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WHY DO 70 % of FINLAND'S BIGGEST COMPANIES NEED A "PLATFORM OF PLATFORMS"?
WHY DO 70% OF FINLAND’S BIGGEST COMPANIES NEED A “PLATFORM OF PLATFORMS”?
And how technology at its best takes us towards humane leadership of the 2020s?
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TEXT: DAVID J. CORD
Finland’s largest organizations build their digital future based on human orientation and the socalled “servicification.” Seamless and smooth service experiences are created only with customers and employees in the center. However, point-like systems built over the decades often become roadblocks to such development. That is where a “platform of platforms” comes into play.
Uber, Wolt, and Airbnb are examples of platform businesses that the media and thought leaders have talked about to the point of boredom. The distance between these “cloud-born” consumer services and large Finnish companies operating in more traditional industries sometimes seems light-years long. However, each of these organizations is in the middle of a transformation that fundamentally changes the manufacturing sector, retail, construction, healthcare, and public administration organizations, namely service-orientedness.
We use services continuously: we ask for a new password from IT, request a week of vacation from HR, or ask for a snapshot of the customer’s recent transactions from the finance team. We apply for daycare, want to see our health history, or request additional funding for a long-drawn-out home renovation project.
The digital services we use usually need a technology platform – typically more than one. One platform manages customers, another HR processes, and a third implements AI solutions. The list continues. There are countless such technology platforms in large companies and public organizations. The platforms’ life cycles stretch from the 1990s to recent days, and at worst, the poor customer – internal or external – must deal with all of them.
Point-like platforms often provide their users with an inconsistent user experience, a variety of logins, and processes whose gaps get patched up with routines such as filling out Excel forms. In addition, they often cause data to fragment into separate repositories, from which it is practically impossible to build insights to lead a business.
I guess no one is saying that leadership in the 2020s service business is the same as in the 1990s. So why do we assume that platforms from the ’90s could support today’s leadership?
Because they can. Nearly three out of four of the 25 largest companies in Finland have already woken up to how the diversity of technology platforms at its harshest leaves behind intermittent processes, siloed data, and an outdated user experience. More than 70% of Finland’s largest companies use ServiceNow’s “platform of platforms” to support their digitalization journey. With ServiceNow’s platform, they can serve their internal customers uninterruptedly, no matter how many different parts of the organization and separate systems are involved. They build smooth and unified onboarding processes for their new hires and managers. They create feedback loops that stretch from the consumer to the outsourced contact center and all the way to the planning systems of the manufacturing shop floor – in real-time. They automate routines to allow more time for meaningful human-to-human interaction. And they create service experiences that are modern and convenient for the users, never mind the number and lifecycle stage of the core systems that lie underneath.
Putting people at the center and harnessing automation and data to serve the customer – both internally and externally – makes it possible to move towards what is excellent about the Ubers and Wolts: a service that flows naturally and as if unnoticed by the users. | www.servicenow.com
Juho Friberg Country Manager, Servicenow Finland
