Recently we attended Knowledge 2022, the flagship event of ServiceNow, bringing together experts, customers, and partners from all over the world around the latest industry trends and platform upgrades.
After the pause due to Covid-19, this year’s Knowledge included four in-person events in New York, Las Vegas, Sydney, The Hague, and was also available online.
Although smaller than the events we previously attended in the US, the event in The Hague felt more powerful than ever. The message and content reassured us that the business opportunities in the ServiceNow environment are on a growing path over the coming years.
The event took place between 11-12 May and included a keynote session, panel discussions, demos, and roundtables, all of which we found very insightful not just for the work we’re currently offering to our clients, but also for our future projects.
During the keynote, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott talked about the growing industry need to develop business apps, and how low-code can play a key role in the global shortage of expert developer support.
This was followed by an App Engine challenge where two participants showed how easy it is to build apps in the ServiceNow environment, one building an app to book pet care services, and the other a travel booking app.
AI & HYPERAUTOMATION, SERVICE OPERATIONS WORKSPACE, CITIZEN DEVELOPMENT, ESG
The talk of town was around AI and Hyperautomation/ RPA, the Service Operations Workspace, Citizen Development, and ESG.
The ServiceNow RPA space now comprises four main features: the RPA management hub where you can manage and orchestrate robots, native integration (similar to the Flow Designer), the Desktop Design Studio where you can setup robot workflows, and ready-built components and tools.
The Service Operations Workspace is a new platform addition that offers different teams at an organization a unified experience to prevent and resolve incidents contextually and quickly.
Regarding Citizen Development, we learned that more and more companies are looking at making this a reality in their workplaces, and that traditional developers play a key role in facilitating this transition.
NN’s Ashutosh Munot offered some really interesting insights into this topic during his talk 007 A bond stratedy to enable citizen development, where he elaborated on the concept and on the advantages that companies should look for when working with citizen developers.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is becoming hotter by the day, as companies realize that although factors here are not necessarily financial, this approach minimizes risk and can positively impact their ROI in the long run.
Lightstep is another new platform addition that offers developers and site reliability engineers agility and real-time overview when pinpointing the source of issues in incident resolution, helping teams reduce downtime more efficiently.
And the new Customer Engagement Messenger provides an improved low-code approach to embed self-service functions in a web page or via links in other content such as email. Companies can add functions such as proactive recommendations, configurable cards, intelligent AI search, knowledge management, helping to increase self-service ROI by reducing the customer journey effort.
A STRONG COMMUNITY WITH A FOCUS ON EXCELLENCE
At the event we also joined several one-on-one sessions with ServiceNow experts for the designer, integration, and service owner workspace, which helped us gain first-hand advice for using these features in our implementations.
We’re happy to see that ServiceNow stays committed to ‘making the world work’ and that the excitement remains high among the NOW professionals and community.
The continued demand for workflow automation on a platform that offers customers simplicity and clear investment perspectives and ROI are some of the factors for which we advocate Bill McDermott’s statement that ServiceNow is on the path to become the ‘defining enterprise software company of the 21st Century’.
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