The more I travel and talk to companies in different parts of the world, the more impressed I am with how U.S. companies have transformed costly and time-consuming manual or paper-based processes into efficient digital processes. And as American companies lead the world in digital adoption and transformation, America also leads the world in the SaaS platforms that make it possible. These highly sophisticated platforms – thousands of processes manifested in digital form – now extend across every business function including sales (Salesforce), HR (Workday), finance (NetSuite), financial planning & analysis (OneStream), marketing (Hubspot), customer service (Zendesk), procurement (Coupa, JAGGAER), inventory management (Tecsys), software development (Atlassian), low-code app development (Pega), cloud computing (AWS), and data warehouse (Snowflake).
Much of the productivity gain the U.S. has seen in the past generation – ahead of all other developed countries – can be traced to a unique fervor for adopting these platforms to create digital workflows, thereby increasing the efficiency of internal and external business processes and lowering the cost to deliver a given product or service. The even better news for American competitiveness is that our industry leaders aren’t stopping there. They’re already on to the next frontier: automation. Reducing or eliminating the need for human involvement in these digital workflows – now with the help of AI – will further increase efficiency and lower costs. And the cherry on top is that the leading platform for doing this is also an U.S. SaaS platform: ServiceNow.
ServiceNow got its start 20 years ago as a cloud-based IT help desk platform. From the outset, the goal was to automate and streamline complex IT operations. But what ServiceNow found was that automating IT workflows was pretty similar to automating workflows in HR, customer service, field service, security, and even software development. The ServiceNow platform now has thousands of out-of-the-box workflows to handle customer and employee issues. And beginning five years ago, ServiceNow launched virtual agents: AI-powered chatbots to predict outcomes and automate repetitive tasks. Now leveraging OpenAI, ServiceNow’s virtual agents take care of many repetitive tasks.
ServiceNow’s site showcases a customer service representative with a busy caseload, including a customer unable to access WiFi. Rather than merely surfacing the case or making suggestions for resolution, ServiceNow only directs the representative’s attention to the case once it has ruled out a local network outage, verified network stability, analyzed similar cases and identified the modem as the likely culprit, and contacted the customer and received necessary specifications for a potential modem replacement. All the representative needs to do is review and approve a new modem. This staggering increase in efficiency helps explain why 85% of Fortune 500 companies are ServiceNow clients.
As I’ve discussed with regard to other leading platforms like Salesforce and Workday, the Achilles heel of the SaaS revolution is talent. Neither higher education institutions nor high schools offer training on these platforms, which are not only complex, but require some industry and job function background in order to make sense. In ServiceNow, “the problem is real and its impact is felt across the ecosystem,” said Brian Symonds, Chief Digital Officer and Head of Digital Transformation at Optimum Healthcare IT, an Elite ServiceNow partner servicing hospitals and healthcare systems, “all of us – ServiceNow services partners, our clients, and ServiceNow team members – benefit from addressing the growing need for skilled talent.” (Note: Optimum Healthcare IT is an Achieve Partners portfolio company.)
So the pioneering SaaS companies themselves have attempted to fill the gap: Salesforce with its Trailhead training portal, Workday with its Basics courses on Coursera, and ServiceNow with ServiceNow University. The goal is to make training and certification as accessible and easy as possible for the millions of candidates these companies need in order to continue to grow their ecosystems. Because the last thing they want to hear when they’re competing for a big license deal is that the client has grossed up their proposal by 20 or 30% to account for the additional cost of attracting scarce labor in order to make the platform work. Although this appears to be exactly what is happening in ServiceNow. According to Symonds, “the scarcity of experienced ServiceNow resources is driving up labor costs in ways that present challenges for us all in the medium to long term.”
Two years ago, ServiceNow announced the RiseUp campaign to skill an additional 1 million people on the platform by 2024. While 1 million is a laudable goal, ServiceNow hasn’t provided an update on how it’s going. It’s certainly possible ServiceNow won’t make it. When it comes to training, “build it and they will come” can break down for two reasons. First, asynchronous online training naturally focuses more on “vocabulary” than project-based learning, let alone hands-on development activities or implementations. And second, because training isn’t the desired outcome. It’s a job. And even becoming certified is no guarantee of a job.
A big reason for this is the experience gap. Training and certification are no replacement for experience, and few if any companies betting on ServiceNow for digital transformation and automation are excited about the idea of hiring a newly-minted ServiceNow admin – let alone project manager or developer – with no prior relevant work experience. According to Symonds, “entry-level talent, albeit trained and certified, lacks practical application and typically requires a significant amount of oversight for six months in order to become productive team members.”
Further complicating life for would-be ServiceNow customers, because the platform can be so transformational, the experience required to become productive is far from uniform. First, there’s familiarity with business processes in a particular industry and/or for a particular job function to be able to understand and map workflows. Next, there’s project management in order to lead implementation engagements. Then there’s development experience – necessary to configure and develop on the platform to ensure that the workflows are put into place. Symonds says that “often the best new ServiceNow consultants have been in developer or project management roles before coming to the ServiceNow platform.”
Closing the ServiceNow talent gap will require solutions for both the skills gap and experience gap. Optimum’s CareerPath is a good example: a hire-train-deploy program where apprentices are hired based on aptitude and interest, not on ServiceNow skills or development experience. Because they get these skills and experiences over the course of their apprenticeship program. “We’ve had great success training talent on ServiceNow through our CareerPath program,” noted Symonds. “We’ve produced and deployed stellar junior ServiceNow talent that are now helping hospitals become more efficient.”
Let’s hope ServiceNow recognizes the need for additional comprehensive solutions to the shortage of trained, certified, and experienced talent. ServiceNow needs 100 CareerPaths – not just one. That’s the only way to put the power of the platform within the reach of all the companies who need it.