What was the best thing about November?
To me, it was the World Forum events we run across Europe at ServiceNow.
We welcomed over 5,000 customers and partners in four locations: London, Frankfurt, Paris and Rotterdam.
The exchange was incredible! There was so much learning on stage and off stage while networking.
Reflecting on the discussions, the main conversations were around 5 key themes which we covered in the main keynotes of each event. I'd like to share these with you today.
5 Common Themes of Concern for Businesses Today
Technology landscape
The technology landscape has never seen such a pace of change before. The need for speed and agility within enterprises has never been so strong. Businesses are pressured to show ROI and innovate faster and better. Everywhere I hear talks about driving value quickly and doing more with less but faster. This is no easy feat for companies and it's driving the accelerated pace of technological solutions coming to the market.
Employee productivity
Companies everywhere are facing an incredible lack of talent and struggle to upskill employees to drive productivity. They want to hire people but can't find them as there's a huge labour market shortage. This leaves businesses with a huge need to reskill and invest in their current employee base to do more with the people that they already have now.
In addition, organisations are struggling to get people into the office which ultimately leads to a lack of productivity. Why? Because in the old days before COVID-19, when an employee got stuck with a task, they just popped over to a colleague's desk and resolved it. Now, you don't have a colleague next to you because you are on your laptop alone at home and even if you can call someone on Zoom, the immediacy and efficacy of learning and solving problems is not the same.
Customer experience
Consumers have never been this demanding. They want an answer now and they don't have the time or patience to wait. Unless you create a way to be available 24/7 with the right answers, you will simply lose customers. This is why automation and AI are so important nowadays and why technology needs to be the enabler to drive the ultimate customer experience, freeing people from doing mandane tasks to really focusing on going deep to drive value realisation for customers.
Enterprise automation
The biggest challenge I have seen throughout my career for businesses has been the siloed organisation. When data and tools don't talk to each other, no one can be productive. Time is wasted and money is lost. Having a foundational platform that can ensure your systems talk to each end-to-end is crucial to be able to drive efficiencies and productivity from automating tasks and processes.
