Some members of our Veran team (pictured above) had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of ServiceNow at the World Forum in London in November. It brought together ServiceNow experts and enthusiasts from around the world, offering a platform to explore the latest trends and developments in ServiceNow’s offerings. Our team delved into key areas such as the application of Generative AI and the future of HR Service Delivery, gaining invaluable insights into the transformative potential of ServiceNow’s technology.
Here are the three main topics that got their brains whirling during and after the event:
Harnessing the Power of Generative AI – how can you enhance productivity, adapt quickly and improve end-user experience?
ServiceNow HR Service Delivery: A New Standard – what does it mean to elevate your HR Service and redefine the rules of engagement between the Business and HR?
Navigating through the Skills Economy – how can you really start to understand the capability of your people, and really embed the ‘skills economy’ into your ways of working to make sure you are ready for the future world of work?
In order to fully leverage Gen AI, your configuration data must be clearly structured and uncomplicated, and your transactional data must be accurate.
Harnessing the Power of Generative AI
One of the standout features of the conference was the emphasis on Generative AI (Gen AI) across the Now Platform and, specifically, within ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery module.
What is it?
Put simply, Gen AI is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that focuses on creating new, unique content or responses by learning patterns from existing data. This means it doesn’t rely on pre-defined rules but has the ability to generate human-like text and summarise themes or content from multiple disparate sources making it a game changer across various applications.
Gen AI & ServiceNow
ServiceNow has embedded Gen AI into all its workflows, which provides three key benefits:
1. Enhanced Automation – Gen AI can understand and respond to natural language queries which means it can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable time for more strategic activities.
2. Intelligent Decision-Making – Gen AI’s ability to make intelligent and context-aware decisions enables workflows to be optimised based on real-time data and user interactions.
3. Improved User Experience - By understanding user queries and providing contextually relevant responses, Gen AI can help bring a more intuitive and user-friendly ServiceNow experience.
How do we bring that to life?
Now Assist, ServiceNow’s Gen AI solution, is revolutionising the way users and service teams operate. For instance, when an employee raises a case Now Assist auto assigns it to an HR agent based on the case content, auto summarises the case for description entry, and even suggests a resolution by scanning for similar cases and recent trends.
There’s a catch!
This all sounds great to HR service teams and end users like employees, right? As you would expect, there is a catch. Gen AI, within ServiceNow or elsewhere, is only as good as its’ source data allows it to be. In order to fully leverage Gen AI, your configuration data must be clearly structured and uncomplicated, and your transactional data must be accurate (Gen AI learns from and reports using this data). For example, if you want to use Now Assist to identify the correct knowledge article and provide a concise summary to an employee via search before they raise a case that has to be dealt with, reducing the load on your HR service team, your knowledge articles need to be consistently tagged (so Now Assist knows what articles are relevant) and clearly written (so Now Assist can accurately summarise the points relevant to the user).
This same concept prevents organisations from fully utilising their HR reporting and analysis tools to gain valuable people insights and this is why our methodologies such as 7S™ (7 Steps) and Optimisation place focus on simplifying and standardising HR configuration design and identifying top priorities in data quality improvements, for our clients.
Despite the reduced scope...and reduced cost of delivery, large and significant benefits for users can still be realised across user experience, efficiency, self-service gains, and more.
ServiceNow HR Service Delivery: A New Standard
What is it?
At Veran we talk about optimising HR Service Delivery and changing the rules of engagement between the business and HR. This means, having a deep understanding of your HR processes, activities and technology and utilising them to their full potential providing a seamless service whilst maximising self-service functionality.
A recent poll related to The SaaS Mindset™, our model for driving cultural change as a tangible outcome of a technology-led programme, showed that ‘Service-led design’ (i.e. designing your technology based on what you want your future HR service to deliver) was voted by HR and technology leaders as the highest impact pillar for delivering true change and benefits from HR technology. This illustrates the importance of focusing on HR Service Delivery within the context of HR transformation programmes, potentially even more so than the other five pillars of Standardisation, Self-Sufficiency, Data-Led, Cross-Functional, and Benefit-Led Continuous Improvement & Innovation.
HR Service Delivery (HRSD) & ServiceNow
ServiceNow’s HRSD is a way to manage employee demand for HR services and information. It can have two crucial business advantages:
1. Single route to access all HR Services – Employee Centre Pro, ServiceNow’s app for service delivery, employee engagement, and communication, becomes your simple, one-shop stop for employees to access company information and updates, self-serve on key information such as HR policies, and access other HR systems.
2. Enhance the HR Operations user experience - HRSD is not just for end users. It simplifies collaborative processes between HR teams as well as the business and enables team leaders to easily understand the workloads of their teams, focus on meeting SLAs, KPIs and drive meaningful data and insights.
So What?
Due to the recent economic climate, we have seen budget cuts in transformation programmes and full-scale HR system deployments. Where organisations have reduced budgets for improving the HR services and technology for employees and HR teams, we see HR service delivery tools such as ServiceNow HRSD playing a vital role. Rather than fully replacing the current HR technology stack and incurring the large cost of delivery, there is a case to implement ServiceNow’s HRSD, or equivalent tool, to operate as a service layer joining together and improving on the current end-to-end HR technology stack. Despite the reduced scope of delivery this brings, and therefore the likely reduced cost of delivery, large and significant benefits for users can still be realised across user experience, efficiency, self-service gains, and more. Veran’s HR Service Opportunity Assessment can help you understand the benefits that the above type of delivery and technology could bring to your organisation. Within a five-day series of workshops, we capture the opportunity that this type of HRSD technology can enable and document this case for change as a business case so you can get your HR service transformation programme moving.
...it is not enough to simply deploy the technology. It is equally critical to examine the end-to-end HR process where skills come into play.
Navigating through the Skills Economy
What is it?
The skills economy is a new concept relating to workforce and talent management, emphasising the focus on skills, not jobs, in organisational management, workforce planning and employee development. This provides a more granular but agile method for enabling success and delivery within your organisation and is anticipated to be one of the most significant shifts in HR practices over the next decade.
The Skills Economy & ServiceNow
ServiceNow is supporting organisations through this significant HR change and enabling key business outcomes, both at organisation and employee levels:
1. Organisation – ServiceNow’s Skills Management enables a catalogue of relevant skills (externally provided but internally updatable) to be applied to employees, roles and career paths for the purpose of workforce management. With employee proficiency captured against skills, business leaders and HR business partners can use this data to compare existing workforce skills within business verticals to those required for enabling business objectives and strategy. This mapping and analysis identifies priority skills for development or recruiting, required learning and development programmes, potential lateral and upward employee moves and promotes organisation agility ultimately enabling successful delivery throughout the business by focusing on the skills required for the future.
2. Employee – ServiceNow’s Employee Growth and Development (EGD) provides various functionalities to support employees in identifying and progressing within their chosen career path with a keen focus on skill development. One of the most significant use cases is the ability for employees to raise aspirations against specific roles or career paths. EGD utilises Gen AI to provide a growth plan relevant to this aspiration, with targeted learning opportunities to enhance skill proficiency based on current employees and role/career data. Employees can review and adjust this growth plan (with or without their manager), allowing them to then action, enhance the most applicable skills, and move forward within their chosen career path.
The end-to-end utilisation of skills
Where this becomes especially powerful is the interaction between employee and organisation levels. Employees can use EGD to become more proficient in skills relevant to their career goals which reduces skills gaps identified in workforce planning supported with Skills Hub, and provides business leaders and HR with a stronger justification for lateral and upward moves; benefitting the employee’s growth and development and the organisation’s agility and delivery.
To fully receive these benefits however, for both the organisation and employees, it is not enough to simply deploy the technology. It is equally critical to examine the end-to-end HR process where skills come into play. For example, to ensure your skills-based workforce planning has as much positive impact on the organisation as possible, employees and managers must be assessing skills in the right way at the right time. If enabling skills-focused workforce planning is a key desired outcome of your talent management processes, these processes should be designed in a way that enables this cross-functional outcome. This outcome-focused approach to design is critical to our various methodologies at Veran and supports our operations and technically experienced consultants to bridge the solution gap between business needs and the supporting technology. In this skills-based example, we work with our clients to re-examine all relevant processes and the available technical functionality, to facilitate the outcome of ‘right person, right role, right time’.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the ServiceNow World Forum Conference 2023 was well worth the trip. It’s given us the energy to continue to explore the world of service delivery and help drive how it can make a significant difference to HR. Various functionality across Gen AI, simplifying routes to access HR services, service delivery user experience, and skills-focused planning and development has got our consultants at the edge of their seats. However these all act as a reminder that to fully maximise the benefits of technology, all HR transformation programmes must:
1. Take an outcome-focused, cross-functional approach to HR service design
2. Assess the opportunity for transformation early to maximise budget utilisation
3. Ensure configuration design is simple and transactional data is accurate
We look forward to implementing our learnings in our work and continuing to deliver transformational change for our clients. If you wish to find out more about how our methodologies and services enable the above three points, please get in touch via contact@veranperformance.com.