Month: September 2021

What’s new in Rome?

The Rome upgrade, which will be ready in September 2021, does not mean only improvement and automation capabilities to work faster and more efficiently for admins and end-users, but it also has a great variety of additional features for department leads and process managers. In this article, we prepared a list of the most exciting improvements from the business perspective.

ITSM – Digital Portfolio Management

Service, Product, and Application Owners will finally have a unified place for managing the entire portfolio of their offerings. This new unified Workspace will be provided via ServiceNow Store at no additional cost, except for the corresponding ITSM/ITBM.

A single place where you can track and manage the lifecycle of your Services, Applications, and Products will give you great insight into your portfolio from a high-level perspective, which is invaluable, knowing how complex and intricate those things can be.

ITSM – Workforce Optimization Enhancements

Source: SPOC

Workforce managers and admins will have new capabilities within their workspace, enhancing Scheduling possibilities, managing their teams’ KPIs, and providing Coaching options to Agents.

Forecast admins will modify Forecast Parameters from the workspace to verify and compare different forecast versions. They can also fine-tune the forecasts manually, adjusting the default forecast properties for greater accuracy.

Shift planning admins can add on-call shifts from a Shift tab or the calendar. They can swap shifts of agents’ within their teams without a need for additional approval and view their agents’ demand and utilization for each day of the week.

KPIs can be added for teams and individual agents, goals can be set to track and monitor how teams and respective agents deal with, e.g., incident resolution. Multiple teams can be given the same set of KPIs/Goals for consistency.

Assessments and Surveys are now available in the manager workspace. Surveys can be added automatically to an assessment when the coaching opportunity triggers it or manually ad-hoc. Skills can be analyzed in the Skills Overview and added to teams, and assigned to individual agents.

All in all, this provides excellent insight and a unified tool for workforce optimization, which is a pretty unique offering in the marketplace.

Find out more.

ITSM – Vendor Manager Workspace

Another Workspace-based enhancement will provide Vendor Managers with a great tool for tracking their Vendors’ performance.

The Rome release adds a new landing page to that Workspace for a unified view of your contracts, improvement initiatives, ranking of Vendors’ performance against their success characteristics, and Vendor satisfaction scores. Improvement Initiatives are a new way to track the Vendor’s improvement of a service, process, or tasks assigned in a structured way. You will also be able to manage the Service Credits that particular Vendors owe you when they are in breach of their Service Level Agreements and view the details of the breaches, analyzing the incidents, outages, and general service availability.

Source: ServiceNow

Find out more.

CSM – Messaging Services

Knowing that paperwork, analysis and approvals are the biggest hurdles in getting things done, ServiceNow offers pre-negotiated SMS and WhatsApp messaging deals.

You can order messaging credits with a separate SKU and leave all the setup to ServiceNow. This additional offering can be added to any of your existing CSM packages.

The messaging is handled by the industry-leading company Twilio, which is no surprise.

CSM – Playbooks

Playbooks are now even more focused on the current task at hand. The layout has been modified to provide contextual information, depending on the type of task the Agent currently handles within the Playbook. Thanks to that, Agents resolve issues more quickly and efficiently.

Playbooks can now be used for an entire workflow, including record creation. The corresponding playbook activity will be triggered, e.g., when a CSM Agent creates a new Case record, prompting them to gather additional information about the customer and their case.

The focused playbook activity view allows the Agents to see the entire workflow, focusing on the current stage and activity. The lifecycle panel displays the workflow stages and following tasks, while the main work area covers the current task’s content.

Dynamic related records can also be configured and displayed, eliminating jumping through multiple screens/tabs.

Source: ServiceNow

Find out more.

HR – Employee Center

The Employee Center is a new portal for your end users within ServiceNow, centralizing the experience from various departments like HR, IT, Legal, or Procurement.

It supports omnichannel self-service and support for your employees to make their experience the best possible. This modern, employee-focused environment boosts end users’ productivity and efficiency and empowers them to solve their issues.

You can easily link the HR Case ticket page with your Employee Center using the provided Portal Configuration module.

Note that if you sed an older version of the Employee Center, you will be advised to download the latest app from the ServiceNow Store. The app is supposed to be getting frequent updates and new features.

Source: SPOC

HR – Employee Journey Management

Managers and department leads can now create complex Employee Journeys, which span multiple departments for increased employee productivity, efficiency, and engagement.

Based on templates, dedicated workflows, and interactions, you can offer your Employees a personalized experience, measuring their satisfaction throughout their journey during the critical transitions.

Employee Mentors can support Employees within respective Journey Accelerator plans by managing, updating, and tracking to-do tasks.

The configuration starts with defining a new Plan type, for example, “Employee Relocation.” Plans contain various Stages as well as to-do Tasks. Task templates allow you to specify unique triggers for each task type. You can define the different stakeholders’ levels of access (Managers, Mentors, End Users). Managers will then use the defined Plan Types to create new Plans for specific Employees, assign Mentors, etc.

Source: SPOC

Source: SPOC

IT Asset Management – Asset Health Dashboard

The Asset Health addition to Hardware Asset Dashboard leverages ServiceNow’s single-source-of-truth platform and provides insights into the overall health of your Hardware Assets.

Asset Managers can receive recommended actions, alerts and gain insights based on the Asset’sAsset’s health. The dashboard comes with reports focused on the health and compliance of hardware asset records. It allows to identify any risks with Assets from Hardware or Consumable models which fall into one of the below categories:

• missing purchase information,
• could not be discovered within a month or are missing,
• scheduled for retirement/nearing end-of-life/requiring refresh,
• having most frequent incidents.

It is easy to filter the above database on Asset model or Location.

Source: ServiceNow

All roads lead to Rome

By the end of the year, you will be able to take advantage of all new improvements in the Rome release. You will have one place for your entire portfolio of the offerings for better tracking and insights. The scheduling and managing teams’ KPIs will become more smooth due to Workforce Optimization Enhancements. You will also get additional Workspace for tracking your Vendors’ performance, with significant analysis options.

Messaging Services will add more speed to getting things done. Your work will be quicker as well in CSM due to enhancements in Playbooks, and the HR process will be supported by the Employee Center and improvement in the Employee Journeys.

Are you interested in the upgrade? Contact us!

Explore Rome ServiceNow Release for Admins, Developers, and Security Teams.

The Rome release is just around the corner, so as usual, we took a sneak peek into the new instance to give you a summary of some great new features being added. This article focuses on the technical aspects primarily relevant for Admins, Developers, and Security teams.

App Engine Studio – Collaboration and Delegated Development

Those much-needed enhancements allow your App Engine developers to work better together. They help minimize the risk of impacting your platform by ensuring the right level of user access.

You can define collaboration descriptors (think “profiles”) such as Owner, Editor and then assign to them the required permissions. Possible types of permissions include Application Management (ability to access source control app versions or delete the app), File Type Access (accessing only specific App File types), Programming Tools (access to script fields),

Deployment (submitting the app to go live). These descriptors can be added for individual users or user groups as needed.

Source: SPOC

If you allow them, users will be able to invite other users to collaborate on their app! An admin must, of course, approve those invites. Overall, you gain much more control over what your (citizen or pro) Devs can do, all from one place.

This plugin can be installed and used either together or separately with Application Engine Studio.

Find out more.

Mobile App Builder

Mobile App Builder will be your new go-to place for Mobile Apps, replacing the current Mobile Studio. A powerful, streamlined interface allows to create and configure rich mobile experiences.

Mobile App Builder is based on the now UI Builder / Now Experience framework, similar to the already introduced, UI Builder-powered Workspace or Portal experiences. It will make it easier for your App creators to move around and tap into the power of this unified design framework and be more productive, providing guided experiences for a quick start. The Builder will manage and organize the flow of the screens which constitute your mobile app. It works together with the Mobile Card Builder, in which you can visually design the individual screens. Some of the benefits include:

• Easy to navigate the structure of your app artifacts,
• Guided configuration of mobile apps, prevention of misconfiguration, auto-population of necessary fields for data relationships,
• Quick and transparent insight into how your app artifacts connect and how they will be presented within the overall app.

This plugin can be integrated with the App Engine Studio but will also be made available on the Store as a standalone plugin at no additional cost.

UI Builder / Now Experience – Portals, Workspaces

A lot of enhancements are coming out in those areas as well.

In the previous Quebec release, it became possible to create new Portals using the UI Builder / Now Experience framework, in addition to Workspaces. Workspaces built using UI Builder now have configurable layouts, with each page being fully configurable as to the placement of individual components. This adds much-sought flexibility compared to previous versions of the Workspaces.

Both Experiences will now benefit from new UI Builder functionalities, some notable additions being:

• Viewport components.

With those, you can add custom pages or third-party interfaces within your UX Portal pages without actually modifying the pages themselves! The viewport allows you to create tabs with different content and manage those using UI builder’s “Manage content” mode without interfering with the parent page. The tabs can have their audience, making it easy to create page variants without worrying about the OOTB pages and upgrade processes. For example, if you add your tab and logic to the Record form page within a new viewport/tab, the out-of-the-box page will still be updated with new features while your new component remains unchanged.

Source: SPOC

Find out more.

• Themes – CSS Editor and Preview Page

You can use OOTB themes, extend those or create your custom themes. Themes also support CSS variables in the CSS editor, making applying your styling to a Workspace or a Portal much more flexible and straightforward. Your UI Builders can reference any Theme variables you define while styling individual components within the CSS Editor.

Source: SPOC

Find out more.

• Condition Builder

Whenever you add Data to your components, you now can use the full power of Condition Builder to specify which data should be fetched for your component. On top of static filters, you can bind conditions to dynamic values like data resources, page properties, client state parameters, etc.

Source: SPOC

Find out more.

Flow Designer

Error Handling

Make sure your Flows always run – even if they don’t run! It becomes possible with the new Error Handling feature, which allows you to trigger separate flow logic if the default logic fails for any reason.

You can add a system log, a notification to an admin, or perhaps automatically create an incident to be solved or manually assign a task to a team if integration fails within your flow.

The Error handling part can use Actions, Subflows, and Flow Logic, just like the main part. It is the high-level equivalent of a try-catch statement.

Source: SPOC

Find out more.

Disable logging

The considerable amount of logged execution details (on by default) which allowed to debug a flow quickly, was also causing instance performance problems. Many of our clients reported this, wishing there was a way to disable the logging or only enable it for specific flows.

In Rome, the logging is globally disabled by default and will only happen when a Flow is tested. You can still enable it globally for real Flow executions by updating the com.snc.process_flow.reporting.level property. What’s more useful is allowing this flow-by-flow to create a record in the Process Automation > Settings table.

Source: SPOC

Find out more.

Dev Studio – create UX Applications

It is now possible to create and manage UI Builder-powered experiences in the Dev Studio. Once the initial configuration record is created in Studio, a “Go to UI Builder” button further develops your Portal or Workspace in the UI Builder.

Source: SPOC

ATF – Headless Browser support

This new feature will help you further automate your testing, whether using a CI/CD pipeline or just running automated unit/regression tests using Automated Test Framework.

You will no longer need to manually open a browser for the Client Test Runner as part of your testing steps to test the User Interface functionality. It will now happen using the headless browser functionality in a Docker environment. This feature requires installing Docker on one of your servers and is supported for Linux and Windows environments. Thanks to that, you can test both backend and frontend without interruption for manual steps.

Find out more.

Security

Several interesting additions, enhancing the security of your ServiceNow Platform:

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) now supports hardware security keys and biometric authentication.

You can give your users more, safer ways to authenticate when accessing ServiceNow. Those include using hardware security keys (which you plug into a USB port on your device) and biometric scanners, such as fingerprint readers or facial recognition scanners.

In order to allow those, you need to install an “Integration – Web Authentication” plugin. Your end-users must first register an Authenticator application and then the specific Biometric scanning device (such as a built-in camera or fingerprint scanner) under Self Service > My Profile. After doing all this, they can see the registered method of authentication when prompted for MFA.

Find out more.

Data Export Metrics

With this new feature added to your Instance Security Center, you can control and monitor which users export data from your instance.

Utilizing the existing Data Classifications defined in your instance, under Export Metrics settings, you can determine which classifications should be included in the Classified exports metrics reports and or in security alerts/notifications (e.g., Confidential, Private).

Source: SPOC

You can then view a dedicated Chart and Metrics breakdown, which will inform you what data is the most exported one, which users export most of the data from your instance, how often that happens, and so on. Currently, the breakdowns are provided per User per Table.

Find out more.

Platform Encryption

Platform Encryption in Rome makes it possible for certain business logic to access encrypted data, which means you no longer have to make a compromise between encrypting data and loss of functionality. When specifying Cryptographic module access policies, you can now define if specific Scripts should have the possibility to decrypt field values “on the fly” and if the System user should be able to decrypt those values.

It also enables orchestration and reporting on those data, giving critical system processes runtime access to decrypted values.

Administrators must still approve or reject a request made by a script or a system user/process the first time it is asked, meaning you remain in control of what is allowed.

Find out more.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

But the Rome release will change your day-to-day ways of working. It will improve collaboration with developers through App Engine Studio, with more options for assigning access to different users. Better cooperation will be possible also thanks to new ways of configuring mobile apps with the Mobile App Builder. Enhancements in UI Builder will improve flexibility, enriching your flow with automatic error handling in Flow Designer and automated testing functionalities in Automation Test Framework. Predictive Intelligence will take the automation process to the next level, spotting which manual work can replace with automation tools. On top of that, you will get better security with Multi-Factor Authentication, Data Export Metrics, and Platform Encryption.

Explore Rome ServiceNow Release for Process Owners and Managers.