in march 2020 our world changed everyone suddenly became distributed we went from all working in these offices spread around the world but centralized in an office to all of a sudden just working wherever we could with whatever equipment we had and all the things that we used to do in the past walking into someone's office to get something done meeting someone by a coffee machine and having a conversation with them or just using that tribal knowledge that exists in your company well we got to kiss all that goodbye that all went because now you don't have a tribe anymore now everyone's working from wherever they can and the interesting thing about this is it's going to fundamentally change the way people work because there's no logical reason to ever go back to the way we work before there's always going to be benefits from what has become the new normal my name is dave wright and i'm the chief innovation officer at servicenow and i want to spend the next 20 minutes or so just talking about what i believe will happen in the world of enterprise software and how the way we work in the enterprise may well become more connected than it ever was before the interesting thing about covert was we got to try digital transformation at a much more accelerated rate than we ever would have before in the past someone would have gone to the network team and said hey sue can we have the whole company log on via vpn well we have the capacity to support that and sue who our network sort of said well let's run some tests and then in four or five months time we'll have a saturday where everyone logs on we'll just use 10 of the company and then we'll extrapolate figures and we'll see if we can support this well that never happened what happened now is people said why don't we just try it on monday so we just flipped that switch and went from working in an office to working in a remote environment and we got to find out how work flows we got to understand everyone that's critical in a company to be able to get something done and and this whole nature now of being distributed i think provides a greater degree of resiliency and scale even if you if you think about the way things developed all the way from the internet onwards this distribution of resources and this way of working across a much wider area has always resulted in more resilient scalable systems so when i talk about linking the enterprise together what do i actually mean by that the the challenge that people have is they run a company based on departments everyone's set up to run in a specific department in a company and there's nothing wrong with that that's that's the way we've ran business for years i'm not going to say we should dissolve departments and work on mass although there is there is an interest in arguments about whether we'll start to see more emergence of enterprise agile as a way of working but the problem you have is all these different departments are sitting out there and they all need to work together to get things done but what they don't have is a common way to communicate all these departments have kind of loosely coupled ways of speaking to each other it could be in some cases in the worst case scenario it could be it could just be form based paperwork where people are actually filling in forms and passing stuff around but most people are using email and spreadsheets and phone calls and as we've seen an evolution of complexity and structuring work we've started to see certain systems be introduced i remember i remember joining the company when it was a lot smaller and we used to do things like salary reviews and what happened is you'd get a spreadsheet sent around with everyone's salary and you'd have to isolate the bits that were for your managers send it to those so they could do salary adjustments hope that you haven't put the wrong spreadsheet or the wrong sheet in to that data file where you sent it to them and invariably every year there was always the email saying oh my god i've sent out everyone's salary to everyone in the team so gradually you get processes in place that stuff things like that happening but but these processes never really spread generally to how we communicate you'll still go to companies now where they'll have millions of dollars worth of equipment for automated production lines and i'll still see people walking around with clipboards taking readings off machines and writing them down knowing that they're going to be entered in another system probably knowing that someone's going to transpose that to another system went to one financial service clients and they said when you describe all these processes they had over 7 000 that they were looking to digitize and many of these processes overlap but did the same things so how can we get a way where people can start to communicate more effectively when they need work done by another department because the second element that you have to deal with is the fact that each of these departments has its own technology stack now the reason they have to do that was everyone has their own system a record their own single system of truth that's what matters to their particular department but the interesting thing is even when people built these systems even these systems aren't connected you might look at the world of crm and your crm platform might be different to your analytics platform which might be different to your ai platform just within that system of record it might be something like the world of i.t or customer service is a little bit more connected perhaps using a solution there were where everything's sitting on one platform but the challenge is how do you then link all these systems together not from a not from a perspective of how do you build a big integration engine but how do you actually allow work to flow across these systems because you don't just have this complexity to deal with you also have all the other things that sit around it what's uh what's our master data strategy what's our mobile strategy what's our ai strategy all those have got to be concluded into this mix and they've got to be dealt with as well so now you start to think about the complexity not just of linking the systems together technically but understanding how work flows across systems because we've arranged things in departments but typically work isn't all processed in one department typically work flows across multiple departments so you imagine a process like a new employee onboarding especially a new employee on boarding now where it might be that they're coming into a company but they're never actually going to the office what happens is it might be a request that's initiated in human resources but it triggers work orders that need to happen from a finance perspective or it might trigger i.t to have to do something it might be that someone comes in from a customer services perspective and although they start in customer service it actually has impact to the sales team and that might cause further knock-on impact with the sales team say hey we need something done in the world of marketing to be able to address this so as you start to do more of these workflows across departments as you start to map out these services the enterprise becomes more and more connected and the more and more of these services you may house the closer this gets to becoming a connected enterprise now eventually you get to the point where everything's connected where you've digitized all your mission critical services and what's happened now is you've built a almost like a service mesh or a service fabric that's it's linking everything together now for me the system of engagements isn't that important how you engage and initiate these these workflows doesn't really matter you should be able to give people a flexibility to do that however they want to do it and you have the systems of record that sit underneath it that sit within all these departments the real thing that's interesting to me is the system of action that links that level of engagement to that system of record now when you've got to the point of saying you've dealt with all the the shared services or the middle office side of it you also get a load of additional benefits that come with that things that people haven't necessarily thought about before you get the capability to be able to analyze those processes to be able to understand how long it takes to get things done and whereabouts it gets delayed or or whereabouts you could potentially improve things also the people who are initiating the requests they get visibility into what's happening so i spent a lot of time trying to understand how people can replicate the consumer world in the enterprise world and i've come to the conclusion there's two things that really drive the experience being better than it was before one of those is choice and one of those is real-time updates so whether i'm booking a table on opentable or whether i'm booking a place to stay when i used to book places to stay on airbnb or whether i'm ordering something off amazon or whether i'm ordering an uber the thing that's really beneficial to me is i get to go on and i get to choose what i want i get to choose based on my current criteria in my current situation then i get real-time updates as either when that's being delivered or in the case of uber i get that map where i can actually see my car coming towards me and that cuts down so much useless conversation where i'd be phoning up people to check when something was gonna happen when it was gonna arrive when i was gonna get what i wanted imagine if i could take that and apply that to every service you request in a company so whenever i initiate a process or whenever i need something i can see exactly where it's going to go through and i know where about it is in that process then i start to get this feeling of being much more connected of of being able to actually get visibility into what's happening and this gives me the the chance to reduce the workload on people and allow people to do things that are much more useful to the company than just being able to process administrative tasks and people sometimes confuse in my mind when they speak to me they confuse consumerization with the user interface now for me i don't use amazon or i don't use uber because it's got an amazing user interface i use it because it's got an automated workflow that runs through the back end that allows me to know that what i've asked for is going to happen allows me to see when it is going to happen so my theory is that we're going to see more and more replication of this in the world of enterprise software so so now we've got to the point where we've we've perhaps connected the middle office we we've got all the different layers of the company understanding how they request work of each other and understanding how they can surface to the top what's happening with that particular request the next thing that becomes interesting is this workload's going to increase dramatically because now we're starting to see the digitization of operations and the digitization of operations presents a number of problems that have been solved by different areas of the company like i.t but now start to become much more relevant when you look at how you start to improve your process of operations so let's say we're getting information from a digitally connected temperature sensor the first thing you need to know is well well whereabouts is that temperature sensor so is it in a an office or is it in a shop or or is it in a hospital now let's say for example it is in a hospital so i've got a temperature sensor that's telling me i don't know it's 72 degrees it means absolutely nothing to me it means nothing to me without context so 72 degrees might be fine if it's in an office but what happens if it's in a refrigeration unit so now i know i've got a problem with refrigeration i need to get something that's that's going to get out there and get fixed because 72 degrees just isn't an acceptable temperature but assume this is happening at scale so you're getting this information from multiple places then you need to prioritize based on what the actual use case is if that refrigerator is being used to keep water cool at a nurse's station it's not going to have the same priority as if it's keeping a blood supply cool or if it's keeping vaccines cool so without that context it's very difficult for me to be able to start to process things in the world of connected operations now obviously this is going to put a huge workload from a data perspective on us we're going to start to see more and more data coming into systems it needs to be processed but luckily we're now at a point in the evolution of technology where the application of artificial intelligence allows us to do so much more than we could before and people used to used to talk five years ago about the fact that well is ai really going to live up to that expectation do we really need artificial intelligence now we've got to the point where ai is inevitable i mean there's just so much data out there you need a way to be able to process it but purely is too much data to deal with and what i think will happen is you'll start to see more and more people accepting that ai isn't the threat people thought it was that it's much more about amplifying human effectiveness it's much more about being able to accelerate innovation and what people are focusing on at the moment from an ai perspective is predictability how can i look at a core set of data and start to spot patterns and potentially identify things before they happen to give me advanced one as we get more and more data into systems and we start to see improvement in some of the algorithms that actually make decisions then we'll start to move to towards an area where it's much more prescriptive where it's not just identifying the potential for an issue to happen it's also starting to say this is the solution that will help you avoid this now when we've got that in place when we fully understand exactly what's going on in an organization and how we can fix some of those problems in an organization people start to understand that the the way that we provide service today doesn't necessarily sit within your company what happens is you have this concept of a lot of your services and it could be supply chain or it could be outsourced services are actually provided by other companies so how do i connect my enterprise to another enterprise and start to get this concept of connected service this is all uh an evolutionary path that i think will will start moving down over the next three or four years to start to tie all these things together to get much more visibility and in order for this to happen in order for this to all come together there's some common technology trends that people are talking about all the time and i think it's the way that these technology trends become linked together that will become the backbone for how we actually start to get to this level of functionality i have a lot of conversations with people around devops everyone trying to move from mode 1 to mode 2 or a combination a hybrid between the two of them everyone's asking for the cio the cto to be able to provide speed of innovation to be agile but to be able to do that with quality and this is where you start to see a move now towards this concept of agile with a platform because people want to be able to have control people want to be able to have governance and compliance over what's created because you see this shift now towards low code and no code development and gartner is saying that by 2025 a majority of all new enterprise applications will be built on these low code no code platforms and the reason people like loco no code is because you take the need for heavy technical inputs out of the development process so now we can use analysts and admins and business owners to go in there and be able to build applications and what that does is it removes the bottlenecks everyone isn't waiting for it to constantly do things because they can do a percentage of them themselves now this will develop too from a a point of view of how you develop applications i i've already seen some trials being done now where people are looking at how they can introduce artificial intelligence and voice based application creation to actually be able to ask for an application which sounds like crazy sounds completely out there how could i just ask a system to build an application but that's kind of what's happened with things like nlq in the world of natural language query people used to have to understand the sql statements to know what table to go to and what fields to select now we've just been able to reduce that to a natural language process where i can just ask a system for information and get it back so it's not that much of a stretch to imagine being able to go in and verbally create a very simple application and that that voice interface that that new way of working very much lands in the the world of consumerization where people are saying well how can we start to apply mobile technology how can we use chat bots how can we use ai to actually be able to give a consumer-like experience in the enterprise because that's what's going to simplify things that's what's going to make things easier for people to use and that's what's going to make people more productive everything from understanding how you're going to work in this this new normality we've got to now all the way through so how can we start to use things like artificial intelligence to make user interfaces much more dynamic and and the the dynamism of a user interface and what you actually do once you've got the data from it is what's driving a lot of the work behind advanced automation so automation for me is going down multiple routes at the moment we've got people looking at stuff like basic robotic process automation we've got people looking at much more advanced orchestration we've got people using technologies to do process mining to be able to see what they can optimize and automate and all these technologies are now starting to come together the use cases that i see get harder and harder the further you go down the line people are very good at automating the simple use cases but then spend a lot of time either looking for things to automate or finding things that are very complex to automate so the key is to start looking at how you use this technology in the world of business operations what are you going to be able to automate that gives you solid value to your business and this transition is already happening now if you look at a recent survey that we were studying we found out that in the last year uh almost a third of the people we interviewed had deployed some kind of advanced technology be that a robot worker ai or analytics the interesting thing was although they were being introduced into the workplace out of the employees we surveyed 75 percent of them said that they actually thought it was making their jobs easier so i think some of that fear elements is going around the world of artificial intelligence now the the concept we talked about before with connecting operations and what this means in the world of iot that will change dramatically over the next few years as we start to see things like 5g become more mainstream we start to see connectivity density rapidly increase we see the concept of edge-based processing starting to happen you'll get to a point eventually where connected assets are just like electricity the assumption will be everything's connected you know right now we're sitting at 22 billion connected devices which sounds sounds insane sounds like a ridiculous amount until i look at something like my home network and during the day i'll see anything between 25 to 40 devices connected to my home network at one point but idc are saying this number could get to over 41 billion by 2025 and it's hard to predict these numbers because i mean things change so often it could go way beyond something like 41 billion but as you do more and more connectivity into your networks you have more and more data being fed in and more and more devices or endpoints or nodes providing that data it makes the world of cyber so much more important because now you've considerably expanded the attack footprint and what people need is not just better security but they need a better way to be more cohesive with how they deal with security situations so again this whole concept of connecting everything together of understanding once you identify an attack vector whereabouts are your points of exposure within your attack footprint that's going to become more and more critical as we get more and more devices online so to finish off what am i what am i really saying about all this how am i saying people should go about looking at this and building out i think for me it's take the simplest step first it's start to digitize manual processes because we can't afford to go through another crisis like we've just gone through and we can't afford to continue this one there has to be a way to break out of this and find better ways of doing things digital workflows are going to form the basis of operational workflows and operational workflows are what drive your product they're what's core to your business and these workflows are everywhere from the world of manufacturing where you're going from factory floor through to shipping to distribution to retail where your processing orders or your scheduling deliveries to the world of finance where banks are doing loan applications pushing them through pre-approval through underwriting all these processes can start to be automated and like we've seen in the world of human resources and i t it starts to free up people by moving them away from project management and administration to allow them to drive more innovation and allowing different ways of doing things i think that fundamentally in a in a world that's now physically disconnected there's never been a more important time for the enterprise to be connected so once again i'm dave wright with servicenow thank you for watching the presentation i hope you enjoyed it