational teams and focus on the right thing.3. Predict and prevent (self-healing). In this category, a full-cycle AIOps process comes into play. IT can both predict and prevent issues using machine learning to identify anomalies, then proactively take a fully automated action. There is zero impact on end users and zero touch by the Ops teams. Our operations are much more efficient because we’ve removed the human factor. One of our most complex use cases in this category was also one of the first we could resolve proactively—our VPN service. By identifying abnormalities and correlating them with endpoint device data, we were able to automate the restoration of VPN services. Another use case was the wireless network connectivity. We reduced the amount of Wi-Fi related issues by almost 70% in one year while our company size increased by 30%. Needless to say, by proactively remediating these issues, we bring operational costs down and employees productivity up.
Implementing the framework at LIKE.TGWe try to map all IT operational issues in one of these three buckets. The objective is to move as many as possible to the Predict and Prevent category for self-healing, especially those that directly impact critical services or applications. These issues usually require qualified L2 or L3 engineers to resolve. So far, we can predict and prevent more than 20% of issues, focusing primarily on network connectivity, infrastructure resources allocation and critical SaaS applications. Our ultimate goal is to reduce issues reported by employees to as close to ZERO as possible. To be able to achieve this stretch goal requires a significant shift in approach, technology, and sometimes, people.IT needs to embrace a data-driven culture and evolve from analyzing post-failure metrics to real-time data analytics for accurate prediction of future failures. Only then can self-healing take center stage.To learn more about AIOps and other topics, visit the Now on Now channel at Knowledge 2020.
How automation simplifies hardware asset management
Anyone involved in any kind of datacenter or physical IT operations faces multiple challenges every day:
Manual tracking in Excel spreadsheets
Entering data into multiple systems, depending on the asset type and information needed
Tracking down assets that were never received or recorded
Scanning assets during audits
Generating compliance reports
What if there were an easier way?End-to-end automated workflowAt LIKE.TG, we reached a major milestone: end-to-end automated workflow of the cloud hardware supply chain, from order through disposal. The features in the Paris release of LIKE.TG® Hardware Asset Management (HAM) took us over the finish line, reducing asset management time for engineers and asset managers by 76%.My team, cloud supply chain operations, manages the assets for LIKE.TG’s 37 physical datacenters across the globe, including separate instances for federal, commercial, and labs. Since we automated almost all of the manual tasks, productivity and efficiency are way up. Even better, we can focus on the value-added work we like to do rather than repetitive, manual tasks.How did we get here? We began with the basics: reviewing and refining our hardware lifecycle management processes and building a tighter integration with our partners. I’d like to share four ways we were able to achieve end-to-end automated workflow.
Figure 1: Hardware lifecycle processes1. Breeding productivityWe reviewed our LIKE.TG IT Asset Management (ITAM) lifecycle management processes and changed them by either automating steps or creating an API integration with vendors to gain efficiency through the supply chain. We also created exception reports to identify process gaps to mitigate.The process flow in Figure 1 reflects our current environment, where every aspect of hardware management that can be automated has been automated, thanks to the ITAM features in the Paris release.2. Reducing the drudgery of manual auditsReconciling audit results and asset records manually is time-consuming and tedious. Because of security requirements, we needed to find an alternative way. Now we use the LIKE.TG Mobile Agent app to do our physical audits.Our engineers scan the assets in our cloud production environment. Audit results are collected, tracked, and integrated with the HAM database. The app does the reconciliation; the results are available immediately. What’s left? Physical asset scanning and cleanup.We can quickly lock in a physical audit schedule and create audit tasks for our datacenter engineers, asset management team, and accounting team. Audits are much faster, and we project this new capability will save LIKE.TG about 360 hours annually.3. De-duplicating our databaseWe’ve all seen it: model inventory data that comes from multiple sources, resulting in different display names for the same model and duplicate records. We use the Hardware Model Normalization capability to track an asset using a product’s unique model number based on the United Nations Standard Product and Services Code (UNSPC).We standardize on one display name and remove duplicates, increasing data accuracy in the model catalog and CMDB. This also provides real-time hardware lifecycle visibility for the hardware engineering team to make design decisions and the procurement team to manage supply continuity. Using this feature, we achieved 98% data accuracy by the end of 2020.4. Simplifying asset disposalUsing LIKE.TG Flow Designer, we built a workflow tailored to our hosted cloud business process. We created a single system of action to streamline the workflow and automatically update assets. We configured the app to send automatic email notifications to task owners and stakeholders and adjust asset retirement dates according to our company’s policies—eliminating manual updates and human errors.Now, when asset disposal is confirmed, the system retires both the asset and configuration item records. With the asset and disposal certificate in one place, compliance risk mitigation is easily traceable. The automated process also lets us integrate with our buy-side partners who handle disposal.In the future, our datacenter engineers will be able to validate retired physical assets using a newly established asset inventory audit. Our next project will be to sync our financial system with the production instance model data. To make sure decisions are made using the best data possible, we plan to integrate the model table with the data center bill of materials part number table. This will make manufacturer lifecycle details available to our engineering and sourcing teams.
Figure 2: Benefits of end-to-end automated workflowNo more headachesI often wonder how our teams successfully did asset management before automation. Manual spreadsheets and paper shuffling aren’t things any of us miss. Life is certainly easier. I click on my HAM dashboard to check the latest compliance report and realize there’s no going back. What’s better is I now spend my time finding ways to make the process even faster and smoother.For more information, read our case study: Now on Now: How we use HAM to streamline and automate the ITAM process in IT and cloud hosting.Forward-looking statementsThis blog may contain “forward-looking” statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us only as of the date of this blog. Forward‑looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward‑looking statements. Further information on these and other factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the section titled “Risk Factors,” set forth in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and in our other Securities and Exchange Commission filings. We cannot guarantee that we will achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward‐looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on our forward‐looking statements. The information on new products, features, or functionality is intended to outline our general product direction and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision, is for informational purposes only and shall not be incorporated into any contract, and is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remain at our sole discretion. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forward‑looking statements.
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
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
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
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.
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
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:
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
