Abstract

With Covid-19 crisis pushing organizations to adopt remote working, there is a crucial need to manage remote teams and ensure that employees are equipped with right working model to enhance productivity. This means shifting from old ways of working, such as in-person meetings and waterfall model, to an effective remote working model that helps effectively manage new ways of working. ServiceNow can enable successful remote team management through remote agile teams and over-the-air solutions. This blog addresses the key challenges in remote working and how ServiceNow can help mitigate these challenges while boosting business continuity.

Five Ways ServiceNow Can Build a True Digital Workplace

As remote working becomes the new normal, companies have an urgent task to engage and collaborate with teams while ensuring productivity and security. However, organizations transitioning to remote working face immediate challenges, including: 

1. Shifting from in-person meetings to virtual meetings – In-person meetings and workstations are effective ways to collaborate and deliver value in a regular organizational environment. However, they are no longer relevant in managing globally diverse, remote teams. Establishing standard virtual meetings and a work from home environment is crucial in improving day-to-day operations and bolstering remote support.
2. Moving from a waterfall model to a single system of engagement – In a typical waterfall development model, global development teams work in close proximity to deliver unit-based outcomes. This means utilizing on-premise, hosted, multi-vendor tools. The abrupt shift to remote now requires a single system of engagement that encourages instant communication, helps in simplifying complex issues, and enables fast-paced decision-making.
3. Ensuring security and compliance –Protecting data, managing users, and ensuring compliance in the corporate network is easy given the increased use of premise hardware firewalls, content filters, and intrusion detection devices. However, as employees use various tools to collaborate and chat in an unguarded remote working environment, identifying and managing potential risks to company assets and critical information is a challenge.

For companies to lead and manage new ways of working, it is crucial to scale an effective remote working model underpinned by the right enterprise solution. Here is how ServiceNow can help enable successful remote team management by: 

1. Enabling workplace transformation – As businesses around the world begin to reopen, companies will need to adapt to a return to workplace runbook underpinned by effective social distancing measures. ServiceNow’s Workplace Service Delivery solution, to be released in Q3 2020, will allow employees to reserve desks, parking spots, and offices while ensuring physical distancing. This will empower management leaders to communicate with employees from a distance and bolster overall workplace management, hygiene maintenance, and sanitization activities.
2. Building effective remote agile teams – Globally distributed development teams are increasingly adapting to the challenges of remote working by organizing sprint ceremonies and virtual meetings. This is crucial for faster decision making, innovative approaches, and enhanced user experience. However, the increased pressure to deliver faster results in these uncertain, stressful times requires agile developers to work closely and respond effectively to deal with the pressure. Utilizing a single tool of engagement such as ServiceNow Agile Development can help concentrate efforts to materialize business outcomes. Businesses can also integrate agile development, automation, DevOps, and integrations for zero touch solutions across the board of industry tools.
3. Delivering over the air solutions – With technologically enabled new ways of working, mobile footprints across organizations have increased multi-fold. This makes it challenging to deliver orchestrated solutions to users’ devices. ServiceNow Orchestration can orchestrate solutions and software delivery by connecting with industry-wide popular software solutions and deliver value to end users via nonstop cloud connectivity.
4. Boosting business continuity compliance – The unprecedented COVID-19 events have triggered the necessity for a thorough review of business continuity compliance by IT teams across organizations. In fact, control teams have been trying to ensure that services are up and running 24/7 for businesses to deliver on their core value. While organizations have implemented change freezes for the better part of lockdown, there are teams who are still delivering core functions to systems and applications. This has increased the risk of cyber- threats making it imperative to control infrastructure change and identify potential risks. This calls for an effective two-faced solution. The primary approach is to have a single system of engagement that integrates multiple security tools, and reduces the time to react in case of a breach. The secondary approach involves using effective IT operations discovery to keep a regular tab on infrastructure change and map it to a control record to establish authorization. A combination of ServiceNow Security Operations and IT Operations Management can help organizations address and mitigate this issue.
5. Leveraging virtual agents for engagement - Finally, organizations should embrace virtual agents for more organizational functions. This not only puts end-users in control but also ensures round the clock coverage and operations at reduced footprints while ensuring uptime and availability. ServiceNow puts forth the virtual agent as an all-round chat engine that helps automate endless actions. Omnichannel, self-service options that can be invoked from emails, SMS, chats, mobile applications, web browsers, and voice assistants are the need of the hour to ensure your customers and end users always have power to get what they want. ServiceNow virtual agent is platform agnostic and can help businesses align end user engagement with market tools such as MS Teams, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. It can reduce up to 60% of recurring issues through effective resolution help for end users.

An enterprise-wide transformation solution is the first step to enable a true digital workplace and empower organizations to emerge stronger, more resilient, and flexible. ServiceNow is a platform that can not only enable the previously mentioned solutions but also enable a large number of organizational transformation solutions.