Exploring GBS from definition to implementation

Speaker: Welcome to the Innovation Today Podcast, where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation. Brought to you by ServiceNow, your partner in digital transformation.

Spencer Beemiller: Thank you for joining us today for another Innovation Today podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Beemiller, an innovation officer here at ServiceNow, and today we're super excited to welcome Aniesh Myneni, industry principal director with Infosys. Aniesh, welcome aboard.

Aniesh Myneni: Thanks, Spencer. Good morning. Hi, I'm Aniesh Myneni. I work in Infosys as a ServiceNow Global Business Services service line lead, a key area that is picking up a lot of momentum in today's industry.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, thanks so much for that. GBS has, man, it's been around for a while and it's the topic of hot topic of conversation today, so I'm excited to dive into it with you and being such an expert in that space. Now with that in mind, it's a fairly robust topic, right, so GBS kind of has this big overarching umbrella of a bunch of different concepts and terminology and frameworks that are associated with it. So, I think we might start by asking how you define GBS and maybe also how you think about the framework around it.

Aniesh Myneni: Sure, Spencer. So, my perspective around Global Business Services is, it's an organizational model designed to provide end-to-end enterprise services within a single constructive structure. We think info that GBS will play a very crucial role in today's digital transformation journey for most of the enterprise customers because it'll help the clients to have one-stop consistent experience for their customers, make sure that the business values are provided across the organization, like improving the agent productivity by bringing in more automation, bringing in cost saving factors for large transformation programs, and also make sure that avoid doing duplication work between different personas in the organization. The last and the most important thing that we also strongly believe for success of any enterprise organization in GBS is to have standardized processes across their departments.

Spencer Beemiller: Yep, that's huge. You made a couple fantastic points in there. It's actually some resounding themes that I've heard talking to a few experts like yourself now in this industry world of GBS on that single area of engagement. So taking the guesswork out of where employees and customers have to go to request service and then standardizing that service from consolidating duplicative, duplicative efforts on the backend that multiple teams might currently be doing into this shared services model and centralized. Now on top of that GBS, like we initially said, it's been around for a little while. How have you seen it evolve over the last decade or so in the work world?

Aniesh Myneni: GBS has been transforming itself over the last decade from a back office low-cost services driven center into an integrated global business services model. While in the last decade the GBS has increased, it got matured. It is also added a lot of complexity in the operating model. The key thing missing around that is the end-to-end perspective, which is the need of the hour now, lack of also global process ownership and limited operational efficiencies, especially during the covid time and post covid for returning back to work hybrid model and end-to-end connected workflow is something most of the GBS customers expect as their business expand.

Spencer Beemiller: So true. Now when you're seeing these emerging trends start to happen to the industry, but specifically in your line of work for you and your teams, what are you seeing those industry trends kind of evolve into what's happening out there in the market?

Aniesh Myneni: What I have seen in the industry trends is mainly four key pillars in the GBS industry. Number one, it all boils down to having a simplified organizational structure by integrating GBS process. The second key area is design everything with a simple user experience and treat your employee as a customer every day. Third important area is automation of workflows by using generative AI capabilities, which are now available even in the ServiceNow platform. The fourth and the last important area is keeping in mind the employee experience improvement and try to give the best possible on the GBS platform.

Spencer Beemiller: That’s huge. Now you said something there that piqued my interest on the simplified user experience piece. I think we come into our work worlds with the expectation of what it's like in our consumer worlds of ease of service, yet there's a lot of complexity when you're talking to these bigger companies. What are some things that you've seen work well from a simplification standpoint to help take out that guesswork for those employees or make it easier to interface with the complexity of the company?

Aniesh Myneni: Yeah, so one of the key things that we have seen is encouraging and also educating our customer to use a single system of platform like ServiceNow. We showed the value of the platform to our customers to make them understand that GBS is a journey. It's not a one-step implementation in itself. We start to move with all the GBS related services starting with people services, which is around the HR side, more connected to the employees, the procurement related, finance and all the legal services and so on. So having these GBS processes on an enterprise next generation platform like ServiceNow where it is so easy to onboard the processes and have them interconnected with each other, let the tool do all the repeated and standardized processes by itself using the power of its workflows, which will help organizations realize the value of GBS on ServiceNow platform.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, that's a really solid point. I mean I think it hits the hammer home around this one platform story. So, once you get it working well in one department, say HR or finance or obviously IT, it's so easy to take what you've configured in that department and launch it in a new area. You're already familiar with how it works. You're already familiar with the configuration process, you're already familiar with the workflow configuration, and you can bring that functionality into these other arms to help them realize what a streamlined version of a process flow would look like through an org. So that's a really solid point. On the notion of hybrid work and what's changed in it changed in our most recent years post covid timeframes. How has that affected GBS at all?

Aniesh Myneni: Yeah, especially post covid and hybrid work environment and also adding the financial headwinds that are there globally in the markets currently, we see that there is a lot of upticks for digitization of GBS processes and it is no longer a kind of a need to have, it's a must have kind of capabilities within the enterprise organizations. So far what we've seen that isolated processes and manual way of operating the GBS cases between different teams have impacted the operational level efficiencies during the covid and post covid times. As we see, most of the agents and personas are working remotely or in a hybrid model, so we clearly see there is a gap and that can be bridged by having a kind of single platform, single data model tool like ServiceNow, which helps to digitize and standardize the GBS process and get them onboarded the quicker time to value on the ServiceNow platform, which will help a significantly move the GBS process, which are traditionally in a backend way of operating to provide the right in-center experience for enterprise services.

Spencer Beemiller: Thank you for that. I'm so curious in here if you have a few industry vertical examples or some specific customer examples that come to mind for you.

Aniesh Myneni: Definitely. While Infosys, we have done several large successful Global Business Services implementation programs on ServiceNow platform. I would like to take out one of our retail customer who has started their journey on ServiceNow traditionally with IT, but they have understood the power and value of the ServiceNow platform and positioned it as one of the top two enterprise platforms within their organization globally. And one of the key be that the CIO of that organization has taken is to even expand ServiceNow for their non-IT like the Global Business Services areas as well. So, we started their implementation starting with the global people services, which is the HR implementation, and once we successfully delivered more business within the organization, also started interest to get onboarded into ServiceNow. So over the last 15 to 18 months, we are able to onboard more than five plus GBS services globally for them on the ServiceNow platform and this Alberta in quick realization on their return off investments, especially in increasing user transparencies, making sure that the satisfaction level of the employees have significantly increased by almost two x times by providing in virtual agent and predictive intelligence and also ease of use of capabilities of the ServiceNow platform, like the workspaces, the customer was able to realize more than 30 plus percentile improvement in the agent productivity in handling the GBS cases as well.

This was a very successful case study and we see that there is a lot of headwind across the globe for the customers to move towards GBS on ServiceNow platform.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, thank you for that. What would you attribute that 30% uptick of success and the five different departments that you got to consolidate and work together in that environment? What would you attribute that success to?

Aniesh Myneni: I would see that evolves a lot of the person productivity consolidation and also give back the time for the agents to work on much more complex cases of other GBS related aspects.

Spencer Beemiller: So some of that repetitive work that they were doing in maybe the most of those five different departments now was consolidated down into one location and freed up time for some of those individuals to then do more higher value work.

Aniesh Myneni: Yes, avoid doing the repeated level one tasks, which we can use the virtual agent and also use the power of automation, the workflows in the ServiceNow platform, and that way we are able to free up their time to focus on other important activities which are needed for the client organization.

Spencer Beemiller: That's huge. There's so many great components to helping that automation strategy and I think part of GBS can include all those great automation tool sets that you have at your fingertips. Like you said, virtual agent there, there's machine learning which is pretty sought after to be able to auto route and auto map tickets based on the history of how they've flown through the organization. There's RPA robotic process automation that works quite nicely into anybody that's having to do any manual entry and we can kind of screen scrape that example and hit those different points of how that can be automated going forward. So there's a multitude of options to be able to expand into there. So thank you for hitting on those. We didn't talk ERP yet, but oftentimes some of these bigger transformational deals talk as part of the GBS rollouts. There's some type of integration or some type of back and forth connection that we have to think about when we're thinking of interfacing with ERP systems. How have you done that? How has Infosys helped implementations of GBS integrate with ERP?

Aniesh Myneni: Yeah, ERP is a very interesting subject and as we see today, currently most of the E-R-P-S-A, like SAP customers are in a journey to move from on-prem of their ERP systems towards cloud and also in this transformation journey. They also want to make sure that they have a clean core ERP systems for their next future use of ERP and this process. We see that there is a huge scope for GBS to manage and onboard all those bolt-on custom processes and workflows which are currently force fitted or customized on the ERP systems. There is a huge opportunity to look at those and get them onboarded on the GBS side of the organization and ServiceNow being a platform of platforms, it sits right on the top where instead of spending lengthy years for ERP migrations and transformations, we can quickly roll out these complicated bolt-on process into ServiceNow platform by using the flow designers, the agent assist capabilities and virtual agent and so on. And also ServiceNow has now come up with the integration hub sports, which helps the customers and the partners to plug and play and easily integrate with the backend ERP systems to get the required data that is needed for the workflow transaction and send any necessary information to the ERP systems, which are like a system of record for the customer within their organization and also now will act as a overarching layer sitting right on the top on their ERP systems.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, that's a really solid point. I think there's something to leveraging those out of the box integration hub spokes, the fact that there's already pre-written spokes for your SAP systems, the fact that you can plug and play it directly into an existing workflow to then push and pull information to bring it in when you need it and only when you need it. And thirdly, at the same time, it still continues to live in the system of record on the investment of the infrastructure that you've already made in that ERP system. So really it just enables that kind of streamlined service fashion to elevate it up to a faster level.

Aniesh Myneni: Right

Spencer Beemiller: Now, I don't think we can get away from any technology call without talking about generative AI. It's still very much on the rise and perhaps at the top of its hype cycle, but where do you see generative AI leveraged in these GBS services? What role does AI play? We talked a little bit about automation earlier on virtual agent and some of the other components of a hyper automation suite, but I'm curious to your take on where generative AI sits in this.

Aniesh Myneni: Yeah, like you rightly said, generative AI is the necessity of today's IT industry evolving on the technology aspects and generative AI will empower everyone even using on the ServiceNow platform. We see that ServiceNow has launched a bunch of generative AI capabilities from the onwards, and that's going to expand from there on in the future releases as well. Definitely GBS is also going to take the value and the benefit of generative AI capabilities on ServiceNow platform. I mainly see that generative AI for GBS is going to help accelerate the productivity of the agents who will be fulfilling the GBS cases, be it HR or procurement services. We can have the AI capabilities embedded into the workflows that will help to queue much more agility and increase the efficiency of the fulfillers within the organization. The second key important area, which I see generative AI can bring a huge impact and a game changer is around the user experience for the customers and also for the employees. So giving them the single stop shop kind of experience model with the easy to use and guided way of assisting them will be helping the organization stakeholders to adopt more to self service capabilities for the GBS services.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, I'll just extrapolate on that because I think you hit on some pretty important things around what's maybe most recently released in Vancouver release, but just how we're generally approaching it. So that second piece of helping the end user consumer, there's this intent understanding about the generated AI component. So as before where you would have to kind of build out the conversation and build out the utterances of thinking the way that your employees would interact or talk to the service request virtual agent, in this case now leveraging gen ai, we can leverage the backend training model that it understands that user and what they're looking to ask for in a much more quicker fashion without you having to configure it as much. And then secondly, on the productivity of the backend case agent, well now we have case summarization that takes long trails of history of what's happened through a service request, for example, and it summarizes it to the poignant information right at the top so the agent doesn't have to go back and kind of scroll through to see what's important to them.

So I kind of almost anonymized this with, we've all gotten those long email chains where there's 20 different emails on there or 20 different recipients on there and a bunch of different threads, and we are trying to find out what they're asking, but we don't know where to go back down or we don't have time to necessarily read through all the lists. So what generative AI has the ability to do is just summarize what's really important and what the ask is of us at that point in time to then take out that guesswork or that busy work of having to go figure out where it lives in that long trade. Thank you for those. I think there's a lot that we hit on today and we're actually coming to the end of the year here in our worlds. Just in general, do you see any predictions for, or do you have any predictions for where GBS is going, or is there anything else that you'd like to sprinkle in here for a general shift or trend that you see happening in the GBS world?

Aniesh Myneni: Yes. As we move to year 2024, we see that there is a shift in way of operating for global business services for the large global enterprise customers. We see that customers on GBS side who have leverage ServiceNow platform to start with the people services or employee workflows. We see them, they realize the value of the platform and they look to onboard more services of GBS into serviceNow platform, be legal related services, procurement, service management, finance operations, or supplier lifecycle management. Today, traditionally these are managed in different tools or KI large sneaker kept in shared mailboxes or manual way of working, but that's not a sustainable model anymore, and we see that in the upcoming year, most of the customers would push to themselves to how a robust digital platform like ServiceNow to set up their GBS services.

Spencer Beemiller: Yeah, that's amazing. Just being able to take it into the other lines of business and further expand it into other efficiencies that we've already gained in areas that we've rolled it out prior, just letting other the parts of the org experience that same benefit. Well, Aniesh, this has been an awesome pleasure of mine. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your expertise around this lovely GBS topic today. I want to thank you so much from the ServiceNow world. Any final thoughts about emphasis or anything in your world?

Aniesh Myneni: Yeah, so firstly, thanks Spencer for getting this opportunity for sharing my viewpoints around GBS. So yes, definitely Infosys on the ServiceNow practice for GBS, we are very serious and betting big on the GBS related services for our customers. We have a dedicated research team to make sure that we analyze the industry through our consulting services in-house and then we will provide the end-to-end capabilities for our customers on the ServiceNow platform. Second is, I hope this episode of GBS thought sharing is helpful for everyone and valuable. I hope everyone takes some key points back to your customers for your strategy discussions and stay tuned for many more interesting updates coming on GBS from my side.

Spencer Beemiller: Amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much Aniesh and thank you from everyone out there on the Innovation Today Podcast, we'll see you on the next one.