Month: September 2019

NSW Hackathon

September 29, 2019October 29, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

Are you ready for a Challenge, and to have some fun?

NSW Government is on a journey to digitally transform for the benefit of its Citizens.

The Challenge is sponsored by the Minister for Customer Service, the Hon. Victor Dominello :

“Governments have to be brave enough, humble enough, and caring enough to ask for feedback in a way that is intuitive and easy – then act on this feedback to improve services” EngageNSW Hackathon – ServiceNow is running a hackathon on 29th October in partnership with The Minister and the Department of Customer Service for NSW to seek ideas on how to engage better with government.

It will take place at:

Fishburners, level 2, 11 York St, Sydney from 7:30am

The Hackathon will be for the full day followed by refreshments in the evening.

Read more here and register now – https://buff.ly/31Iaf0L

NSW Hackathon – The Brief

The brief is simple;

Create innovative new ways for Government to engage with the community and deliver a better citizen experience:

How can NSW Government give all members of the community a genuine opportunity to “have their say” at scale?
How do we close the loop, continuously, with those that consume government services, to make sure customers can participate and have a voice in how government services are delivered?
Government wants to get a better read on what is working and what is not. How can we provide better visibility and tracking of what the key issues are that citizens are facing?
They also want to be able to reflect what has been heard from customers back to the community more broadly. How can government deliver that kind of experience and show they are listening?

Issues to address

huge variety in the most appropriate and effective way to engage with different community segments
the need to get views on issues in a customer context (as opposed to filling in forms and submitting feedback relating to specific topics of interest to government)
cost-effectiveness, accessibility, usability
ability to reuse previous community feedback and build on it for each engagement

Engaging with citizens is something every government wants to get better at, so coming up with a great idea and building a solution could be the start of something much bigger.

The Hackathon will use the ServiceNow platform for all development work. We will provide an instance of the software for each team on the day. Teams that have a broad mix of participants (eg from government, industry and education) and include members with problem-solving skills, creative skills as well as the ServiceNow platform technical skills are likely to make the most progress on the day.

Getting Started

Register for the event and create or join a team of ideally around 4-8 people
Make sure you understand the problem we are trying to solve. Read some of the background articles
Attend the Information Session at 5:30 pm on Wednesday 16/10/19
Learn about the ServiceNow platform and how to develop innovative solutions using its powerful capabilities
Start thinking about solutions! Check out the judging criteria to make sure you are in for a chance of winning one of our prizes.
Check out the FAQ’s if you need help

Registering for the Event

If you have not previously taken part in a ServiceNow hackathon, you will need to register to use the site.
Once you have done this, you will still need to join a team to take part in the EngageNSW Hackathon. You can either create a team and invite others to join, or else you can join a team that has already been created. If you create a team, you will also need to join that team.
If you don’t know what other teams there are or who is in them, you can always go solo for now and then either join a team later or try to recruit some more hackers, hustlers or hipsters for your team.
Teams that have a broad mix of participants (eg from government, industry and education) and include members with problem solving skills, creative skills as well as the ServiceNow platform technical skills are likely to make the most progress on the day.

Understanding the Problem

Engaging with citizens is something every government wants to get better at, so coming up with a great idea and building a solution could be the start of something much bigger.

There are plenty of places you can do research on the challenges of engaging with citizens, but here are some ideas to get you started :

10 lessons on citizen engagement from the World Economic Forum
what they are doing in Taiwan with the “gov-zero” movement
Some general background in designing for digital democracy and
this article by Amelia Loye in the Mandarin

Information Session

We will run an information sharing session on October 16th at 5:30 – 7 pm. Come over to the ServiceNow offices to have a few refreshments, meet your teams and get an introduction to the challenge. We will present on the topics that will help you get a head start in preparing for the Hackathon, such as :

Digital Democracy – engaging citizens in a digital world
Designing with people in mind
Overview of the ServiceNow platform, including Q&A
Setting yourself up for success – doing the homework and preparing for the big day

We will send out invites to everyone who is registered on a team nearer the time.

FAQ’s

How do I Register? Go to the EngageNSW event website and enter your details
How do I create or join a team? Once you have registered, you can either create or join a team, or go solo. If you work for a government department, get together with some of your colleagues. If you know of a ServiceNow partner that works with your department, how about contacting them to see if they have any resources who would like to volunteer to join your team so that you have some technical resources. And let us know if you would be interested in having any students join your team. We would like to help some students to get some experience of working in teams on solving real problems on the platform.
Where is it? Fishburners, Sydney Startup Hub, above Wynyard station in Sydney CBD
What’s the agenda for the day? 7:30 am for coffee and snacks, 8 am start, Challenge overview by the Minister at 9 am, work, coffee, work, lunch, coffee, work, tea, work, talk to moderators, pitch if requested, approx. 5 pm get prizes if winner, then relax and have fun for networking and refreshments. Head home when done.
Is there food? – yes, you won’t go hungry or thirsty
What do I need to bring? – laptop and power chord. We will provide wifi.
Judging criteria? Address the challenge. In addition, the judges will be looking for

- Creativity & Ambition – How innovative, creative, different, or stand out is the application or solution?
- Look & Feel, Quality, Ease of Adoption – If this was a new application launched, how easy would it be to use, how hard would it be to learn for the end user?
- Impact to people – What change or effect would this have to the user and to the government?
- Power of the Platform. Innovation – How did the team best utilize the features, Plugins, Share, etc.?
- Business Value – Is this viable? Does it solve a real problem?

Events

Dreamworld Wildlife Fund

September 26, 2019September 26, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

At Enable, the main thing for our CSR team is to further develop our program by bedding in major partnerships across all of the countries, and focus on engagement in the offices.

We are pleased to announce they are supporting the Dreamworld Wildlife Foundation.

ABOUT DREAMWORLD WILDLIFE FOUNDATION

Dreamworld Wildlife Foundation (DWF) supports conservation, research and education in the wild.

Dreamworld Wildlife Foundation (DWF) was established in 2012 to provide support, practical assistance and funding for wildlife conservation initiatives, particularly the ecology of threatened and endangered species. DWF support direct conservation efforts, relevant research, public education, advocacy and co-operation with like-minded organisations and regulatory authorities to protect wildlife.

DWF is the largest zoological donor to tiger conservation globally. Through their relationships with other conservation charities, they protect tigers in the wild through education, anti-poaching and community engagement initiatives.

Since being established in 2012, DWF has generously received public donations of over $2 million. These donations are largely linked to activities within Dreamworld Theme Park from royalties on merchandise sales and wildlife activities, supplemented by bequests and donations made online and in-park. DWF also receives funds from external partners, such as international zoos and now Enable Professional Services

For more visit – https://www.dwf.com.au/

At this years APJ conference, we provided the DWF with a $5000 cheque to continue their important conservation work. Our CSR Lead, Alison Lane, presented the giant cheque ( and the real one) to the animal handlers and our surprise guest Kimberley the Koala.

Events

What I learned about Leadership

September 25, 2019September 26, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

At this year’s company conference, we wanted to create an atmosphere of learning, recognition, fun and also little competition; we did this by weaving in a variety of Tribe challenges over the three days together in the Gold Coast.

At the Thursday evening welcome dinner, we broke off into pre-existing ServiceNow Tribes and provided each Tribe with a coloured bandana and the introduced the 3 challenges that the Tribes would participate in over the three-day conference in the Gold Coast. On the first morning, we sent our 100 strong participants down to the beach to compete in the first challenge:

1: LIFT AND BUILD

Teams had to find a way to get 4 individuals from point a to point b without the 4 people touching the ground when at the second point, they had to construct a structure with spaghetti and Marshmallows that would support the weight of a shoe.

2: RACE AND TUG-O-WAR

On morning 2, teams competed in retro games like egg and spoon races and of tug of war.

3: BUILD A BOAT

The final challenge took place on Saturday afternoon and required all Tribes to build and race a boat in the hotel pool.

Firstly teams had to create a war cry, and earn their equipment and tools, then build the boat, finally racing the boat across the pool to take out the competition.

WHAT I LEARNED:

Observing these teams over the three challenges was highly interesting, as the event coordinator, here’s what I learned:

Our Enablers are incredibly competitive
Everyone has a different interpretation of the same instructions
Providing clear rules is important to some people but not others
Communication was KEY to each of the winning teams
Energy is infectious
Our Enablers are crazily creative
Finally, the winning team set an intention to win

THE WINNING TEAM’S STRATEGY:

I interviewed the winning team leader, Suzanne Gerrard, from the Customer Success Tribe about their strategies to win the tribe challenges. She mentioned that it was not by accident that the team won. “Our team set out with an intention to win,” I asked her how, “On the welcome night of the conference, we received our team allocations, and set about learning each other strengths, skills and communication styles, we agreed that as a team we could win, and win we did.

“It was important to know when we should step up to a challenge and when we needed to step back and offer support, working with our strengths was vital to winning. We spent time during every challenge encouraging each other, offering kind words and cheering each on to keep our spirits high.”

Suzanne added “On the final day, we had already tested our strategy on two other beach challenges, we knew what was working and how to adjust if it wasn’t, we knew what each person was great at doing and when we each needed to step up to the plate. The final challenge was to build a boat, before any design work was started we decided a tactic for this final challenge and set about the work dividing to conquer; some people as builders, some as engineers, others on the tools, cutting cardboard, tape and plastic sheeting as required, we also knew who would race the boats in the end, being strategic to choose an anchor at the back and a lighter rower at the front to keep the boat going as fast as we could.”

She mentioned, “I knew we would win because as a team we set an intention to win, everyone was committed to the same goal, all team members provided support based on their own strengths to reach the same goal and most of all we supported each other, true teamwork.”

Written by –
Nicole Bailey
MARKETING CONSULTANT
Tribe – CSR/SOCIAL

News

Enable Professional Services is now an Elite Partner of…

September 25, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

Enable Professional Services is excited to announce it is a ServiceNow Elite Partner. This highest level of partnership recognises Enable’s outstanding customer satisfaction, successful implementations across all ServiceNow modules, and number and quality of certified staff.

Enable’s Managing Director, Bruce Hara, said “I’m thrilled Enable has become the only home grown Elite Partner in the APJ region. Our team sticks to our values of being pragmatic, passionate and committed, and I’m proud to see that mindset produce amazing project outcomes and customer satisfaction.”

The ServiceNow Partner Program recognises partners based on their experience, expertise and specialisations. Enable’s achievement of the Elite Partner designation (the highest possible) also reflects the company’s customer success and depth of knowledge.

In this way, the partnership designation helps organisations choose a ServiceNow partner that is proven to be up to date with the ever-expanding capabilities offered by ServiceNow.

“Our dedicated ServiceNow team is 220+, and we’re looking to reach 250+ by June 2020. We have Enable tribes dedicated to HR, CSM, ITBM, ITOM, ITSM, GRC, SecOps and Architecture, so we can deliver the full suite of ServiceNow offerings with experienced, certified consultants who not only understand the platform, but the business challenges, context and priorities driving it,” said Bruce.

He acknowledges four factors underpinning Enable’s accomplishments:

Hitting stretch revenue targets. Enable achieved 100% of its revenue target in 2018-19, which was over 60% year-on-year growth. Back-to-back CRN Fast50 awards testify to the company’s ongoing growth (and Enable is looking to earn another one this year).
Growing sustainably. Both Enable’s Hong Kong and Singapore businesses delivered customers in the company’s top 10 revenue list for the year. These businesses are already sustainable and profitable, and a new Bangkok office and two delivery centres in India add to Enable’s potency in the region.
Customer Advisory & Support by Enable (CASE) is now live, with subscription customers able to ensure they’re getting maximum ROI from their ServiceNow instance. CASE is a maturing of Enable’s advisory and managed service offering, and gives the company an annuity revenue stream.
Building a quality leadership team. Specifically, Suzanne Gerrard and Paul Thomason added significant capability when they joined Enable in the past 18 months as General Manager of Australia and Director of Strategy and Innovation respectively.

Commenting on the year ahead, Bruce said, “Enable has never been better positioned to take advantage of a buoyant market, leveraging our current position as the APJ market leader for ServiceNow consulting, and creating further opportunity for ourselves and our customers.”

Events

CSR in Hong Kong

September 24, 2019September 24, 2019
by Mun Law

After weeks of preparation and negotiation, the first CSR program is launched in Hong Kong! Enablers in Hong Kong are so excited about it and looking forward to all the activities that are being arranged.

We are so delighted to have found the social enterprise Elite Thai Boxing and Fitness to arrange the training with the theme – well-being for Enablers!

Most important of all, giving back to society and nurturing the youth.

Elite Thai Boxing and Fitness have a partnership with multiple NGOs including the Society for the AID and Rehabilitation of Drug Abusers, Small Group Home of International Social Service, the Society of Rehabilitation and Crime Prevention, etc. Over 10 marginal youths invited by the NGOs have successfully completed the structural training programme provided by Elite Boxing and Fitness and become qualified Thai boxing and fitness Teaching Assistant equipped with martial arts skills and ethics.

On this day, we were welcomed by the “Principal Coach” and two teaching assistants to engage in a meaningful training class. We enjoyed the intensive fitness training and Thai boxing techniques like fighting stance and footwork; fist, elbow, knee and kick techniques, but most important of all, giving back to society and nurturing the youth.

Written by –
Mun L Law
SERVICENOW SENIOR TECHNICAL CONSULTANT
Tribe – CSR

For more about the Elite Thai Boxing and Fitness please see their website – https://eliteboxinghk.com/

Events

Food Bank Fareshare

September 20, 2019September 23, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

This morning the Queensland team had a chance to come down to the Fareshare kitchen to prepare meals for those who are in a food stress situation.

This is, of course, homeless people but also normal families with the income-earner going through illness or financial difficulties. So far we have packed, sealed and deployed 450 meals with more than double to go.

Alison Lane, CSR lead at Enable Professional Services said,

I’m always looking for meaningful events for our people to participate in.

I’m proud that Enable prioritises it’s Corporate Social Responsibility program, as we recognise how important it is for our people to feel engaged not only within our organisation but within our community.

This morning I took my team out of the office and down to FareShare at Foodbank Australia to prepare meals for those in a food-stress situation. Pretty powerful stuff hearing about the great work they do with the staggering amount of unnecessary wastage that’s happening every day in this great country of ours.

We packaged 2784 meals in a 3.5-hour session this morning, it was a great team-building exercise that makes a real difference to struggling families. I highly recommend Foodbank for a CSR team building event.”

Great work team.

News

Enable Professional Services becomes Elite ServiceNow partner

September 18, 2019September 18, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

Sydney-based consultancy Enable Professional Services has become the first local ServiceNow partner to crack Elite status in the SaaS vendor’s partner program.

ServiceNow added an elite tier to its partner program as part of a May 2019 program re-launch. Elite partners typically specialise in five or more ServiceNow products across the IT, employee experience and customer service workflows and has established operations in multiple geographies.

Enable Professional Services (EPS) has five Australian offices, plus presences in India, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

“I’m thrilled Enable has been recognised as the first homegrown Elite Partner in the APJ region,” said Enable’s Managing Director, Bruce Hara, who added that EPS has over 220 staff dedicated to ServiceNow and plans a further 30 hires by June 2020.

“We have Enable tribes dedicated to HR, CSM, ITBM, ITOM, ITSM, GRC, SecOps and Architecture, so we can deliver the full suite of ServiceNow offerings with experienced, certified consultants who not only understand the platform, but the business challenges, context and priorities driving it,” Bruce added.

Managed services helped EPS score its new status: the company’s Customer Advisory & Support by Enable (CASE) product is now live and offers subscription customers an evolved advisory and managed service offering. It also gives EPS annuity revenue!

“A big congratulations to Enable for achieving Elite status. This status is a testament to Enable’s deep industry expertise, and capabilities to drive organisation-wide digital transformation for our joint customers,” said Mitch Young, SVP, APJ, ServiceNow.

“Our key partners have a shared focus on creating great work experiences and unlocking productivity, to change the way work gets done.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE SOURCE: https://www.crn.com.au/news/enable-professional-services-becomes-elite-servicenow-partner-531027

Resource

NewYork HRSD Highlights

September 17, 2019September 18, 2019
by David Liu

ServiceNow New York release is finally here! Although ServiceNow does releases at a fast pace of twice per year, customers are always looking forward to the highly anticipated new features and enhancements that come with every release.

In this post, we will focus on some exciting highlights within the ServiceNow HRSD (Human Resources Service Delivery) Module.

1. Mobile Onboarding App and Now Mobile for HRSD

ServiceNow has always paid strong focus on delivering a great user experience for its customers on both desktop and mobile platforms. In New York, ServiceNow has released a new Mobile Onboarding App dedicated to onboard new hires seamlessly via mobile devices. The Mobile Onboarding App can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

Note that the Human Resources Scope App: Lifecycle Events plugin will need to be enabled as a prerequisite. The activation of this plugin comes with a subscription cost.

When the new hire installs the app and logs in, they would be presented with an app homepage illustrated below:

ServiceNow Onboarding Mobile App will provide New Hires with the following features:

Media Content section where relevant content can be pushed to New Hires throughout different stages of their onboarding processes.
Activity Sets for the Onboarding Case whereby New Hires may click into and complete their to-do tasks such as signing documents, completing profile information, watching new hire videos or providing any other supplementary information.
Ask a Question where New Hires can correspond with HR Agents via the Comments section in the Onboarding Case.
Notification tab where New Hires can see all Push notifications related to their onboarding process (i.e. when a new to-do task has been assigned to the New Hire). There is also an option to enable/disable Notifications.

On the same note, New York also sees the release of an HRSD Mobile App. Now Mobile for HRSD provides employee the ability to view HR requests, request help, complete HR tasks and chat with the HR Virtual Agent.

mobile app screenshot taken from ServiceNow Product Documentation

2. Collect employee input with employee forms

ServiceNow has enhanced HR Tasks with a new type called ‘Collect Employee Input’. As the name suggests, this new type of HR Tasks provides the functionality for collecting additional information from employees throughout the lifecycle of an HR Case. The catch here is that information is collected in the form of survey questions which can be mapped to fields on any target table – meaning that you don’t necessarily have to create any additional ‘dummy’ HR Services, HR Cases or custom fields to achieve the same purpose!

Configuring a new ‘Collect Employee Input’ HR Task can be done in several easy steps. We will illustrate the steps with an example below:

Create a new Employee Form which acts as the parent container.
In this example we will create a new Employee Form for obtaining conflict of interest declarations from employees.
On the Employee Form record, create questions using the Survey Designer – note that you can leverage all existing Survey capabilities. In this example we have created a mandatory question (‘Do you have any conflicts to declare?’) and if employees answered ‘Yes’, a follow up question will appear prompting for declaration details.
On the Employee Form record, define target table and field mappings. In this example, we have set the target table to ‘HR Profiles’ and created mapping for two custom fields related to Conflicts of Interest.
Now that the Employee Form record has been configured, we can trigger a new HR Task either manually or via a workflow. Once triggered, employees will see a new to-do task on the Employee Service Centre as per below:

Once submitted, the collected input is mapped to the HR Profile record as per below:

Optionally, we can extend the functionality to conditionally trigger a follow-on task. For example, if an employee has declared a conflict of interest, we can configure the workflow to conditionally trigger another HR Task for the employee’s manager to review details on the declaration.

3. Related items and Articles

A great nifty feature in the New York release is the ability to cross map related Catalog Items and related Knowledge Articles, thus allowing employees to easily find relevant information and submit relevant requests on the Employee Service Centre.

Configuring a new mapping between Catalog Items and Knowledge Articles can be illustrated with an example where we will relate the ‘Direct Deposit Setup’ Catalog Item to a Knowledge Article containing details on setting up direct deposit accounts. In addition, we will also map it to another ‘Direct Deposit Enquiry’ Catalog Item.

Navigate to the Catalog Item in question and note the two newly added related lists: ‘Related Articles’ and ‘Related Catalog Items’. Modify the related lists to add the desired Knowledge Articles and Catalog Items.
Now that the mapping has been configured, when an employee navigates to the ‘Direct Deposit Setup’, they will be presented with the view below:

Since the related lists are defined by many-to-many (m2m) tables, you can also relate a Knowledge Article to a Catalog Item or another Knowledge Article.

For more resources, tip and assistance watch this space for more updates to come soon.

Written by –
David Liu
SERVICENOW SENIOR TECHNICAL CONSULTANT
Tribe – Architecture

Events

Sydney Running Festival and the Smith Family

September 16, 2019September 16, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

Our Enable Professional Services Sydney team completed this year Sydney Running Festival on Sunday 15 September.

Not only were the team focused on completing the run but also sought to raise much-needed funds for the Smith Family.

At Enable, we are focused on investing in a child’s education, helping them break the cycle of disadvantage. That’s why Enable partners with The Smith Family.

By giving young Australians the extra support they need to fully participate in their education, we can prevent them from experiencing a lifetime of poverty. We love working with The Smith Family towards our shared vision of a better future for young Australians in need.

Our team of 10 aimed to fundraise $1000 to help The Smith Family as part of the Sydney Running Festival 2019.

The final numbers are in and we have raised $2427.

Thanks to the Sydney team, our customers and all who contributed to fundraising or supporting on the day.

Events

User group meetings in the west learn all about…

September 9, 2019September 16, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

Last week Enable Professional Services hosted 51 delegates at the Exchange Now User Group Meeting in Perth.

Darren Everet, Customer Success Manager of West Australia MC’d the event with our own Grahan Strydom speaking about a hot topic, “Flow Designer int he real world.”

Hosted at the venue Total BS, a Tavern in St Georges Terrace, the team ran a session of high interest covering Flow Designer and it’s real-world application.

EXCERPT: “The Flow Designer is a non-technical interface for building and enabling process automation capabilities, known as flows. Flows automate business logic for applications or processes such as approvals, tasks, notifications, and record operations.”

Download the full presentation here