What are the steps to follow in a digitization process?
A digital transformation starts like any other business project: with a strategy. What are my goals? What is my roadmap?
On the other hand, there is an important particularity: we must innovate taking into account history and technical debt. Very often we inherit old and sometimes outdated systems and infrastructures, often lacking the agility to adapt to new needs. So this is the challenge: how to modernize an organization with agility by relying on tools that are no longer sufficient? How do you manage major transformations with minimal disruption and negative business impact? Understanding what already exists is therefore one of the first questions to ask yourself when starting to digitize your business.
How should we address and manage the technical debt issue?
The need is therefore to bring agility to existing processes and infrastructures, without replacing them completely. This is the value of the solutions offered by ServiceNow: creating the link between the existing system and what we imagine for the future.
With our platform, we bring this flexibility while our partners bring their business and manufacturing knowledge. Technology without business knowledge and implementation skills is useless. And viceversa.
We also work well with large integration and consultancy firms, more regional integrators and specialists in their fields (HR, finance, etc). Together, we co-create solutions that are truly tailored to customer needs.
In summary, we combine our strengths: on the ServiceNow side, our tools allow us to technically carry out digital transformation projects. From our partners, they have in-depth expertise in their favorite subjects.
We could almost speak of a perfect alliance with our ecosystem of partners. They bring their know-how to build and implement a digital transformation strategy and we deliver the solutions. We are all winners: our member companies and of course the customers!
What our partners remember is the power and adaptability of our ServiceNow platform. This allows them to support their customers on a long-term basis and to develop the solution as needs arise.
Do you also form special ties with technology partners?
We have partnerships with major publishers such as Microsoft, Google, People Soft, IBM play no one else but them. This is what we call “Working Better Together”.
Over the past two decades, the paradigm has changed. The notion of competition has evolved into that of “coopetition”, i.e. the interest of customers takes precedence over the individual interest of each publisher… And the interest of customers is to be able to benefit from innovative and valuable solutions .
For example, we incorporate some of our solutions into those of Microsoft, and this simplifies the work of the customer who no longer has to use two systems since everything is combined into one.
And the human in all this?
It is essential to involve all stakeholders in an ambitious digital transformation project. These are projects that can lead to profound changes in the user experience, carried out over several months, even years, so the support of everyone – from the highest level of the hierarchy to the operational teams – is essential. This is the challenge of change management.
In managing a project, communication is key. This is one of the important elements in choosing a partner based on her problem.
In short, skill and talent are everything. Without humans, nothing would happen!