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TECH TALK: SERVICENOW
7 REASONS SPEED IS A CRITICAL BUSINESS SUCCESS FACTOR
Learn how Computacenter and ServiceNow can help businesses protect and grow at speed
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The global pandemic changed the world, markets, and organisations forever. It also changed the importance of speed – with markets moving more quickly and businesses executing “protect and grow” strategies. It has necessitated that corporate IT organisations need to move at “the speed of business”. But what does this actually mean for your IT organisation?
To help, this article lists seven reasons speed is a critical success factor for your business.
THE VARIED NATURE OF SPEED IN BUSINESS
While most people will appreciate that speed is now vital to business success on multiple levels, it’s also important to understand that while it might be an opportunity, it is also likely a necessity. Where the need for speed is not only something that creates a competitive advantage but is also “table stakes” for market participation.
Speed, whilst a word we commonly use in our everyday language, can also be viewed through a “velocity” lens. At least in IT circles, this might be perceived as a facet of Agile or DevOps, but there’s a reason the term velocity is used – it’s “speed with direction”.
If you like scientific definitions, “velocity is a vector that includes a speed and a direction”. It reminds us that speed alone is insufficient to deliver the value your business needs – with both “speed and no direction” and “speed with the wrong outcomes” likely to do more harm than good.
So, what can your IT organisation do to improve in a speed context (or velocity, efficiency, or similar “good speed” way)? Not only in terms of IT service delivery and support but also in helping other business functions add speed.
There are many opportunities, some of which can be classed as necessities, and the following seven reasons explain why your IT organisation and other business functions need to improve business operations and outcomes “at pace”.
1.
Getting value from technology and business investments quickly
A primary aspect of speed that shouldn’t be overlooked is the rate at which organisational speed can be added (and thus the benefits realised). For example, the time to value for introducing the new technology that helps deliver the speed needed across the next six areas.
Many organisations achieve the required time to value – from work automation solutions such as ServiceNow – through third parties that bring both solution expertise and accelerators to ensure value optimisation and the swiftest possible journey to its realisation.
2.
Responding to changing market demands quickly to realise competitive advantage
Many people would argue that this change was happening pre-pandemic but that the crisis of 2020 and its long tail has increased the speed of many markets, impacting the need for speedy business operations and change.
Speed is a competitive advantage. Or, if a “glass half empty” perspective is taken, the lack of speed is potentially a business killer. This critical need might be meeting market demands for increased speed, perhaps related to product and service delivery, or the ability to deliver against market-driven changes quickly.
3.
Increasing process efficiency through optimisation and automation
Many organisations have already adopted the mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”. Hopefully, in this specific order – with quality placed ahead of speed to help ensure that the increased efficiency is value-adding rather than detrimental to customer experiences, products and services, costs, or other aspects vital to business success.
The increased use of automation, especially intelligent automation that leverages artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities that employ machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU), is key to increasing process efficiency across the business to deliver “better, faster, cheaper” operations and outcomes.
4.
Improving employee productivity through better experiences
Better business function operations, services, and outcomes make for better employee enablement, but there’s the employee productivity perspective to consider too. Where services and support capabilities – whether provided by IT or other business functions – need to be aligned with “what matters most” to employees.
This is wrapped into the need for internal service providers to focus on the delivered employee experience, where research shows that “the most important factor for employee experience is being able to make progress every day toward the work that they believe is most important.”
Automation helps, but it’s essential to appreciate that employee expectations rose during the pandemic, with working-from-anywhere (WFA) scenarios adding to the need for speed or issue resolution in particular.
5.
Improving the speed of data insights for better decision making
Tactical and strategic decisions, and thus the data that drives them, need to be timely. This need for speed can relate to many organisational areas – for example:
- Customer understanding
- Identifying service, operational performance, and experience-based issues and opportunities
- Facilitating agility, including strategy adaptation and pivots
Automation again helps, as does the use of AI in the form of predictive analytics.
6.
Increasing organisational resilience, including through speedier risk management
One of the key learnings from the global pandemic was the need for greater organisational resilience. This improvement includes the speed of risk identification and effective mitigation, plus the remediation of business-affecting issues where both data-based insights and automation assist.
Improved resilience can include people-management-related speed too. For example, the ability to bring in new employees and make them productive as soon as possible thanks to best practice employee onboarding capabilities and the technology enablement that makes them work.
7.
Speeding up business and technology change activities
While the importance of speed-of-change has already been called out, there are two key change areas where speed is critical to business success:
- Transformational change – including the execution of digital transformation strategies where enterprise service management opportunities allow the corporate service management or IT service management (ITSM) tool to be employed as a business-critical system to enhance automation, efficiency, and insight
- Business-as-usual change management, including the speedy introduction of new technology features and services that enable business innovation and success.
Both are areas where operational automation can be used to drive new automation and the business benefits this brings.
PUTTING YOUR BUSINESS IN THE FAST LANE
According to ServiceNow around 60% of companies do not take a value-led approach to projects. However, value is what ultimately drives investment decisions, particularly time to value and metrics that show when the expected value will be achieved.
The points 2 to 7 that I outlined above, contribute to achieving speed to value or in more simple terms, a faster return on investment. And that’s what can put your business in the fast lane.
IN DISCUSSION WITH SERVICENOW
What happens when two veterans of the industry come together to talk about the pace of change in our joint markets and customers? Naturally, we film them discussing all things ServiceNow and Computacenter!
The following videos capture Chris Price, Divisional Director at Computacenter and Paul Hardy, Evangelist, Innovation-EMEA at ServiceNow in conversation.
Act and move fast
Customers want support with new ways of working in different areas of the business such as compliance, risk management, security as well as ITAM, ITSM, etc. Demand for this support is accelerating. Watch video to see more.
The market is moving quickly
"The partnership between ServiceNow and Computacenter will compound the pace with which we are moving, and we know the market is moving quickly, to ensure we can deliver great services to customers." Watch video to see more.