The IT Nerd

ServiceNow and Workplace from Facebook today announced new integrations designed to create great experiences for the growing distributed workforce. Together, ServiceNow and Workplace from Facebook will help make work, work better for people by enabling organizations to streamline communication between executives, departmental leaders, and employees to create more meaningful, employee‑first experiences.

The new capabilities enhance an existing ServiceNow Virtual Agent integration. With Virtual Agent, employees can request support, receive updates on in‑progress requests, and connect with live agents when needed—all without leaving Workplace. Enhanced capabilities include:

• ServiceNow Employee Campaigns integrated with Workplace from Facebook: Companies can now distribute relevant content to employees directly through their Workplace experience, as well as other channels, making it easier for employees to stay informed, engaged, and productive from anywhere and across any device.
• Workplace from Facebook Integration Spoke: Available as an IntegrationHub Spoke, customers can quickly create new integrations for Workplace from Facebook to meet their unique and evolving employee experience needs.

ServiceNow and Workplace already work with some of the biggest and most respected companies around the world. Together, the companies serve customers across all industries, including Sun Life Financial, Telenor Group and Petco.

A study by MIT shows that companies delivering on employee experience can double customer satisfaction and increase profitability by 25%. For employees ‑ both those in desk‑based roles and on the frontlines ‑ IT tools must be consumer‑grade: easy to use, integrated, and omnichannel.

The pandemic has proven that proper communications to employees must be a coordinated effort between all departments. IT, HR and workplace services leaders can no longer work in silos and must invest in integrated technology to foster an inclusive, connected, and more productive organization.

For more information about the Virtual Agent integration, the Workplace from Facebook Integration Spoke, and ServiceNow Employee Campaigns, click here.

Serving families in Canada’s largest metropolitan community where parents expect the best tools for managing COVID-19 will be used, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) knew it needed to use technology to help students return to school safely.

Having already implemented ServiceNow’s ITSM capabilities back in 2017, the TDSB turned to ServiceNow’s Safe Workplace app suite to manage a safe return to school – making it the only school district in Ontario to use public-facing apps to manage its response to COVID-19.

• The Readiness Surveys app gathered real-time data on student preparedness to return to school, revealing that 27 per cent required accommodations to begin their studies – more than double what they had anticipated. 
• By working with Toronto Public Health, the TDSB was able to optimize ServiceNow’s Health Screening app to meet provincial requirements and streamline the process for ensuring students and their families complete the necessary health checks before returning to school on a daily basis.
• Intelligent chat features enabled parents to reach out with questions, and this information was connected to the ServiceNow platform so it could be routed to service desk agents when necessary.
• Leveraging the power of ServiceNow’s Now Platform, all data collected by these apps are organized into a single view in the Safe Workplace Dashboard. This enables the TDSB to communicate with students and parents quickly and easily, while helping school staff to manage the logistics of ensuring students are safe while learning on site and at home.

Today, all of the TDSB’s 500+ schools are open and more than 50,000 students and families are using the apps every day.

Accenture and ServiceNow have formed a new business group to help private and public sector clients accelerate their digital transformation and better address today’s dynamic operational challenges. The Accenture ServiceNow Business Group represents a significant multi-million dollar investment from both companies over the next five years.

In the COVID-19 era, organizations are under more pressure than ever to innovate faster, reduce costs, enhance productivity, and meet their customers’ needs. The Accenture ServiceNow Business Group will help organizations rapidly evolve organizational processes and unlock the full value of technology investments by adopting digital workflows that deliver modern, personalized customer and employee experiences. This includes empowering employees and customers with self-service and remote work programs that offer increased flexibility, mobility, and choice. By establishing a more modern workplace with platform-driven, technology-enabled workflows, organizations are better positioned to balance business needs, satisfy customer demands, drive employee engagement, deliver productivity expectations, and realize workplace cost optimization.

The Accenture ServiceNow Business Group will deliver industry- and domain-specific solutions and services to customers. Together, Accenture and ServiceNow will initially help accelerate digital transformation programs for customers in telecommunications, financial services, government, manufacturing, healthcare, and life sciences. Workflow innovation will focus on employee engagement, customer service and operations, artificial intelligence for IT operations, and security and risk. Additional industry solutions will be developed in the future.

Supported by approximately 8,500 Accenture people skilled in ServiceNow, the new group brings together dedicated professionals from both organizations with expertise in transformational workflow and platform development, marketing, sales, and business development across numerous priority industries. The business group will develop advanced industry and domain-focused solutions designed to deliver tangible, positive outcomes for clients at scale.

For example, Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading, research-driven pharmaceutical company with more than 51,000 employees and an Accenture and ServiceNow customer, uses ServiceNow’s technology and Accenture services to create a seamless, consumer-grade experience for global employees and customers.

Accenture and ServiceNow also collaborate to serve government entities. Earlier this year, Accenture Federal Services (AFS) announced a $96 million task order to help the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) modernize its enterprise service management and IT capabilities, using ServiceNow to power the digital transformations end-to-end. Using the Now Platform, AFS will work with the VA to automate its manual workflows and introduce applied intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, allowing the VA workforce to focus on more complex tasks that serve veterans.

Accenture’s use of ServiceNow is a strategic enabler of customer-facing innovation at scale and, as a ServiceNow customer, the company uses ServiceNow workflows for employee engagement, invoice processing, asset management, artificial intelligence for IT operations, and its universal service desk. Accenture recently made the Now Mobile app available to its more than 500,000 people.

As a ServiceNow Global Elite Partner, Accenture is one of ServiceNow’s largest global go-to-market partners and winner of its Global Partner of the Year award in 2020. For more information on the Accenture ServiceNow Business Group, visit:

• https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/alliances/servicenow?src=SOMS
• https://www.servicenow.com/partners/accenture.html

The stakes have never been higher for enterprises – in order to survive, it’s crucial for them to enhance employee productivity, get full visibility into their operational footprint, and respond to incidents and issues in real-time.

ServiceNow and IBM today announced a strategic partnership to help enterprises around the globe automate IT. The partnership includes a first-of-its-kind joint IT solution – combining IBM’s Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s IT Service Management and IT Operations Management Visibility – that equips companies with the tools they need to drive greater efficiency, reduce risk, and lower costs in IT across their organizations.

The company also released new products to help businesses and employees manage work in the wake of COVID-19 and sustain business continuity, including:

• Launching Connected Operations, a powerful new solution that bridges IoT data with ServiceNow digital workflows so enterprises can monitor and manage critical infrastructure, break down data siloes, and pursue new business models (like goods-as-a-service). You can find more informationhere.
• Updates to the ServiceNow Safe Workplace app suite, including a new Health and Safety Testing app to streamline the process for requesting and receiving test results from employees. You can find more information on today’s release – including a new Safe Workplace Experience for Now Mobile and enhanced contact tracing capabilities with Zebra Technologies’ MotionWorks Proximity solution – here.

At Microsoft Ignite 2020, ServiceNow introduced new workflows embedded in Microsoft Teams to improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution. Powered by the Now Platform, the new capabilities also improve agent productivity by enabling them to more effectively collaborate and complete key tasks in Microsoft Teams. 

Teams is Microsoft’s fastest-growing business app ever. That was true in 2018, long before lockdowns started driving up numbers for remote work and learning. As of April 29, Microsoft Teams had 75 million daily active users, up 70% from just six weeks prior. That month, Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. 

The new capabilities announced today include: 

• Employee experiences in Microsoft Teams: Companies want to provide employees with support for whatever tools and devices they choose to use. By embedding ServiceNow natively within Teams, employees can submit requests, receive updates on in-progress requests, take action on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, and connect with live agents when virtual agents cannot assist – all without ever leaving Microsoft Teams. 
• Agent capabilities in Microsoft Teams: Agents spend most of their time in ServiceNow IT Service Management but want to more easily leverage the collaboration functionality in Teams to communicate with employees and collaborate with other agents. Now, agents can use Notify to launch the Teams client to engage with peers directly, push major incident updates to business stakeholders, and open direct chats with employees from an incident or request.  When used with the new Teams Meeting Extensibility feature, ServiceNow workflows enable agents to be more productive by resolving major incidents directly from within a Microsoft Teams meeting.  

The new capabilities are available for select customers as part of the Beta program today.  

Today’s updates come on the heels of the ServiceNow Now Platform Paris release, which features several high-demand Microsoft integrations to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Customers can use these integrations to: 

• Optimize hybrid cloud spending and usage with Microsoft Azure support for ServiceNow Cloud Insights,
• Streamline new hire onboarding with ServiceNow employee experiences and Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and
• Gain greater control and visibility into organizational assets with ServiceNow Software Asset Management and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

Additionally, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent Lite plugin for Microsoft Teams, also released in Paris, offers a limited version of Virtual Agent for IT Service Management standard customers. It launched with three prebuilt conversations for common IT support requests. These keyword-based conversations run in the web chat client and in a virtual agent messaging integration with Microsoft Teams.  

Today’s announcement furthers the companies’ partnership announcement from 2019 to accelerate digital transformation for joint customers. Customers are accessing the value of this partnership with more than 25 joint solutions available between Microsoft and ServiceNow today. The companies have committed to continued ServiceNow-Teams innovation to enable richer employee experiences from anywhere, at scale.

ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company that makes work, work better for people, today announced a new integration with Cisco DNA Spaces to enhance contact tracing with its Wi-Fi-enabled Proximity Reporting app. This integration will help businesses returning employees to the workplace by monitoring their workspaces closely for physical distancing. The company also added new capabilities to its ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite,making travel for business safer and more manageable.

The integration with Cisco DNA Spaces will allow joint customers of ServiceNow and Cisco to seamlessly import location-based data into the ServiceNow 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.

New Employee Travel Safety App

ServiceNow 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.

The ServiceNow 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 ServiceNow will continue plans of new releases twice a month to support customers’ evolving needs, given the dynamic nature of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many Canadians have settled into working from home during COVID-19, but employers have room for improvement to make working from home more productive for all employees. A new survey commissioned by ServiceNow reveals Canadian office workers want to–and anticipate they’ll need to–continue working from home for the foreseeable future, and they expect their employers to address key challenges to make working from home work better.

Results from ServiceNow’s Work From Home Productivity Study, which polled 1,000 Canadian office workers, reveal one in three employees are feeling less productive in their current work from home environment. They cite not having the proper set up, tools and technology to enable them to be more productive—even after working remotely for more than two months. 

Employees struggle with their physical and mental workspace

Before COVID-19, many Canadian office workers had dedicated spaces for working and living. With the onset of the “new normal,” blending the two into one has been difficult for many employees, and even more so for those with little prior experience working from home.  

• One-quarter of Canadian office workers who previously had never worked from home still do not feel properly set up to do so effectively (26%), compared to 5% who had worked from home before. 
• One in three office workers are less productive in their current work from home situation than they were in their usual workspace (32%). 
  • Employer preparedness for the work from home transition plays a role here, as decreased productivity rises to 44% among those who say their employer was unprepared.  

• 37% say technology is a barrier to productivity. Other barriers to productivity include: taking care of others (29%); mental state, including anxiety about the current state of the world and isolation from living alone (28%); and lack of a dedicated space for work at home (23%). 

Despite increased reliance on technology, issues persist when working from home 

Technology is critical to enabling work and connecting employees to their colleagues and organization. Despite that, many of the issues that employees working from home face today are directly related to tech: 

• Months into working from home, tech issues are the top barrier to productivity (37%) and a whopping 83% of Canadian office workers feel their employer is not meeting their needs very well when it comes to supplying them with state-of-the-art technology. 
• Improved technology would help increase productivity for half of Canadian office workers (51%), identifying an opportunity for improvement even among those who have not reported tech as a barrier to productivity.  
  • 26% would be more productive with increased access to tech software that enables communication, collaboration, workflow management, HR technology and remote onboarding/training. 

• Almost 9 in 10 Canadian office workers (85%) report relying on technology in both their work and personal life more now than they ever have before. 

Flexibility is key when working from home 

Canadians have new expectations about working from home today and in the future, and employers should be prepared to meet these needs. Even after physical distancing measures are lifted, 9 in 10 Canadian office workers say they want to work from home with an average preference of 14 business days a month – about 67% of the time. 

• Half of employees (50%) are utilizing the flexible work hours their employer offers, a significant 32% increase from pre-pandemic.  
• 68% of Canadian office workers say work-life balance is very important to them during this time. 
• Competing obligations are a challenge. 55% of working parents say they have a lot of personal responsibilities that get in the way of productivity when working from home. 
• Working from home does have personal benefits, including saving time commuting (69%) and saving money (62%), leading to more time for personal hobbies and projects (57%).  

Additional survey findings can be found here. 

ServiceNow continues its Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience with an announcement of ServiceNow Safe Workplace, a four-app suite and dashboard designed to help companies manage the essential steps for returning employees to the workplace and support everyone’s health and safety.

With nearly 80% of Fortune 500 companies using ServiceNow technology, ServiceNow Safe Workplace promises to reach a significant portion of the workforce. ServiceNow is making the apps immediately available today (press release here and hi-res imagery and b-roll here), including:

• Employee Readiness Surveys: Helps organizations gauge their workforce’s level of preparedness to return to the workplace by presenting and capturing employee responses to a series of questions that address employees’ personal readiness for and level of interest in returning to the workplace. 
• Employee Health Screening: Enables companies to screen employees before entering the workplace to ensure compliance with entry requirements such as temperature check and PPE allowing employers to determine if it’s safe for the employee to enter the workplace.
• Workplace Safety Management: Allows facilities and workplace services managers to quickly configure clean and hygienic, socially distanced workspaces so that employees can safely return to the workplace. 
• Workplace PPE Inventory Management: Helps organizations manage and monitor their PPE inventory needs to ensure the physical safety of their workforce. 

Top Knowledge 2020 Sessions this Week

Below is a quick snapshot of key sessions you may want to tune into.

This Week’s executive sessions:

• ServiceNow’s CIO Chris Beedi and SVP of Global Technical Support Dean Robison share how digital workflows on the Now Platform delivered over $100M in value by driving digital transformation across its business. 
  • View on-demand Tuesday, May 19

• Lara Camia, ServiceNow Chief Strategy Officer, wife, and mom of three, will share how working women can achieve success and inspire others. 
  • Tune in Wednesday, May 20, at 12:15am ET

Customer sessions taking place this week:

• How USAA moved from Excel to ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Response solution in just 90 days.

• How Lowe’s is using ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery solution to streamline its outdated manual HR processes.

Check out virtual highlights from Knowledge 2020, Week 2, here, including:

• How 7-Eleven overhauled its customer experience to offer immediate, multi-channel customer support and redefine “convenience” for the modern world with a new mobile app and delivery offering.

• How Swiss Re has undergone a decade-long journey with ServiceNow, most recently using ServiceNow to manage a $1 billion-plus operations budget across IT, finance, sourcing, legal, HR and more. 

ServiceNow has kicked off its six-week-long Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience with brief keynotes focused on the Now Platform and IT, Employee and Customer Workflows. Knowledge 2020 content will be available for free starting today, and new sessions, channels and content will be made available each week through June 12. 

The company also made several announcements spanning key partnerships, acquisitions and new innovations across its IT, Employee and Customer workflow offerings. These announcements build on ServiceNow’s Q1 earnings results from last week, which show the resiliency of ServiceNow’s business in the COVID-19 era, as enterprises accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to support the at-home-workforce and work outside traditional office environments.

The announcements include: 

• ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2020 Launches Today, Focusing on New Era of Employee and Customer Workflow Experiences. ServiceNow Knowledge 2020 focuses on the power of ServiceNow’s workflows to accelerate digital transformation, delivering a new era of employee and customer experiences required in a post-COVID world. As companies transition from traditional workplaces to everyone “work-from-home” to employees can choose to “work from anywhere,” the need for robust enterprise digital workflows is greater than ever.
• The expansion of ServiceNow Employee Workflow capabilities into enterprise workplace services and legal departments. The company announced a series of new Employee Workflow offerings to support the return to workplace efforts, including the news it has acquired select assets from App4Mation, a leading workplace application company, allowing businesses to plan and implement a phased return to the workplace, and released a new Legal Service Delivery product to automate the capture, routing and delivery of legal requests.  
• Global availability of ServiceNow’s customer experience integration with Adobe, which lets enterprises connect data from Adobe Experience Platform and ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management workflow product to deliver seamless and connected customer experiences.
• Launch of the Now Support Mobile Application, a dedicated, personalized app for customers to obtain post-sales support — anywhere, anytime. 

ServiceNow is committing to protect the jobs of its 11,000-plus global workforce through 2020 despite the economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also expects to keep hiring for new jobs worldwide this year. In addition, ServiceNow expects to continue to protect the jobs and salaries of several hundred support staff and contractors who are not working while ServiceNow’s offices remain closed.

ServiceNow has continued to hire and onboard new employees throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The company expects to create and fill more than 1,000 new jobs in the U.S., and more worldwide, by the end of 2020. Additionally, this summer the company will welcome approximately 360 college interns from around the world to work across its business. As a digital workflow company, ServiceNow has been able to quickly pivot to a digital internship program, maintaining the ability to provide college interns valuable career experience, even if employees continue to operate in a work-from-home environment. ServiceNow’s employees worldwide have been working from home since mid-March and expect to continue to do so until June 1.

Additionally, ServiceNow, along with Accenture, Lincoln Financial Group, and Verizon, this week announced People+Work Connect, a collaborative online employer-to employer initiative that will bring together companies with workforces laid off or furloughed due to COVID-19 with those in urgent need of workers. More than 800 ServiceNow jobs will be posted through this collaborative effort. At no charge for employers to join and participate, the initiative is intended to help shorten the complex, lengthy cycle of finding new employment. For more information, visit: https://peopleworkconnect.accenture.com/welcome.

Helping Customers Respond to COVID-19

ServiceNow is continuing to work aggressively to support its customers during this challenging time, including helping local, state and federal agencies better manage and coordinate emergency response efforts by utilizing ServiceNow’s digital workflow platform technology and no-charge COVID-19 emergency response applications.

Washington State’s Department of Health, a ServiceNow customer, initially created the Emergency Response Operations app on the Now Platform to manage their own response to COVID-19. Working with ServiceNow, the Department of Health has made the app available to all government entities at no charge. 

In addition to the State of Washington’s Emergency Response Operations app, ServiceNow recently developed and introduced three, no-charge community apps: Emergency Outreach App, Emergency Self Report App and Emergency Exposure Management app. These community apps are part of a broader Customer Care Plan launched by ServiceNow in March to support its customers as they focus on maintaining business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Examples of organizations leveraging ServiceNow to support their COVID-19 efforts include:

• The City of Los Angeles, which was able to implement drive-through COVID-19 testing using the Now Platform. Within 48 hours of deployment, 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.
• The Calgary Catholic School District, which used the Now Platform to enable staff with links to critical information for a seamless, rapid transition from teaching in the classroom to educating from home. This continued student learning was made possible because of the simplified employee experience made available to their teacher
• A US retail company, that was able to rapidly respond to the influx of human resources cases for emergency paid leave requests due to COVID-19 by using the Now Platform. Within 96 hours, a mobile application was built and deployed to 330,000 employees globally.
• A large City in the U.S., which deployed an application on the Now Platform to assist 1.8 million of its citizens in need of food and distribution of other necessities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More information about ServiceNow’s customer care plan, including accessing the community apps, can be found at servicenow.com/crisisresponse.

ServiceNow and its employees also have committed $1.5 million in cash donations to help COVID-19 response efforts. ServiceNow will make $1.225 million in corporate grants to the United Nations Foundation; the Centers for Disease Control Foundation; the NYC Mayor’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund; the Silicon Valley Community Foundation COVID-19 Coronavirus Response Funds; and Second Harvest of Silicon Valley. Employee matching gift campaigns will raise additional funds to benefit non-profits in the local communities where our employees live and work.