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Update on COVID-19
Updated March 30, 2020: Read this post for updates to LIKE.TG's response to COVID-19.As uncertainty persists with the COVID-19 pandemic, LIKE.TG remains squarely focused on keeping its employees healthy and safe and its customers supported and productive.Taking care of our peopleThe health and safety of our 10,000-plus global employees, office staff and communities remain our top priority. We are closely following government, CDC and WHO guidelines as we continuously assess our policies and support efforts.We have asked all employees to work from home through at least May 4th. We are asking our contractors and support staff to stay home as well. All employees, contractors and support staff continue to receive their normal wages during this period.We are requiring that employees avoid business travel unless business critical, and every employee can opt-out as they see fit. We will continue to monitor the situation and impact to our employees, contractors and support staff in real-time and will make adjustments as needed.Helping our customersAs a global company, we have critical business functions, including technical support and cloud operations, distributed in regions around the world. This model ensures consistent, world-class customer support and service levels for our customers.We are committed to delivering high levels of uptime for LIKE.TG instances to ensure that our customers have all of the capabilities available to them to continue their operations. We maintain an Advanced High Availability Architecture with the ability to run a customer's production application from a pair of data centers located in geographically different regions. More information about our architecture and data center pairings is available here. LIKE.TG has also confirmed that our business-critical partners have contingency plans in place to ensure further business continuity.LIKE.TG's business continuity plan covers the ability for our cloud operations and technical support teams to work remotely in a safe and secure manner so they can continue to serve our customers. All remote access happens using secure connections and multifactor authentication and is in compliance with applicable regulations and corporate standards.As we continue to navigate the changing situation, we are confident in our business continuity plan and our ability to provide customers with the support they need to maintain their own business continuity.LIKE.TG will continue to closely monitor the situation and is prepared to make real-time decisions to implement other measures to support employees, customers and stakeholders as needed. The company also will provide ongoing updates on the status of its annual user conference, Knowledge 2020, scheduled to take place online beginning May 5th .
How CIOs lead in times of crisis
I never thought I’d have to tell the LIKE.TG leadership team, “Don’t worry if you see employees carrying out equipment. They need their monitors to work from home.”But about a month ago, my team and I were discussing that topic and others like it as we planned for the impacts of the coronavirus.That was then. Now, we have asked our 10,000+ employees around the world to work from home. We’ve encouraged them to take the equipment they might need to make their home office as functional as the regular office. We’ve even told our employees in India to expense their ride-share because it’s hard to carry monitors home on public transportation.I’m obviously not the only CIO in this position. I talked to a lot of peers last week and it’s clear that as companies make tough decisions on how to keep their people safe and productive—while also keeping their businesses running—CIOs are leading through this crisis.That’s because CIOs and IT leaders have been preparing for this. The move to cloud platforms, collaboration and virtual meeting software, employee self-service, and scalable network capacity—just to name a few—has enabled us to go on offense to help our people, our companies, and our peers not miss a beat.
So, with the permission of the CIOs I’ve talked to, I wanted to share the key takeaways we have discussed:1. Employee safety and comfort. Every CIO I talked to started the conversation with the impact to their employees. Business continuity/disaster recovery—obviously critical. But the people part of their operations was top of mind, including employees’ mental health. One CIO, whose business is 100% people-driven, told me the first directive they always issue is that their employees should do what’s right for them. That’s powerful.2. Human resiliency. A great reminder from one CIO was checking in on one’s human resiliency. How many layers deep is your human resiliency? For example, do you have a plan if the three people with root passwords on critical systems are unavailable? What about the two IT personnel who are critical to the financial close? In other words, plan technology and personnel backup.3. Local ISP bandwidth. Many CIO’s cited concerns around saturating the local network bandwidth as many employees are working from home and kids are engaged in virtual learning. While there is no quick solution, one CIO said he was tiering employees based on estimated network consumption (operations staff vs. engineers, etc.) and implementing policies to enforce these tiers. In addition to saturating ISPs, some employees don’t have high-speed internet to begin with. In India, for example, I told employees a few weeks ago to purchase and expense MiFi devices.4. IT equipment supply chain: One of the bigger concerns for CIOs is the supply chain and whether suppliers can meet the demand for new laptops and data center equipment. Multiple CIOs cited concerns around the supply of equipment and potential disruption to the physical transport (shipping and logistics). One CIO said they were lengthening the normal four-year life of their equipment to extend its use and reduce the strain on the supply chain.5. Cyber. Many CIOs are seeing an increase in volume of attacks (phishing, social engineering, etc.). However, no new attack vectors were identified. One CIO I talked to learned that his fingerprint scanners—part of physical multi-factor authentication—could only be cleaned with a soft cloth. Since that won’t effectively eliminate coronavirus, he was relying more on facial recognition, which is hands-free. Another proof point that the devil is in the details!6. Regulated markets customer operations. For companies that serve regulated markets or have compliance requirements (federal, PCI, etc.), special care has to be taken when call center and support employees manage customer transactions (e.g. credit card transactions) from home. For example, no cameras on computers that handle customer data, or no family members in the same room to overhear customer calls. To make sure its employees understood the significance of maintaining those standards while working remotely, one company I talked to had their call center employees read and sign documents to reinforce the point. At LIKE.TG, we did live testing at employees’ homes two weeks ago to make sure our customer support employees were ready; we fixed any gaps before they happened.
7. Collaboration and design will take work when everyone is working from home. It’s much harder to collaborate virtually than in real life. This is especially important in deep design, form thinking, and other techniques that require behavioral collaboration. A lot of companies don’t think through what that means in a remote setting. One CIO suggested coaching employees through their first remote design session so they could learn the different principles and then coach others. Virtual whiteboards can help, too, and several CIOs—including me—are looking at how to implement them quickly.8. Hiring doesn’t have to stop. Hiring of new employees doesn’t have to stop—interviews can take place through video. However, hiring managers may need to be trained so they are comfortable making decisions without meeting candidates in person. Virtual onboarding is a new process many companies are standing up.9. For essential employees, consider a rotating schedule. I admire my peers whose companies do life-saving work. Pharmaceutical companies. Hospitals. Cities and emergency services. For essential personnel with no option to work from home, many have implemented team-based rotating schedules. Half of essential personnel go to their physical locations one day; the other half another day. And so on. They can then follow social-distancing recommendations and still serve their patients and communities.10. We’re all in this together. As one CIO mentioned, “The world is pulling together. People are actually entering into open conversations about what to do. When everybody’s in that state of mind, any problem can get solved and you can work through it.” I couldn’t agree more.For example, in partnership with Washington State’s Department of Health, LIKE.TG is launching a no-charge community app, Emergency Response Operations to help companies and governments implement critical workflows for emergency response and crisis management as they manage through COVID-19.In the midst of crisis, we’re all working through it together.
Honoring API heritage: Reflecting on the past, embracing the future
May is a time when the U.S. honors the contributions and influence of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people. The AAPI community within LIKE.TG, which extends beyond the U.S. to include Asians and Pacific Islanders (API) everywhere, is a vibrant tapestry of cultures, offering countless avenues for celebration.“Whether one lives in Singapore or their family has emigrated to another country, such as the United States, many API members lean on cultural touchstones such as food, art/dance, and religious practices to connect them to past generations,” says Sheila D., director of publishing and operations at LIKE.TG and co-chair of the API employee belonging group.“This connection is a superpower and a backbone of our strength as a community. Food and traditions bind us together across vast cultural differences. Honoring the past positions us to create a better future for generations to come,” she adds.This year, in a nod to our internal theme of “Rich past, radiant future,” we're thrilled to commemorate API heritage with a spotlight on two remarkable employees—one from the U.S. and one from Australia—who graciously share personal objects that link them to their roots. These artifacts illustrate why cultural connections are deeply cherished.
Beyond the desk: Stories of well-being and belonging in Japan
The LIKE.TG office in Tokyo is bustling with activity. Alongside our rapid growth in Japan, our employees are creating a strong culture of belonging and well-being.We believe in putting people first, whether giving them the flexibility to watch a basketball game, take their kids to the doctor, or feel empowered to bring their creativity to the table.In this brief video, you’ll meet several employees who share unique stories about why they’re proud to work at a company that values their sense of belonging and their overall well-being.Accessibility note: The video is transcribed at the end of this blog post.
Celebrating Pride: Loving loud and living proud
June is Pride Month, a global observance honoring the vibrant diversity and invaluable contributions of the LGBTQ+ community. At LIKE.TG, we cherish our LGBTQ+ employees and allies who bring their authentic selves to work every day.We’re celebrating Pride this year with our internal theme of "Love loud, live proud." Two employees share their tales of growth, hope, and inspiration, underscoring the enduring power of love and acceptance.Accessibility note: The video is transcribed at the end of this blog post.
LIKE.TG invests $1.1 million in employee-chosen community projects
Gina Mastantuono, chief financial officer at LIKE.TG, and Jacqui Canney, chief people officer at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog post.At LIKE.TG, we're driven by our collective desire to fulfill our purpose to make the world work better for everyone. As part of that, we’re dedicated to cultivating an inclusive and resilient culture while investing in the health of our communities and the planet.We encourage our people to embrace a growth mindset and employ their creative thinking to help solve a variety of challenges to create a more sustainable and equitable world.In support of these efforts, we’re thrilled to share that LIKE.TG is expanding our partnership with global nonprofit organization ChangeX. We’re investing an additional $1.1 million into sustainability-focused community projects across nine countries in 2024.These grants are grassroots in nature. We’re putting the power of impact directly into the hands of our people, enabling them to help choose local projects that receive funding and help drive positive transformation for their communities.
Helping local communities thriveIn 2023, in partnership with ChangeX, we funded pilot projects in Ireland and Germany. LIKE.TG employee committees in each region selected the eco-focused community-led initiatives they felt aligned best with the company’s goals and had the most potential for impact and engagement.This partnership exceeded our expectations, allowing us to channel our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments directly into the community. This resulted in bike libraries, environmental education, tiny forests, and more.Given the momentum of the pilot projects, employees in Germany opted to put the grant money toward the implementation of robust solar energy education programs in schools. The programs combine the use of solar energy with practical teaching materials to give children the tools they need to learn about sustainability and climate.Philippa H., a manager of field marketing at LIKE.TG, participated in building one of the solar-power projects. “When we finished putting together a solar panel, a young boy plugged in an electric piano and began to play it,” she says. “It was a beautiful moment and such a good reminder that we must care for the planet for future generations.”Increasing our investmentInspired by the success of these projects, our additional investment will provide employee communities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the UK, and the U.S.—in addition to Ireland and Germany—with US$75,000 to US$100,000 each. These grant funds are for sustainability projects, such as ecosystem restoration, food waste and redistribution programs, and environmental education initiatives.“LIKE.TG lives its purpose, where sustaining change is more than a donation alone—it’s about partnership and demonstrating an unflagging commitment to a better world,” says Mark Cockerill, senior vice president of legal at LIKE.TG and executive sponsor for ChangeX in Ireland.“Partnering with local communities allows our employees to dream big and do good, and it ladders up to LIKE.TG’s overarching global impact strategy to positively reach 20 million people by 2030,” he adds.
Empowering employee-centered local impactAmong LIKE.TG’s 70-plus offices around the globe, we recognize that each community has distinct characteristics with unique needs. Our employees know their communities best, and ChangeX provides us with the platform so our people can help make local decisions around our investment.People want to work for organizations where they feel supported to learn, grow, and develop in their careers while continuing to make an impact both at and beyond work. We see firsthand how investing in our people is key to fulfilling our purpose. We put our people at the center of everything we do.We work hard to cultivate a culture in which people can do their best work, live their best lives, and fulfill our purpose together—what we call our People Pact.By giving employees opportunities to invest in their communities, everyone wins. Our people get to play a role in accelerating positive change where they work and live. We get to focus our impact on communities around the world and make meaningful progress toward our long-term sustainability goals.We believe change is about more than giving a donation—it’s committing to be a partner for the change we want to see.Know of a great environmental project in your community? Have the organization apply for a LIKE.TG ChangeX grant:United StatesAustraliaBrazilCanadaFranceGermanyIrelandJapan (coming soon)United Kingdom
Meet Sumit: Embracing authenticity in the workplace
At LIKE.TG, we're continually inspired by our colleagues who courageously bring their true selves to work every single day. Sumit B., talent acquisition optimization recruiting lead in the UK, epitomizes this ethos, embracing authenticity in the workplace.Raised in a strict family, Sumit often felt like he was leading a double life, hesitant to come out as LGBTQ+. Over time, he gained the strength and courage to accept and embrace his authentic self with his family and has never looked back. That genuineness spills over into every area of his life.Accessibility note: The video is transcribed at the end of this blog post.
LIKE.TG’s leaders unlock innovation
Modern organizations need to move fast. Toggling between legacy and modern systems is frustrating. Often there are disconnects between legacy and modern platforms, requiring manual work to bridge the gap.Many of the LIKE.TG customers I speak with every day tell me they’re trying to drive automation across a mix of legacy and modern applications. Beginning today, I’ll be able to tell them that with the Intellibot acquisition we just announced, they’ll be able to extend their automation capabilities to more systems.Simplifying workIntellibot extends LIKE.TG’s core workflow capabilities by helping customers automate repetitive tasks for intelligent, end-to-end automation. LIKE.TG intends to build Intellibot's capabilities natively into the Now Platform® so customers can more easily integrate with both modern and legacy systems. This will help them drive productivity and strengthen existing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) efforts.Intellibot’s robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities complement our existing automation functionality, which includes AI/ML, Integration Hub, Creator Studio for low-code app development, Process Optimization, Flow Designer, Virtual Agent chatbots, Natural Language Understanding, and Document Intelligence.
LIKE.TG will have a complete, end-to-end automation portfolio that can help customers identity opportunities for automation using Process Optimization and then execute on those opportunities with an unmatched set of automation capabilities that are all natively built on one platform.RPA allows companies to undergo rapid automation without changing background processes or jettisoning all their legacy IT systems.For example, instead of having to look up a customer billing record in an old legacy custom app, cross-reference the customer order number in a heavily customized enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and then find the original service contract in a 20-year-old client-server application, LIKE.TG customers will be able to do it all in one customer workflow experience. Customers will be able to configure bots right on the Now Platform to complete these repetitive tasks and bring the data back into the workflow.End-to-end automationLast November’s acquisition of Element AI helped us apply modern AI to text and language, chat, images, search, question response, and summarization, accelerating AI innovation natively in the Now Platform. We took things a step further with the recent Now Platform Quebec release. The acquisition of Intellibot will deepen our investment in powerful automation capabilities that boost productivity and allow users to focus on more complex and strategic work.Incorporating Intellibot’s advanced RPA tools in the Now Platform will move us closer to automating business processes from start to finish through a combination of technologies that create a great employee and customer experience. The ultimate outcome will be a world of work where businesses are accelerating innovation and thriving.Customers want orchestrated, intelligent, end-to-end automation. The pandemic has only exacerbated this need. With end-to-end automation, we’re delivering on our purpose of making work, work better for people and making companies and organizations more productive.LIKE.TG expects to complete the acquisition of Intellibot in Q2 2021.Use of forward-looking statementsThis blog contains "forward-looking statements" about the expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, and strategies relating to LIKE.TG’s acquisition of Intellibot. 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, the inability to assimilate or integrate Intellibot's technology into our platform; unanticipated expenses related to Intellibot's acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources; and potential unknown liabilities associated with Intellibot's business. 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.
How 3 determined IT pros built tech careers with LIKE.TG
Lauren Canney co-authored this blog post, the third in a three-part series about the LIKE.TG co-op program for college students.We’ve discussed what it’s like to be a LIKE.TG co-op and how personal experiences help us adapt to the workplace. Once we dive into our roles, we realize that LIKE.TG is much more than a tech company. It’s a community where we all contribute to fulfilling our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.Pairing creativity and innovationWith experience leading a team of 20 designers at Northeastern University, Max S., an event field marketing co-op, brings a wealth of creative knowledge to his role. His LIKE.TG team has been more than happy to tap into his creative skills and innovative ideas.Max has worked on a range of projects at LIKE.TG, including web design, where he’s learned to balance creative thinking with exceeding customer expectations.“These projects are great for my creativity because I get to test out what pictures work best, what layout is most appropriate for what the customers are looking for, and what LIKE.TG is looking to offer our customers,” he says.Michele G. has had a similar experience. Outside of work, she's a musician who enjoys turning her emotions into poems and songs.As a marketing co-op for corporate events, she gets to express that same creativity and personal tone in her favorite project, “happy Monday posts,” which are weekly updates for our internal network about LIKE.TG’s flagship Knowledge event.
Engaging in a supportive communityFor Emma T., another corporate events marketing co-op, seeing how the LIKE.TG community supports each other has been one of her favorite experiences while working here.“I'm put in a better mood because of how nice the people at LIKE.TG are and how I see them interact with me as a stranger to them,” she says.“I think my ‘aha moment’ when working at LIKE.TG has been seeing people from different backgrounds come together to support one another,” adds Richard Z., a digital acquisition strategy and operations marketing co-op. “When everyone has a shared experience, that’s what I enjoy about working together in projects.”Max emphasizes the people as well. “The world works because of people who care,” he says. "I have a team that prioritizes community and respects inquiry—not sure what else I could ask for.”Although our time as LIKE.TG co-ops is limited, we're grateful for the skills we develop, the work experience we gain, and the connections we make with our colleagues. By dreaming big and embodying the People Pact and company values, we can make the world work better—even if we’re just one small part.Join a company where you can play an active role in fulfilling our purpose. Explore LIKE.TG early careers.
Nearly 1,000 organizations worldwide implement LIKE.TG’s free emergency response apps
Update on LIKE.TG’s Emergency Response program: With help from our partners, LIKE.TG is helping organizations manage through the COVID-19 pandemicOn March 16th LIKE.TG released four emergency response apps free of charge to help organizations manage through the COVID-19 pandemic. To date nearly 1,000 different organizations have started leveraging these apps to assist their employees during the crisis. They include federal and state agencies as well as hospitals and healthcare organizations.LIKE.TG is working with its partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, DXC Technology, EY and KPMG, to distribute and support the apps.“We are humbled by the extraordinary and rapid response to these apps in an effort to help the world flatten the curve on COVID-19 as fast as possible,” said Bill McDermott, LIKE.TG’s CEO. “These LIKE.TG applications enable emergency outreach, self-reporting and exposure management, which are precisely actions that organizations can take right now to help people get through this crisis.”“Local, state and federal agencies, hospitals and healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and the list goes on. Customers in different sectors around the world are utilizing these apps. We are truly putting technology in the service of people, everywhere,” McDermott continued.One early adopter is the San Francisco city government. Linda Gerull, CIO of the City of San Francisco, said: “Unlike emergencies that impact physical infrastructure, this pandemic crisis targets people. The City of San Francisco is committed to continued high quality service to residents and must now ensure the city workforce is available and working on prioritized response initiatives. LIKE.TG’s community apps for emergency self-reporting and emergency exposure management will deliver mission critical information to resource managers to assess and manage organizational readiness in key areas of healthcare, law enforcement and fire as well as city essential services.”
Partner supportTo further support customers, LIKE.TG is working closely with its partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, DXC Technology, EY and KPMG. These partners are helping their customers to quickly deploy the LIKE.TG community apps. They also are working with customers to quickly develop other emergency response apps on the Now Platform that address specific industry and customer needs.Accenture“We have been working closely with LIKE.TG and our many other technology partners to help governments, businesses and communities around the world at this most critical time of need,” said Paul Daugherty, group chief executive of Accenture Technology and chief technology officer. “We remain committed to these partnerships and to bringing the full strength of our technology, systems and industry expertise in assisting organizations as they work to navigate this unprecedented and evolving situation.”Deloitte“Right now it’s more critical than ever that we work together to bring our experience, innovation and agility to serve organizations who are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Den Roenfeldt, principal and LIKE.TG alliance lead, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “We are proud to work with LIKE.TG to apply our technology applications and experience to help clients better track the spread of the virus internally, provide employee outreach and share knowledge quickly.”DXC Technology“In response to the current crisis, organizations worldwide are doing their utmost to address the needs of their people, customers and partners. DXC Technology and LIKE.TG are committed to proactively deploying these new apps quickly, efficiently and securely to help manage crisis response workflows and risk to the business,” said Dan Stoks, vice president of the global LIKE.TG practice at DXC Technology. “The development of our new Corporate Incident Response application – which allows clients to quickly respond to critical events by orchestrating response teams and plans, while maintaining a 360-degree view of the situation – is an example of that commitment.”EY“In times of crisis, organizations need reliable solutions to ensure critical operations are running smoothly and efficiently,” said Paul Webb, global LIKE.TG practice leader at EY. “Leveraging the Now Platform, EY rapidly developed a digital solution that provides businesses with the ability to swiftly connect with EY payroll advisors, operations teams and professionals as they cope with the impact of COVID-19. The close collaboration with LIKE.TG puts the urgent needs of EY clients first, providing them with technologies and guidance to prioritize employees while focusing on sustaining normal business operations.”KPMG“As we face unprecedented business disruption, KPMG is pleased to work with LIKE.TG to help organizations quickly maneuver through this challenging time. As our clients are faced with meeting the critical needs of their employees and customers, it’s imperative that we work together and continue to innovate,” said Mitch Kenfield, LIKE.TG executive sponsor and US practice lead partner at KPMG US. “Through the power of LIKE.TG and KPMG, we can continue to support organizations with real solutions, while easing cost challenges during this difficult time.”Available at servicenow.com/crisisresponse, the four community apps — Emergency Response Operations, Emergency Outreach, Emergency Self Report, and Emergency Exposure Management — are designed to help LIKE.TG’s customers and non-customers, including government agencies and enterprises, manage complex emergency response workflows. The Emergency Response Operations app is available for no charge to government agencies. The other three community apps are available for no charge to companies and agencies through September 30, 2020.Emergency Response Operations app for government agenciesWashington State’s Department of Health, a LIKE.TG customer, initially created the Emergency Response Operations app on the Now Platform to manage their own response to COVID-19. Working with LIKE.TG, the Department of Health is making the app available to all government entities at no charge.“As the epicenter for COVID-19 in the U.S., the State of Washington’s agencies, emergency responders and public health professionals had to rapidly assemble an incident management structure to lead outbreak response and mitigate the spread and impact,” said Jennifer McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Washington State Department of Health.“Leveraging LIKE.TG’s Now Platform, we were able to digitize processes that allowed us to quickly resource critical Incident Management Team positions. This automated a manual and labor-intensive process that was fraught with errors while also providing real-time visibility into resource allocations. Improved accountability will allow us to secure the maximum federal reimbursement for incident expenditures. We are building on the success of this phase with automation of the other Incident Management Functions such as resource demobilization, planning, logistics, and finance.”“Given the complexity and importance of community within this crisis, we believe it’s our duty to share our approach and the application we were able to quickly develop on the Now Platform. That’s why we have worked with LIKE.TG to make our application freely available to other governmental entities. By digitizing these processes, responding to an emergency does not have to create an emergency to coordinate,” McNamara concluded.
Customer care planIn addition to the State of Washington’s Emergency Response Operations app, LIKE.TG developed and introduced these three, no charge community apps:
Emergency Outreach: during a crisis, this app leverages the Now Platform to help companies connect with employees to assess the impact. Employers can reach out by email to provide information and safety measures and request a response to confirm if employees are safe and where they are located. Employers can also leverage the LIKE.TG Now Mobile App to send push notifications to employees via mobile to get response.
Emergency Self Report: this app helps an employee notify their employer that they are self-quarantined and when the employee will return to work and provides workflow support for the employer.
Emergency Exposure Management: when a company becomes aware that its employee is diagnosed with an illness, this app helps the employer identify other people who might have been exposed based on the employee’s meetings history and job location.
These community apps are part of a broader Customer Care Plan launched by LIKE.TG to support its customers as they focus on maintaining business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes a commitment to maintaining virtually 100% uptime for LIKE.TG instances; and launching a Now Community forum where customers and partners can interact with other customers, as well as an Apps Suggestions portal, where customers and partners can provide their ideas for COVID-19 related apps or features.More information about LIKE.TG’s customer care plan, including accessing the community apps, can be found at servicenow.com/crisisresponse.
Put humans in the loop to generate real value from generative AI
Efficiency is the bedrock of success for any organization. In the continuous pursuit of streamlined operations and increased productivity, LIKE.TG Automation Engine serves as a valuable asset, enabling LIKE.TG platform owners and automation leaders to quickly and cost-effectively connect or automate any system, document, or task with minimal code.Automation Engine is part of a broader hyperautomation strategy that organizations need in order to maximize efficiency in the current and future market landscape. Hyperautomation is focused on automating the business as much as reasonably possible, evolving people’s work to enhance their experience and impact, and applying the right tool for each need—all on a single platform.Let’s explore three ways Automation Engine can help drive a hyperautomation strategy.1. Seamless workflow integrationCompanies are built on departments, which lead to siloed departmental systems, such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning. Departmental leaders then implement automation tools, such as robotic process automation (RPA), to automate processes.These “islands of automation,” or siloed automation tools, automate at the departmental level only. Even if they're connected across departments by Centers of Excellence, they're not connected to other automation tools and technologies. Both siloed departmental systems and islands of automation act as barriers to hyperautomation.Automation Engine connects siloed departmental systems and islands of automation to make hyperautomation possible. Work flows seamlessly across the enterprise through a complete set of integration capabilities, including API integration for modern systems and RPA for legacy systems.Additionally, Automation Engine connects siloed automation tools from any vendor into a cohesive whole through Automation Center, a centralized automation operational and analytics hub.Discover how features of Automation Engine, including generative AI, can help connect workflows across the organization in our hyperautomation landscape webinar.2. RPA excellenceBesides integrating LIKE.TG with legacy systems, RPA automates the “last mile” of manual, repetitive tasks that may still be slowing down workflows. These tasks could be any repeatable sequence of actions that humans have to do in Windows apps, web browsers, or legacy system UIs as part of a larger business process.Explore RPA best practices and key strategies for deploying RPA and maximizing cost savings within the context of your broader hyperautomation strategy.3. Accessible low-code automationWe live in an era where automation should be readily accessible to everyone. Through its low-code app development and automation capabilities, App Engine and Automation Engine together empower technical and business users to create new applications while upholding governance standards.This empowerment fosters increased collaboration between lines of business and IT, further breaking down silos within organizations and removing barriers to process improvements.For example, Hancock Whitney Bank successfully incorporated low-code as part of its hyperautomation strategy. Find out how the bank achieved this and the valuable lessons learned in the process.Gain deeper insights into how Automation Engine can maximize efficiency, enhance experiences, and empower your hyperautomation strategy.
Nearly 1,000 organizations worldwide implement LIKE.TG’s free emergency response apps
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, LIKE.TG invited our global partner ecosystem to join us in supporting customers across the world who chose to implement our four no-charge emergency response apps. We also invited partners and customers to develop their own COVID applications on the Now Platform®.To date more than 1,000 organizations have downloaded the emergency apps, which help keep employees safe and productive during this difficult time.The four emergency response apps were created with great speed and agility in early March, to help our customers and partners manage complex crisis management workflows. Given the need to create new workflows fast, when they were needed most, we recognized that many customers and partners would also want to create their own COVID-related apps on the Now Platform®.In recent weeks, many of our partners across the world have identified new COVID-related workflow requirements and embraced the opportunity to create their own emergency response apps. Australia-based Enable and San Diego’s Cask are two partners who leaned in with LIKE.TG to help customers keep their businesses running and their employees safe.Working with the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), Enable created a LIKE.TG-based web portal to help local tech companies manage their business continuity challenges.“The website is a one-stop shop for organizations to find free service offerings, advice and tools,” says Enable CEO Bruce Hara. “The aim was to help Australian businesses trying to keep their head above water as they close offices and worksites, have staff work from home, and lose contact points with their customers. The site is packed with vital information on, and free tools for, alternative work arrangements and new technologies, including collaboration platforms for remote business services."Enable and LIKE.TG created the AIIA portal pro bono. Since launch the portal has received more than 40,000 visitors, representing 30 different organizations.In California, meanwhile, LIKE.TG partner Cask built a COVID-19 testing app for the City of Los Angeles in under 36 hours. Cask used the Now Platform to deliver a world-class outcome with unparalleled speed, agility and impact.“The City of Los Angeles came to LIKE.TG and Cask to ask how they could coordinate and streamline testing,” says Cask vice president Jason Rosenfeld. “We built an app that supports drive-through testing so Angelinos can drive up, have their appointment to get tested, and then move on, versus having to wait in the line.”Cask’s development team stayed up all night to get the app launched. Cask initially worked hand-in-hand with the Los Angeles mayor’s office, and then handed off management of the app to the city’s IT team. Within a few days of launching the app, the city was able to conduct more than 5,000 COVID-19 tests safely.
We are honored and grateful that our partners stepped up so quickly to build these applications and support our customers in their time of need. When we unify our focus and work with our partners on mission-based objectives, we enable an amazing “force multiplier” impact on our customer outcomes.This is just the beginning. LIKE.TG has many other partners across the world who embrace our values and culture as extended members of the LIKE.TG family. These partners are in the process of creating and certifying new COVID-19 workflow applications to help customers address their most challenging requirements.COVID-19 has forced us into a new normal. On good days and bad, we continue to live out our purpose and focus on doing what’s right for our customers and the world. At LIKE.TG, we make the world of work, work better for people—with and through our partners.
LIKE.TG partners lean into emergency response
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, LIKE.TG invited our global partner ecosystem to join us in supporting customers across the world who chose to implement our four no-charge emergency response apps. We also invited partners and customers to develop their own COVID applications on the Now Platform®.To date more than 1,000 organizations have downloaded the emergency apps, which help keep employees safe and productive during this difficult time.The four emergency response apps were created with great speed and agility in early March, to help our customers and partners manage complex crisis management workflows. Given the need to create new workflows fast, when they were needed most, we recognized that many customers and partners would also want to create their own COVID-related apps on the Now Platform®.In recent weeks, many of our partners across the world have identified new COVID-related workflow requirements and embraced the opportunity to create their own emergency response apps. Australia-based Enable and San Diego’s Cask are two partners who leaned in with LIKE.TG to help customers keep their businesses running and their employees safe.Working with the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), Enable created a LIKE.TG-based web portal to help local tech companies manage their business continuity challenges.“The website is a one-stop shop for organizations to find free service offerings, advice and tools,” says Enable CEO Bruce Hara. “The aim was to help Australian businesses trying to keep their head above water as they close offices and worksites, have staff work from home, and lose contact points with their customers. The site is packed with vital information on, and free tools for, alternative work arrangements and new technologies, including collaboration platforms for remote business services."Enable and LIKE.TG created the AIIA portal pro bono. Since launch the portal has received more than 40,000 visitors, representing 30 different organizations.In California, meanwhile, LIKE.TG partner Cask built a COVID-19 testing app for the City of Los Angeles in under 36 hours. Cask used the Now Platform to deliver a world-class outcome with unparalleled speed, agility and impact.“The City of Los Angeles came to LIKE.TG and Cask to ask how they could coordinate and streamline testing,” says Cask vice president Jason Rosenfeld. “We built an app that supports drive-through testing so Angelinos can drive up, have their appointment to get tested, and then move on, versus having to wait in the line.”Cask’s development team stayed up all night to get the app launched. Cask initially worked hand-in-hand with the Los Angeles mayor’s office, and then handed off management of the app to the city’s IT team. Within a few days of launching the app, the city was able to conduct more than 5,000 COVID-19 tests safely.
We are honored and grateful that our partners stepped up so quickly to build these applications and support our customers in their time of need. When we unify our focus and work with our partners on mission-based objectives, we enable an amazing “force multiplier” impact on our customer outcomes.This is just the beginning. LIKE.TG has many other partners across the world who embrace our values and culture as extended members of the LIKE.TG family. These partners are in the process of creating and certifying new COVID-19 workflow applications to help customers address their most challenging requirements.COVID-19 has forced us into a new normal. On good days and bad, we continue to live out our purpose and focus on doing what’s right for our customers and the world. At LIKE.TG, we make the world of work, work better for people—with and through our partners.
Planning for continuity with COVID-19
COVID-19 has put the business continuity plans of every SaaS company to the test, and the test isn’t over. But we’ve learned a few things in the last week that I’m hoping will help your organization.It’s all about peopleThis isn’t a traditional BC/DR scenario, where a disaster like an earthquake knocks a data center offline. It’s about how we adapt to support employees connecting and operating from home, so we can maintain our support for our customers. This means four things for us:
Ensure that everyone has what they need for secure connectivity, with all the tools they need to do their jobs. Because we don’t know what the massive, global shift to working-from-home will do to home bandwidth, we’ve published expense guidance on tethering mobile devices and purchasing MiFi hotspots.
Build reporting that keeps a daily, laser-like focus on productivity and absenteeism so we can adjust available capacity to meet our most critical needs.
“Press pause” on all non-critical programs, so we can reallocate people’s time to more effective communication and collaboration across global sites.
Have plans to adapt how we hire and ramp up new team members quickly
Clear communications are more essential than everIn this rapidly-evolving scenario, everyone wants to be helpful, which is terrific. But it also runs a higher risk of miscommunications. Early on, we realized how critical it was to clarify roles and responsibilities for communications, both internal and external. Even if people think they know this, it’s important to reinforce who should be the point person for communications. This is especially essential to ensure that we’ve got clear lines of communication between our teams and those we depend on to deliver excellent support – no crossed wires. We also want to ensure everyone’s on the same page, so we run daily standups, no longer than 30 minutes, so that all of our leaders have the same situational awareness.No plan survives first contact – adapt, iterate, and innovateBy themselves, plans are no substitute for continuous planning and adaptation. We don’t know how the COVID-19 situation will play out, except that it will be fluid, and we have to have an adaptive mindset. We’ve already had to adapt our plan from a single site, one-time event to a protracted event affecting us globally. As I noted earlier, we run daily standups to report progress and status. We run capacity modelling and scenario planning exercises to assess different decisions we might have to make in advance. We even outlined new procedures for how we collaborate, taking into account our new circumstances. It’s not enough to say ‘we have a plan’. Leaders at every level need to focus their time on adapting and updating their plans to stay a step ahead of a rapidly changing situation.
LIKE.TG Joins Bay Area Companies to Distribute $22M in Funding in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis
Funding from 25 companies will go towards organizations responding to the crisis, with a focus on COVID-19 funds through the CDC Foundation, United Nations Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Funding will support vulnerable populations, nonprofits, and small businesses impacted as well as national and global public health response efforts
This is an unprecedented moment in time as we globally fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies and sectors must stand together in an urgent, coordinated global response to flatten the curve of this pandemic. To align efforts, increase impact and encourage other companies to get involved, 25 companies are coming together to support the CDC Foundation's Emergency Response Fund, the United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, or the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Regional Response Fund.At LIKE.TG, we are proud to join forces with 24 other Bay Area companies that have committed an initial $22M in collective funding for organizations on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Funds will support the evolving local, regional and global response efforts through several beneficiaries.Funding for the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund is meeting rapidly evolving response needs around the world. These funds will help communities and public health responders meet the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.“Philanthropic and private sector support is critical for use alongside government funding to address needs that arise in emergency responses where speed and flexibility are paramount to saving and protecting lives,” said Judy Monroe, MD, president and chief executive officer of the CDC Foundation. “That’s why flexible philanthropic and private sector support is imperative. We are incredibly grateful to see everyone coming together at this time to address the very dangerous coronavirus threat.”Funding for the United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund will support the global public health response. These funds will directly support the World Health Organization’s work to help countries prevent, detect, and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of us have a personal stake in conquering this pandemic," said Elizabeth Cousens, President CEO of the UN Foundation. "And we can bend the curve if we take swift, smart action now. Contributions to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund will support the World Health Organization’s lifesaving work – and we are immensely grateful."Funding for the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Regional Response Fund will support organizations in each of the 10 Bay Area counties. These funds will specifically support low-income individuals and families, nonprofit organizations and small businesses that are impacted by this crisis.“We and our Bay Area community foundation partners are proud to lead this effort to raise funds and shepherd critical resources for those most in need in our region during this unprecedented global crisis. We are grateful that local companies are committing themselves to helping our communities. In such uncertain times, it is uplifting to witness the philanthropic and business sectors coming together to take powerful action,” said Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation President and CEO.We are joining with Autodesk, Box, DocuSign, Cisco, Dropbox, GitHub, Intuit, LinkedIn, NetApp, Okta, PagerDuty, Palo Alto Networks, Pledge 1%, Postmates, Pure Storage, Salesforce, SAP, Silicon Valley Bank, Slack, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, Workday, Zoom Video Communications and Zuora in this effort. We urge other companies to join us in supporting their local and global communities during this evolving crisis.To get involved, visit the CDC Foundation's Emergency Response Fund, the United Nations Foundation COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund and Silicon Valley Community Foundation COVID-19 Regional Response Fund.
Resources to help your business handle COVID-19
Updated September 28, 2020So many aspects of our businesses and lives are under pressure right now. LIKE.TG is committed to helping you and your organization get through this situation today and in the future and get stronger as a result. We can meet this challenge together.On March 16th, we announced our Customer Care Program, including four emergency response apps. We’ve already seen tremendous traction with the apps. As of March 25, nearly 1000 organizations have downloaded the apps. In addition, our amazing community has generated many new ideas, resources, tools, and stories. Some are best practices, some are specific to customers of the Now Platform®, and some come from LIKE.TG partners who are helping with new apps, services, and strategy.We’ll be updating this blog regularly to help you tap into the energy, spirit and innovation of the LIKE.TG community.Expertise from practitioners at LIKE.TG:
Planning for continuity with COVID-19 link
Nearly 1000 organizations implement LIKE.TG’s emergency response apps
How to keep the humanity in #WFH
COVID-19 Crisis Management in Action: Now on Now webinar
Our partners are stepping up to help with the COVID-19 situation:
New partner apps available on the LIKE.TG Store
New pro bono services are available from partners
As a reminder, we have crisis response-related tools from the LIKE.TG product and services team:
New HR Health Alert Employee Experience Pack – This download for HR Service Delivery customers helps CHROs on the front lines deal with COVID-19.
Remote Installation Services Partners and LIKE.TG Remote Services can assist customers in activating and deploying the Emergency Response Management applications.
Business Continuity Management – Learn how organizations including LIKE.TG use plans, exercises, and workflows to recover from disasters effectively, manage risks to critical business functions, and help achieve operational resilience.
New content to help you understand the four community apps for emergency response management:
Emergency Response Management app overview
Video demos for each app
Please stay tuned for updates, new webinars and events, both live and on-demand. Thank you for being part of our community. You can join the online discussion and get support here.
Special report: Putting GenAI to work in the enterprise
Generative AI (GenAI) is on track to be the most powerful technology of our time. As such, it’s created quite a buzz.“Generative AI has awakened people's imagination for AI,” explains LIKE.TG Chief Digital Information Officer Chris Bedi. “AI has been around for a long time. People use machine learning models, but they couldn't feel and touch it like generative AI. That's why it's very exciting now.”To help people better understand what GenAI can do and, more importantly, how it can be used in the enterprise, LIKE.TG created a GenAI special report.An entirely new way of workingThe possibilities of GenAI in the enterprise are seemingly limitless. When implemented on an intelligent platform, the technology can make every person, process, system, industry—everything—work better.Brian Solis, head of global innovation at LIKE.TG, believes GenAI will power a new era of business growth, along with an entirely new way of working. The question many business leaders are asking is, “How, exactly, do I get started?” The short answer is, with the right platform.A safe, sane approachAI-powered assistants delivered on an intelligent platform can empower people to be exponentially more productive. But to implement GenAI in a way that’s secure, business leaders must understand the data upon which GenAI bases its actions and recommendations.Yoshua Bengio is one of AI’s pioneers. A leading machine learning scientist and winner of the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, he explains how organizations can deploy GenAI tools in a way that’s transparent, responsible, and auditable.A continuing topic is how and when governments should move to regulate the AI industry. The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act provides the most ambitious governance framework to date.The GenAI-human partnershipOpen-access, open-governance large language models (LLMs) are sure to affect the way software is developed. A conversation between Nicolas Chapados, vice president of research at LIKE.TG, and Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at AI startup Hugging Face, provides fascinating insight into how GenAI is democratizing code. This makes it possible for people of all skill levels to develop applications—no technical experience necessary.Forget the old “robots are coming to replace us” narrative. To tap into the full potential of GenAI, humans need to stay in the loop, as Hal Gregersen, senior lecturer for work and organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, emphasizes. Business innovation requires a strong partnership between humans and AI, he says.LIKE.TG has long been a leader when it comes to integrating AI into our products. Discover how we help organizations put GenAI to work.
Early lessons from a crisis
The million-dollar question we are hearing on an almost daily basis is ‘when will we have a vaccine for COVID-19?’. According to many sources, including the New York Times, it may still be a long way off. This means the prospect of living in the ‘new normal’ is something we may need to accept and adapt to for quite some time.The nature of the outbreak, and the need to physically distance, brought significant changes and restrictions to how millions of us carry out our everyday lives. It’s forced us to reimagine how we do business and how we approach our daily tasks.At LIKE.TG we’ve been addressing the numerous challenges that the COVID-19 crisis presents. We’ve been supporting our 11,000+ employees, all of whom have been working from home since mid-March. We also transformed our annual, one-week Knowledge event into the Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience.Fast-tracking new digital workflowsI’ve been encouraged to see examples of many other businesses adapting to our challenging environment in an extremely agile manner.These efforts aren’t focused on technological advancement, but on how the development of technology can improve customer and employee experiences, both quickly (to navigate the current crisis) and to lay a foundation to improve the quality of our working lives in the future.We have been absolutely overwhelmed and humbled by the resilience, agility and ingenuity of our customers, who have been making tremendous strides on their digital transformation journeys with the help of the Now Platform.They have been able to ramp up customer service and quickly create new digital workflows when they were needed most.In times of uncertainty, they have made work, work better for their established at-home workforce and for those employees used to working in traditional office environments.Workflow apps to accelerate the crisis responseThe pace of change has accelerated considerably for businesses. At LIKE.TG we’ve moved quickly to help organisations navigate the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.In mid-March, when most European countries were introducing strict measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, we released four community apps to help our customers manage emergency response workflows.CDL is one EMEA-based customer that has demonstrated robust business continuity management with these emergency apps, operating business as usual and delivering on customers’ service level agreements without disruptions or dips in productivity.It took CDL only two days to move the majority of its 600+ team into home offices and switch to a fully operational work-from-home mode. Their employees are using our Emergency Self Report app to notify CDL if they are self-isolating or may be at risk.Our commitment to supporting businesses has continued, with the launch of our Safe Workplace Apps and Dashboardon 19 May 2020, designed to help companies manage the essential steps for the safe return of employees to the workplace.The CIO approach to navigating the ‘new normal’While there is a very real and immediate need to mitigate and manage the rapid pace of change that COVID-19 crisis presents, some businesses recognise the opportunity to look further ahead.From my frequent conversations with CIOs across the EMEA region, I know they are taking time to pause, assess and reset. They want to learn from the pandemic and prepare for the new working world that will emerge after the crisis has passed.Two clear trends have emerged from those discussions. The first is that COVID-19 is accelerating digital transformation, with workforce initiatives topping the CIO agenda.The second trend is a heightened awareness of the value of trusted partnerships. In moments of crisis, CIOs are looking to leverage existing partnerships that have been built on past success. They are turning to vendors and partners who can provide trusted counsel and support, and who know their clients’ businesses inside out.At LIKE.TG, I believe that our commitment to making work, work better for our employees, our customers and our partners has never been stronger. We will continue to invest in our platform, support our community and empower our people.Working together we can make the world of work, work better for everyone during this COVID-19 crisis — and beyond.
Partner innovation helps LIKE.TG customers through the pandemic
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, LIKE.TG and our partners have been busy meeting the needs of customers across the world.In recent weeks, several of our global partners have rolled out new applications, web portals and other services to help customers manage emergency response efforts. In these difficult times, their ingenuity, agility and speed have been nothing short of inspiring.On March 16, LIKE.TG announced a new customer care plan to help our government and private sector customers respond to the pandemic. As part of the plan, we released four new community apps designed to manage complex emergency response workflows. The apps have since been downloaded by more than 1,000 organizations around the world. Many of our partners have customized the apps to meet the needs of their clients in all regions.Hexaware, a LIKE.TG partner based in Mumbai, created a push-button deployment pack for the entire LIKE.TG customer base. This enables easy training for organizations wishing to use the four emergency response apps in the LIKE.TG store.Beniva Consulting Group, a LIKE.TG partner based in Calgary, implemented the COVID-19 Self-Report app for a Canadian energy company. Beniva also built a crisis dashboard for the company that allows executives to monitor employee health status in real time and communicate the results to impacted communities, government officials, and other sources if required.Crisis innovationMany of our partners and customers have built their own emergency response apps on the Now Platform®. One great example is Entrago, a LIKE.TG partner based in Australia. Working with an Australian healthcare provider, Entrago created a Covid-19 triage app to assist with hospital intake.“It’s basically a questionnaire to help the general public understand whether they need to go to hospital and what treatment they need,” said Entrago CEO Cameron Douglas-Savage. “It also helps the hospital understand the patient’s risk factors based on their medical history.”Here in the U.S., many financial institutions have struggled to process a massive surge in business loan applications under the federal government’s emergency relief programs. LIKE.TG partner INRY stepped up with a Small Business Loan Management app based on LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management solution. Their app enables lending institutions of all sizes to more efficiently process applications for the SBA Small Business Paycheck Program.“The Small Business Loan Management app is a cost-effective, secure, enterprise-grade solution that addresses the challenges associated with the rapid mobilization and deployment of relief aid to small businesses in need,” said Bipin Paracha, CTO and co-founder of INRY.Employee service delivery is another critical need, as companies around the world face the challenge of provisioning newly virtual workforces. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, LIKE.TG partner Cognizant had already begun building an employee service portal for a global pharmaceutical company.When the pandemic hit, Cognizant quickly added service portal features to help transition the pharma company’s employees to remote work. The portal now helps the company distribute news to employees more easily. It provides tools for remote work, and assists with HR, travel and IT requests.Our partners have stepped up in some of the hardest-hit regions in the world. Recently, LIKE.TG partner Volteo built a COVID-19 assistance portal for a Spanish university. Called SOS COVID-19, the portal is modeled on Now Community, LIKE.TG’s community portal. It allows hospitals, nursing homes and other care providers to request medical supplies and other emergency goods. It also enables users to find institutions in need of supplies and provides details on how to help.The portal is now being used in hard-hit areas across Spain, Italy and other European countries. Volteo launched SOS COVID-19 on April 2. According to Volteo, care providers have since received 1,500 medical coats through the portal, as well as 8,000 scrub hats, 2,000 face masks and 200 pairs of boots.The COVID era has brought about a fundamental shift in the way we all live and work. I’m truly humbled by how our partners are leaning in to help our customers as a force for good. We must continue to come together to meet the unprecedented challenges of these times. At LIKE.TG, we are honored to play a role in making the world of work, work better for our customers, partners and people everywhere.
How our customers are innovating through the pandemic
“Pandemic response experience” is not the first line you’d expect to see on a CIO’s resume. As a deadly new virus spread across the world in recent weeks, however, IT leaders everywhere have been scrambling to ensure their employees stay safe, connected and productive. At the same time, we all need to protect top line revenues, ensure the customer experience doesn’t miss a beat, and avoid any disruption to customer operations.As the CIO of LIKE.TG, I frequently exchange notes with CIOs at other companies. Most of them use the Now Platform to manage digital workflows for employees and customers. These days we’re dealing with many of the same challenges.Most of us have operations in multiple countries. Most are experiencing supply chain disruptions and addressing the challenge of providing network access and equipment to dispersed employees, many of them unused to working remotely. On the cyber front, many of us are seeing a surge in phishing and social engineering attacks.At the most basic level, we’re all focused on keeping our people healthy and safe. On March 16, LIKE.TG launched a new customer care plan, which includes four no-charge apps to help companies and government agencies manage their emergency response programs. The apps have since been downloaded by more than 1,000 organizations worldwide.
In addition, many of our partners and customers are building their own digital workflows to help deliver vital emergency services. This is a truly global effort that spans hundreds of organizations around the world. Let me share just a few examples, to show what’s possible when a global software ecosystem mobilizes to meet a common challenge.The City of Los Angeles used the Now Platform® to build a COVID-19 portal that supports drive-through coronavirus testing. Within 48 hours, the city pushed their portal live to 16 million citizens who can now research and verify symptoms, schedule an appointment, and choose a drive-through testing location.Using the Emergency Self Report and Emergency Exposure Management applications, the city and county of San Francisco has been delivering mission-critical information that resource managers use to assess and manage organizational readiness in healthcare, law enforcement, fire and other essential services.At a retail company specializing in home improvement, the HR team was facing a surge of emergency paid leave requests due to COVID-19. Within 96 hours they built a mobile leave request app on the Now Platform and deployed it to 330,000 employees globally.Finally, a multinational pharmaceutical company is using our mobile employee workflow tools to help its European employees get to work. Currently, borders are closed across Europe for everything apart from necessary commutes. In recent weeks, officials have been asking border crossers to provide documentary proof of employment or be turned back.This is where a mobile, centralized hub and one-stop-shop has proven an unexpected benefit. Thanks to the Now Platform, employees are able to access and download their proof-of-employment letters from their mobile devices with just a few clicks from their mobile devices. Within the first two weeks, more than 2,700 employees downloaded this letter. This has allowed them to travel to their campus, where they are working to develop life-saving medications.I’m proud that LIKE.TG is doing its part to help the world get through this crisis.I’m humbled by the creativity and drive of our partners and customers, who are using the Now Platform to get vital work done in very tough circumstances. I’m confident that together we can get through this crisis and emerge stronger on the other side.
New integration with Uber for Business gets employees safely moving again
I miss being in a car. I really miss having someplace to go! But I’m also glad that when it’s safe to go back to our offices, I’ll have the option of commuting with Uber for Business, right from my LIKE.TG Safe Workplace suite.We launched the LIKE.TG Safe Workplace suite two months ago. It includes apps that help companies prepare for and facilitate a safe and effective return to their respective workplaces. We’ve included important functionality like contact tracing, workplace safety management, employee surveys, and health screenings, and we are adding new features every couple of weeks.Our latest addition – Uber for Business – is included in our Workplace Safety Management app, which is one of the apps in the suite. With it, employees who have decided they’ve had enough of their home office, closet office, garage office, or kitchen table can easily coordinate their Uber ride to and from their workplace.
If you know me, you know I love our Now Platform® because it is one architecture, one data model, one platform. Uber for Business is another powerful platform that I’m happy to integrate with, because our strengths combined help solve one of the largest problems businesses face—helping their employees feel safer when commuting to and from work, as soon as it’s safe to reopen.More than 600 customers have downloaded our Safe Workplace apps. Uber recently rolled out new features and policies to help protect the health and safety of both riders and drivers. As a result of this partnership, I’m certain that an exponentially larger number of employees in a variety of industries will be able to rely on an easy, safer, commute option, and their companies will be confident in a flexible and practical return-to-work solution.I hope to become a power-user of this Uber for Business integration soon enough. Until then, if your workplace opens and you get to use it as a LIKE.TG customer, let me know what you think
Safeguarding our employees during the coronavirus crisis
By Sally Sourbron, Senior HR Director, EMEAAs I’m sure is the case with many of us, I’ve found that time has seemed to move at a much faster rate than usual.At the beginning of March (which feels like a lifetime ago), I was working from LIKE.TG’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. We were in the midst of daily, cross-functional crisis meetings as the coronavirus started to sweep across the globe.The discussions were focussed around how best to serve our employees who were being impacted by the pandemic, and how to prepare in locations where the infection rates were still low — but set to rise.Three key areas stood out as being absolutely vital in safeguarding our staff:1) Communicating with clarity2) Creating a highly productive, fully remote workforce3) Provisioning reporting capabilities for those affected by the virus.We knew that our own platform would be invaluable in delivering the digital workflows and applications we needed to achieve these goals.New normalOur actions were guided by a simple philosophy: we were not ‘socially’ distancing — only ‘physically’ distancing.Simply put, this means that just because we’re currently unable to work in the same physical space we shouldn’t lose the critical connections between our people.On the Now platform we created a single source of truth for employee-focused information during the crisis, from the company’s response and travel policies, to mental health and wellbeing resources. And all this information can be accessed company-wide — on desktop and via mobile.We have also been able to get targeted messages to specific parts of the business, helping us to adjust and respond to the unprecedented and ever-changing situation we’re all experiencing.We’ve enabled our teams to adapt to entirely new ways of carrying out ‘business-as-usual’, often overnight.Our virtual onboarding is just one example. This has been central to enabling our commitment to no layoffs and making new hires through 2020. We’ve pivoted from an in-person experience on day one to a 100% virtual experience, with digital processes that ensure everyone is integrated into LIKE.TG from the point they receive their offer letter.Our platform is supporting these big shifts in working with guidance on checking in with direct reports, virtual onboarding and offboarding processes, and remote interviews.This clear, real-time communication across the company has greatly helped with our transition to what has become the ‘new normal’.Protecting our peopleEnsuring the safety and wellbeing of our people is paramount. That’s why our conversations back in Santa Clara also sparked the idea to create specialist apps, within LIKE.TG, to manage our response to the crisis.Our engineering and response teams worked in partnership with the crisis response team to ensure the apps were up and running in just two weeks.The Emergency Outreach app helps us connect with employees to assess the impact of the situation at an individual level. We can reach out to check if people are safe, where they are located, and if they require any specialised support.Using the Emergency Self-Report app, our employees can quickly and easily notify us if they are self-isolating, and when they expect to be able to return to work — providing workflow support for their teams so they can resource appropriately.We recognised that those employees who are self-reporting may also have been in recent close proximity with their colleagues. So, we built the Emergency Exposure Management app again on the LIKE.TG platform. As soon as a team member confirms they have symptoms, the app will identify other employees who might have been exposed, based on their meeting history and job location. We then notify these workers to self-isolate — helping to keep our employees, and the greater population, safe.Finding the right pathThe world has changed and moved very quickly since my conversations back at HQ.I’m extremely proud of our response to an incredibly difficult situation. We’ve acted decisively, using all of our knowledge and expertise to create workflows that really make a tangible difference to the safety and wellbeing of our people.Using our own Now platform, we’ve put in place a firm foundation upon which to face an uncertain future.And the great thing is, we’ve been able to share all of this with our customers. Many clients are already implementing our emergency apps — which are free to use — to safeguard their own staff and keep business operations running smoothly.This reverberates around entire communities, and we’re happy to play a role in helping the world adapt to the crisis.As the situation continues to evolve, so will our response. But by placing our employees’ physical and mental health at the centre of our decision-making process, I’m confident we’ll find the right path for our workforce, our customers and therefore our business.
Taking care of business (even from home)—making a commercial in quarantine
In January, we launched a commercial to celebrate work—work that flows smoothly, so employees can focus on what matters most. However, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the ad, set in a traditional work environment, no longer fit with the current reality in which most American’s are working from home.A new world of workThe COVID-19 pandemic has created unique challenges for businesses.To reflect the changing needs of organizations around the world, we set out to create a new commercial that provides a moment of levity, but also conveys that our technology enables people to stay connected and productive no matter where they are. In order to adapt the ads to respond to COVID-19, we had to produce new commercial content while adhering to social distancing and overall health guidelines.
LIKE.TG partners with Cisco to enhance contact tracing capabilities
LIKE.TG announced a new integration with Cisco DNA Spaces, a location-based application and analytics tool, to enhance COVID-19 contact tracing.The integration will use the Wi-Fi-enabled proximity reporting application to help organizations manage the return of employees to the workplace, as well as closely monitor workspaces, to maintain proper physical distancing. We’ve also added new capabilities to the LIKE.TG Safe Workplace suite to make business travel safer and more manageable.How the integration worksThe integration with Cisco DNA Spaces will allow joint customers of LIKE.TG and Cisco to seamlessly import location-based data into the LIKE.TG Contact Tracing app and identify potential interactions with an affected employee. Proximity Reporting from Cisco DNA Spaces allows customers to better understand the extent of each interaction and potential exposure to floors and buildings across the workplace. This is based on employees’ Wi-Fi network connections to laptops or mobile devices, so case managers can take immediate and informed actions. The new integrated solution will help to reduce workplace transmission of infectious diseases, like COVID-19, by identifying on-site employees who might have been in contact with an affected employee.“We are committed to innovating and expanding the LIKE.TG Safe Workplace suite to help businesses manage the new and complex workflows required to help keep employees healthy and workplaces safe,” said Blake McConnell, senior vice president of Employee Workflow Products at ServiceNow. “Through the power of the Now Platform, we are helping our customers navigate this uncharted territory and solve the unique challenges that arise as a result of the pandemic, so that companies and employees can feel confident and safe about returning to the workplace.”“We’re thrilled to partner with LIKE.TG to help our customers prioritize the health and safety of their workers,” said Rajesh Reddy, Head of Product, Cisco DNA Spaces. “By integrating Cisco DNA Spaces, the industry’s leading indoor cloud location platform, with the power of the LIKE.TG platform, customers can more easily deploy and manage end-to-end return to workplace solutions. Our customers can confidently introduce return to work policies knowing they have a solution to react quickly to an incident, while also protecting the privacy of employees.”
New Employee Travel Safety AppLIKE.TG also introduced the new Employee Travel Safety app as part of its Safe Workplace suite. Available immediately, the app enables organizations to pre-authorize business travel for employees based on the safety of their destination. Automatic health verification before and during travel and daily contact tracing check-ins help ensure company safety guidelines are followed to help make travel safer.“To ensure safe business travel during the pandemic, it’s critical for NCR and our employees to establish best practices and commit to working together throughout the travel experience,” says Linda Sherman, VP of Global Sales Operations at NCR. “LIKE.TG’s Employee Travel Safety app automates and simplifies the process of travel authorization and approval while ensuring our policy guidelines are being adhered to. Ultimately, our focus is on the health and safety of our customers and employees and enabling them to do their jobs.”The LIKE.TG Safe Workplace suite has been downloaded by more than 700 organizations, including Bremer Bank, American University, Coca Cola European Partners, and State of North Carolina, and LIKE.TG will continue plans of new releases twice a month to support customers’ evolving needs, given the dynamic nature of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New contact tracing app and health screening features help bring employees back to the workplace safely
Uber, Coca Cola European Partners, State of North Carolina, BankUnited, and AmeriGas Using LIKE.TG Safe Workplace Apps to Make Returning to Work, Work for EveryoneIn only four weeks since the initial release of LIKE.TG’s Safe Workplace apps, close to 400 customers worldwide have implemented over 1,600 app installations to manage the safe return of their employees. These enterprises include Uber, Coca Cola European Partners, State of North Carolina, BankUnited, and AmeriGas including many LIKE.TG partners.“During this unprecedented time, North Carolinians need to know that they can count on the state’s agencies to provide on-going, critical support,” said Tracy Doaks, Secretary of the N.C. Department of Information Technology and State Chief Information Officer for the State of North Carolina. “Earlier this month we deployed LIKE.TG’s Workplace PPE Inventory Management app, which allows the N.C. Department of Administration to manage our PPE inventory for thousands of employees across 10 agencies to ensure that we are meeting the physical safety needs of our workforce and, by extension, the needs of our residents.”LIKE.TG is committed to helping our customers manage workplace and workforce readiness. Employee health and safety is priority No. 1. We also continue to use our Safe Workplace apps, and we estimate using these apps can help companies deliver $1M of labor productivity for every 10,000 employees. Our market-leading Safe Workplace apps enable customers to harness LIKE.TG’s single-data model and single workflow architecture to accelerate their readiness efforts, while maintaining business continuity. These apps are getting downloaded in just matter of a few days at many organizations globally.Given the changing and dynamic nature of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are planning releases twice a month to support customers’ changing needs.
We are pleased to release a new Contact Tracing app, which is generally available today. This app helps employers support a safe workplace for their employees by identifying potentially exposed employees based on workplace data. The app then executes follow-up activities -- from interviews and check-ins to location sanitizing and closure -- with case management and automated workflows to help support workplace safety. Finally, the app helps assess business risk of remaining open by evaluating exposure trends on the safe workplace dashboard. In order to identify employees that may have been in contact with infected individuals, the app can leverage a number of data sources such as employees at the same location, attendees in the same meeting room from Office 365, employee self-report logs, and badge scans. Customers can configure the information collected, used, and disclosed through the Contact Tracing app to ensure their use of the apps is in line with data protection laws and regulations that apply to them.Customers can now deploy our Safe Workplace apps for their global employee population with new support for eight languages including French, German, and Spanish.
Feedback from our customers plays an important part in our innovation roadmap. Based on recent input from our customers, we have significantly enhanced our employee self-service capability in our employee portal as well as Now Mobile. Specifically, with Employee Health Verification, employees are now able to provide answers to health screening questions in a self-service manner and get authorization to enter the workplace before leaving home. We have also enhanced our Workplace Safety Management app to provide employees the ability to make single or multi-day workspace reservations. The app also now provides a visual floor map view, providing them with an easy digital experience and freeing up workplace administrators’ time.Making the world of work, work better for people is LIKE.TG’s promise. And, with regular updates to these apps, we are delivering out-of-the-box workflows to help our customers ensure that returning to the workplace works for everyone.
