效率工具
Turning a vision for better employee engagement into reality
When you visit the About section of a company’s website, you probably expect to find information about the company’s culture and values. In how many cases are those statements more hype than reality? Does the company do the things it needs to do to help its employees be their best?It’s never been more critical to foster employee engagement and productivity. Attracting, nurturing, and retaining the best and brightest talent has always been a challenge—regardless of the economy’s ebbs and flows. More human resources leaders are recognizing the employee experience is a crucial component to success.Changing employee expectationsA big part of the challenge is that employees are bringing new expectations to the workplace. Their experience as digital consumers has shifted their ideas about how work should function.Today’s employees want self-service tools that allow them to find answers fast. They expect easy access to information. They want an intuitive way to request the resources and tools they need to do their jobs. In other words, work shouldn’t be a lot of work.LIKE.TG is helping companies create compelling, seamless, and consistent employee experiences with a single, holistic platform. It provides the foundation that allows organizations to streamline and optimize the employee experience in three areas: people, places, and global business services.
Empowering workersA great employee experience can do a lot more than make work easier for employees. It can free them to focus on high-value tasks instead of administrative minutiae. It also confirms an employer’s message that its people are its most valuable asset.Great employee experiences prove a company is willing to invest in talented workers and give them what they need to thrive.Rethinking workspacesToday’s workplaces aren’t just locations to plug in devices and attend meetings. They’re places to connect and collaborate virtually or face to face.Organizations that want to improve employee engagement in this age of hybrid work need a fresh perspective on what it means to be an employee—a definition that’s constantly evolving. Employers must bring together people and places safely with the digital tools to reserve and redefine workspaces, support visitor processes, and enable creativity and productivity.Promoting efficienciesModern enterprises aren’t confined by borders. Their employees can work from almost anywhere.To maintain the consistency that’s essential to a great employee experience—and keep the cost of employee services in check—many businesses are embracing global business services. These services help innovative organizations seamlessly deliver standards and quality no matter where or how employees choose to work.Numerous LIKE.TG customers are already reimagining the employee experience and creating the type of workplace that empowers their people to reach new heights. Read their stories in our Book of Knowledge: Employee Experience.
Employee experience: How we can tackle the Australian skills shortage
The Australian IT sector is at a crossroads. The industry is rapidly growing, with the demand for new technology services and projects at an all-time high, according to Deloitte and the Australian Computer Society (ACS). But the ongoing shortage of workers is impacting the employee experience and the sector’s ability to deliver.COVID-19, border closures, and limited immigration have combined into a perfect storm for employers seeking the right skills. The IT industry is no exception. But, unlike many industries whose workforces have been upended as a result of the pandemic, the tech sector has long been plagued by labor supply issues.Broader talent opportunitiesDomestically, a small population and long-term underinvestment in the right education, skills development programs, and training opportunities have left the Aussie technology industry struggling to sustain itself. As a result, many firms look further afield for the right talent. Yet, national immigration policies continue to materially impact the ability of many organizations to quickly acquire skills from the global job market.Australian businesses are now battling many countries facing similar challenges. Reopening the nation’s borders will provide some welcome relief, reducing pressure on local workers and delayed projects. Opening new skilled labor pathways, broadening fast-track schemes, and reducing immigration requirements can further ease pressure—especially as the global talent war heats up.The industry also needs to change its expectations around minimum skills requirements and be open to upskilling non-traditional candidates to fill in-demand roles. Structured, career hire programs should focus on attracting people from diverse groups, including a range of socio-economic backgrounds, educational experiences, and mature workers looking for new opportunities.
The power of partnershipAn overall rethink on how Australia’s governments and industry come together to build skills—and reskill—is also needed to solve the sector’s skills shortage. A focused, strategic approach is required, with governments, industry, and education providers coming together to evolve and implement coordinated policies that ramp up the nation’s skill base.Good progress has been made, as evidenced by the Skill Finder Platform and the Victorian Government’s Digital Jobs program. But there’s still plenty of room for growth and increased investment in more state and national programs.At LIKE.TG, we’ve been proactive in developing initiatives to increase our own local workforce. We combined with our partner ecosystem, training provider MEGT, and TAFE NSW for the NextGen Program. This offers candidates at any career stage a pathway into the tech industry, without requiring a degree.Through our partner network, we provide candidates with on-the-job training alongside structured learning at TAFE. This year, we plan to significantly scale the initiative to make a real dent in our supply shortage.The employee experience equationRetaining IT staff in a post-pandemic world will be top of mind for many businesses in 2022. COVID-19 has created a new breed of worker who’s more interested in flexibility and a family-friendly workplace, with streamlined processes for working anywhere, anytime.Shaping a winning employee experience can help ensure greater loyalty, reduce turnover, and pay long-term dividends. Even better, a great employee experience has been shown to improve customer experience too.Employers with a culture that supports hybrid and remote work and an ethos that focuses on outcomes versus time in the office will have the most success in attracting talent. Hybrid work is here to stay, and businesses need to look at how they integrate this model into their long-term plans.
At LIKE.TG, we’ve invested heavily in reinventing our office space, creating more collaboration areas and including key amenities, such as a game room, barista-café, and gym. This helps our teams work more creatively while improving employee well-being.Key areas for organizations to improve include work-life balance, training and development, and benefits. The Australian IT sector can only continue to grow if the industry and government step up to focus on employee development and skilling initiatives.The approach must be multifaceted and include:
More partnerships between government, industry, and training providers
Faster, simpler immigration requirements
Broader pathways to enter the industry
Employee experiences that attract and retain workers for the long-term
The future of the industry—and its workforce—depend on it.Find out how LIKE.TG helps organizations improve the employee experience.
New world of work: The great re-evaluation
The “Great Resignation” put employees in the driver’s seat. A new LIKE.TG-commissioned survey suggests that Canadian workers are re-evaluating their workplace priorities.This has led to a shift in what Canadian workers demand from potential workplaces, forcing employers to reconsider their overall experience offerings.Canadian office workers now expect something more fulfilling and meaningful than a paycheck. In order to attract and retain talent in the new world of work, local employers must look beyond traditional workplace policies and compensations.In search of greater flexibility and fulfillmentAs companies move toward a hybrid work model, many employees are weary of the challenges caused by work-from-home (WFH) culture. Difficulty unplugging and increased burnout continue to be issues for many Canadians and are some of the top reasons office employees considered leaving their jobs. Despite that, employees did enjoy some of the perks of WFH, especially the freedom to work their preferred hours.Beyond the desire for more flexibility, Canadian office workers want digital tools that make everyday work simpler, easier, and faster. Specifically, they’d like machine learning to handle the tasks they find tedious.As artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes more available and convenient, employees are looking to AI to automate their menial work tasks. AI offers the potential to decrease stress and burnout while freeing employees to focus on the more essential and fulfilling aspects of their jobs.Click the image below to see an infographic of our key findings from an online survey in Canada.Accessibility note: The infographic is transcribed at the end of this blog.
The Great Re-Evaluation is underway. Canadian employers must evolve with employee expectations to attract top talent. Find out how LIKE.TG helps organizations prepare for and embrace the new world of work.Transcript of infographicThe Great Re-Evaluation Has BegunEmployee experience matters more than ever.Find out why employers need to meet evolved employee expectations to attract and retain talent.Cash is not kingIn the battle for talent, high salaries do not trump tedious work.71% of Canadian office workers would never take a frustrating or unrewarding job, even for higher pay.And...they also want purpose.In a time when people are rethinking what matters to them, there is an increasing trend to do work that is more meaningful and contributes to larger societal goals.Flexibility is desiredThe most attractive thing an employer could offer Canadian office workers is flexibility in work hours.48% of office employees say the freedom to work preferred hours would inspire them to move to a new organization.But...they also want to keep those hours reasonable.Increased burnout (32%) and increased work hours (28%) are the top reasons office workers would leave their current jobs.Let them unplugThe pandemic has created many challenges that continue two years later.41% – Difficulty unplugging is one of the top challenges of working remotely.27% – This is one of the top reasons Canadian office workers would leave their current job.Canadians are looking to AI to reduce stress and burnout and free up time.Canadian office workers feel the benefits of artificial intelligence include the potential to:
Reduce stress – 46%
Free up time – 33%
Reduce burnout – 23%
Solutions that help employees unplug are one of the most attractive things an employer could offer office workers.2 in 3 want their employers to invest more in solutions that reduce menial tasks.82% - 8 in 10 Canadian office workers see automation as the most beneficial application of AI at work, especially when used for IT services, computer backups, analytics and reporting, routine tasks, spreadsheet-based processes, and more.Good news—change is at your fingertipsIn 2022, AI is an accessible and powerful tool to make an employee’s work faster, easier, and more accurate.Discover how LIKE.TG can help drive the change Canadian office workers want to see.Start nowThis online survey was facilitated by Asking Canadians. The study was in field between Jan. 10 and 18, 2022, and surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,501 English and French-Canadian office workers working in companies with 500 or more employees.
3 ways to supercharge HR digital transformation
Human resources (HR) digital transformation isn’t just a switch you can flip. It’s a never-ending process that starts at different points for every organization and team. When I meet with HR leaders across industries, I’m always excited to learn about their unique, complex challenges.As we stare down a new wave of economic uncertainty, it’s never been more important for HR leaders to make a strong business case for HR digital transformation, whether for our CEOs, boards, or investors.In a survey by Fortune and Deloitte, 76% of CEOs said they have a “pessimistic” 12-month outlook for the global economy. Especially in this climate, business leaders want to know what kind of value they’re getting from their technology investments. They also want to improve productivity and efficiency across the workforce.I know from experience how difficult it is to implement massive HR changes at a global organization, no matter the global economic pressures. That’s why I joined LIKE.TG: We offer a world-class platform that delivers tremendous value for our employees, managers, and company. We do this for our customers too.HR leaders need new ways to deliver for their people and drive business success. As an HR business leader, I want to share three ways a company can supercharge its HR digital transformation.1. Integrate HR and digital technology teamsHR and digital technology (DT) teams need to integrate their functions and rewire their partnership to be more strategic, predictive, and proactive.People already have consumer-grade technology that simplifies their lives in radical ways every day—from ordering a ride to filling a prescription. They expect the same at work. HR and DT teams need to align to deliver that experience, which unlocks their talent advantage and business growth.With that integrated vision and partnership at the top of our company, our HR and DT teams can set achievable key performance indicators and better understand our processes. Together, we focus on three imperatives to measure our progress:
Velocity: Innovate quickly to remain competitive and drive ongoing success.
Intelligence: Move away from manual reporting to real-time predictive analytics.
Experience: Create great employee and customer experiences that minimize both costs and inefficiencies.
Years ago, when a LIKE.TG employee had an issue—anything from requesting a cellphone to getting an approval for business travel—our self-service tool only handled a fraction of those transactions.HR and DT worked together to improve the AI and machine learning for our digital self-service tool. In 2022, it handled about 80% of employee questions and issues, even at higher volume, for our growing, global workforce.
2. Invest in the right technologyWhen companies cut costs, some leaders think they can’t prioritize the employee experience. This is a misconception. An exceptional employee experience doesn’t need to be expensive. Thoughtfully curating experiences for employees and managers can boost employee productivity and engagement while saving time and resources for organizations.HR leaders need digital solutions that automate tasks and insights to help them predict what their people need. When customers work with LIKE.TG to streamline the employee experience with HR Service Delivery, they don’t have to spend a fortune upgrading or buying new systems. They can simply connect their existing systems to the Now Platform for an improved experience.This simplifies enterprisewide activity into a single, integrated view. Then we offer great experiences across the platform, integrating tools in one place for employees.For example, when Delta Air Lines needed to launch a one-stop shop to support its 75,000 people during the pandemic, LIKE.TG helped build it in just 48 hours.Beyond the experience, the Now Platform offers tremendous return on investment (ROI). In 2021, Forrester Consulting studied the potential ROI of deploying LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery at several companies. The study showed that organizations aiming to improve workplace productivity could see:
Increased ROI (up to 254%) and savings (up to $7.62 million) over a three-year span
More than 10,000 hours saved by using self-service for up to 80% of repeat inquiries
Up to a 30% boost in productivity during onboarding and offboarding
3. Create a single viewHR teams have a similar set of daily questions, ranging from how to attract and retain great talent to how to progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.HR leaders are looking for ways to make those decisions based on the data and insights available to them. They want to distinguish the signal from the noise, and they need to visualize data in real time rather than waiting for lagging reports.That’s why LIKE.TG built the CHRO Dashboard on the Now Platform. The dashboard offers a control tower view with easy access to insights, from the enterprise level to functions, down to teams and individuals.Within a few minutes and clicks, I can gather data on an emerging issue—a bump in the attrition rate in a particular location, for example—and take action to resolve it in real time, on the go. It helps us make data-driven decisions quickly using the most relevant, timely insights—all to create a better experience for our people.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps HR digital transformation.
4 ways Manager Hub simplifies the role of the manager
The workforce is facing massive disruption. A skills shortage is challenging leaders to rethink their talent strategy. And 81% of workers feel at risk of burning out, according to a study by Mercer.At the same time, employees are reevaluating what they want from work. A lack of flexibility and limited opportunities for advancement are among the top 10 reasons U.S. workers left their jobs in 2021, according to Pew Research. Business leaders today know that the employee experience will remain critical amid every workforce challenge they face now and in the future.The evolving role of the managerManagers sit at the center of this workforce disruption. As the connective tissue between an organization and its employees, their role is more complex, and more important, than ever before.Over the last few years, the function of the manager has evolved from a driver of deadlines to a coach who connects employees to the right projects, roles, and resources. People leaders need to focus on team well-being, ensuring employees have the right tools and opportunities to be successful from anywhere.Unfortunately, the technology managers use every day wasn’t built for them. They deal with too many point solutions that don’t work together. A study of Fortune 500 companies revealed U.S. employees toggle between apps and websites roughly 1,200 times each day. What if we could change all that?Introducing Manager HubLIKE.TG® Manager Hub is a purpose-built destination that provides personalized resources to help people leaders stay informed and engaged with their teams. It streamlines work so managers can focus on their people, not processes.We launched Manager Hub as part of the Now Platform® Tokyo release. Based on hundreds of hours listening to the unique needs of our customers and their employees, it’s a single platform that powers the entire manager experience.
Unlock AI-powered efficiency with HR shared services
Updated Oct. 5, 2023More than two decades ago, organizational theorist Dave Ulrich recognized a problem: Most businesses were underusing human resources by treating it like an administrative function rather than a strategic powerhouse.UIrich introduced the concept of HR shared services, a model that aims to boost the strategic impact of HR teams by streamlining legacy systems to drive greater agility for employees and improved cost savings for the bottom line.An uncertain labor market, inflation, and increasing pressure to cut costs have raised the stakes for HR. As a result, executives are showing renewed interest in Ulrich’s model. Let's look at how unleashing an HR shared services strategy can transform your HR function and team.From chaos to clarityAs Ulrich discovered, navigating HR services can be an arduous task for employees. Agents and users must grapple with fragmented service centers and outdated systems while facing a lack of transparency throughout their processes.In the realm of HR service, visibility remains a considerable challenge. Service teams often find themselves operating in silos, impeding their ability to gain comprehensive insights into their service operations. This leads to a cumbersome experience for employees, who must navigate multiple portals, often with limited self-service capabilities.In this complex landscape, both sides of the service request process crave an improved and seamless experience. Solving this is about more than enhancing efficiency; it's about streamlining operations, reducing costs, and saving time for HR organizations.AI for better self-serviceIn Ulrich’s original vision for HR shared services, the three branches of HR—Centers of Excellence, service centers, and business partners—could share resources and best practices. AI wasn’t part of the mix.Today, however, HR teams can automate many repetitive tasks with AI capabilities to create a smarter, more connected experience for the whole organization. Modern digital platforms can perform microlevel tasks, such as automatically:
Handling a new hire’s onboarding experience
Serving up a quick how-to guide to a manager after a stressful meeting
Unlocking AI to make it easy for users to get what they need with a 24/7 Virtual Agent that understands their requests in natural language
With the power of AI, organizations can deliver relevant information, make predictions and recommendations, and automate repetitive tasks. These outcomes enable employees and customers to focus on areas humans excel at: creative thinking, customer interactions, and unpredictable work.
How teams benefitAdopting AI as part of your HR shared services plan can deliver the capabilities, security, and analytics you need to help people work easier, faster, and smarter. When businesses switch to a shared services model, the whole organization can benefit in four ways:
Supercharged productivity – Embracing a shared services strategy creates new opportunities to inject productivity into all areas of the organization. Using AI to elevate solutions, products, and employee workflows can free employees to focus on the work that's most important and rewarding.
Automation and consolidation – Using automation can simplify the number of tools and systems that need to be maintained. Content governance can help ensure self-service information is continuously relevant and effective.
Business resilience – Under a shared services model, HR uses its resources more efficiently, allowing teams to respond faster. AI and automation help free HR decision-makers for high-level planning, meaning no conversation happens without HR’s input.
Cost and time savings – Streamlining processes helps reduce costs and save time for employees. The division of labor is more efficient since experienced HR professionals can handle strategic decisions while other teams take care of lower-hanging fruit.
AI-powered HR shared services in actionAs a company dedicated to fostering connections and delivering happiness, Zoom embarked on a journey to enhance its employee and customer experiences. The company partnered with LIKE.TG to optimize its internal processes and provide exceptional support for its 8,000 employees, affectionately known as "Zoomies."With historical growth, Zoom had acquired various disconnected tools. The company realized it needed to better connect its employees to align with its culture of delivering happiness. LIKE.TG AI-powered HR and IT solutions enabled Zoom to consolidate all its employee services and support into a unified service portal called AskZoomPX.Offering consumer-grade self-service, AskZoomPX became a one-stop shop for HR services and knowledge base articles, averaging 2,000 monthly tickets. This empowered Zoom employees, especially new hires eager for self-service info, to find what they needed when they needed it.By centralizing support, LIKE.TG helped Zoom reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), resulting in significant annual cost savings. Zoom reduced simple queries by 75%, freeing agents to focus on strategic tasks. Providing a single source of truth, this centralization also led to more resilient IT and HR services and better-informed decision-making.Partnering with LIKE.TG, Zoom upgraded its employee experience and improved its IT service efficiency while maintaining its dedication to connecting people and delivering happiness.Find out more about building an HR shared services strategy to drive productivity while boosting bottom-line benefits.
4 steps to an engaging employee experience
Businesses face tough competition for employees in today’s job market. According to McKinsey research, 89% of employees want to feel they’re living their purpose. For 70% of survey respondents, that sense of purpose is largely tied to their work. If an employer doesn’t meet that need, many workers will flee to a company that does.Cultivating a climate that helps workers fulfill their purpose is vital—and can lead to increased employee satisfaction and decreased turnover. Here are four steps to help you create an attractive, engaging employee experience.1. Know what doesn’t workPromoting an inviting atmosphere is as much about knowing what doesn’t work as it is about knowing what does. Research firm UNLEASH surveyed 1,000 organizations to glean insights about unsuccessful human resources (HR) projects.Discover the findings in our Why HR projects succeed webinar. You’ll also learn the steps NASA, DHL, and Amazon took to elevate their employee experiences.2. Meet employees where they areIn today’s hybrid world of work, some employees work in the office, while others work remotely. Managing both personas can be challenging. How do you meet the needs of one group without isolating the other?Gain insights in Managing a dual workforce. The panel discussion of HR experts includes global HR analyst Josh Bersin, as well as HR leaders from McDonald’s, food company Mondelez, and transportation company Ryder System. Get up to speed on the latest trends and discover the benefits of an omnichannel employee experience.3. Create connected experiencesSixty percent of remote workers feel disconnected from their co-workers, according to Pew Research Center. Less connection can lead to less engagement and commitment and, ultimately, employee departures. Your workers depend on you to create experiences that help them feel connected to their colleagues and the company.In Redesigning work, two LIKE.TG transformation officers give pointers on how to start thinking differently about hybrid work. Learn ways to:
Attract and retain talent
Drive worker productivity
Personalize the employee journey
Support managers
Find out how LIKE.TG unified the employee experience internally using our HR Service Delivery and Workplace Service Delivery solutions.4. Simplify employee exitsTurnover is inescapable, no matter how connected and engaging your employee experience might be. Help departing workers exit with grace by streamlining offboarding. Watch our Managing employee exits webinar for tips. A LIKE.TG business analyst and a people product director detail how we simplified the LIKE.TG offboarding experience through automation.
LIKE.TG and Zoom expand partnership to deliver great experiences
In today’s complex, hybrid world of work, collaboration and productivity can quickly give way to chaos and silos if organizations don’t prioritize digital business transformation.At LIKE.TG, our solutions help companies make the most of their digital business efforts by connecting teams, processes, and silos. Zoom has a similar goal: to help people connect, collaborate, and work together. Our shared commitment to our customers means we’re constantly innovating together to create great experiences that help make the world work better.Today at Zoomtopia, Zoom’s annual customer event, I was thrilled to join Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan on stage to announce our expanded partnership. The announcement highlighted new integrations, available immediately, that will help our joint customers elevate productivity and improve collaboration across their organizations.Meeting employees where they areThe pandemic permanently altered how businesses view work and the employee experience. With dispersed teams and changing workplaces, digital services need to be accessible, consistent, and available at employees’ fingertips—regardless of where they’re working.We’re introducing LIKE.TG® Employee Center for Zoom so that employees can access the benefits of Employee Center directly within Zoom. This is a game changer, freeing employees from spending time and cycles toggling between apps to get work done.
This solution builds on the LIKE.TG Virtual Agent integration with Zoom Team Chat we announced earlier this year to deliver self-service to employees when and where they need it. Without ever leaving Zoom, employees can:
Get help across departments
Make desk reservations
Find company news and resources
Access personalized tools and information
Simplifying the service agent experienceWith 58% of customers saying they’ll pay for better customer service, according to Forbes, building cohesive, connected experiences isn’t a choice for companies; it’s an imperative. We’re taking our integrations with Zoom one step further to simplify the experience as agents provide service and support.Zoom Contact Center for LIKE.TG gives service agents a single place to get work done. It brings Zoom Contact Center interactions—such as inbound and outbound calling, click-to-dial capabilities, call logging, and call notes—directly into LIKE.TG so agents can effectively manage customer communications and resolve issues fast.
Incoming calls from Zoom Contact Center are automatically matched with customer records in ServiceNow. Providing critical customer information, such as the products owned and preferred language, allows agents to route customers to the most qualified agent to provide more personalized service. Call details are automatically logged, reducing manual data entry and driving agent productivity.We’re also enabling Ticket Collaboration with Zoom Team Chat so that service agents can resolve issues fast with live collaboration in Zoom. Agents can convene and collaborate across multiple teams on open tickets, helping to ensure they have the right information and resources to quickly solve requests.Empowering your greatest assetsAs work continues to evolve, the ability to collaborate and communicate quickly and effectively will be a critical differentiator.I’m incredibly proud that, together with Zoom, we’ll help organizations simplify workflows, boost employee productivity, and create great customer experiences to make work better for everyone.The innovations are available today in the LIKE.TG Store.
How prebuilt ERP workflows tame unruly source-to-pay operations
Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are good at executing transactions and producing document-based outputs, such as purchase orders. But they fall short when it comes to connecting the work of users across departments and functions. Prebuilt ERP workflows can help.Having spent more than 25 years in the ERP space, I’ve seen only a handful of customers with a single ERP instance. Most have heterogenous landscapes with many ERP instances of different release levels with point solutions bolted on top.Faced with challenging economic conditions and system landscapes that are expensive and difficult to maintain, organizations are looking for ways to reduce costs and create efficiencies. At the same time, they’re wondering how to provide better experiences for their employees and external stakeholders, such as suppliers.Should they innovate or reduce risk? Should they drive down costs or focus on building mutually beneficial supplier relationships? The answer to both questions is a resounding yes. Organizations can manage and control spend, scale business, and reach risk and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals with prebuilt ERP workflows.Addressing ERP implementation challengesERP system landscapes have typically grown over decades, often through mergers and acquisitions. They tend to be burdened by customizations, add-ons, and extensions. As a result, teams work from multiple sources of truth that provide limited visibility and create silos. This inhibits integration and cross-functional collaboration.Lack of appropriate system support can lead to considerable “noise” in the procurement process. For example: Employees are frustrated with difficult-to-use specialist systems, so they resort to ordering online. They circumvent established purchasing processes, choosing to expense their purchases rather than using existing suppliers and contracts. This complicates spend management, resulting in fewer discount opportunities.In turn, already-taxed procurement and finance specialists are burdened with tasks that generate zero value, such as responding to employee and supplier requests about nondelivery, incorrect delivery of an order, or nonpayment of invoices, to name a few.According to LIKE.TG customer benchmarking,1 procurement and finance teams spend more than 50% of their time managing this noise. What if there were an easier way to provide a better overall purchasing experience for employees through self-service and automated guidance?
Enter prebuilt ERP workflowsPrebuilt ERP workflows can help organizations solve problems that elude point solutions and underlying ERP systems. They deliver out-of-the-box functionality that provides a single engagement layer for:
Enhanced user experience
Improved process orchestration
Automated, self-service tasks
LIKE.TG prebuilt workflows don’t replace transactional systems. Rather, they help organizations connect silos between those systems to enable innovation in user experience, work orchestration, and automation. In this way, they can help organizations achieve fast and high returns on the investments they’ve already made.How fast? Average deployment of LIKE.TG Source-to-Pay workflow takes about 11 weeks. It allows organizations to quickly run spend through the system, onboard thousands of suppliers in a matter of weeks, and use sophisticated task management to automate issue resolution.Boosting procurement team productivityThe AI-powered Sourcing and Procurement Operations workflow boosts procurement team productivity. At the same time, it increases spend under management and employee engagement with multichannel, guided experiences.By deploying Sourcing and Procurement Operations, a global sports apparel company estimates it will save $1 billion on procurement by fiscal year 2025. The company went from more than 24 systems and more than 12 ways to start a requisition to a single starting point for any kind of procurement.Unifying all systems into automated workflows has helped the company increase spend under management and its ability to monitor and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion spending to reach its sustainability goals.Onboarding, engaging, and offboarding suppliersThe Supplier Lifecycle Operations workflow onboards, engages, and offboards suppliers with integrated risk management to help organizations create a more sustainable and ethical supply base.A leading aerospace manufacturer realized a 300% return on investment by using a global standard supplier workflow platform. The manufacturer consolidated processes that span finance, supply chain, and legal departments and business systems, from ERP and email to spreadsheets and contracts.As a result, the company can engage with its business partners across a variety of channels, all orchestrated in a single environment that helps reduce part stock-outs and ensure compliance with export requirements.
Reaping the benefits of ERP workflowsLIKE.TG prebuilt workflows aren’t limited to procurement or supply chain. They extend to adjacent business areas such as finance, ESG, and risk and compliance operations. In a true better-together play, we ensure that experiences, data, and process flows are integrated across those offerings.ERP workflows connect people, processes, and data, improving efficiency and productivity. They help provide:
One delightful experience for everyone: casual users, department specialists, and suppliers across devices
Multichannel access, meeting users where they are
Increased process efficiencies
Decreased cost and churn
Shortened procurement cycle times
Fast supplier onboarding
Prebuilt workflows can typically address 80% to 90% of an organization’s ERP requirements, helping resolve process breaks. To address the other 10% to 20%, LIKE.TG App Engine provides no-code and low-code capabilities to build custom solutions and fill any remaining white spaces in a controlled and scalable manner.Line-of-business stakeholders often have the creativity and subject matter expertise to optimize ERP systems, but not the technical knowledge. Low-code and no-code technologies put easy-to-use tools in the hands of the people who best understand these processes, while offering the necessary guidance and control by IT to monitor the development and deployment of such applications.Saving time and moneyA global agrochemical manufacturing company struggled with data consistency, accuracy, and integrity in its core business processes. Employees manually retrieved and aggregated data from their ERP environment and various point solutions, leading to delays and data inaccuracies.The company turned to App Engine and built workflow extensions to accommodate the master data and task interactions with these transactional systems. Export and post-shipment documentation processes have dramatically accelerated—from one week to less than one day—while order fulfillment processes have shrunk from three hours to 30 minutes.Automating and eliminating the noise of nonvalue-adding tasks translates into real savings—measured in work hours, the ability to repurpose valuable resources, cost reduction through discounts, or improved supplier relationships. That money in the bank goes a long way to help with supply assurance, brand recognition, and achievement of ESG goals.LIKE.TG ERP workflows transform what’s possible, at every point on the cost and risk curve. It’s time to say yes to both employee satisfaction and spend control.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps organizations modernize ERP workflows.1 Benchmarking data from current LIKE.TG Source-to-Pay Operations customers
Using real-time data and insights in the competition for talent
In today’s job market, competition for talent is fierce. According to a survey by Fortune and Deloitte, 71% of CEOs said they “expect talent shortages to continue.”People are reevaluating their priorities by quitting (or quiet quitting), starting their own businesses, retiring early, searching for a renewed sense of purpose at work, or taking advantage of more opportunities given the flexibility remote work provides.High employee turnover means the talent skills gap remains a major risk for companies. HR leaders are looking for new ways to attract and retain people with the skills to adapt to evolving business needs.New maps for talent acquisition (TA) leadersI know from experience how daunting these challenges are. Before I joined LIKE.TG, I helped lead and centralize the talent acquisition strategy at The Walt Disney Company. Disney’s reach is vast. It’s a massive, global conglomerate that owns more than 200 companies, covering movies, resorts, cruise lines, TV networks, consumer products, video games, and more.With 200,000 employees across brands, we had a wide variety of talent needs. When you imagine the skills required to work as a “cast member” at Disneyland Paris, it’s a very different profile from a news analyst at ABC News, an animator at Pixar, or a producer at ESPN.Every TA leader has their own, unique set of issues. As the competition for talent intensifies, recruiting and retaining workers remains the common pain point for all TA leaders—not just at companies with Disney’s reach. Taking one look at this uncertain economic landscape, TA leaders can see they need new road maps.That’s why I joined ServiceNow. For a TA leader who wants to power her talent strategy with smart technology and insights, this is the company with the platform and technology to design those solutions—for our people and our customers.Recruitment has become one of the most important strategic levers for companies. It’s shifted from being viewed as a transactional lever to one that requires a sophisticated approach, grounded in data. With the rising importance of people strategy within companies, TA leaders have a seat at the table. TA teams need the right data and insights to help C-suite leaders make smart decisions and navigate the turbulent talent market.
3 ways we use the power of our people and techAt LIKE.TG, we provide leaders with the data and insights they need in three key ways:1. Gaining a single view for quick actionThe LIKE.TG CHRO dashboard gives HR and TA leaders a single view of real-time data and insights across the enterprise. We filter the most important information to make data-driven decisions and can solve problems quickly.If we see that a team in a specific location is struggling to recruit diverse talent, we can take immediate action that day. We don’t have to chase a moving target with monthly or quarterly reports.2. Crowdsourcing the best talentFor TA teams in today’s market, it’s not enough to use data and insights. At LIKE.TG, we want to go further and use the scale of our 20,000-person workforce to map the best talent.That’s why we’re developing new ways to identify top achievers across the talent landscape—all based on crowdsourcing from our employees and their professional networks. We’re also working on new ways to better quantify and innovate our “quality of hire” measures so that we can focus on recruiting and developing the best talent at all levels.3. Simplifying the hiring process and reducing biasNo matter the size or industry of the organization, we all want our TA teams to be more productive and efficient. We also want to automate transactional processes for our hiring managers and recruiters so that they can do more of the strategic work they enjoy.We’re using our own platform to create workflows that support TA teams. For example, we needed a tool to model candidate offers quickly and easily. One of our team members got to help build the Offer Calculator in just three weeks. This helps recruiters quickly check a candidate’s offer based on anonymous comparisons and local market data.Recruiters love this tool because they can get real-time data on how the offer stacks up, rather than scrolling through different spreadsheets and systems. Most important, it helps ensure equitable, objective offer packages.These are just a few of the ways LIKE.TG harnesses the power of our technology to simplify work and create new workflows for HR and TA teams. With solutions like these, our company and customers can feel confident competing for the best talent, no matter how tough the competition is.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps create a unified employee experience from end to end.
How to boost employee efficiency in the new world of work
In modern organizations, employee efficiency matters just as much as—if not more than—productivity. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they capture different phenomena. Productivity measures how much work an employee gets done overall. Efficiency refers to an employee’s ability to get more done in less time, with fewer resources.Executives who focus on one at the expense of the other could be missing out on a crucial part of the employee experience and hampering their ability to innovate.Why employee efficiency?Although employees spend hours attending meetings and answering emails, many feel like they’re not accomplishing anything. Even if they are productive, they’re not necessarily efficient.Completing tasks might require unnecessary steps, pose avoidable roadblocks, or force workers to seek help or approval from outside teams such as engineering or human resources (HR). About half of employees report spending two hours or more on repetitive tasks, according to the Formstack 2022 State of Digital Maturity report.The majority of executives (80%) are open to changing key workplace processes such as meeting structure and cadence to avoid wasting time on pointless activities, McKinsey found. The problem, executives say, is that their current processes often create silos and foster poor communication. As a result, it takes much longer to get work done than it should.Inefficiency has consequences beyond missed deadlines and delayed product launches. Workplace inefficiency can lead to attrition and reduced morale. This is especially crucial right now, when companies are struggling to retain employees.A striking 40% of workers say they’re likely to leave their job within the next three to six months, even if they don’t have another job lined up, according to another McKinsey study. When employees feel like their efforts are futile, they get frustrated. The downstream effects include unhappy customers and less innovative products.An inefficient employee is a disengaged employee. That’s hugely important: Gallup’s 2022 State of the Global Workplace Report found that only 21% of employees feel engaged at work. Employee engagement is particularly important at a time when so many companies are short-staffed.
Efficiency drives engagementEngaged employees who are able to get work done quickly and enthusiastically tend to be willing to go the extra mile at work, seek out new opportunities to learn, and take on more responsibilities. They also experience less stress, less anger, and fewer health issues.Let’s look at an example of how efficiency can drive engagement. Traditionally, marketing teams have needed help from development teams to create new web landing pages. While marketing handles the content, development makes sure everything works on the back end.Rather than quickly spinning up a new page to reach new audiences, marketing must go through a lengthy process to secure the resources needed. This inefficiency creates opportunities for miscommunication and diverts valuable development resources from high-stakes projects.New technologies have emerged that can mitigate this problem. Specifically, many teams are now using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to turn this cumbersome process into a quick, repeatable workflow. Smart technologies can automate the process or serve up quick pointers on how to create a landing page.Real-life examplesAutomation is playing a key role in driving efficiency and engagement for many organizations.Swedish aerospace and defense company Saab used LIKE.TG Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions to digitize its paper-based onboarding process, saving 12,000 hours per year and boosting employee satisfaction by 25%. Automated workflows connect the departments and functions involved in onboarding, so new hires start with all the tools, services, and information they need to stay engaged from day one.The University of California, Irvine automated and centralized its payroll system, connecting 24,000 employees across 400 departments and 38 divisions. The university used LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery to create the Employee Experience Center, a single destination for all things HR and payroll, resulting in an 87% ease-of-use score.Boosting employee efficiency is good for business and people. By enabling more efficient work, organizations can foster innovation while helping people do the work they enjoy.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps improve employee efficiency.
Source-to-Pay Operations: The key to cutting costs and boosting satisfaction
Since we launched Finance and Supply Chain Workflows in May, I've had a lot of conversations with LIKE.TG customers. They want to know how we're applying the Now Platform to address the challenges their business stakeholders have been facing across the source-to-pay process.LIKE.TG Source-to-Pay Operations automates and organizes the work of procurement—from onboarding suppliers and managing indirect procurement requests to confirming receipt and paying suppliers for products or services delivered. It bridges systems, teams, and data sources, and even brings external stakeholders onto a single platform to simplify and accelerate processes.An easier, more efficient way to workAlmost all companies today rely on a patchwork of systems to address the various needs and tasks in the source-to-pay process. Navigating different systems and figuring out processes or statuses can be frustrating for employees and suppliers.For procurement professionals, it involves too many manual processes, especially around data entry. Every manual step slows your current process and introduces opportunities for workarounds. It’s no wonder companies struggle to increase the amount of spend under management.There’s an easier, more efficient way for your employees to work. Source-to-Pay Operations consists of three products:
Sourcing and Procurement Operations automates the source-to-receipt process for seamless purchasing and case management across teams, allowing sourcing and procurement to focus on strategic priorities such as building a higher-quality supplier base and negotiating more favorable contracts.
Supplier Lifecycle Operations enables you to quickly onboard suppliers, effortlessly manage supplier data, add key supplier contacts, monitor supplier performance, and enhance productivity of the teams that engage with suppliers so your teams can do more, more easily, without a corresponding increase in headcount.
Accounts Payable Operations helps finance departments simplify and coordinate the activities required to pay suppliers accurately—from matching invoices to purchase orders and goods receipts to approvals and payment release—so your organization can pay confidently and improve supplier relations.
Empowering employeesSource-to-pay stakeholders, such as procurement, receiving, and accounts payable, can now focus on more strategic activities:
Optimizing spend
Achieving more responsible sourcing and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals
Forming a higher-quality, more resilient supplier base
Confidently paying suppliers accurately and on time
This is the intended work of teams across the source-to-pay process. It’s why you hired them, and it’s what they want to do. Too often, though, employees are overwhelmed with status request emails or manual data entry tasks that burn time and energy without adding value to the business.Source-to-Pay Operations alleviates the tedium so that your employees want to follow established procurement processes, procurement professionals have more time to focus on value-adding activities, and suppliers are kept in the loop. With Source-to-Pay Operations, you can:
Double the number of requests and suppliers handled by your procurement team
Uncover discounting opportunities by consolidating spend and taking advantage of early-payment discounts
Raise supplier quality and reduce fraud with embedded ESG and risk management
Create a better experience for all with one easy-to-use environment for getting work done
Connecting systems and increasing valueIf you're a Now Platform owner, this may sound familiar. We use the core technologies from the platform—workflows, case management, AI—and apply them to the procurement space.If you're a procurement professional, think of LIKE.TG as a one-stop shop to help an employee get work done. Source-to-Pay Operations connects to and augments underlying systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or sourcing solutions so you get more value from existing investments while simultaneously making life easier for your employees.LIKE.TG Finance and Supply Chain Workflows are a recognition of and response to the idea that we need new and better ways to compose the business systems that span teams, applications, and data streams. Now you can say yes to both cutting costs and increasing employee satisfaction.Find out more about Finance and Supply Chain Workflows.
4 ways to master employee growth and development with AI
Amid the whirlwind of today's job market and ever-evolving economy, one critical key to an organization's success emerges: empowering employees with growth opportunities that both entice top talent and secure the future of your business.As millennials and Gen Z progressively make up more of the workforce, investing in their career growth has become crucial to the future health of any organization. In fact, 74% of Gen Z and millennial workers are willing to leave a job if the company doesn’t invest in employee growth and development, according to an Amazon-commissioned study.To stay ahead, HR and business leaders must adapt to the changing landscape and invest in modern approaches and technology to foster sustainable and systematic employee development. With the emergence of new AI tools, employee skills and learning have entered a new era of intelligence and people-powered innovation.Let’s explore four key trends that can help future-proof your workforce.1. Adopting a skills-centered working modelIn the face of rapid technological advancements and evolving workforce needs, it's crucial to embrace a skills-centered approach. That means identifying and prioritizing the skills of your workforce. By mapping individual skills to specific roles, your organization can align its talent with business objectives and help ensure a more agile and adaptable workforce.2. Finding untapped developmentTraditional methods of mapping skills to job titles can be time-consuming and inefficient. Using AI-driven solutions for this purpose can help you recognize and use employee strengths more effectively. This enables individual growth and development opportunities that align with employees' personal and professional goals, fostering a sense of engagement and motivation.3. Aligning strategies and business goalsCollaboration between employees, managers, and the greater organization is essential for driving employee growth and achieving business success. By setting shared goals and establishing mutual benefits, you can maximize employee potential through skills-based development.A collective effort like this can foster an environment that supports continuous learning and growth and pay off for both the employee and company.4. Empowering workers to reach their potentialAI-powered tools offer tremendous possibilities for optimizing employee growth and development. By identifying employee skills, organizations can empower employees to take charge of their career advancement based on their strengths and growth opportunities.This encourages a self-driven approach to development that allows employees to work toward their goals while contributing to organizational success and growth.Employee growth and development are non-negotiable for business success. By embracing skills-centered strategies and AI-driven solutions, organizations can help employees reignite their passion for work while boosting business results.Get more insights to unlock the full potential of your workforce and cultivate a culture of continuous learning and development in our ebook: Supercharging employee growth and development.
Accenture and LIKE.TG launch global skills training partnership
We previously blogged about our strategic partnership with Accenture and promised to take you behind the scenes of this flourishing collaboration. It’s such an ambitious and successful project that we want to provide a view of the scope and innovation involved to help other businesses on their digital transformation journeys.One of the key aspects to understand is that this isn’t a straightforward technology integration or sales partnership. We’re not plugging what we’ve already got into a new framework and rebadging our offering. Instead, LIKE.TG and Accenture are offering a new approach to delivering digital transformation projects.We are building from the ground up and investing in each other’s capabilities. We are training ourselves and leveraging unique resources like the Accenture Cloud Innovation Centre in Rome, where customers can build, test, and implement cloud solutions. By going back to the fundamentals, we can come up with new ways to tackle the huge challenges businesses are facing today—that will only get more difficult tomorrow.Chris Pope, global VP of innovation at LIKE.TG, recently highlighted education as a significant building block when it comes to realising the full potential of digital transformation. As such, it forms a big part of our partnership with Accenture.Real-world experience to bridge the skills gapThere are important questions that need to be answered if we are to deliver on our corporate goal of creating the new digital workflows that unlock the full potential of today’s workforce and solve the sector-specific challenges that businesses are facing.These questions include:
Who will be delivering these projects on the frontline?
What skills do they need to have?
How do we accelerate learning so customers and employees can quickly see the benefits?
How can we help businesses extract the full value of the Now Platform®?
Of course, there are a huge number of computer science courses available today, but there is a gap between those courses and real-world digital transformation projects. Typically, new graduates will need to go through three to six months of academic training before they are set to work as fully-fledged consultants on a live project. There is almost no way for new recruits to get the specific, hands-on training they need to be successful unless we give them that experience.Our goal is to accelerate that process and get the brightest graduates delivering real-world benefits in a fraction of the time. That’s why we created the new Accenture LIKE.TG Academy programme—a new way of training students to become consultants who will be the digital transformation leaders of the future.The power of mistakesAt the heart of our academy methodology for turning students into consultants is embracing the power of mistakes. Digital transformation is incredibly complex. Making mistakes is how students will learn the best strategies and techniques for leading projects.As a result, we are intentionally creating an environment where students can be put through their paces on real-world challenges—where errors will likely occur. This isn’t a test to trip up students, but rather an approach that gives them permission to be wrong, as we know this will accelerate the learning process.Recently, we completed a trial of this new academy programme with our first cohort of students in Madrid, where months of learning was condensed into a four-week course. The crucial difference versus typical training courses was that our academic training was consolidated into the first two weeks of the course, while the remaining time was spent working on real-world tasks. This “learning through doing” period included instruction provided by both LIKE.TG and Accenture.Absolutely stunning resultsThe results have been absolutely stunning. All of our students successfully completed the course and started work as junior consultants the next day—on live projects—with minimal supervision.Critically, the new consultants have highlighted how comfortable they felt moving onto customer projects straight after the completion of the course. The acceleration in their personal development was an opportunity they all embraced. Several of the former students said they were “pinching themselves” because they were so happy to be working on live customer projects soon after finishing the programme.Equally satisfying, customers have commented to us that these new consultants are incredibly impressive.Delivering in-depth skill training at scaleThe academy programme is just one example of the innovation that we are generating within the Accenture and LIKE.TG partnership. Following the success of the trial, we expect to train another 200 students in the next six months. There is a long-term plan to usher as many as 5,000 new students through the academy.From the recognition that graduate trainees with more tangible real-world skills are needed, we created a hugely ambitious and innovative global education programme.LIKE.TG is now busy running “train the trainers” sessions for Accenture across Europe and the US. And Accenture is busy identifying the best locations for the next students to embark on the course. This is an excellent example of how to deliver in-depth skills training at scale.The Accenture LIKE.TG Academy is just one aspect our strategic partnership. Be sure to read our next blog to learn about another example of how we are delivering more meaningful services to help customers solve their transformation challenges.
LIKE.TG acquires UltimateSuite, furthers investment in EMEA talent
We’re thrilled to announce that LIKE.TG has acquired Czech Republic task-mining company UltimateSuite to further its investment in innovation and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) talent and skills.The acquisition provides LIKE.TG with key technology and a team of researchers, developers, and leaders who’ve spent years developing a task mining solution. A core piece of process mining, task mining uncovers actionable insights to identify automation opportunities and streamline repetitive work.
This follows LIKE.TG's investments in Internet of Things technology provider G2K in Munich and database performance company Swarm64, based in Berlin. All three of these acquisitions were about much more than technology. They were also about the people and expertise behind the companies.Investing in people“When it comes to speed and agility, it’s hard to beat a subject matter expert with a strong startup spirit,” explains Elias H., director of business strategy for NowX, who joined LIKE.TG as part of the G2K acquisition.“With our strong background in the retail industry, we’re very pleased that LIKE.TG understood our expertise early on and positioned and enabled us in a way where our knowledge can really reach its full potential and influence how LIKE.TG approaches and understands the retail industry,” he adds.Yana K., part of the Swarm64 acquisition, delights in LIKE.TG’s approach to not only gaining talent and technology, but also growing it for long-term business success. “The business push to have a better database to better serve customers gets very nicely merged with our startup,” says the senior manager of data platform software for ServiceNow.“As a startup, we get the best outcome: the right technology, the right people at the right time,” she adds. “It’s such a fruitful ground for innovation. That’s just a magical mix for doing innovation at scale.”Expanding rolesBoth employees have experienced career growth as a result of their transition to ServiceNow. Yana’s team is responsible for database provisioning and cloud service operations. Her role changed substantially, from being part of the executive team to working closely with development teams.“It was a very positive change because I get to work closer with the technology and with engineers,” she says. Yana found ramping up a bit intimidating, as she and her team had a lot to learn. “Everything is massive here when you come from a small startup,” she explains. Creating relationships with people helped. “The more you learn, the more you understand.”Elias transitioned from a general role at G2K to a more specific role at ServiceNow. “There’s a team and an expert for everything, and you never have to face a challenge alone,” he notes. “There’s best practices and templates to work from, and the amount of knowledge available and the knowledge management around it is incredible.”Growing and retaining EMEA talentAfter six months at LIKE.TG, Elias feels that the EMEA regions are becoming more autonomous and less headquarters-centric, “which is shaping up to be a better framework for scaling and building a structure that works with the local workforce, customer base, and regulators,” he says.Those regulators and regulations in EMEA can sometimes be a bit complicated, Yana adds. “EMEA is pretty strict in many aspects compared to the U.S., with regulations around support.”Despite that, “EMEA is buzzing,” Elias says. “It’s dynamic, growing fast, and full of interesting customers that make it inherently attractive. What makes it even better is that LIKE.TG takes that Silicon Valley vibe and blends it seamlessly with the social needs and demands of EMEA. It’s like a unique work culture cocktail.”LIKE.TG has kept G2K’s former office space in Berlin and given it a new lease on life, Elias continues. “There’s talk of it becoming its own executive briefing center and demo hub, further strengthening the region and giving customers and partners a great new place to see and interact with innovative technology in the heart of Europe.”
Improving employee experiencesIn addition to being investments in EMEA talent, the UltimateSuite, G2K, and Swarm64 acquisitions were investments in improving employee experiences. The technology gained in each acquisition has been or will be merged into the LIKE.TG platform.“If you look at how LIKE.TG has been doing acquisitions in the past, we pride ourselves on organically surfacing these capabilities into our unified platform,” Eduardo Chiocconi, vice president and general manager for process mining at LIKE.TG, told TechCrunch.UltimateSuite’s task mining tech will help employees be more efficient and productive. Converting real-time data into insights and actions, G2K’s tech offers a way to streamline workflows with broad applications across industries. Swarm64 database tech enables personalized experiences for greater employee productivity.“With G2K’s technology, a retailer can automatically track the availability of products on the shelf and connect a workflow that, once a critical low availability level is reached on the shelf, automatically checks for product availability in the on-site inventory and alerts and guides frontline staff through the replenishment process on their handheld devices,” Elias explains.The tech can also detect equipment failures as they occur and automatically trigger Field Service Management workflows and instruct frontline staff with countermeasures. “These are just two of the many use cases retailers will benefit from with G2K’s technology on the LIKE.TG platform,” Elias adds.Integrating Swarm64 tech with the LIKE.TG platform helps provide faster response times and faster dashboards, Yana says. “On top, we support many more use cases. The variety of workloads with LIKE.TG can be better supported with Swarm64 technology,” she adds.Investing in technology and expertise helps LIKE.TG fulfill our purpose to make the world work better for everyone, regardless of their geographic location or company size.Find out more about how the world works with LIKE.TG.
Visualizing data with extended reality in HR
Nick Diaz, associate software engineer at LIKE.TG, and Eugene Chuvyrov, principal inbound product manager at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog post.In the future, your chief human resources officer might strap on a virtual reality (VR) headset to look at employees’ 3D avatars, browsing the company’s talent pool to find the right candidate for a project. Oh, wait, that future is now.When the LIKE.TG innovation office was asked to provide an engaging experience for 30 HR executives from 14 companies, we knew we wanted to do something different. We regularly dream about creating wow moments for customers to get them excited about the possibilities of technology.Professionals already have a choice of devices—from laptops to mobile phones to tablets to desktops—for getting their work done. Could the world of work, like in the consumer realm, go beyond the two-dimensional surface to embrace wearable devices, such as VR headsets, for visualizing data?Dazzling with virtual realityAfter much exploration, we decided to take the LIKE.TG platform into extended reality by building a project in Roblox, an immersive platform.The HR executives donned VR headsets to wander around the virtual talent marketplace, where they saw their employees’ skills and teams’ overall talent profiles in a 3D environment. They could even experiment with adding and removing members to see how such decisions would affect their teams’ skills distribution.They got to do all this while being immersed and having fun moving around and interacting in a VR world. But instead of a video game, they were exploring their organization’s digital twin filled with virtual employees.A 3D, immersive view of dataOn the technical side, what stands out about this experience is the transformation of skills-mapping data from the Now Platform into a 3D visualization. Participants saw a 3D bar graph of their team’s talent profile and avatars of their employees and potential employees. Moving closer to a virtual person brought up a list of that individual’s skills next to them.HR executive participants could add or remove a person from the team and watch the team talent bar graph change in real time as a result. Through this activity, talent data became something participants could manipulate, interact with, and immerse themselves in within the extended reality space.VR offers a powerful, fresh way to conceptualize data rather than looking at a traditional organizational chart or a large data set of skills. During development of the project, we were blown away by the obvious skills gaps we noticed in the data visually that we hadn’t picked up on when it was in 2D.Having an overview of available talent is complex, whether you're seeing the skills of an employee or reviewing a list of skills for an entire team. A 3D chart can provide you with a better visualization of this complexity and allow you to notice skills gaps or changes in a more palpable way.
Built on an intelligent platformWe were able to build this experience because of the power of the Now Platform. It interconnects an entire organization and can provide a wealth of information about an enterprise.Our skills intelligence capabilities in LIKE.TG Employee Growth and Development track employees’ skills across an enterprise. This allows managers to assess the needs of their organization, identify gaps, and make informed hiring and upskilling decisions.We used the detailed view of individual skills and the aggregates as a foundation to build the 3D Roblox experience of an enterprise’s talent profile, drawing from the Now Platform.Seeing skills mapping data is just one example of what’s possible with 3D visualizations and extended reality. Across industries, enterprise data has the potential to be transformed in extended reality. In the future, the Now Platform and the comprehensive data it provides will serve as the foundation for 3D explorations of an enterprise.Different perspective, new valueVisualizing and exploring data in new ways offers great value. In addition to helping identify gaps in existing data, it can provide an interactive way to explore decision paths and their effects on different measures.More broadly, using extended reality technology to visualize data will help business leaders take on new perspectives so that they can make better-informed decisions. There is enormous potential when we combine the power of the Now Platform with extended reality. If you want to see a bit of that future today, make sure you’re looking through a VR headset.Find out more about how emerging technologies are changing the world of work.
Meet the winners of our inaugural Best Employee Portal Contest
As the leading employee experience platform provider, we at LIKE.TG felt it was time to recognize and share the creativity, methods, and results of our most advanced customers’ employee portals built on the Now Platform using Employee Center Professional. So, we kicked off the inaugural Best Employee Portal Contest and are excited to share the results.Why invest in employee experience?Customers invest in great employee experiences to realize dramatic employee engagement and productivity gains. A large U.S. bank, for example, saved $2.4 million in one year in employee productivity using Employee Center Pro for its MyTech IT portal.To enter the contest, customers had to submit a live employee portal. A panel of nine judges narrowed down the submissions based on portal strategy, user experience, and continuous improvement. The top 10 finalists were asked to submit a pitch video to explain what differentiated their portal strategy and how it made an impact on their organization.Portal submissions generally fit into three classes:
Single-department service portals
Multi-departmental, unified service portals
Modern intranet portals
Designs ranged from nearly out of the box to completely custom. Regardless of class, every finalist prioritized user experience research with employees, emphasized personalization with proactive targeted communications and content, and made decisions based on analytics and employee feedback for continuous improvement.Top employee portalsThe grand prize of $3,000 and a team trophy goes to Vertex Pharmaceuticals for its exceptional commitment to user experience (UX) research. During extensive UX research with employees, the company realized “one size fits none,” explains Kimberly Rose, executive director of people experience, analytics, and digital innovation at Vertex.
In addition to personalized experiences, the company built Career Hub, Manager Hub, and new-hire “Go” experiences for employee journeys.“Career Hub resulted in increased manager effectiveness, internal mobility, talent retention, and multimillion-dollar cost avoidance,” says Patty Anand, senior director of enterprise systems at Vertex.Rocket Companies took the No. 2 spot. “We didn’t want a traditional intranet,” explains Chris Smith, director of internal communications at Rocket. “We wanted a digital workplace with powerful search, service workflows, flexibility, extensibility, and integrations.”Rocket Companies realized a tenfold increase in self-service rates after creating its modern intranet, RockWorld, using Employee Center Pro.Coming in third, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) created myBMS, a unified services portal for IT, HR, facilities, and other areas of the organization. BMS used mostly out-of-the-box standard features, such as news center, app launcher, microsites, and taxonomy. But the company tailored the experience and even developed a custom facilities site directory.“We’re respected and viewed as the central hub of information within our company,” says Ken Meisch, senior manager of workforce portal experience at BMS. “Value is recognized by the various groups partnering with the portal team to generate traffic and promote awareness for their projects and services.”Rounding out the contest finalists are these eight companies (listed alphabetically), as we had a tie for 10th place:
Arrow Electronics
Australia-based bank
Baker Hughes
NASCAR
Paramount
Stanford Health Care
U.S.-based bank
Visa
Want to see and learn more?If you aspire to boost employee experience at your organization to increase engagement and productivity, see contest graphics and videos on the LIKE.TG community.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps organizations create a unified employee experience.
Closing the digital divide in our own backyard
Students throughout the U.S. faced massive technology and connectivity gaps before the pandemic. Now, with COVID-induced remote learning, the situation is more urgent than ever. Many students cannot afford internet connectivity. Many don’t have personal laptops or tablets. And school districts are struggling to obtain the resources needed to support students who are now dependent on distance learning.While the pandemic has presented tremendous challenges, it has also become a catalyst to find new ways, large and small, to bridge the digital divide.As a global enterprise, LIKE.TG believes in making the world of work, work better for all of us – students included. That’s why we partnered with the City of San José, CA, located near our headquarters, to help address the digital divide.Despite being the largest city in Silicon Valley, many San José residents are excluded from the opportunities offered by the technologies developed in their own backyard. At the start of the pandemic, more than 67,000 students in San José didn’t have access to connectivity or devices. We’re proud to share that we have played a part in helping the City of San José reduce that number to approximately13,000 students in need."As cities nationally grapple with a digital divide laid bare by this pandemic, we applaud LIKE.TG's creative partnership with Revivn that enables far more of our students to learn with high-quality computers than the traditional model of refurbishing used devices that children may or may not be able to actually use in class,” said Sam Liccardo, Mayor of San José . “Thank you to LIKE.TG for stepping up to this more innovative approach to bridging our digital divide in San José and all of Silicon Valley."Closing the Digital DivideThe City of San José was the first city in the U.S. to pledge to close the digital divide by establishing the Digital Inclusion Partnership, a $24 million cross-sector fund with the goals of ensuring every single resident has a working device, enhancing digital literacy skills, and providing internet connectivity to every resident. In addition to providing devices to students, the City of San José also works closely with each student’s family to ensure digital literacy training for parents through community-based organization grantees.The Digital Inclusion Partnership is the City of San José’s largest philanthropic effort in recent history. For its part the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), in collaboration with Ernst Young LLP (EY) and the CA Emerging Tech Fund (CETF), recently kicked off a Digital Divide Drive for the 2020/21 academic year asking its members, including LIKE.TG, to help close the gap for students without access to computing devices.
As a company, we were all in. In November and December, we donated more than 260 laptops to the program in partnership with Revivn, and we expect to donate thousands more in the coming year to the City of San José as well as to programs in other cities including San Diego, CA and Kirkland, WA, where we have offices. It’s a win, win. We get to contribute to our broader sustainability efforts while playing a small part in addressing the needs of our local communities, and the City of San José moves closer to their goal of a 1:1 student device ratio.“This is a great example of how industry and government come together here in Silicon Valley to solve real world problems,” said Jordan Sun, Chief Innovation Officer, City of San José. “We are very excited to have LIKE.TG as our newest partner in digital inclusion. In April 2020, San José schools started with a 67,000 device need. As of this month, the city and county delivered over 54,000 devices into the hands of students. The finish line is now in sight for a 1:1 device-student parity with 13,000 devices remaining in need for enabling adequate distanced learning.”Powering Donations with WorkflowsIn addition to our devices, it was important that we contribute our skills and knowledge. We turned the donation cycle into a workflow using our own software. For the laptop donations that LIKE.TG contributed this year, we used our IT Asset Management (ITAM) product to search our local inventory and, based on our 3-year depreciation cycle, identify laptops to be retired and donated. From there, the entire workflow to return, replace, and prepare the device for donation was automated.“LIKE.TG workflows have been essential in quickly and efficiently identifying laptops to be donated to the Digital Divide Drive,” said Poonam Kripalani, Senior Manager, ITAM Governance at ServiceNow. “Using our ITAM solution, we can enlist the power of AI to automatically mark laptops that fit our donation criteria and, with just a few clicks, address a pressing need in our local communities by giving devices a second life and moving them into the hands of students as quickly as possible.”Using our own technology to run our business every day is gratifying. But seeing our technology join forces with our Global Impact goals to make a direct impact in our local communities is especially rewarding. As the pandemic continues to upset the status quo and further expose inequalities in our world, I can only imagine the difference we could all make in our local communities if we collectively took part in these initiatives. Together we can turbocharge our impact as we enter 2021.We are proud to support the important work being done by the City of San José, SVLG, EY, and CETF to get technology in the hands of students who need it most. That’s a smarter way to workflow.Kathy Mulvany is head of global impact at ServiceNow.
Ensuring a safe return to school
Planning for a safe return to school in the midst of a health crisis is a daunting task. From gauging student preparedness and determining special accommodations to meeting government health requirements and communicating protocols with parents quickly and easily, there are many factors for IT services to consider.That was especially true for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the largest school district in Canada, which has 583 schools and 245,000 daytime learners. In our third episode of the Canadian Leadership Exchange, we spoke with Peter Singh, executive officer of IT services at the TDSB, to learn how the district used technology to ensure a safe return to school—while building confidence in the community around the district’s health and safety procedures.There’s an app for thatHaving already implemented LIKE.TG ITSM capabilities in 2017, the TDSB turned to our Safe Workplace Suite to manage the transition.The Readiness Surveys app helped the district gather real-time data about student preparedness to return to school. And, by working with Toronto Public Health, the TDSB was able to optimize the LIKE.TG Health Screening app to meet provincial requirements. The app also helped streamline the process for ensuring students and their families complete the necessary daily health checks.Watch the video to learn more about how school boards can leverage the power of digital workflows to improve the education experience and facilitate a safe return to school.
Extended reality: The future of digital learning
Although the extended reality of the metaverse may seem like it belongs in a mystifying, somewhat distant future, we’re already living in it. It’s built on the integration of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in the physical world.Industry leaders are exploring how these emerging technologies can enrich existing business processes. What they’ve honed in on is that the metaverse has remarkable potential to transform the future of digital learning and work. In some circles, this transformation has already begun.Reimagining experienceIn its simplest form, the metaverse represents the next evolution of how we interact with the digital world. Up until now, the digital realm has been a tool we use. Now, through AR and VR, it can become another layer of lived experience.
Survey finds HR leaders will drive business transformation
As organizations worldwide embrace digital transformation, HR leaders are turning to innovative solutions to make smart talent decisions, supercharge employee experience, and increase operational efficiency.HR executives will lead the way in stepping up digital transformation to drive business transformation over the next 18 months, according to research by LIKE.TG and ThoughtLab. Our Employee Experience Trends 2024 report details the reasons why: to boost employee satisfaction, lower costs, increase growth, and improve workforce productivity.With the rise of advanced technologies, such as AI and generative AI (GenAI), HR leaders are realizing the importance of aligning their strategies with C-suite objectives. In 88% of digitally advanced organizations, HR executives are working with the chief information officer to make the best use of technology.
Revolutionizing how work gets doneAI and GenAI are top of mind for HR leaders across all industries and regions. According to our research, 65% of survey respondents believe AI will revolutionize how work gets done.“With the right approach,” says Jacqui Canney, chief people officer at LIKE.TG, “GenAI personalizes experiences and helps people focus on strategic, innovative, creative work that’s fundamentally human, rather than mundane tasks.”HR leaders agree. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of HR innovators—senior HR executives in the most digitally advanced organizations—already use AI for everything from human call center support to workforce optimization to HR service delivery.The 65% of HR innovators who’ve implemented GenAI are using it to create job descriptions, streamline research, generate communications, and screen job applicants. The majority of HR innovators (73%) plan to increase the implementation of GenAI in their organizations in the next 18 months to further optimize recruitment and hiring.Reinventing HR service deliveryWhile AI and GenAI are changing the workforce experience, HR-specific solutions offer additional efficiency for talent management.Cloud-based human capital management, self-service portals, workforce optimization services, and other digital technologies help HR leaders execute their strategies. All survey respondents expect to increase the use of these solutions over the next 18 months to reduce HR costs and inform decision-making.
Using intelligence to inform talent decisionsDigital HR practices have created repositories of data across organizations. HR leaders are using this data to elevate talent management in numerous ways:
Fill talent gaps
Improve productivity, cost efficiencies, and performance
Align talent with business goals
Enhance staff skills and mobility
The focus on data will become increasingly important as HR leaders embrace reality: 55% believe half or more of their workforce is under-equipped to help propel future growth.To fill talent gaps over the next 18 months, they’re adopting initiatives to upskill and reskill employees, hiring critically needed talent outside the organization, and making the best use of the talent they have by increasing visibility into worker capabilities.In addition, HR leaders plan to shift to a skills-based talent strategy, take measures to improve career development, use data to inform talent decisions, and cultivate a culture of continuous learning.Gain more insights in our complimentary Employee Experience Trends 2024 report. It includes data regarding C-suite priorities, talent, skills, GenAI, and how HR leaders across industries are spearheading business transformation.
3 ways to improve workforce productivity
HR leaders are being asked to meet seemingly contradictory goals, with even fewer resources than their historical counterparts had. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) are under pressure to boost workforce productivity and business profitability while reducing overall costs. HR managers have the daunting task of improving employee retention and career satisfaction while fostering business growth.The good news is reaching all those goals is achievable. By embracing digital transformation that includes automation and AI technology, HR leaders can liberate themselves from routine tasks. With this newfound freedom, leaders can focus on high-value business evolution, workforce productivity, and retention goals.HR groundbreakers are already reaping the benefits of their digital transformation journeys. They suggest three ways to achieve similar results.1. Create a centralized HR/career hubMany companies try to solve their HR operations and talent development issues by investing in new tools. In fact, Okta found the average company uses 89 different employee-facing apps.1Employees often lose time and patience trying to navigate this maze of “solutions” in search of career guidance and answers to questions. Subsequently, businesses lose money through inefficiency and employee attrition.Innovative HR leaders have learned that additional technology doesn’t always lead to better business value. Digital transformation is the key to economic business growth.The best path to successful strategic digital transformation is seamlessly integrating disparate systems and departments into one unified employee experience. This can enable employees to efficiently find answers to their questions in a single place, boost productivity, and positively affect business results. More specifically, it:
Enables employees to solve their own problems using AI chatbots and other automation tools
Lightens HR agents’ workloads by eliminating mundane tasks
Gives managers and business leaders insights into what their employees need to be more productive and engaged
2. Optimize employee experiencesA Pew Research Center study found that one of the top reasons employees leave a company is lack of career development opportunities. According to Gartner, “based on the average cost of replacing one employee and average attrition rates, an organization with 10,000 employees could spend $16 million per year to replace employees who quit due to burnout.”2An HR platform that supports employees’ growth and development can:
Make it easy for employees to self-drive career development from a single place
Help organizations retain, grow, and develop highly skilled individuals aligned to business goals
Enable smarter talent decisions by providing visibility into workers' capabilities
3. Embrace automation and AIAutomating traditionally paper-based tasks and manual knowledge-sharing processes can help employees at all levels be more efficient, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks and projects. When paired with AI, automation offers even greater opportunities for businesses to cut costs, save time, reduce errors, and flourish.
Successful HR leaders and analysts recognize AI and strategic automation as catalysts for increased profits and productivity. Beyond bottom-line benefits, AI and automation can help improve human capabilities.IDC predicts that by 2026, 90% of the world’s largest organizations will augment operational roles with automation, increasing worker efficiency by 30%.3HR leaders who’ve embraced digital transformation, automation, and AI are blazing a trail to success. In doing so, they’re proving that digital transformation is the key to building a more satisfied and productive workforce and surviving and thriving into the future.Find out how your organization can realize similar workforce productivity benefits in our ebook: 3 steps to drive employee retention and business growth.1 Okta, Businesses at Work, February 20232 Gartner, HR Leaders Monthly, May 20233 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Manufacturing 2024 Predictions, #US51276023, October 2023GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
LIKE.TG acquires Advance Solutions IP to enhance talent acquisition experience
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG has acquired Intella, an end-to-end talent acquisition solution. Developed by Advance Solutions Corp., a LIKE.TG Elite Partner, Intella simplifies talent acquisition and accelerates every stage of the recruitment journey.The application—built on the Now Platform®—creates frictionless, connected experiences across the full employee lifecycle, bridging the gaps between workforce planning, recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and beyond.
Driven by customer demand, we’re seeing that many of the organizations using LIKE.TG for employee onboarding and HR support are looking to bring more employee-related workflows onto the Now Platform to create a seamless, end-to-end experience. The Intella acquisition is helping us address this need by harnessing Advance Solutions’ expertise as a strategic consulting and implementation partner.“I’m thrilled about the integration of our talent acquisition solution with LIKE.TG,” says Gaurav Kochhar, CEO of Advance Solutions. “This collaboration showcases our team's expertise and is a testament to the power of LIKE.TG as an enterprise application development platform. By working together with LIKE.TG, we aim to enhance employee experience for customers worldwide.”Streamlined recruitment and onboardingHiring managers will now have a cohesive way to open job requisitions, evaluate candidates, and initiate the approval workflows needed to make a job offer—all from a single platform. Job applicants will also benefit, with a smoother transition through all stages, from applicant to candidate to employee onboarding.All these workflows are powered by AI to enable organizations to evaluate more candidates faster while reducing bias and shortening the time needed to recruit and onboard the next generation of talent. We’re helping our customers build the workforce of tomorrow by connecting the dots across every employee journey to create a positive experience for both hiring managers and candidates.A unified experienceDesigned with Advance Solutions’ talent acquisition expertise and 15-plus years of success in implementing and building innovative solutions on the Now Platform, Intella provides a natural extension of the LIKE.TG employee experience portfolio.Intella integrates seamlessly into our broader roadmap for enhancing employee experience across the entire lifecycle. For hiring managers, it provides a streamlined process that offers real-time tracking of recruitment activities, enhanced data analytics for strategic decision-making, and automated workflows with integrated tools for talent management, talent acquisition, and workforce planning.In addition, its native generative AI capabilities can support a more equitable, skills-based approach to hiring and internal mobility.
Committed to the partner ecosystemAs a native talent acquisition solution built on the Now Platform by a LIKE.TG Elite Partner, Intella is another great example of our continued investment in the partner ecosystem and our focus on innovating together. Keeping our partners front and center is critical as we continue to innovate and grow while helping customers accelerate digital transformation.Intella follows acquisitions of Enable OHS technology,Hitch Works,Mapwize, and4Facility technologyas part of our ongoing commitment to enhance employee experiences and power the future of work. We’re building a differentiated, end-to-end employee lifecycle management solution that helps people-centric organizations scale and meet the business needs of tomorrow.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps organizations elevate employee experience.Use of forward-looking statementsThis release contains “forward-looking statements” about the expectations, beliefs, plans, and intentions relating to LIKE.TG’s acquisition of the Intella technology from Advance Solutions Corp. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. 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. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forward‑looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include, without limitation, inability or delays in assimilating or integrating the Intella technology into our platform; inability to receive post-closing support from the employees of Advance Solutions Corp.; unanticipated obligations or liabilities related to the acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; and disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources. Further information on factors that could affect our financial and other results is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.
Why choice is the new currency for higher education
The pandemic has forced the higher education sector to rethink learning options and experiences for students both locally and abroad. It’s also underscored a critical factor in driving increased value and sustainable returns: A university’s hard-earned reputation is intrinsically tied to its student experience.By providing physical and virtual access, effective tools, and technology, institutions can empower students to personalize their educational experiences and unlock how they learn best.When learning transitioned overnight from predominantly in-person to entirely online, universities quickly adapted, and learning continued. The shift also put the student experience in sharp focus—along with the multiple friction points caused by traditional education systems, processes, and organizational structures.Although increasing efficiency was a survival strategy in 2020, the urgent priority is retaining existing students and attracting new enrollments. And that relies on reputation.Before the pandemic, many of Australia’s universities had been investing in digital transformation (DX) at breakneck speed, embracing DX as the enabler of innovation, competitive advantage, and survival.Now, against a backdrop of sector-wide financial strain, how do education leaders create the business case for a truly connected student experience?Building workflows to learn from anywhereBefore the pandemic, several of Australia’s leading higher education institutes were already well on their way to reimagining the entire student experience. According to Dr. Stephen Weller, chief operating officer at Australian Catholic University, COVID-19 has only served to strengthen this commitment.“When physical distancing restrictions were made mandatory, there was no time to ask students what they wanted before they moved to online learning,” Weller recalls. “We didn’t start from a point of defining the ideal SX [student experience] and responding to what they’d asked for.“What we’ve learned over the past year is that investment in the online experience will unquestionably enhance the on-campus experience. And, at the heart of that ecosystem is the individual student. Our goal is to deeply personalize their journey by knowing who they are, what they’re interested in, and what they do. Automation and intelligent workflows are fundamental to achieving that.”
Likewise, at Western Sydney University, the lightbulb moment came in the dismantling of departmental silos that previously served either students or staff. It’s a cultural shift that has rapidly accelerated digitization efforts.“COVID served as a circuit breaker to our traditional structures. For the first time, we’ve organized according to specialty or focus, not audience,” explains an executive at Western Sydney.“We now have portfolios serving staff, faculty, and students—and it’s proving revolutionary at every level of the institute. No longer do we have 14 separate schools administering the exact same process in dozens of different ways, often to the same student.”Transforming the student experienceRemoving silos to organize around the customer in a commercial enterprise may sound obvious, but that ignores the entrenched frameworks in which most universities operate. What these Australian higher education institutes are doing is akin to throwing out the rule book—and it’s working.“The crisis has challenged our thinking around digital workflows and the interoperability between different areas of the university,” the Western Sydney executive continues. “We’re using the Now Platform to collaborate and develop shared practices, which is reducing the number of processes dramatically.“Being able to deliver frequent pulse surveys via a mobile app allows us to iterate and pivot. We’re also using AI and machine learning to harness data about the employee experience that, up until now, we hadn’t been tapping into.”When work, works better for employees, efficiency soars, productivity increases, and the student experience transforms.A new era requires a new rulebookIn the scramble to embrace modern ways of working, technology can be used to fill a gap. But those who do it best use technology in the service of people to deliver better experiences. Leading education providers often ask, “How can I connect directly to the student, or employee, without friction and add value in a meaningful way?”People think of historic sandstone campuses as a “real” university experience, but if students can’t self-serve to access everything they need or do so via single sign-on, it impacts their everyday experience. Expectations are higher when reputation is higher.As students move through the lifecycle from prospect to alum, there are numerous friction points traversing faculties and departments. These are high-risk moments when vital data is often lost, the source of truth is compromised, and the experience can be negatively impacted.No amount of investment can remedy this; universities must first change how they view the student experience. As in-person learning becomes the norm again, institutes can’t afford to see online and on-campus as two separate experiences. Like retail, the student experience is a connected ecosystem.When technology is used in service of people, students and employees connect seamlessly across systems and departments. Mundane, repetitive tasks are removed from overburdened workloads, so employees can focus on more strategic work. Digitization unleashes productivity and offers new ways to deliver personalized, differentiated experiences.
Consumerizing the student experienceAt LIKE.TG, we work with our higher education customers to map the best possible student experience. We do that by asking three key questions:
How are you delivering interactions—for example, triggering automated actions to complete tasks before classes commence or serving up appointment scheduling for advisers or support services?
How are you measuring the success of those experiences?
What data do you draw on to create and improve upon that experience?
As Weller notes, “Whether you have an unassailable reputation or an emerging reputation, the challenge is the same.” Universities must increasingly deliver intuitive, consumer-grade student experiences to stay in the game.What we’re seeing with bold leadership at institutes like the Australian Catholic University and Western Sydney University is that once the organizational chart is off the table, digital transformation efforts are supercharged. It’s less about the size of the transformation budget than it is about mindset.Only then can higher education providers start unlocking powerful high-touch experiences, automating menial tasks for their employees, and harnessing data to create intuitive, multichannel moments that matter for their students.Learn more about Western Sydney University’s digital transformation journey in its on-demand Knowledge 2021 session. Registration is free.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
LIKE.TG brings security automation to the cloud with AWS
Cloud infrastructure presents new risks, new systems, and less control for security teams that are already overwhelmed by security alerts, manual processes and siloed security tools that complicate decision-making and the hand-off of remediation to IT counterparts.To help solve this challenge, LIKE.TG, the digital workflow company that creates great experiences and unlocks productivity, has extended its security operations portfolio with the release today of two integrations with AWS Security Hub. LIKE.TG is aligned with AWS’s strategy of providing security at-scale, and our vendor-agnostic approach and ability to take action on a range of security data sources is a unique value for our joint customers. With these integrations, joint customers can aggregate cloud data within Security Hub, then automatically kick-off the approved response or workflow in LIKE.TG Security Operations or IT Service Management (ITSM), directly from Security Hub.Streamlining cloud workloads through tight security and IT integrationSecurity Hub provides customers with a single place that aggregates, organizes and prioritizes security alerts from multiple AWS services. With this new partnership, AWS customers can use the LIKE.TG platform to coordinate security incident and vulnerability response across hybrid cloud deployments and workflows, leveraging the openness, scale, and automation of Security Operations and ITSM with Security Hub.For example, when an alert meets defined criteria in Security Hub, a security incident or ticket is automatically created in Security Operations or ITSM. In Security Operations, threat intelligence on observables can enrich the security incidents, providing precious contextual data to support triage and remediation. Predefined playbooks can be assigned based on the incident category (e.g. malware, Brute Force, DOS attack, etc.) to guide response actions. Analysts can also manually forward events from the AWS Security Hub console to drive response. In addition to pre-defined playbooks, customers can use Flow Designer to create the custom workflows required for their organizations’ postures, policies and processes.The Power of the Now Platform when transitioning to AWSTo effectively manage and improve systems, customers need to know exactly what assets are in their IT environment and have current, accurate configuration data. The LIKE.TG CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. When paired with LIKE.TG Service Mapping, the CMDB becomes serviceaware—which enables applications to be serviceaware as well.Using built-in workflows, LIKE.TG routes incidents to the correct personnel or response tools to contain, mitigate or remediate threats. Post-incident reporting, customizable dashboards and metrics help teams improve processes going forward and provide a dynamic and continuous view of the overall security profile. Importantly, customers can leverage LIKE.TG’s integration with AWS Security Hub to help with their transition to AWS, as LIKE.TG provides a single platform solution to manage both on-premises and cloud-native workflows.LIKE.TG takes a customer centric approach to developing products and services. As companies increasingly shift to the cloud and digital business requires more complex IT infrastructures, LIKE.TG is here to help, regardless of where workloads reside.For more information, visit LIKE.TG’s Security Operations and ITSM Community blog posts.
