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Elevating telecom service delivery: A chat with industry experts
The telecommunications industry led the charge on technology adoption decades ago. Now the industry is facing a severe technology debt. As customers demand faster and better products, companies must somehow update or adapt legacy infrastructure to deliver cutting-edge services.To keep up, executives are making bold choices: investing billions in infrastructure to keep up with demands for digital services and building workflows to eliminate silos between departments. But these moves are easier said than done.I spoke with three industry experts on the Innovation Today podcast to learn how companies at the top of their game are elevating telecom service delivery.The quest for quality experiencesTelecom companies are under tremendous pressure to deliver digital services on demand. That’s not as simple as shipping new products. Most telecom companies’ customers have already experienced a digital transformation, which has elevated their expectations for their telecom service providers, according to Ben Bendre, an associate partner with the Global Center of Competency for Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment at IBM.“The best service experience from a company like Amazon or Starbucks depends on the quality of the experience their telecom service providers can deliver,” he says. Yesterday’s services aren’t good enough for today’s businesses.To deliver premium experiences, companies must somehow blend decades of legacy infrastructure with the new hybrid world of cloud infrastructure. Telecom companies use hybrid networks, which combine legacy, terrestrial, and cloud-based IT networks. This approach increases both the cost and complexity of their operations—and hurts their agility.Old technology, new problemsThe unnecessary complexity runs deep. “All service providers have the same issue,” Bendre says. “Every time a new product came along, they built a new application to manage it.” Now, organizations have a multitude of order management stacks to handle each of these applications. But the technologies aren’t integrated. “These silos limit visibility into what you’re providing,” he adds.Fragmented application stacks make it difficult to track metrics around service provision. Companies can’t improve what they can’t track. As a result, teams are wasting a lot of time on manual work that could be automated. This negatively affects client delivery quality.A technical aptitude issue is at play here too. Reskilling a highly knowledgeable workforce given the advancement of technology is no easy task.Vicki Harris, director of business development at Thirdera, says departments such as business development, product design, finance, order management, and procurement really feel the technology lag. But companies often draw a hard line between these departments and IT, and the two don’t communicate. “A lot of my approach is making sure businesses understand new technology and what it can do for them,” she says.
New possibilities with data and analyticsImproving decades-old technologies and processes is doable but not easy. To start, executives must build a data-driven organization, says Jinu Koshy, vice president of domain consulting at Infosys. If they don’t, improvement won’t be difficult—it will be impossible.Koshy says companies are leaving a lot of rich data on the table. Every time a customer calls to request a repair, make a complaint, or change their service location, it involves data. All of that data can be leveraged to improve the business.“Start by asking, ‘Do we have a culture of data?’” Koshy recommends. “That doesn’t mean [you need to] build a 10-story apartment building and then try to fit your data in it. It means you should think about how to build data into your architecture.”When companies fail to collect data, they lack insight into what technologies they need to update and in what order to provide the best service. This leads to communication issues, Harris says, because teams can’t adequately prioritize projects and establish metrics for success.“You need to have the analytics to understand whether your customers and teams are actually using the things you’re putting in front of them,” she adds. This provides a better way to rationalize what your customers are using, with open transparency in sharing the metrics for agreed-upon success.Automation to the rescueOnce a telecom company has metrics about its services, that data must be synthesized and used. “This is a huge opportunity for industrial automation,” Bendre says. By integrating software and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and internet of things (IoT) devices, companies can monitor customer activities and solve problems before they arise.To show why automation and integration are so important, Bendre explains two key pillars of the telecom industry that have traditionally operated independently:
Service delivery, in which the organization takes an order and delivers it
Service assurance stack, which ensures a service keeps running
“But companies have started to think about this as a single, end-to-end platform,” he says. When everything is integrated into the same platform, it’s easier to gain visibility into issues, automate manual processes, and remove roadblocks. “This opens up new revenue possibilities,” he says.That single, end-to-end, integrated platform is what LIKE.TG provides. Integrated dashboards and data insights can save companies money. Instead of always building a new product or investing in a new tool to solve a problem, companies can make the most of what they already have.“They can take advantage of existing technologies with an end-to-end workflow that allows them to realize their potential,” Harris says.Telecom companies are using “workflows of workflows,” as Bendre puts it, to take multidomain service orchestration to the next level. “Before, we bandaged solutions to make processes work together,” he says. “Now, we can orchestrate processes across multiple product lines, but also across multiple third-party partners like security vendors.”Incremental innovationAutomation and integration are fundamentals. To truly get ahead, organizations must innovate. But innovation requires democratization, Koshy says. It’s not enough to invest in advanced technologies such as AI and ML—they must be made available to everyone in the organization.Koshy stresses that what works for the IT department might not necessarily work for business or finance. If each department is empowered to use technology to solve its own problems, then everyone can make substantial progress toward their goals.“It’s not about a big-bang approach,” he says. “It’s about managing change through incremental effort.” And incremental effort is where the alchemy of innovation is brewed.Get more tips on reimagining the telecom experience in our ebook: Accelerate revenue growth in telecommunications.
Welcome to the Now Platform Madrid Release
When Fred Luddy founded LIKE.TG in 2004, he envisioned a cloud-based platform anyone could use to manage digital workflows inside an organization. The Now Platform Madrid Release builds on Fred’s vision, with new mobile experiences that take full advantage of the native capabilities on your smartphone.To date, most mobile enterprise applications have been scaled-down versions of desktop apps. When you shrink a browser form down from a 15-inch monitor to a 4-inch phone screen, however, you get an experience that is pedestrian at best, and infuriating at worst.
Help has arrived. The Now Platform Madrid Release delivers powerful mobile experiences across LIKE.TG’s IT, employee and customer workflows, including any custom application that is built on the platform. It features a native mobile user experience (UX) that allows service representatives to resolve customer issues by simply swiping and tapping, in the same way we use consumer apps to shop, hail rides and stay in touch with distant friends.
The Now Platform Madrid release includes more than 600 innovations . It ships with a number of powerful mobile apps for common workflows, including our flagship IT Service Management and Field Service Management products. It also gives customers the power to turn any digital workflow into a mobile-first experience. For example, with the new LIKE.TG Mobile Studio, anyone can build new apps quickly using a drag-and-drop interface that doesn’t require a single line of code.The Now Platform Madrid Release is our fourth release since I joined LIKE.TG in December 2016. Over the past two years we’ve steadily expanded our functionality across all of our workflow products. We’ve also rolled out new products such as IT Asset Management, Enterprise DevOps, and Enterprise Onboarding, and new platform capabilities that include agent intelligence and virtual agents.We’ve added powerful machine learning technologies that help service representatives solve problems before customers know they have them. Let’s say you work on the IT help desk at a big company. You get into work in the morning and are confronted with a blizzard of tickets, all from employees working on the third floor of your building. Ticket 1 says “I can’t connect to WiFi!” Ticket 2 says, “Bloody hell, the wireless router isn’t working.” And Ticket 3 simply says, “Internet is down.”The new Text Similarity Engine in Agent Workspace uses machine learning to scan all these incidents, figure out what they have in common and propose a solution based on similar issues that have come up in the past. Result? Problems get resolved faster, customers and employees are happier, and service representatives get to focus on more complex work that yields meaning for them and value for their companies.I’m really proud of the global engineering, product, and design teams that worked tirelessly to ship the Now Platform Madrid Release on time while delivering high-quality innovation. We’re already hard at work on the next Now Platform release, which will extend the mobile functionality of Madrid with consumer-grade experiences for customers and employees.We look forward to partnering with customers as they bring this release to life. I’m excited for what comes next.Join the live broadcast on March 13th to discover new ways to unlock productivity and deliver great work experiences.Register
The Power Of Partners; Because A Platform Alone Is Not Enough
As LIKE.TG President and CEO John Donahoe has said, if all you have is ‘just’ a software platform, then that’s not enough to bring about digital transformation in real terms.For our customers now looking to take their businesses forward and reap the benefits of digital workflows, partners play an essential role in helping to re-engineer processes and ensure any given implementation is carried out in a high-quality manner.This integral role of our partners was highlighted at this year’s LIKE.TG EMEA Partner Summit 2019 in Barcelona, which kicked off with an opening address delivered by Ankush Korla in his interim role as Area Vice President Alliances and Channel EMEA.EMEA accelerationAnkush set the scene by talking about the acceleration the EMEA region is experiencing in terms of growth—a positive trend driven directly by the work of LIKE.TG partners in this region.I had the pleasure to present my take on the LIKE.TG strategy, which is aligned to hit $1 billion worth of business in the EMEA region by financial year 2020.While this target is no small mountain to climb, forming more strategic relationships with customers and partners is a critical part of this journey. In fact, it is strategic partnerships, over and above purely technical partnerships, that are a key method for building deep, collaborative working practices—and this is central to our plan for the EMEA market.As we move forward, we want to be more than just a ‘hot’ company that is popular in Silicon Valley—we want to be a great company that invests in our people and our partners, and really drives customer success.Customer success as a philosophy and mindsetWhat that really means is, when a customer signs, that’s not the end of the business relationship, it’s really just the beginning.As our SVP for Customer Outcomes, Jimmy Fitzgerald, explained in his keynote: “Customer success is a way of life, a philosophy and a mindset that shows we understand where the ‘true north’ of every customer really is. We need to understand what each customer is really trying to achieve at the start.”Where customers are struggling to articulate the business case for their software investments, it is LIKE.TG’s responsibility to help clarify, define and deliver that business case.Customer success cannot be delivered without partner success and Jimmy highlighted the three pillars around which LIKE.TG is working to support partners:
All partners must have the confidence that LIKE.TG will continue to grow so that they themselves have a larger addressable market to target for the future.
LIKE.TG is focused on giving partners the tools to be able to become more prescriptive with customers.
LIKE.TG is working hard to make sure that all partners have the right strategic engagement model in order to be able to grasp the maximum number of market opportunities.
The four principles for ecosystem transformationDay two of the Partner Summit started with a presentation delivered by David Parsons, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel Ecosystem at ServiceNow.Looking ahead, David detailed our precise formula for partner development across a division that will now be known as ACE, standing for Alliances Channel Ecosystem. The four tenets that underpin ACE are Simplification, Predictability, Trust and Accountability.Prescriptive guidance for outcomesMargreet Brenkman, Senior Director for Customer Success EMEA at LIKE.TG, continued with the importance of partners becoming more prescriptive with customers.She guided our partners on the four aspects of success that LIKE.TG customers exhibit:
State and measure business goals – customers that can express what they want to achieve are generally more successful.
Actively lead your transformation – it’s a journey and change needs to be driven throughout the organisation.
Get your LIKE.TG technology foundations right – LIKE.TG’s best customers align to the LIKE.TG roadmap and plan upgrades regularly.
Create user excitement and drive adoption – every user needs to think about how their experience will improve.
Just as important as the keynotes and formal presentations at the annual EMEA Partner Summit are the numerous opportunities for informal discussions and relationship building.The event is really important to LIKE.TG employees to learn about what our partners need. It creates an environment where questions are openly tabled from the start and we can respond to every point of interest expressed by our partners.With LIKE.TG Knowledge 19 coming soon, many of the partners I met in Barcelona are already looking forward to following up their work inside the LIKE.TG partner ecosystem.
CreatorCon Challenge finalists ready to disrupt
They built it and showed it. Now it’s time to show it again – this time for money – on the big stage at Knowledge 2019. Buckle up finalists, it’s about to get real!We challenged entrepreneurs to unleash innovation on the Now Platform back in October – to take the platform into new workflows in white spaces where LIKE.TG isn’t, to think strategically about how to leverage the platform for what it does best – creating digital workflows that unlock productivity and delivering great experiences. In short, we’re looking for applications that will achieve product/market fit in the LIKE.TG ecosystem and enable customers to drive digital transformation in enterprise- and industry-wide processes, where LIKE.TG doesn’t with our out-of-the-box products.Let’s take a look at each finalist and why we think they’ve ticked all of the boxes above.http://bluepineapple.io/Bluepineapple’s Green Folder is a BPMS (Business Process Management Software) solution for public sector/government that solves a huge problem like the one at the California DMV – manual, paper form based, unstructured, opaque, super slow and frustrating, and error prone processing in government agency services. Green Folder combines digital workflows and document automation to transform this into a modern experience for citizens.http://hiperhipo.com/Workforce Connect is a predictive workforce modeling and forecasting solution that complements LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery and enables businesses to generate future workforce demand plans including 3-5 year forecasts using key business data elements. It utilizes advanced analytics and modeling leveraging the data in LIKE.TG to simplify the once complex task of planning for future workforce demand. With Workforce Connect, HR organizations can forecast resources down to job title and skill level based on targeted business outcomes (revenue, operational expenses, margins etc.), and create actionable plans to secure resources to achieve those outcomes.https://vividcharts.com/VividCharts is a data visualization solution that enhances LIKE.TG reporting and Performance Analytics and enables anyone in IT and any line of business or department across the enterprise to tell stories with LIKE.TG data. VividCharts provides a growing library of out of the box visualizations and a no code solution called Slate for creating presentations directly in LIKE.TG that leverage real-time LIKE.TG data. Data export to excel, spreadsheet calculations, and slide deck prep in PowerPoint with instantly out of date data for your monthly reporting cycle are a thing of the past.What’s Next?The finalists will pitch to, and answer questions from an esteemed judging panel, including LIKE.TG Founder and Chairman Fred Luddy and an A-list of VCs and entrepreneurs at the CreatorCon Challenge Final keynote at Knowledge 2019. Finalists will compete for a $250K investment from LIKE.TG Ventures, residency at the LIKE.TG ISV Accelerator in Santa Clara, and sales enablement and marketing to accelerate their market traction. Come and join the thrills and spills!
Knowledge 2019: Day 3 highlights
What’s new on the Now PlatformA year ago at Knowledge 2018, Pat Casey asked customers for their feedback on the Now Platform. Casey, LIKE.TG’s senior vice president for DevOps, got an earful. The apps weren’t as cool or fun to use as consumer apps, they said. “Make it like Uber” was a common refrain.Another request was to improve scalability. With exponentially more data pouring in to businesses every day, customers needed the ability to manage thousands or millions of data points in real time. And on the privacy front, customers wanted tighter controls over their data.LIKE.TG listened and came back with an array of new features and capabilities. At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3 of Knowledge 2019, Casey unveiled Now Platform innovations designed to help customers deliver consumer-grade mobile apps with increased scalability, security, and usability.All of the following will be available in this fall’s New York release:
Siri shortcuts. This tool will offer multiple ways to simplify and customize voice interactions with mobile apps. Users can build shortcuts for common actions, such as open an incident, show to-dos, or request a day off.
Natural Language Understanding: Building on NLU technology from the AI startup Parlo, which LIKE.TG acquired in 2018, the platform will offer a no-code tool to create mobile voice-to-text shortcuts. Starting with the Orlando release in 2020, the Natural Language Query tool will enable customers to create customized virtual agents for mobile.
Database performance optimization: This will let customers with large datasets generate reports faster than ever before. In a demo, Rani Hamdi, VP of quality engineering, showed how the current platform took 28 seconds to run a report for a million-point dataset. With the new DPO tool, he was able to run a report in a mere three seconds that analyzed 10 times the amount of data.
Instance data replication: This will allow customers to replicate data from different instances, synced in real time. Previously, companies had to build out data replication manually. Now, with a simple configuration, you can sync data between instances with no-code implementation.
Data residency and compliance. This new compliance tool helps customers keep up with rapidly changing data privacy and security regulations in countries around the world.
KYOK (Keep Your Own Key): With Instance Key Management, customers can take control of their own data, with LIKE.TG serving as a secure backstop. And while your data is safe in the cloud, it will remain encrypted so that LIKE.TG itself can’t access your data unless you request it. “We’re excited to put the keys to your data privacy in your hands,” said Mike Lents, VP of service engineering.
Josh Kahn, vice president and GM of LIKE.TG’s Platform business unit, then took the stage to show how customers can harness the new capabilities of the Now Platform.Kahn outlined two broad categories of applications that customers are creating on the Now Platform. The first is productivity apps that are purpose-built to automate specific business workflows such as vacation requests, customer feedback and loaner equipment requests from IT. “While productivity apps automate small, simple processes, their business value adds up the more you add to the platform,” said Kahn.
On the productivity app front, David Record, division chief at the U.S. Department of State, demonstrated a vacation request app that replaced an older, paper-based process. The old process had multiple approval layers and took 15 days to process each leave request. Record’s team built a LIKE.TG mobile app that drove processing time down to 10 minutes. Using the Now Platform’s no-code development tools, they got the new app up and running in just three weeks from concept to launch.The second category is transformation apps, which optimize core processes that create significant business value for the company. These core processes are often highly complex and cut across multiple departments in an organization. Examples include employee recruitment, contract management, patent tracking, employee mobility and many more.To highlight transformation apps, Kahn introduced Sandra Tartol, VP of enterprise business operations for Optum Rx, a large prescription management company with 65 million customers worldwide. OptumRx processes $91 billion in prescription spending every year. Tartol explained how the company used LIKE.TG to transform unstructured prescription management processes, saving tens of millions of dollars last year alone.Other Day 3 highlightsAt the CreatorCon Spotlight, Marcus Torres, head of product for LIKE.TG’s platform business, walked developers through new tools to manage the work of developers and builders within ServiceNow.Guided App Creator makes it easier to import data from outside sources like spreadsheets so that it can be manipulated within the Now Platform and more quickly deployed into workflows.The Now UI Builder allows non-developers to assemble reusable workflow components in a drag-and-drop interface to create working dashboards. Finally, DevX creates a workspace which pulls all these elements together, regardless of whether the user wants to work at the code level or manipulate the components as drag-and-drop objects.
Highlights from Knowledge 2019
Highlights from Knowledge 2019It’s impossible to call out all the highlights from a three-day gathering with some 20,000 attendees and more than 600 events and sessions. We took a stab anyway. Here are key moments and takeaways from Knowledge 2019.
IT transformationHide complexity, embrace simplicity: LIKE.TG CEO John Donahoe kicked off the main keynote on digital workflows by contrasting the simplicity of apps we use in our personal lives with the often maddening complexity of software and other tools we use in our jobs. Chief product officer C.J. Desai showed how LIKE.TG can help bridge that divide with several new features in the New York release, including Integration Hub Action Designer, which puts consumer-grade apps in the hands of developers and operations teams.
Luddy sees a re-empowered IT: In an on-stage interview on Day 3 with Donahoe, LIKE.TG founder Fred Luddy explained why he believes IT will drive business innovation in coming years. “As we become dependent on more and more services, IT becomes more important,” Luddy said. “Their role is the nexus for all of the technology in an organization. They have an intimate understanding of every facet of the business.”
The power of proactive IT: In the IT workflows keynote, Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright teamed up with Pablo Stern, SVP of IT workflow products. Theyt unveiled exciting new features coming with the New York release. Those include Alert Intelligence, which leverages AI insights to identify root causes faster, and Visual Playbooks, which recommends prescriptive actions to stay on top of security threats across the enterprise.
Managing data at scale: At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3, Pat Casey, senior vice president for DevOps, unveiled innovations for IT pros that increase data usability, scalability and security. Chief among those are the new Database Performance Optimization tool, which lets customers with huge datasets generate analysis and reports faster than ever before; and Instance Key Management, which lets users manage their own data using LIKE.TG as a security backstop.
Customer experienceUnifying the customer experience: In the afternoon keynote on Day 1, Farrell Hough, SVP of customer workflow products, shared her vision for how the Now Platform can help companies transform their customer service operations. Tools in the New York release, such as the Guided App Creator, will allow companies to unify all aspects of the customer experience through a single app.
Scrantonicity wins the Knowledge Hackathon: On Day 2, more than 60 developer teams competed in an eight-hour sprint to create the most innovative new apps on the Now Platform. The big winner: Team “Scrantonicity,” five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., home of the sitcom “The Office.” Together they built a LIKE.TG app that tracks and integrates travel expenses using Virtual Agent, proving that a Hackathon victory is even sweeter than a “Dundie.”
Employee experienceIT and HR: Better together: In every organization, IT and HR must collaborate to win and retain top talent. Too often these two functions aren’t aligned, Blake McConnell, senior vice president for employee workflow products, told the crowd in the Employee Experience keynote on Day 2. Better alignment is coming with the New York release, thanks to tools like a mobile onboarding app and Virtual Agent integrations powered by advanced natural language understanding.Overnight sensation: Wrapping up the Employee Experience keynote with an eye-popping success story, Sean McCann, CIO of corporate functions at HSBC, explained how LIKE.TG helped the global bank undertake a massive HR transformation for its 235,000 employees. “We hadn’t customized our HR systems in 18 years,” McCann said. “But with assistance from LIKE.TG, we changed the way our people worked in 66 countries overnight.” Today, 88% of HSBC workers say they are highly satisfied or satisfied with their employee experience.
Into the Hackzone: LIKE.TG employees had a chance to strut their stuff in this year’s Hackzone, where they showed off a variety of Now Platform applications built in their spare time. Among the demos that got attendees buzzing: a functional, kinetic LEGO windfarm; a “Kegorator” that measures beer flow and keg temperature (with complimentary pours); and a custom pencil engraver. As much as the Now Platform can make work processes efficient and interconnected, the Hackzone offered a welcome reminder: Work should also be fun.
Highlights from Knowledge 2019
Highlights from Knowledge 2019It’s impossible to call out all the highlights from a three-day gathering with some 20,000 attendees and more than 600 events and sessions. We took a stab anyway. Here are key moments and takeaways from Knowledge 2019.
IT transformationHide complexity, embrace simplicity: LIKE.TG CEO John Donahoe kicked off the main keynote on digital workflows by contrasting the simplicity of apps we use in our personal lives with the often maddening complexity of software and other tools we use in our jobs. Chief product officer C.J. Desai showed how LIKE.TG can help bridge that divide with several new features in the New York release, including Integration Hub Action Designer, which puts consumer-grade apps in the hands of developers and operations teams.
Luddy sees a re-empowered IT: In an on-stage interview on Day 3 with Donahoe, LIKE.TG founder Fred Luddy explained why he believes IT will drive business innovation in coming years. “As we become dependent on more and more services, IT becomes more important,” Luddy said. “Their role is the nexus for all of the technology in an organization. They have an intimate understanding of every facet of the business.”
The power of proactive IT: In the IT workflows keynote, Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright teamed up with Pablo Stern, SVP of IT workflow products. Theyt unveiled exciting new features coming with the New York release. Those include Alert Intelligence, which leverages AI insights to identify root causes faster, and Visual Playbooks, which recommends prescriptive actions to stay on top of security threats across the enterprise.
Managing data at scale: At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3, Pat Casey, senior vice president for DevOps, unveiled innovations for IT pros that increase data usability, scalability and security. Chief among those are the new Database Performance Optimization tool, which lets customers with huge datasets generate analysis and reports faster than ever before; and Instance Key Management, which lets users manage their own data using LIKE.TG as a security backstop.
Customer experienceUnifying the customer experience: In the afternoon keynote on Day 1, Farrell Hough, SVP of customer workflow products, shared her vision for how the Now Platform can help companies transform their customer service operations. Tools in the New York release, such as the Guided App Creator, will allow companies to unify all aspects of the customer experience through a single app.
Scrantonicity wins the Knowledge Hackathon: On Day 2, more than 60 developer teams competed in an eight-hour sprint to create the most innovative new apps on the Now Platform. The big winner: Team “Scrantonicity,” five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., home of the sitcom “The Office.” Together they built a LIKE.TG app that tracks and integrates travel expenses using Virtual Agent, proving that a Hackathon victory is even sweeter than a “Dundie.”
Employee experienceIT and HR: Better together: In every organization, IT and HR must collaborate to win and retain top talent. Too often these two functions aren’t aligned, Blake McConnell, senior vice president for employee workflow products, told the crowd in the Employee Experience keynote on Day 2. Better alignment is coming with the New York release, thanks to tools like a mobile onboarding app and Virtual Agent integrations powered by advanced natural language understanding.Overnight sensation: Wrapping up the Employee Experience keynote with an eye-popping success story, Sean McCann, CIO of corporate functions at HSBC, explained how LIKE.TG helped the global bank undertake a massive HR transformation for its 235,000 employees. “We hadn’t customized our HR systems in 18 years,” McCann said. “But with assistance from LIKE.TG, we changed the way our people worked in 66 countries overnight.” Today, 88% of HSBC workers say they are highly satisfied or satisfied with their employee experience.
Into the Hackzone: LIKE.TG employees had a chance to strut their stuff in this year’s Hackzone, where they showed off a variety of Now Platform applications built in their spare time. Among the demos that got attendees buzzing: a functional, kinetic LEGO windfarm; a “Kegorator” that measures beer flow and keg temperature (with complimentary pours); and a custom pencil engraver. As much as the Now Platform can make work processes efficient and interconnected, the Hackzone offered a welcome reminder: Work should also be fun.
Work life should be like real life
C.J. Desai: Work life should be like real lifeAs chief product officer, my job is not just to lead great innovations but to ask philosophical questions, such as: “What actually is work?” Is it a thing you show up for and measure in hours, or is it a passion you pursue and measure in the outcomes you deliver for your customers?We rarely say, “work was GREAT today.” That’s because great moments at work are pretty rare. Why is it so easy to update a shopping list linked to a grocery delivery service in your personal life, while at work you might find yourself standing outside a conference room arguing over who reserved the room?LIKE.TG exists to make work, work better for people so that our customers can eliminate manual tasks and do more strategic and satisfying work. This week at our Knowledge® 2019 conference in Las Vegas, we will be sharing our product roadmap, demonstrating future innovations, and showing how LIKE.TG is redefining the future of work with digital workflows.Bring consumer experiences to workWe’ve grown used to great mobile experiences for shopping, socializing, banking and much more. Work is different. A simple, easy, intuitive mobile experience for the enterprise doesn’t yet exist. At LIKE.TG, we’re developing high-quality, more human mobile experiences for work. We’re tackling some of the most common work processes, and making them simple, easy and intuitive to do from anywhere. This is all new.We designed Now Mobile to help employees get work done, solve problems and search for information on-the-go. Now Mobile is designed to allow employees to complete day-to-day work tasks like requesting a new laptop, opening an HR ticket or searching for the holiday calendar, all from the palm of their hand. Employees will be able to get work done with the most-used features on their phones, such as the camera, GPS, microphone, QR code scanner and more. Employees will finally be able work in the same way they use consumer apps to shop, hail rides, and stay in touch with distant friends.Now Mobile is designed to include any workflow running on the Now Platform®, helping our customers to manage and update the app without writing a single line of code. The Now Platform puts the power of app development in the hands of the business, so that IT, HR and other departments will be able to manage Now Mobile more efficiently and spend their time on projects that make work better for their colleagues.Create a great onboarding experienceStarting a new job is never easy. Getting your laptop from IT, your benefits from HR, your desk from facilities is complex, time consuming and frustrating. For the first time, we will be showing Mobile Onboarding, which is designed to give employees a consumer-grade mobile experience before they even step through the door at a new job. The app is designed to allow employees to set up payroll, select the type of computer they will use, and more--all from an intelligent and intuitive app. Simple on the surface, Mobile Onboarding is designed to connect separate HR, Finance, and IT systems and hide the complexity from the user. This is the future of work.Say “hello” to Siri ShortcutsIn your personal life, how often does Siri help you search for information or contact a friend? Most of us never think about asking Siri to help at work. Now, you can have a quick chat with Siri wherever you are to take care of a complex work task. Let’s say you just received an urgent request from your boss. She needs a summary of all first-tier support tickets from the past week, but you are out of the office, only have your phone with you and are about to step into a meeting. No problem: “Hey Siri, open ServiceNow. Create a report of tier 1 support incidents since Monday and email it to Yvonne Jones at Acme Corporation.” Your boss gets what she needs within minutes. Simple, easy, game-changing.Work just got better, didn’t it?This simple experience actually runs on a complex set of digital workflows. Our new Natural Language Understanding technology paired with our new Siri Shortcuts and Google Assistant integrations are designed to translate the voice input to text and determine intent. New Natural Language Query capabilities are designed to use that intent to generate the SQL code necessary to create and send the report, all managed by our Virtual Agent enterprise chatbot solution. The client gets what she needs in minutes and work continues to get better, right?The best service is no serviceCompanies increasingly rely on IT to update and maintain digital services for everything from email to payroll to software testing. We are introducing new workspaces and capabilities designed to help IT serve employees, customers and partners.We are enhancing Agent Workspace with more intelligence to handle tedious, repetitive processes, so IT agents can focus on more strategic, value-added work. We are building the voice, Virtual Agent and NLU capabilities I mentioned earlier to work within Agent Workspace, enabling employees to self-serve with request creation from within Virtual Agent and automatic subscription to services based on specific requests.With Service Owner Workspace, service owners gain a single interface for complete visibility into the real-time performance of all of the IT services and offerings they provide. Knowledge workers are empowered to act quickly, correctly and confidently – even under stressful situations – to take action on near-term solutions. Service Owner Workspace aims to inform service owners with all the information they need to make smart long-term service investment decisions.Operator Workspace is designed to help IT optimize digital services and prioritize where to focus operations efforts with a holistic view of application and service health. Operators can manage a large number of services, resources and distributed operations and scale processes to keep up with demand to add services at a rapid pace.These innovations will make work better for IT agents, service owners and operators.Meet LIKE.TG Finance Operations ManagementThe month-end close process is one of the most tedious, time-consuming processes in a company. Today, most finance teams rely on manual methods when they are closing their books. They use legacy tools that don’t speak with or connect to each other.Onstage today at Knowledge 2019, we will show the LIKE.TG® Finance Operations Management product and its first application - Finance Close Automation – which is built for the office of the CFO. The Finance Close Automation app is a natural extension of our workflows and platform capabilities. As a complement to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Finance Close Automation is designed to help finance and accounting teams digitize their workflows to reduce finance close risk, improve team satisfaction, and accelerate the financial close process.The idea for Finance Close Automation was conceived by our former Corporate Controller, Amir Jafari, when he envisioned harnessing the power of the Now Platform to improve our manual finance close process. Amir led a team that began innovating the Finance Close Automation app; this team paved the way for NowX, our internal group focused on developing new concepts for products. We invested in his idea and Finance Close Automation is the inaugural product coming to market from NowX. Today, we use the application for our own quarter- and year-end close processes, and Amir now leads the new business unit responsible for Finance Operations Management.PayPal, a global technology platform and digital payments leader, is an early adopter of the Finance Close Automation application and has already seen positive results. “The LIKE.TG Finance Close Automation app is an innovative new solution that brings together all aspects of the finance close process, enabling simplification, transparency, better controls and greater efficiency,” said Aaron Anderson, PayPal’s Chief Accounting Officer and Vice President. “With its entry into the finance arena, we believe LIKE.TG will make a meaningful impact on finance departments across industries.”Deloitte, the lead launch partner for LIKE.TG’s Finance Operations Management, shares a passion for infusing innovation and accelerating operational efficiencies. “Working with LIKE.TG, we’re helping clients drive digital transformation across their organizations. We are particularly excited to help mutual clients like PayPal realize the potential of enterprise service transformation by extending workflow capabilities to the finance close process,” said April Slovensky, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLPThis is the power of digital workflows.Great moments at work don’t have to be so rare. The Now Platform is the not-so-secret sauce that allows us to deliver experiences that make getting stuff done at work more like our personal lives.The innovations mentioned above, and more, are expected to be rolled out over the next year in our upcoming New York and Orlando platform releases. By addressing head-on the friction we feel at work, the Now Platform takes care of the work you have to do so you can focus on the work you want to do. That’s delivering onour purpose of making the world of work, work better for people.The future of work just might be great and it starts now.Use of Forward‑Looking StatementsThis blog post contains “forward‑looking statements” regarding our product roadmap and future innovations and product releases, including but not limited to statements that include words such as expects, intends, aims or similar words conveying that the information is not historical fact. Forward‑looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward‑looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward‑looking statements we make. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include, without limitation, delays or unexpected difficulties related to future product releases, our ability to realize benefits from partnerships, and the ability to develop and gain customer acceptance of new products and services. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward‑looking statements. The information in this blog post on new offerings, features, or functionality is intended to outline our general product direction and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision.
Introducing the LIKE.TG Blog
“When I started LIKE.TG in 2004, my vision was to build a cloud-based platform that would enable regular people to route work effectively through the enterprise.”-Fred Luddy, FounderYou may have noticed a few changes at LIKE.TG over the past year, in particular our rebranding efforts – a new logo, a new color palette and a simpler, more intuitive user experience. As part of those efforts, we are relaunching our company blog.LIKE.TG technology enables great experiences for employees and customers. Quite simply, we make the world of work, work better for people. We designed our blog in the same spirit, making it easy for you to find the information you need, when you need it.Here you’ll find the latest news from our company. We’ll share what we’re building to enhance the power of the Now Platform. We’ll also publish insights by LIKE.TG experts on how digital workflows can create great experiences and unlock productivity.Our Life at Now section celebrates the people of ServiceNow. We’re proud to have been named one of LinkedIn’s Top Companies to work for in the United States, and we are committed to building a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging.Together with our customers, LIKE.TG is building the future of work. These are our stories.
Demo highlights from the HackZone 2019
Everyone has their own favorite aspects of the Knowledge conference, but the tinkerers and makers among us make tracks for the HackZone.Similar to how CreatorCon highlights the innovations of our partners, the HackZone showcases projects that bring the platform to life by the people who we work with every day. It’s also one of the most active areas on the show floor, populated by kinetic Lego devices, a working keg, and a smoky campfire-like smell coming from a pencil engraver.True to the maker spirit, LIKE.TG colleagues developed these demos in their spare time. “Almost all of these are weekend and evening projects,” says Principal Developer Evangelist Jason McKee, who helped wrangle entries to the HackZone while building the Kegerator demo on his own. “They are labors of love.”The results are hands-on examples of leveraging the Now Platform to build entirely new experiences for our customers. The best of them have the characteristics that define the most successful LIKE.TG apps: speed in creation and deployment, smooth integration with the Now Platform, great customer experiences and scalability.And fun: Situated next to the BeerOps programming competition, HackZone demos are meant to be accessible, interactive and kinetic. It’s the one place in Las Vegas, if not the world, where you are sure to find noise, smoke, beer, LEGOs and robots all in one place.
2019 Hackathon Winners Announced
Knowledge 2019: Hackathon winners announcedThis year’s Knowledge conference attracted some 20,000 attendees to hundreds of breakout sessions, keynotes, and other events. Yet for many coders and the “maker” crowd among us, the centerpiece of the show is the CreatorCon Hackathon, in which developer teams compete to build apps on the Now Platform.On Day 2, several hundred attendees organized into more than 60 teams gathered for an eight-hour competition that ended at midnight. After presentations by finalists on Day 3, judges announced three winners:
1st place: Team “Scrantonicity”Comprised of five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., the winning team created a LIKE.TG app that tracks travel expenses.The team used Virtual Agent and a range of APIs to build an app that handles airline and hotel reservations, rideshare, and optical character recognition of receipt photos. Team members: Sean Teeple, Marcus Dermont, Jim Trott, Brandon Senese, and Mike Borthwick.2nd place: Team “Above the Line”Taking advantage of the fact that Virtual Agent can be set up to be public facing, the runner-up team created an app that automates customer identification for the process of renting or checking out cars.Social good winner: “Superconnectors”To create more accessibility for the hearing impaired to work in call center environments, Superconnectors created an app that leverages Service Portal and a web browser’s speech API to convert a customer’s voice to text. It then converts the service agent’s typed reply back into synthesized speech.
Behind the scenesSome Hackathon teams formed a year ago at Knowledge 2018; others signed up on the fly. They compete for various reasons. “Many people come in with problems they want to solve, or just a core idea for an innovation,” said LIKE.TG developer evangelist Jason McKee. “Sometimes they have a great idea but they don’t know how to build it themselves. Others just want to build something.”CreatorCon Hackathon apps often find their way into new products and services built on the Now Platform. “In past years we’ve had people build business solutions here, take them back to the office, polish them up and move those apps into production,” McKee said.While the 8-hour time constraint is tough, McKee notes that anything is possible. His personal record for building a functioning app on the platform: 37 minutes.BrewOps ChallengeOther developer competitions are also drawing attention in the CreatorCon area at Knowledge 2019. The BrewOps challenge—which McKee called “program development drag racing”— is running each day of the show. Teams of three developers have 100 minutes to solve a themed challenge. This year, the theme was improving the workflow for a brewery.As with the CreatorCon Hackathon, BrewOps winners receive tech gadgets as prizes. Bragging rights matter just as much. “In this community, being a Hackathon or BrewOps winner is something you put on your resume,” McKee said. One of last year’s winners, he noted, wound up adding something else to his resume: a new job at ServiceNow.CreatorCon ChallengeThe third competition, the CreatorCon Challenge, has the most at stake. Teams from LIKE.TG partner companies spend the year before Knowledge competing to be finalists. The winning team gets $500,00 in seed money to develop their idea.Some ideas seem a bit crazy at first. McKee remembers when one attendee brought in a robot and wanted to build a service that could shut down a nuclear power plant remotely.“If all the electronic control systems on a power plant run wild, this robot’s job was to roll in and hit the manual shut-off,” McKee said. “They had no idea if that was a real thing, they just thought it could be. When they presented their results as finalists, an attendee who works in nuclear power came up and explained that it’s a real scenario. It’s called the scram button.”
Your Work Life Just Became as Great as Real Life
Ever since the rise of the modern corporation in the 19th century, the typical company has been a cluster of silos: IT, HR, legal, finance and the rest. That was then. Today a very different kind of company is emerging, based on a web of partners and functions that collaborate and share information in real time.In no small part, this shift is happening because employees want to work differently. They expect technology to make their work life as great as it’s made their home life: simple, convenient and accessible with a swipe on their mobile device.LIKE.TG is driving that transition. Thanks to digital workflows running on the intelligent, intuitive Now Platform, silos are disappearing. Work moves smoothly across the enterprise. Employees spend less time on routine tasks and more time on meaningful work that creates value for the business.
LIKE.TG opens first datacenter in Korea
LIKE.TG has opened its first datacenter in the Republic of Korea, with the goal of accelerating digital transformation in the region. This will allow LIKE.TG to provide APAC customers with the platform and solutions that grow productivity and improve the employee experience.With Korean companies still adjusting to the 52-hour work week that President Moon Jae-in enacted in July 2019, the need to automate routine tasks is more important than ever. By opening the cloud-based datacenter, LIKE.TG can provide Korean companies with the platform and solutions that help improve productivity and deliver a better employee experience.The newly opened datacenter will make it possible for companies in Korea to access the cloud-based Now Platform® and our innovative suite of workflow solutions. Mitch Young, LIKE.TG’s senior vice president, APJ said, “The opening of the datacenter reflects the importance and growth potential of Korea and the entire APAC region. We will continue to support Korean corporate customers so they can better experience LIKE.TG's platform and solutions.”“For companies embarking on their digital transformation journey, LIKE.TG aims to support their efforts by delivering digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity,” said Young. “This is a great opportunity to help Korean businesses make work, work better for their people.”A representative from LG CNS, one of LIKE.TG’s first customers in the region, said, "Based on solid cooperation with global partners like LIKE.TG, we will provide more reliable, cloud-based, innovative services to Korean companies."With a commitment to investment and growth in Korea, LIKE.TG will enable Korean companies of all sizes across various industries to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and achieve lasting business success.Visit LIKE.TG Korea to learn more.
Are You Innovation Experienced?
The technology industry introduced its first Proof of Concept (PoC) labs somewhere around the mid-1990s. The Internet had really started to gain traction and there was a dynamism to our web pages, Windows 95 worked really well and nobody was really worried about the millennium bug yet. It was time to show what ‘might’ be possible with the new breed of technology.Technology today moves a lot faster than it did back then. Concept labs still exist, but users expect a more tangible experience of what it can do to make our working lives better.Innovation ExperienceLIKE.TG took this drive for immediacy and immersion forward this October with our Innovation Experience, showcased at Now at Work London 2019.This immersive and contextual experience technology hub was an opportunity for our customers to physically walk into a special zone and experience a workspace that truly represents the office of the future, today.We’ve constructed the space to showcase scenarios that are common to all work departments, not just the IT function. The technologies are empowered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and so are able to interpret the needs of humans more intuitively, directly and rapidly.All LIKE.TG solutions that form part of the Innovation Experience are mobile-first. This means that all functionality can be accessed and executed from a users’ smartphone, tablet or laptop device. People can now manage work at their desk, or, equally, they can be in the coffee shop, on the bus or train.
Saddle up partnersWe took visitors to the ‘Saddle Bar’, which is a real bar in San Diego, near the original wooden space ship where LIKE.TG started in 2004. Users were shown how to build an application on the Now Platform from this mobile location.They witnessed the transition from initial app design, through to working in ‘sprints’ (Agile processes designed to encapsulate elements of work and drive them forward rapidly) and then onwards towards the ultimate app deployment.A lot of the innovation showcased was based on our LIKE.TG New York release instances, as well as the technologies we are bringing in from our partners, including Office 365.Channeling information streamsAs we now work to expand the scope of digital business wider every day, we need to be able to connect to information from traditional data stores alongside telemetry from IoT sensors, and much more. Information streams from any source can be plugged into the LIKE.TG platform and fed towards the users who are creating applications in these new work environments.Innovation Experience visitors got a hands-on experience of using the LIKE.TG Guided App Creator to design working applications faster than ever previously possible.The platform asked visitors whether their app should have location maps, whether it should be web-based, whether it should have a phone icon for voice functionality, and if it should have other pre-canned elements of functionality. So it’s all low-code no-code and ready to use from the get-go.The office of the future – nowAt the LIKE.TG Innovation Experience, which we intend to showcase beyond Now at Work London, if users want to book a meeting area, they can do so using the booking systems that run in Office 365. To make things even more intuitive, this kind of action can be carried out using chatbots. There are ‘human handoff’ controls in place for the AI to release to human operatives if they can’t resolve a request, but the system always shows the user what ‘confidence rating’ its AI actions are based upon first.There’s a lot of intelligent automation happening in the background, but visitors to the hub themselves don’t feel like they’re exposed to much technology because it augments and supports tasks so intuitively that it encourages thinking about work itself, not about the underlying workflows.When people send text messages, they don’t think about how data packets are transferred between carrier networks. It’s the same at the hub – the office of the future. We can see that people start thinking more about the impact and value of the work they are carrying out, rather than the nature of the work and the processes that underpin it.The LIKE.TG Innovation Experience has proved to be an immersive and contextual environment that is inspiring, yet real. It is thought-leading, yet achievable. When employees start to realize that they can achieve so much more in the workplace, they get inspired by the journey they have just taken and decide that there are so many other problems to be solved.It’s a virtuous circle that drives the passion to innovate. Our new generation of workers realizes that they can work anywhere, at a pace that suits their own personal goals and deadlines, in harmony with their personal lives. This freedom lets the creative juices flow and allows us to further eradicate all the time killing, antiquated and poor experiences of the past.Proof of Concept is so last millennium, the proof is in front of us – at the LIKE.TG Innovation Experience.
Celebrating what’s possible on the Now Platform
Anyone can find the switch after the lights are on, observed the Chinese philosopher Confucius (okay, maybe he didn’t say it exactly like that in 500 BC, but you get my point). This insight applies to all of the customers, partners, entrepreneurs and tinkerers who find the inspiration to build something new on the Now Platform®.It can be hard to turn on the proverbial “light bulb” and imagine what you need before it exists. In the past 15 years we’ve come to rely on smartphones, social media, machine learning, process automation and predictive analytics. Because of these technologies, our perception of what’s possible has dramatically changed.Nearly every company and department are using technology to change how they operate. We call this trend digital transformation. At LIKE.TG, our focus is on delivering digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity. But we know that we can’t do it alone. Together with our partners, we represent a true ‘force multiplier’ for our customers, helping them accelerate their digital transformation journeys and drive business value.That’s why I’m proud to share that the LIKE.TG Store hit an important milestone this month: 500 apps. These apps represent what’s possible on the Now Platform when you apply workflows to the complex business challenges facing us every day.
Introducing Now Intelligence
Here at LIKE.TG we think people should be able to work the way they want to, not according to the rigid dictates of legacy software. Thanks to the Now Platform, help is on the way. The Now Platform Orlando release features new AI and analytics capabilities designed to make work, work better for people. We call this group of capabilities Now Intelligence.Now and customer Intelligence enhances IT, employee workflows, so every department in your company can work smarter and faster. These tools combine human and machine intelligence to make better decisions, solve problems, find answers, and automate tasks.
With Now Intelligence, LIKE.TG enables better work experiences powered by insights that streamline business decisions and unlock new levels of productivity across the organization. Highlights include:
Cloud Insights, a new solution that helps optimize the cost of your cloud assets by making intelligent recommendations on managing usage across business hours, choosing the right resources, and enforcing usage policies.
Agent Affinity for Work Assignment allows customer service teams to assign work to the best agent using intelligent context to improve customer satisfaction. This can include assignment to a specific team that always services a specific customer, agents who have served the customer previously, or agents who have experience with related tasks.
Virtual Agent with Natural Language Understanding updates continue to build off innovations unveiled in our Madrid and New York releases, making it easier to create and maintain Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models.
Software Exposure Assessment enables security and IT teams to minimize vulnerability risk by identifying vulnerable software and related devices and servers, then initiating changes immediately through standard IT workflows.
Mobility solutionsWork increasingly happens on mobile devices. The Orlando release features a host of new mobile features designed to make work, work better on the go. These features have all been used by LIKE.TG employees, who are the first customers for new features on the Now Platform.During the fourth quarter of 2019, for example, 73% of new Now Mobile app users interacted with the search feature during the first week after installing the app. We also found that search continues to be a very important feature, with 30-40% average weekly usage for existing users.Here are highlights of the new mobile features in Orlando:
Mobile Agent enhancements that deliver native mobile experiences so service desk agents and operators can resolve issues at any time, through any mobile device. These capabilities are available on ITSM, ITOM, and Field Service Management solutions.
Mobile Branding and Analytics allow customers to configure the mobile experience to deliver your organization's branded look to your pre-hires, new hires, and employees, while getting detailed visibility into the services they use most.
Mobile Targeted Campaigns provide employees with important and relevant information (like 'tax time', site updates, local IT initiatives) right on their mobile devices, using profile information like department and job type. This proactive approach to employee communications increases satisfaction and reduces calls to the service desk.
The Orlando release is also great news for developers. The Now Platform now features automated change management for DevOps pipelines. These tools generate fresh insights for developers and IT operations while automating manual, time-consuming change approval processes. This will enable customers to release features developed off-platform more rapidly, while maintaining security. LIKE.TG DevOps, which was initially available through the LIKE.TG store, is now available as part of the Orlando release.Orlando is the sixth platform release I’ve overseen at ServiceNow. I’m so proud of the global engineering, product, and design teams that worked tirelessly to ship the Now Platform Orlando release on time while delivering high-quality innovation. These teams are already hard at work on our next platform release, coming in the fall.We’re excited to introduce and walk you through the Now Platform Orlando release with Now Intelligence. Join us for the release broadcast on March 19th. The Now Platform Orlando release is generally available today. The LIKE.TG Now Agent, Now Mobile, and LIKE.TG Onboarding apps are available to download on the Apple iOS store and Google Play store.
An ecosystem approach to pursuing the digital agenda
Since joining LIKE.TG a few months ago, I have spent a lot of time talking to our partner ecosystem about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead of us in the next 12 months.I use the term ‘partner ecosystem’ on purpose, becauseit indicates a collaborative, community-like environment, consisting of a number of diverse players working together — and these are the values LIKE.TG is committed to support.What our partners are telling me is that the market is shifting when we look at established channel models. There is pressure on the traditional two-tier channel system to re-imagine its go-to-market strategies, scale in an ever-more commoditised market and create value.Towards new and differentiated servicesAdded value is indeed delivered through new services centred around digital transformation and the role of partner networks here is huge.New technologies such as Machine Learning and AI are here, but their true potential is realised when they are integrated into an offering, or a process. Business value will be unlocked when customers are taken on a journey, and one that is supported by a vendor-partner ecosystem engagement.The nature of this engagement, much like digital transformation itself, is becoming long-term and value-driven, rather than transactional. When I describe digital transformation as a long-term process, it is because there is no switch button to turn it on, but continuous waves of innovation, and ongoing digital agenda.What has really affected the traditional business is that the line between consumer lives and business lives is becoming increasingly blurred, with consumer-grade experiences from our personal lives challenging established ways of working.Mobility is going to be critical in terms of supporting collaboration and remote working, and delivering great mobile-first experiences at work.Capitalising on the digital agendaMost organisations are still in their infancy in terms of exploiting and capitalising on the digital agenda. But with digital transformation now being a top priority for the boardroom, the demand within our ecosystem is growing.Businesses are seeing the impact that digital workflows running on the Now Platform® are having on employee and customers experiences, and they are asking our partners, “Help me, how can I do this?”The partners who are best placed to answer are those who are already committed to accelerating their own digital transformation journey. At LIKE.TG, we think about our partners as being our ‘customer zero’. This means they need to be fully digital themselves if they are to help other organisations pursue their own digital agenda.We don’t expect them to do this themselves either. At LIKE.TG, we want to enable ourpartners to innovate on theNow Platform, and collaborate with each other in a dynamic environment.We are also committed to helping our partners augment their skillset and drive their agility and efficiency. To this end we have put in place progressive training programmes to enable partners to have access in a format they need, when they need it. This will potentially reduce thetime to certification across our global partner ecosystem.The year of the platformWith the debate about the cloud now more or less settled, andwith multi-cloud strategies becoming the norm, 2020 will be the year of the platform.Wewill see the knitting together of a multi-platform approach, and one where LIKE.TG will continue to be intrinsically woven into the fabric of how organisations work. This is what is making digital transformation real and is unlocking new value for businesses.LIKE.TG has a laser focus on developing easy and intuitive user experiences and our partner ecosystem plays an integral role in our strategy. Forus, partner success is synonymous with customer success and the key lies in creating a thriving ecosystem of innovation.
Introducing the Now Platform New York release
Ever since the rise of the modern corporation in the 19th century, the typical company has been a cluster of silos: IT, HR, legal, finance and the rest. That was then. Today a very different kind of company is emerging, based on a web of partners and functions that collaborate and share information in real time.In no small part, this shift is happening because employees want to work differently. They expect technology to make their work life as great as it’s made their home life: simple, convenient and accessible with a swipe on their mobile device.LIKE.TG is driving that transition. Thanks to digital workflows running on the intelligent, intuitive Now Platform, silos are disappearing. Work moves smoothly across the enterprise. Employees spend less time on routine tasks and more time on meaningful work that creates value for the business.
Now Platform Enables Organizations to Scale DevOps to the Enterprise
New enterprise DevOps solution will let LIKE.TG customers develop better software faster, shipping to production in minutes vs. days, weeks or monthsDevOps is here to stay. And for good reason.In today’s hyperconnected world, if you’re not fast, your competitors will be. Every industry is being disrupted by software, and every company is trying to figure out how to navigate and embrace new technologies as they scale.DevOps, the practice behind developing digital products, fosters an agile relationship between development and IT operations. LIKE.TG realizes that in today’s fast-moving business world, DevOps is essential for any organization seeking to rapidly respond to changing customer and marketplace demands. In fact, 56% of global infrastructure decision makers now report that their organizations are implementing, have implemented, or are actively expanding their DevOps initiatives, according to the January 2019 Forrester report, Five Key Trends To Benchmark DevOps Progress.LIKE.TG already digitizes IT, employee and customer workflows with the Now Platform. Today, we are introducing LIKE.TG DevOps, which extends the power of the platform to simplify and speed software development and deployment.While many businesses are leveraging DevOps in various capacities, they’ve yet to be able to scale it across their entire organizations. The challenge in scaling is that while there are many tools at developers’ fingertips, enterprise processes around audit, compliance, security and change management may still be performed manually. This can result in friction and delays during deployment, as well as limited visibility across numerous teams within an organization, making it difficult to drive best practices and DevOps adoption across the enterprise.“CIOs are driving cultural change and new tool adoption to accelerate speed and quality capabilities through DevOps practices,” said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, Cloud Operations, IDC. “Over the past several years, our executive advisory indicates when successfully adopted, DevOps improves cross-silo change management capabilities, drives IT and product management alignment, and empowers executives with clear metrics that drive business growth. Successful adoption requires connectivity across the toolchain and increased use of automation.”Extending the Now Platform to DevOpsLIKE.TG DevOps connects developers and IT operations using the Now Platform to automate the manual and time-consuming change approval process, to enable customers to release features rapidly and safely.LIKE.TG DevOps also provides visibility across the product development toolchain. It integrates with leading DevOps tools to provide automated change management and a single dashboard across planning, development, testing, deployment and operations. This allows leaders to easily view common metrics across teams and drive best practices, regardless of the tools being used. This can mean shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency and more dependable, high-quality releases.Powered by the Now Platform, LIKE.TG DevOps helps IT departments approve code faster by automating the process based on pre-set rules and policies determined by change managers, in turn allowing them to focus attention on higher risk submissions. Developers will see their code in production in minutes rather than days or weeks, and they’ll be able to build code and submit it for approval using their favorite tools.LIKE.TG DevOps currently integrates with Jira Software, GitHub, BitBucket and Jenkins, with more integrations expected to be rolled out periodically.
One of our DevOps pilot customers, Thomas Larsen of DNB Bank ASA, recently said, “LIKE.TG DevOps will help our business keep pace with the demand for new software and deliver rapid customer value without compromising quality or increasing risk. We are seeing the benefits of the solution already and expect to make updates and changes in minutes instead of days or even weeks. The agility we expect to achieve will play a key role in enabling our organization to be nimble in reacting to customer demands and market opportunities.”
LIKE.TG DevOps is currently available for financial services organizations based in the Northeast region of the United States and the United Kingdom. The offering will be gradually rolled out to additional customers in 2020.
Reducing the financial services change lifecycle from days to minutesA platform-based approach to DevOps is crucial, especially for highly regulated industries such as financial services, as it enables developers to constantly adapt software to evolving regulations.From trading firms to big banks and exchanges, financial services organizations are vying to deliver new features and content to customers faster and more securely, and they are leveraging DevOps tools and practices to support those efforts.Should a financial services company undergo a time intensive audit, for example, LIKE.TG DevOps offers access to a slew of data and the ability to quickly track and understand who changed the code and why, how the deployment approval decision was made, what tests were conducted and what results were achieved, helping teams gain visibility and the ability to audit the end to end development and release process as needed.One LIKE.TG customer, a large global financial services organization, has 25,000 developers who were spending 20% of their time chasing approvals to deploy in controlled environments. By utilizing LIKE.TG workflows in partnership with their development tools, time spent on change orders was reduced from 55 hours to 18 minutes, and a change lifecycle decreased from 23 days to 90 minutes.The Now Platform deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and helps unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. With LIKE.TG DevOps, our customers now have the tools to help keep pace with the demand for new software and deliver rapid customer valueTogether with customers like DNB Bank, we are making the world of work, work better for people.Use of Forward‑Looking StatementsThis blog contains “forward‑looking statements” regarding our future plans. Forward‑looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward‑looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward‑looking statements we make. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include: (i) delays in rolling out the offering to additional customers and (ii) delays in releasing the additional integrations. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward‑looking statements.
LIKE.TG New York release paves the way to a native mobile-optimized future
Everybody loves their smartphone. Some people even go to bed with their device or even keep it close to their pillow. But, as we enter the second decade of pocket-sized mobile computing, it’s crucial to realize that we’re coming to an important strategic inflection point.Until now, users have been pretty much okay with mobile app functionalities that have been ported over from their desktop versions, such as “pinch-and-zoom.” However, such experiences won’t endure because of their essentially non-native level of mobile optimization.This changing tide is why our LIKE.TG New York release extends new desktop and native mobile capabilities across the workplace at scale.Mobile enterprise epiphanyThis is the point when mobile has finally come to the enterprise. This is the point when the mobile device you take to bed with you becomes the mobile device you can’t sit at your desk without. It is the point when digitally transformed experiences at work span omnichannel zones—from the desktop to the web and across embedded IoT systems. Now, these experiences also fully embrace mobile out-of-the-box use cases to create more intuitive consumer-like applications.We know that more than half of employees now expect their employers to offer native, mobile-optimized tools, propelling this functionality to the fore of the New York release on the Now Platform®.Beyond pinch-and-zoomAs we move beyond pinch-and-zoom, we will start to adopt a far broader set of device commands and these digital interactions have been engineered into the New York release. Over and above a desktop mouse click, we are paving the way for users to tap, swipe, flick, speak, and even snap (as in take a photo) to spread consumer-like functionality across enterprise systems.If your laptop is broken or malfunctioning, then why should you have to do more than simply take a picture of it and send it to IT support? New levels of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) facilitated by LIKE.TG® Predictive Intelligence in the New York release drive image recognition so that this kind of request can be intelligently automated and resolved.The arrival of this type of functionality heralds a new wave of enterprise experiences that enable workers in every role to get work done faster, more easily, and more intuitively.User creation and curationThe New York release is really putting the power in the hands of end users. By empowering them with no-code mobile application and services development, organizations will no longer need armies of tech people to make things happen.You might say this is quite a brave move, because we will now be judged on the ability of users themselves to get work done through native mobile functionality that is purpose-built for employee requests and actions. We’ve only thrown down the gauntlet to ourselves in this way because we’re confident in the scope, breadth, and power of our platform to be able to deliver for all users, in all roles, in all industries.As we move forward and look to the next stage of mobile technology development, we will naturally further enhance the Now Platform to accommodate and embrace the next wave of voice recognition, biometrics, object recognition, and more.Spanning the employee lifecycleThe New York release also features a new LIKE.TG® Onboarding and Transitions app, which makes starting a new job extremely simple by combining all of the multi-departmental tasks involved in getting up and running as a new employee into a single, intuitive mobile experience.From pre-boarding (all the things you do before you start a new job, such as signing an NDA or submitting a photo for your security badge) to onboarding, induction and onwards, LIKE.TG has built a self-serve offering that spans the entire employee lifecycle.What’s different now is that this has all been engineered for native mobile behavior, enabling employees to use features like their device camera, mobile notifications, etc. These are experiences that people are accustomed to every day in their home lives and that have now been brought to the enterprise level. It means that work experiences become just as great as what are often leisure-centric home and personal experiences outside of work.Core platform elementsIn addition to tools for the complete employee lifecycle, I’d like to call out three further platform enhancements that users can look forward to in our New York release. All essentially mobile native, each element of the Now Platform expansion has been built to provide enterprise-wide services and information to employees regardless of their location.
Reducing complexity with Now Mobile and Virtual Agent innovations – with the help of Natural Language Understanding Model Builder, users can easily train models with sample sentences and phrases, and then improve accuracy by mapping words to their company vocabulary.
Transforming finance with financial close automation – features automated journal entries, integration with SAP and Oracle, plus embedded policy and compliance functions.
Guided app creator – this innovation means anyone can build a digital workflow employing the LIKE.TG new wizard-like user experience, without any coding experience required. It includes an easy spreadsheet to table converter.
Since the LIKE.TG New York release is here, we have already started working with our customers and partners on upgrades and, equally, on the next release of the Now Platform, which (as you will have already heard or worked out) begins with the letter O. Get your bags packed for Orlando!
Entrepreneurs unleashed: Announcing the 2019 CreatorCon Challenge Winner
If you could solve a big business problem by building a new digital workflow, what would you create? Would you build a chatbot that improves healthcare by instantly connecting patients with available doctors? Or a mobile app for universities that delivers a great student enrollment experience?These are the questions LIKE.TG posed to entrepreneurs and app developers in October when they announced this year’s CreatorCon® Challenge – LIKE.TG’s global competition for ISV startups to create new apps and take the Now Platform® into new uses and industries.LIKE.TG challenged participants to take its London and Madrid platform releases to the limit: Use Virtual Agent, Mobile Studio, Flow Designer, Integration Hub, Performance Analytics, Service Portal and more to solve a business problem.The finalists were chosen by our panel of tech and VC expert judges: LIKE.TG Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors Fred Luddy, True Ventures Partner Om Malik, Lighter Capital CEO BJ Lackland and GGV Capital Managing Partner Glenn Solomon.
This year’s winner* is VividCharts, a data visualization company that utilizes Service Portal to extend LIKE.TG reporting and Performance Analytics and enables anyone regardless of technical skill level to tell stories with LIKE.TG data. VividCharts provides a growing library of out of the box visualizations and a no-code solution called Slate for creating presentations directly in LIKE.TG that leverage real-time LIKE.TG data.“Congratulations to VividCharts for delivering a fantastic solution that helps companies make their LIKE.TG data more actionable” said Avanish Sahai, LIKE.TG’s vice president of ISV and Technology Alliances. “VividCharts’ application demonstrates the power of the Now Platform for ISVs to extend LIKE.TG workflows and create brand new apps that deliver business value for enterprises globally.”“We are thrilled to be LIKE.TG’s 2019 CreatorCon Challenge winner,” said VividCharts Co-founder and CEO Mitch Stutler. “VividCharts saves companies time when building dashboards and presentations with LIKE.TG data. Winning CreatorCon this year will enable us to accelerate our mission to help our customers turn LIKE.TG data into stories.”VividCharts joins an ecosystem of hundreds of ISV partners that has certified and published nearly 450 apps and integrations for the Now Platform on the LIKE.TG Store. The innovative applications this community has brought to LIKE.TG customers complement and extend LIKE.TG IT, employee, and customer workflows.The 2017 first-place winner, Factor5™, whose CourseLoop app helps streamline curriculum management, create new course offerings and help students plan their experience, continues to find success – now with five of Australia’s largest universities as customers, including Monash University and Murdoch University. Factor5 raised AU$2.8 million ($2 million) in additional funding in 2017 and 2018.The 2018 first-place winner, SalesWon, is experiencing strong market support for its SalesWon CRM CPQ application, which accelerates and streamlines the sales process by creating a single quote to cash to customer service process. SalesWon has already landed several new accounts and is establishing market traction as a direct result of the visibility gained from the CreatorCon Challenge.The CreatorCon Challenge is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to rapidly turn their ideas into marketplace reality on the Now Platform, which has a proven track record of helping companies fundamentally transform the way people work. We believe that’s one reason LIKE.TG was named Forbes’ No 1. world’s most innovative company in 2018 and a Leader in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High‑Productivity Application Platform as a Service.LIKE.TG continues to see growth and momentum around its ISV ecosystem. During a busy and exciting Knowledge conference, it’s clear that partners and customers are embracing the Now Platform to make work, work better for people.*Hiper Hipo was originally selected as the 2019 CreatorCon Challenge winner but was determined to be ineligible and has been disqualified.Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service, 26 April 2018, Paul Vincent, Van Baker, Yefim Natis, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark Driver, Rob Dunie, Jason Wong, Aashish GuptaGartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications
LIKE.TG partner spotlight: A conversation with Enable CEO Bruce Hara
When Bruce Hara launched Enable in 2014, the Australian tech entrepreneur’s goal was to bring consumer-grade software experiences to the workplace.It wasn’t until he hired his first employee, Josh Bateson, who suggested they partner with LIKE.TG to help propel the new business, that he realized the power of the Now Platform. Today Enable is a valued LIKE.TG partner that helps organizations throughout the Asia-Pacific region achieve their digital transformation goals.Based in Sydney, Enable has offices across Australia and in Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. They also have delivery teams in India, operating out of facilities in Bangalore and Noida. Enable was recently honored as LIKE.TG’s APJ Elite Partner of the Year for 2020.Enable has about 200 customers. The firm has a strong presence in telecommunications, banking and insurance, the energy sector, and the public sector, where it works with state and federal governments across Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Hara’s team helps clients in functions ranging from customer service and human resources, to governance risk and compliance, and security. They also have strong capability in IT Service and Operations Management, having been LIKE.TG’s 2019 APJ IT Workflow Partner of the Year.We called Hara to learn how Enable has managed through the COVID-19 pandemic, and to get his take on business conditions in the region. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How is your business holding up during this crisis?We’ve held up very well across all our offices. It’s been a significant challenge, but I’m incredibly proud of our team. We’re fortunate that we’re an organization that lives and breathes digital transformation. So, our teams already had the ability to work from anywhere. Since the pandemic began, we’ve done everything remotely, from kicking off new projects to celebrating ‘go lives’ with customers.It’s been a perfect showcase of our methodology, The Enable Way, which we use to deliver projects and engage our customers. At Enable, we’ve shown customers how remote working can be responsive, collaborative, innovative and highly successful. We’ve enjoyed this collaboration with our customers and setting up success in the new ‘normal’ for us all.What about your customers?Very noticeable has been the starkly different abilities of businesses and government departments that have been progressive in their digital transformation, compared with those that haven’t. This difference is not simply about the ability to function remotely, but the ability to thrive remotely. It is the ability to access everything you need via mobile devices, regardless of your function, seniority or geography. To know your work platforms are accessible from anywhere, and secure. To know your staff can breathe a little easier, because they’re set up for success. To know your customers can still rely on the services and products that you provide them.We partner with many of Australia’s state government departments of education. It's been inspiring to see how they’ve adapted and successfully provided infrastructure and services enabling thousands of schools to deliver education remotely throughout the pandemic. Government departments that have invested in digital platforms like LIKE.TG have reaped the benefits of their progressive decision making. As a result, they have more time and energy to focus on their mission and supporting citizen services.Another positive show of intent is our large enterprise customers prioritizing their ongoing digital transformation throughout the pandemic. We’ve closed multiple A$1 million plus deals over the past three months with financial services, energy, transport, property and telecommunications businesses. These projects are across the Now Platform, including CSM, GRC, Security Operations, HR and IT workflows.What are the biggest growth areas for Enable right now?As a pureplay LIKE.TG partner, we’re more excited than ever about the growth and maturity of the platform. We’re complementing our award winning LIKE.TG capability and certifications with advisory and industry specific solutions for telecommunications, financial services, energy and utilities, as well as the public sector. Bill McDermott’s statement about LIKE.TG being the “platform of platforms” aligns with the opportunity that we strive to create for our customers. For them, there is tremendous opportunity to improve service management across their enterprise, continually improving the service experience and efficiency for their staff and customers.Our role is to advise and enable our customers to get there quickly and achieve the enormous value associated with digital transformation. We’re doubling down on our platform capability, growing our practices and teams dedicated to CSM, GRC and HR. We’re investing further in our IT consulting capability, specifically IT Operations Management and the business value that can be created via the common service data model (CSDM). Our customers are telling us that our advisory services dedicated to their sectors, along with our experienced LIKE.TG practices and capability, make us a one-stop shop for their LIKE.TG roadmap.We’re also making it easier for our customers to stay ahead of the game with their investment in LIKE.TG, via our subscription offering: Customer Advisory and Support by Enable, or CASE. Right now, organisations need to be agile. They need ways to deliver their services while managing costs. They need pragmatism and flexibility from their consulting partners. Our CASE offering provides that assistance, from advice and road mapping, to project work, to mentoring, training and even capability building. Essentially, it’s what you need when you need it. At the same time, a range of CASE entitlements keep a customer’s LIKE.TG platform secure, healthy and upgraded.How do mobile platforms play into your strategy?100% of our projects have an embedded mobile strategy. In every industry, whether it’s B2B or B2C or the public sector, it’s imperative to provide services to customers, employees and citizens via an easily accessible platform. In the age of being able to work from anywhere, staff and customers should be able to trigger requests and workflows that extend through an organization’s back end to be resolved.It’s not necessarily about an organization being able to provide its full offering on a mobile platform. Pragmatism should override perfection. We aim to get minimum viable products to market that are secure and useful, and then continuously improve them based on customer and user feedback.
What have you heard from your customers about how business will change after the pandemic?We're consistently hearing from executives that they are prioritizing the ability of their staff to operate remotely on a moment’s notice. Accepting a remote workforce means you can access the best talent wherever they may be. I think smart CEOs are going to be rethinking how they orchestrate virtual workforces to get the best outcomes for employees, customers and shareholders.The pandemic will disrupt traditional industries beyond what was already happening. Will we still need all that corporate office space? Will central business districts ever be as busy and bustling? What about the public infrastructure and transport that supports them?Also, globalization led workplaces to spend huge amounts on travel for meetings and conferences. I think there’s likely going to be some new thinking around that spend as well. How we’re now working will, at least in part, be the way we work ongoing. That is, a lot of people can work from anywhere, at flexible times, in outcome-driven ways. Success is all about what a person does and how well they do it.Are you hiring nowadays? What’s your sense of the IT market in your region?We’ve continued to hire and grow our team during the pandemic. First and foremost, we’re an organization that works with customers on their digital transformation, in ways that uphold their business priorities. So, we need people who can engage and consult with customers at all levels. As a dedicated LIKE.TG partner, we’re also on the lookout for talented developers and architects with deep platform knowledge and strong technical capabilities.What are your key learnings from the pandemic?Companies with great cultures and trust in their people, partners and processes can do amazing things in a very short space of time.Pragmatism and a focus on continual improvement crushes the idea of perfection every time. Let’s remember this as we continue collaborating and innovating post pandemic.Digital transformation, when delivered in concert with a focus on assisting people is the biggest opportunity of our time.
Introducing the Now Support mobile app
The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded me and many others of the importance of customer service. Today, customer service management is a 24/7 business.LIKE.TG’s Now Support portal already allows our customers and partners to manage their instances, upgrades, and users from one central location.We recently upgraded our public Now Support portal by providing easy access to the right content and making logins easier with the help of our Virtual Agent chatbot. Today we’ve taken a further leap by launching the Now Support mobile app. Customers can now obtain post-sales support via a dedicated mobile app. Previously, customers could only obtain support via web browser, often via laptop/desktop. This new app will make work, work better for our customers.Built on the Now Platform®, the Now Support mobile experience is a personalized app that provides LIKE.TG administrators with easy access to most of the resources available via our portal offering. This new mobile experience is designed for use on the go. Customers can track issues, create cases, access helpful content, receive notifications, and obtain instant fulfilment via our automation store–anywhere, anytime.Increasingly, people work anytime, anywhere, at home and outside traditional office environments. As a result, customers need more flexible support. This shift has accelerated enterprise mobile adoption. According to LIKE.TG’s recent Mobile Usage survey, 90% of companies already provide apps to employees, with more than one quarter of workers using the apps to request help or ask a question.Resolve issues on the goOur users often have many responsibilities, ranging from LIKE.TG admin work to development, operations and other IT tasks. As a result, customer admins face a heavy volume of both requests and information. This can impact their ability to capture key details and avoid mistakes.With the Now Support mobile app, LIKE.TG admins can consume, manage and track critical information, such as common requests and critical cases, on the go. Work can now be distributed anytime, anywhere, away from traditional office environments and desktop settings.Customer admins and technical support professionals who are responsible for monitoring and maintaining the health of their companies’ LIKE.TG workflows are often assigned to “on call” duty, where they must be available around the clock–sometimes for up to a week at a time. The Now Support mobile experience eliminates the anxiety and burden of feeling tethered to a desk, offering customers access to critical capabilities from the palm of their hand, including:
Real-time notifications;
Ability to move critical cases forward as needed;
Change management;
Access to the Now Support library of knowledge; and
A consistent and continuous experience across touchpoints and channels.
The Now Support mobile app is just one of the ways we are focused on making work, work better for our customers. This week, we’re also introducing a fully revamped Customer Success Center to provide even more ways to learn and harness the power of the Now Platform. The new, persona-based Customer Success Center will offer customers one place to learn, share and achieve their goals. It features expanded search capabilities, in-depth knowledge documents and a dedicated repository of Customer Success webinars.By deploying our own Customer Service Management (CSM) solution, we’ve achieved a step change in customer support here at ServiceNow. Thanks to the Now Platform®, we can tap into other LIKE.TG applications and capabilities that enable us to scale as we grow. Now Platform features such as the Now Support mobile app and Virtual Agent deliver better self-service experiences for our customers. They also improve the case fulfilment experience for our technical support engineers.Our customers and employees have responded positively to the improved self-service experience. Fewer than 10% of issues are reported to us via phone. More than 83% of all customer cases are submitted online via the Now Support portal.Here at LIKE.TG, we believe we are our own best use case. Our enhanced Now Support portfolio is a key step in our own digital transformation journey. We continue to expand use of our own products internally, with a mission of maintaining or exceeding our 9.2 CSAT score for Customer Support.Quality support is a necessity for LIKE.TG customers. That’s why we are committed to providing our users with alternative ways to access the support they need, when they need it.The new Now Support mobile app is available now for download to all customers via iOS and Android.
New partner integrations in Now Platform Paris release simplify common workflows
By now, you’ve heard a number of us at LIKE.TG talk about the “workflow revolution.” The COVID-19 pandemic has made businesses rethink how they operate, engage employees, and serve customers. As importantly, it has accelerated digital transformation. Our customers tell us every day that they’re relying on their digital platforms to ensure business continuity, enhance employee productivity, and even drive growth.That’s something we don’t take lightly. In fact, our partners and our LIKE.TG teams have made sure that we’re including as many new technology integrations as possible in the Now Platform Paris release so that our customers will have even more tools to help them stay agile and resilient now and in the future.Our customers’ success is our success. By “our,” we mean LIKE.TG and partners like Microsoft, Twilio, and SailPoint. Together, we’re responding to our customers’ dynamic needs. Read below for more detail.
LIKE.TG Service Graph updatesOne of the advantages of the Now Platform® has always been our one data model structure – our CMDB. And, keeping with our goal to drive value across the entire customer lifecycle, we know that our customers also need a consistent, data-driven approach to managing their entire digital lifecycle. To meet this need, we’ve added LIKE.TG® Service Graph to our CMDB to help customers digitally manage planning, deployment, business processes, and more. Stemming from our acquisition of Sweagle, Service Graph now underpins all of LIKE.TG’s solutions, enabling businesses, for the first time, to bring together technology, people, and processes into a service-oriented view.We are also introducing the Service Graph Connector Program to take Service Graph one step further. The Service Graph Connector Program is a new designation within the Technology Partner Program and brings in the expertise of our partners. The connectors, built by LIKE.TG and our technology partners, ensure that many of the third-party tools that businesses rely on today are directly integrated with LIKE.TG, making it easy for customers to integrate, upload, and organize data on a single platform. Inaugural technology partner integrations include Armis, HCL BigFix, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Dynatrace, ExtraHop, Forescout, Jamf, LogicMonitor, Cisco Meraki, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft SCCM, Qualys, SolarWinds, and Tanium.Part of what we focus on with our partners is delivering high-value business outcomes to customers, and these new integrationsare part of how we do that.Microsoft integrationsSince forming our strategic alliance with Microsoft, we’ve worked closely with them to develop innovative solutions that help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys and deliver great employee and customer experiences. Today we’re launching four new integrations among our LIKE.TG solutions and Microsoft, focused on Azure and Teams. These include:LIKE.TG Onboarding Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): With more than 60% of employed Americans working from home (Gallup), remote onboarding is more important than ever. Our new LIKE.TG Onboarding integration with Microsoft Azure AD automatically kicks off the right onboarding workflows as soon as a new employee profile is created in Azure AD or an HR system. Hiring managers provide input on the business roles the new employee is going to perform, and the integration automates the provisioning of the right set of resources, including role-specific applications. New hires get the information and systems access they need to be productive from anywhere, on day one. HR leaders, hiring managers, facilities teams, and many more get a simple, quick way to give new employees a great first-day experience.
Microsoft Azure Support for LIKE.TG Cloud Insights: Cloud Insights empowers IT leaders with cost optimization, cost reporting, and savings automation capabilities to help navigate the complexities of the cloud. Now supported within Azure, Cloud Insights works with Microsoft Advisor to streamline its recommendations and automatically kicks off a LIKE.TG IT workflow, helping IT leaders save time and money.LIKE.TG Software Asset Management (SAM) Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory: One of the biggest frustrations for IT pros is keeping track of all of their software licenses. Now, our SaaS License Management application connects with Microsoft Azure AD so that Software Asset Management admins can download a full list of applications, users, and groups across systems into a single, holistic view. They can also monitor information like user login and usage data, which helps them reclaim unused licenses, forecast future licensing needs, and cut back on unused licenses at renewal, ultimately driving more engagement on existing technology investments and saving time and money.Virtual Agent Lite plugin for Microsoft Teams: Especially now with so many virtual meetings, LIKE.TG customers who use Microsoft Teams have said their employees would be even more productive if they could self-help IT support from their Teams window. Our new Virtual Agent Lite chatbot makes that happen. It’s a limited version of Virtual Agent for our ITSM standard customers and launches with three prebuilt conversations for common IT support requests. These keyword-based conversations run in both the web chat client and in a Virtual Agent messaging integration with the Microsoft Teams app.“Our customers understand how important it is for their businesses to be agile and resilient,” said Ari Schorr, Senior Program Manager for Strategic Alliances at Microsoft. “We’re thrilled to bring these new integrations to life with LIKE.TG, so that we can help make employees’ lives easier at work. By connecting LIKE.TG’s digital workflows with Azure and Microsoft 365, we’re empowering customers to leverage the cloud to make work better.”
Twilio integrationTwilio is the leading cloud communications platform and a popular platform with LIKE.TG customers, and our partnership with them increases agent productivity and speed to market of a new communication channel. With Twilio-powered SMS interactions we’ve integrated new conversational messaging capabilities within our Customer Service Management solution. This integration lets companies engage with their own customers through Twilio. Businesses that use both Twilio and LIKE.TG will be able to quickly implement new, additional conversation interfaces and streamline contact channels through the Now Platform.“The customer experience is crucial for business success in the next normal,” said Molly Fischer, Senior Director, Strategic ISVs at Twilio. “Twilio is excited to partner with LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management solutions to help businesses improve the experience they offer customers by enabling them to communicate on the channels they prefer, all in an easy, streamlined, and efficient way.”SailPoint integrationWe’ve worked with SailPoint for more than eight years. With the Paris release, we’ve announced an expanded partnership that integrates SailPoint for Service Catalog with LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery. The integration benefits businesses by bringing together all service and application requests and approvals into a consolidated view. It also gives employees simplified, more streamlined HR service, so they can be as productive as possible while still getting questions answered.“By integrating with LIKE.TG’s employee workflows, we are making it simple and easy for businesses to deliver amazing employee experiences,” said Harry Gould, SVP of WW Partners at SailPoint. “The combination of SailPoint for Service Catalog and LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery brings all of the information employees need into a single, secure location, helping them to be productive, cost-efficient, and most importantly, enjoy their work.”Looking aheadLIKE.TG Workflows are essential building blocks for business agility and resilience amid the COVID economy. Partners play an important role in developing the workflows our customers need to drive their digital transformations, and together we force multiply value for their businesses. We’re humbled and thrilled by the work we’ve accomplished together this year, and for the opportunity to continue working with our partners to make the world of work, work better for people.
It’s a wonderful workflow
Every business has a CEO. And especially in today’s environment, most CEOs face challenges. Business continuity, employee productivity, customer service, to name a few. If they didn’t know it before, COVID has made CEOs realize that outdated, offline processes are slowing them down, frustrating employees and customers, and costing them too much. With winter approaching in half the world, one could say CEOs feel they’re being left out in the cold.Fortunately, LIKE.TG can warm up and melt away even the frostiest process problems CEOs face. Every CEO can change their world of work — and realize all new possibilities — one workflow at a time on the Now Platform®.Just ask Santa. In our new “Chief Holiday Officer” campaign, the CEO of North Pole, Inc. needs to deliver joy to millions of children around the world in less than 24 hours. No small feat.
So, how does Santa drive elf-like efficiency, get automatic wish list corrections, and keep his helpers from melting down over too many disparate legacy systems? He turns to the magic of workflows to solve any challenge – big or small – like the entire holiday season.Santa and his team understand that workflows — digital processes that route work through an enterprise — have the potential to impact bigger and broader change, to make hard-working elf employees more productive, and to delight deserving kids around the world.Santa may be a fictional CEO, but for regular CEOs facing new and legacy business challenges, our campaign premise is still the same: “Whatever your business is facing, let’s workflow it” with digital workflows on the Now Platform.
A single cloud platform with one architecture and one data model, the Now Platform is the platform of platforms for digital transformation. It breaks down departmental silos; it easily integrates with other systems; and it helps CEOs realize possibilities across the world of work that they’d never realized. In this case, good things come in platform packages, bringing simplicity to a company’s complexity and transforming how work gets done across an enterprise.Sound like a wish list for 2025? It’s the reality of today. Workflows really can accomplish all of that. Which is why our campaign invites CEOs — even those without a red velvet suit and jingle-bell sleigh — to benefit from the gift that keeps on giving: “Whatever your business is facing, let’s workflow it.”
