The News: ServiceNow recently acquired Hitch Works, a company specializing in skills mapping and intelligence. The AI-powered skills insights will be added to the Now Platform helping customers address talent gaps by tying employee learning to workforce planning. Read the full announcement on ServiceNow’s blog.
ServiceNow’s Acquisition of Hitch Works to Help Customers Address Talent Gaps
Analyst Take: ServiceNow’s acquisition of Hitch Works bodes well for customers, especially as it relates to addressing and mitigating talent gaps. ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a unified system for digital business, with a suite of tools designed to enhance employee experience, provide easy access to analytics, and facilitate the deployment of automation. The Now Platform provides a comprehensive foundation for digital work, and in recent months Service Now has been expanding their offerings in impressive ways.
With ServiceNow’s acquisition of Hitch Works, the company will be adding a powerful tool. Hitch Works enables organizations to coordinate employees’ skills, experiences, goals, and location, ensuring that the right tasks can be assigned to the right people. This serves employers by improving efficiency and also delivers a solid assist to employees by ensuring that their interests and goals are brought to management’s attention when opportunities are being assigned.
Hitch Works Expands ServicesNow’s Skills Intelligence Capabilities in Impressive Ways
I’m a fan. It’s clear that Hitch Works will complement the functionality of ServiceNow’s Now Platform in impressive ways, opening possibilities neither product alone currently offers. With an increasing shortage of talent, it is critical that the talent that is available be fostered, deployed, and retained as effectively as possible. That makes skills management an integral component of an effective digital business. However, existing solutions tend to be distinct products that are siloed from the general platforms with which employees and managers primarily interact. This hampers efficiency and prevents AI and machine learning assets from interacting across multiple services. ServiceNow’s acquisition of Hitch integrates these capabilities into the Now Platform, effectively solving these problems. Even better, it enables Hitch Works’ solutions to scale across a larger ecosystem.
The process of integrating the services is slated to begin with the Now Platform’s employee workflow solutions. The Now Platform already offers the ability to map process flows and analyze inefficiencies. What I especially like about this is that with the added insights from Hitch Works, the Now Platform could highlight when employees aren’t being used to their full potential and help allocate tasks as efficiently as possible. As the platform develops, one can imagine it could even begin to identify untapped skills based on employee performance. The possibilities of this alone are staggering and go a long way toward helping address talent gaps.
Another Smart Move from ServiceNow
As I mentioned earlier, I think this is exciting news and a smart move on ServiceNow’s part. ServiceNow’s acquisition of Hitch Works will no doubt drive the the evolution of its Now Platform in ways that are sure to be attractive to customers — and that’s what it’s all about.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
