Competition is brutal across every industry. If you can’t operate faster, your company is destined to be outmaneuvered by your competition. The winners will be the enterprises that can innovate and transform faster than everyone else.

However, too many enterprises are struggling with finding the time to innovate.  We polled participants in a recent webinar with TriNet and found over 72% of the respondents were using 70% or more of their efforts to just keep the lights on (figure 1)! Basically, they are stuck in an old work model where too much of their time is spent on running the business instead of changing the business.

Figure 1. Survey taken of webinar participants, joint ServiceNow and TriNet webinar March 8, 2017

To succeed, enterprises must get out of the “keeping the lights on” business mentality and focus on accelerating business velocity.

IT is uniquely positioned to help companies move out of run-mode by service enabling everything. Because IT platforms drive every business process, employee interaction and customer experience, IT is uniquely positioned to lead companies to achieve the highest levels of speed and productivity.

We need to rethink how work gets done. Incremental improvement is not going to achieve the level of speed that enterprises require to stay competitive. We must build a new model of IT operations.

At ServiceNow, we’ve been going through this transformation ourselves. In 2013, 74% of our IT spend was on running the business. Our processes were highly manual and inefficient. We set out to look at everything we do and identify how we could automate it all. What we discovered is that 84% of what we do has potential to be at a higher level of automation. Using service automation, we shifted our IT spend from run to grow. In 2016, 43% of IT resources went to innovation.

Increasing innovation is a journey. It requires creating the right alignment and execution framework around key goals and metrics, organizational implications and risks.

For more on this topic, listen to the replay of our webinar “Shift to Innovation to Achieve the “Lightspeed Enterprise” .