Organizations are missing out on major productivity gains because they use email to drive transactional business processes, according to Allan Leinwand, Chief Technology Officer of ServiceNow, a cloud computing computing.
“Email is sucking the life out of the company’s most valuable asset – its people. Employees reflexively use email, aided by relevant file attachments, for almost everything,” said Leinwand in an interview with Networks Asia. “The unstructured nature of this reflex is incredibly unproductive for routine and repetitive processes. Add instant messaging and micro blogging and our means of communication has become even more fragmented and unstructured.”
Leinwand notes that employees today want to be empowered to make their work better. “That is why we need to create more self-service opportunities and modernize the employee experience with service portals. I think the mantra of “work smarter, not harder” embodies what ServiceNow has been trying to help enterprises with.”
The following is the excerpt of the email interview with Networks Asia:
Has technology like cloud computing really improved productivity and can you provide examples? The Singapore government has been pushing productivity for a long time but most studies are showing that productivity has been falling. Why is this and what can be done? We often hear the mantra to "Work smarter, not harder,” how does this relate to productivity? How do efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness factor into productivity?
I believe that cloud computing has enabled us to get more things done in a shorter time. The simple concept of using a network of servers hosted on the Internet instead of local computers has set off a true revolution in both the consumer and business worlds. The cloud has irrevocably changed the way we buy things, find a place to live, get from one point to another and even connect with our friends and colleagues.
When cloud computing was in its infancy at the turn of the 21st century, it provided a remedy for some typical IT headaches: less infrastructure to own and maintain and no more delayed IT schedules, while simultaneously meeting departmental needs. Fast forward to today and the cloud – be it public, private or a hybrid of the two – has become the primary force that powers the evolution of business. It separates enterprises that are able to innovate, adapt and grow from those that cannot and are thus doomed to fail.
To give you an example of real productivity gains through cloud, at ServiceNow, we found that it took roughly 30,000 emails to process 2000 purchase orders. That’s about 15 emails per single request. We set up a self-service process and structured workflow to manage purchasing. As a result, we have reduced cycle time for standard purchase orders from five days to two days – a 60% reduction!
I think the mantra of “work smarter, not harder” embodies what ServiceNow has been trying to help enterprises with. People want to become experts; they want to be empowered to make their work better. That is why we need to create more self-service opportunities and modernize the employee experience with service portals. Employees want this kind of self-reliance, shaped by tech use in their personal lives. And the fact of the matter is that CIOs today have a mandate to extend that consumerized ease-of-use into the workplace.
Why does productivity matter? Email is usually the most used when it comes to service management and workflow monitoring. But does purchasing a cloud platform really justify the cost? IT impacts the workplace across areas like communications, work applications, productivity tools, etc., but can also include time wasting things like the internet. So does IT help or hinder productivity?
The bottom line is that organizations are missing out on major productivity gains because they use email to drive transactional business processes. Email is sucking the life out of the company’s most valuable asset – its people. Employees reflexively use email, aided by relevant file attachments, for almost everything. The unstructured nature of this reflex is incredibly unproductive for routine and repetitive processes. Add instant messaging and micro blogging and our means of communication has become even more fragmented and unstructured.
These systems can cater to one-on-one communication, idea sharing and broadcasting of information. But when it comes to orchestrating service processes that require systematic contribution from people across multiple disciplines, they fall short. These systems simply don’t apply the necessary structure and rigor needed to drive business processes and deliver a service experience that people expect and need to be more productive in today’s work environment.
A survey of 2,000 managers we conducted last year showed that they wasted two days every week on undue administrative work, not core to their job function. That’s 40% of their time every week, wasted through inefficiency.
For a firm with 5,000 employees, a quick calculation shows that two days per week equates to 2,000 employees or 4 million unproductive work hours a year! With those numbers, it’s easy to make the justification for deploying more efficient solutions that can help stem that massive drain on corporate productivity.
ServiceNow was designed to address these issues, make work more structured, and bring the consumer experience into the enterprise.
Security and privacy concerns usually hinder cloud adoption in Asia. How is ServiceNow tackling that issue? How are you dealing with data residency issues? Where are your data centers and do you have any in Singapore or Asia?
When I speak with technology leaders, I like to tell them that our cloud is safer for data than your own datacenter. How? The first point is that we know our service. We developed it from the ground up and operate only one service. We operate tens of thousands of copies of ServiceNow instances and monitor the service in intimate detail. Given that we run a single service, finding unusual signals in our monitoring that warns us about security issues is relatively straightforward
Secondly, we are fanatics about building a homogenous environment. Every part of our infrastructure is built with the same architecture – regardless of geography or scale. That is, the same servers, operating system, virtual machines, databases, and so forth. Homogeneity means that we can track and find issues quickly, know when we see activity that requires investigation and then deploy remediation quickly to a limited set of configurations.
Thirdly, we know that many of the recent public security events occurred because a piece of infrastructure was operational and unpatched. We patch regularly and track our progress against this patching process daily. Nothing goes unpatched for security issues in our environment for any extended period of time.
Data residency or sovereignty is a complex issue, but the fact that ServiceNow has data centers on five continents is key. Many enterprises and government organizations do not allow their data to leave their regions, so simply having data centers in all regions of the world can help overcome that security objection by storing data locally in the region.
An additional security feature that eliminates many data sovereignty concerns is the ability to send data that is encrypted in the region to the cloud and know that the cloud cannot decrypt that data. Edge Encryption is a ServiceNow platform feature that uses a software proxy that resides on the customer premise, usually behind a firewall, to encrypt sensitive data with a customer-generated encryption key. This customer-generated encryption key is never sent to the ServiceNow cloud and sensitive data unreadable to anyone but the customer. Thus, sensitive data never leaves the region and data sovereignty is maintained.
ServiceNow’s data centers are arranged in pairs and we have 8 data center pairs, for a total of 16 data centers, across the globe. We have two data centers in Southeast Asia – Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as two in Australia.
What are usually the biggest hurdles that enterprises face when faced with the question of cloud adoption? What does scalability and elasticity mean to ServiceNow? Which sectors/verticals are you seeing the most interest for ServiceNow solutions?
As I mentioned, we have seen a lot of concerns around security. The other hurdle CIOs and IT leaders face is the question of cost. Singapore and Asia in general are very cost-sensitive when it comes to any technology deployment, even more so than other international markets. But once the decision makers see how much ServiceNow can help improve the bottom line, the investment cost is easily justified.
Scalability and elasticity is at the core of the ServiceNow Enterprise Cloud. Our cloud is built on an advanced architecture called multi-instance, rather than the older multi-tenant architecture that nearly all clouds today are built on. A multi-instance architecture gives every customer its own unique database, which means that it is impossible for your data to be commingled with any other customer. The multi-instance architecture is not built on large centralized database software and infrastructure. Instead, we deploy instances on a per-customer basis, allowing the multi-instance cloud to scale horizontally and infinitely.
This means that the ServiceNow multi-instance cloud scales with the needs of each customer, without commingling resources or depending on centralized compute or storage that can fail. We have individual customer instances that serve hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe on a daily basis, executing tens of thousands of tasks and performing millions of database transactions.
You were previously CTO of Infrastructure at Zynga. How has your experience there shaped your views on enterprise cloud architectures?
Throughout my career I have spent time building complex networks, systems and software platforms that operate at a very large scale. My experiences in the world of gaming gave me insights into how to scale a cloud architecture extremely fast to handle explosive consumer growth that can literally happen over minutes and hours. Translating that experience into the world of enterprise cloud has meant that we are always thinking about how to architect for the next order of magnitude. Our teams spend time talking about how our enterprise cloud would operate if we scaled 10x or 100x from where we are today. It is only by having those rapid growth moments in your career do you think about these scaling issues and prepare for them. In the end, this means that ServiceNow meets the needs of our customers today and far into the future.
We talk of the modern workforce and working from anywhere, how can productivity be measured and what are the tools we need to enable for them and the business to succeed? How good are cloud based productivity tools like Office 365, Salesforce, etc. in enabling a mobile workforce? Is tying people to a desk and office better?
I don’t think we can go back to being a tied-down workforce. But at the same time, we know there are certain job functions that will require an employee to be seated at a desk most of the time. The key is that organizations need to constantly listen to their employees to find out how they can be their most productive.
One of the ways that enterprises can achieve productivity quick wins is to adopt a service orientation to the way people work. You can drive higher levels of productivity by engaging employees in service workflow that crosses departmental boundaries. Requestors get what they need faster and providers automate time-wasting repetitive tasks. The service experience emerges from a departmental focus, to a broader set of common goals toward which everyone contributes. Service performance is transparent to both requestors and providers. The purpose of work is crystal clear. As “creatures of habit,” we know where and how to get what we need. Everyone inside and outside the firewall is more productive.
By helping enterprises in Singapore and around the world consumerize support services and automate administrative tasks, ServiceNow is helping to drive massive efficiency increases. We are freeing up millions of hours of highly skilled management time – resources that companies can use to focus on business growth and bottom-line profitability. We believe that enterprises that invest in consumerization and automation can gain a profound competitive advantage, delivering benefits that go far beyond simple cost savings.