In this new series of Now on Now stories, we share how we use ServiceNow products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire you--our customers and partners--to achieve even greater business value and resiliency through the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Customer Workflows Book of Knowledge.

Ninjas are known for their stealth and agility, skills that take much practice and study to master. They are never satisfied with their current abilities and always seek to improve. Those noble aspirations are not limited to secret warriors. In the current climate, IT leaders are also busy adding new capabilities to their skillset. In my IT Experience Podcast, I regularly sit-down with IT pros who have valuable advice for their peers.

IT typically leads the charge on selecting, implementing, and maintaining the organization’s IT Service Management (ITSM) platform of choice. Over time we see ITSM solutions become an integral resource to connect employees and IT.

The rules of customer engagement have changed drastically in the last decade, not only for direct customer-facing roles but also for internal customer-facing roles such as technical service team staff, NOC admins, and more. Organizations across the globe are now fully aware that great customer service from support teams and NOC teams can have a lasting impact on employee productivity, morale, and in turn, the organization’s overall revenue churn and growth.

User account creation is a long-winded process that involves various configurations. Such a tiresome, manual process is naturally prone to errors, especially while creating user accounts in bulk. Errors made in the user provisioning process will result in frustrated users calling the service desk to request permission to access resources, to be added to the appropriate groups, to update missing profile details, etc. Why provisioning users through the Admin Center is inefficient.

IntegrationHub spokes accelerate ServiceNow-Microsoft workflow automation One of the features of the Now Platform Paris release is built-in Microsoft Azure Active Directory integrations that simplify common workflows ServiceNow Onboarding and Software Asset Management (SAM).

Let’s say you’re shopping in a retail store. You have everything on your shopping list except for one item. You’ve browsed through each of the aisles (twice), and you still can’t find what you’re looking for. What do you do? You’ll most likely go to the service desk. There, an associate can direct you to the aisle and shelf of where the item is. This is exactly how the IT service desk works for internal employees throughout an organization.