I recently had a chance to sit down with Matt Schvimmer of ServiceNow to talk about the news of their HR Service Automation application.  The conversation was about how their Service Automation platform can deliver an HR application that makes it easier for organizations to automate HR case management.  This new application from ServiceNow manages the service relationships between HR and employees through a service catalog.

SiliconANGLE.tv New Video Playlist:  Data Enhanced Social Video Player

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGy3ZLA99_U

My Angle

ServiceNow is growing like a weed with its Service Automation for Information Technology (ITSM).  The company has solved a big problem in helping IT manage their business and environments, relieving pain for IT and enabling top line revenue through more efficient operations.

This announcement brings those ServiceNow platform features of automation to the HR sector.  Sitting on top of other apps like Workday etc. makes for a great market expansion for ServiceNow, and for relief for HR departments who are still operating on old web 1.0 service catalogs.

Here is ServiceNow’s Official Statement:

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the enterprise IT cloud company, today announced ServiceNow HR Service Automation, a new application that makes it easier for organizations to automate HR case management. This new application manages the service relationships between HR and employees through an online storefront, similar to the ones they use at home for purchasing personal goods and services. HR Service Automation eliminates the volumes of phone calls and email exchanges it takes for organizations to execute HR service delivery and gives control, insight and productivity back to HR management.

In the typical enterprise, most interactions between employees and the HR department are still based on manual, unstructured, communications – email, telephone calls or personal visits. This masks what are actually simple and repeatable request/fulfill relationships and makes it virtually impossible for HR management to understand the work being done by its staff to support the company and for employees to know the current status of their requests. With information existing only in email or standalone notes, there is no centralized ability to track work, set priorities, build reports or capture knowledge. Often, the only recourse for HR management is to hire more staff to stay ahead of the ever-increasing demand. Without structure and automation, the HR service delivery model becomes increasingly inefficient and error-prone.

“Email was the primary means of requests to HR, and the department was drowning in an increasing number of them,” said Nicole Tate, manager, Application Delivery and Support, MetroPCS. “With ServiceNow, we were able to automate the request/fulfill model for HR and streamline interactions for greatly enhanced productivity and responsiveness. Now, HR can fully understand its workload and manage it far more effectively.”

“Service management processes and workflows are often inefficient or non-existent in most business units such as HR, finance, facilities, legal, etc.,” said Robert Young, research manager, Enterprise System Management, IDC. “In fact, many business units are relying on a cascade of disparate spreadsheets, email trails, and documents to manage customer interactions and the delivery of services. Unstructured processes and ineffective communication tools often lead to operational inefficiencies and human errors which directly impact business productivity.”

The ServiceNow Service Automation Platform allows organizations to build custom applications and leverage one user interface, code base and data model to create a single system of record. This allows both IT and non-IT business units like HR to gain significant service delivery improvements through the use of self-service, social media, automated work flows, and service frameworks. ServiceNow advanced automation and process workflow capabilities provide a single platform to evolve the IT service model to service domains inside and outside the enterprise for managing service relationships.

Service Automation for HR

ServiceNow HR Service Automation complements human capital management software, such as Workday, by providing a self-service, online storefront for employees to make requests to HR. In addition to general HR requests, out-of-the-box categories include questions about benefits, vacations and leave, payroll, employee relations and HR systems. This consumerized catalog experience combines with process automation to fulfill common requests and eliminates unstructured communications from the HR service delivery process. HR requests are auto-assigned, scheduled, tracked and reported for a vastly higher level of productivity and efficiency. Organizations can customize their service catalog items and define their own processes for workflow and automation.

With predefined dashboards and reports, ServiceNow HR Service Automation enables HR executives to understand the department’s workload and make better decisions about resources and staffing to better align with business goals. Reports include overall workload volume, types of requests and individual workloads. Companies can also create custom reports within the application and use ServiceNow Performance Analytics for key performance indicator-driven dashboards and scorecards, historical trending and predictive modeling.

“Like many service departments in the enterprise, HR suffers from an antiquated style of work in email that massively impairs productivity,” said Shane Jackson, vice president marketing, ServiceNow. “ServiceNow customers can manage request/fulfill relationships across all business functions in a simple and automated system. With ServiceNow, enterprises can modernize the management of service relationships and help the organization enter a new age of agility and efficiency.”