Paris release is the latest version of the platform of platforms, where ServiceNow offers new features and integrations for process facilitation and cross-team collaboration. If you’re an admin, process owner, or a manager, you’ve come to the right place! We’ve chosen 12 features and integrations, giving you here an overview of the productivity boosters you may find exceptionally valuable.
1/12 Process Automation Designer
Process Automation Designer allows Business Process Owners to easily create and manage cross-enterprise, end-to-end process workflows without any code. Multiple separate flows and actions can be connected to create one unified process flow.
You can pass information between different stages of your process, visualize and manage the activities comprising your process. Those flows or actions are then gathered using Lanes – typically to represent the different Actors taking part in your Process.
This provides you, as a Process Owner, with a high-level overview and control of all your distributed Flows created in Flow Designer by Developers. In Addition, you can work with Workspace Admins to create new features called Playbooks (see below). Those can help to guide your Agents or End Users on how to follow your process – step by step.
2/12 Playbook Experience
Playbooks are smart little guidebooks for your Fulfillers or other Users, which facilitate the handling of specific tickets according to… well, your playbook (ensuring best practice and adherence to your process). This adds a “to-do” type of list to the Agent Workspace whenever a ticket is opened and provides a streamlined view, combining both the ticket or other relevant data with the actions to be taken by the Agent.
For example, one step can show a ticket form to edit some fields, another step can require additional input (comments) from the Requestor, another one can show relevant Knowledge Article, and so on. Every step can then be “Marked as Closed”. This is not unlike the Guided Setup you might have seen for ITSM or ITOM configuration.
You can use an existing default Experience with its content renderers or create your own ones. Although technically Playbooks have been available in ServiceNow for some time now (e.g. for Security Incidents), the Paris release provides this platform-wide, with better management and configuration tools.
3/12 Predictive Intelligence Workbench
The current trend is that AI should serve anyone, and anyone should be able to use AI. With this in mind, Paris gives us the Workbench dedicated to the low-code approach. With it, you can configure and fine-tune your Machine Learning solutions, without any prerequisite knowledge of ML theory or coding skills.
You can select one of the pre-configured “typical use-case” templates or start from scratch. Again, the experience is very similar to that of Guided Setups. Typically, you first create and train one or more different models. Then you evaluate the results and make fine-tune adjustments. After testing the models, you can select the model with the best performance or accuracy, and deploy that model into your business process.
4/12 Change Success Score
You can now analyze the success rate of all changes, which is automatically calculated for your Change Teams based on pre-defined formulas, taking into account things like successful changes, unsuccessful changes, changes with issues, P1, P2, or P3 Incidents generated by the respective Team’s changes. The scores are calculated daily using the familiar Performance Analytics engine. You get a new Change Success Score PA dashboard where you can observe the trends from a high-level point of view.
But you can also see this for every change – on the Change form, there will be a mini-dashboard shown when you click the new icon next to “Assignment Group”. If a specific Team’s score is high, change approvals can be automated – as there should be no need to review every change manually for high-performing teams, thus saving a lot of valuable time.
5/12 Analytics Center for Agent Workspace
This brings the Performance Analytics capabilities to your Agent’s Workspace. You can ensure that they have their critical KPIs and targets immediately available to them, so they can proactively control them. Agents can filter the indicators, watch the daily score, and change trends, according to your Performance Analytics scores configuration. Every Indicator can be drilled-down into, to see KPI details.
6/12 Source Control for global apps development
Now you can use Source Control (e.g. GitHub) also while developing global apps from the Studio. Although we recommend creating scoped apps, sometimes this option could come in handy, allowing you to build new features or customize your platform, with style.
7/12 Portal Analyzer
We feel that this is a stub of something potentially much bigger. Could this be the first step in the direction to provide comprehensive User Interaction analysis for your Service Portals, similar to the Mobile Analytics for native mobile apps?
Currently, this little feature churns out a list of all widgets used on your service portals, together with the information on the level of customization for each widget (ready-made, customized, cloned, new), number of views, and users who have viewed each widget. It can be pretty helpful to determine which widgets are not-so-helpful or how your customization impacts interaction rate. To use this, you need to install the plugin, fire the “Portal Analyzer” scheduled job, and then view the records in the “Service Portal Analyzer Entries” table.
8/12 Software Asset Management – MSP Support
The SAM application was enhanced with support for Managed Service Providers, allowing you to deliver hosted Software Asset Management services. Multiple clients’ software data and services can co-exist in a single, multi-tenant instance now. Domain separation provides for safe separation of their data and processes. You can easily switch to specific customer domains and perform any actions there, resulting in your single source-of-truth platform for a global SAM offering. If you are not an MSP company but still think about separating your data (or are using Domain Separation already), this might be good news for you as well.
9/12 Telecommunications Service Management & Network Performance Management
ServiceNow launched a whole new industry-facing offering with the Paris release – TSM and TNPM, which supports the telecom industry. This offering combines CSM Pro and ITOM capabilities with Telecommunication-specific capabilities.
Some highlights worth mentioning are eBonding for Telecommunications – this is an OOTB integration to synchronize your instance as a Telecom service provider, with your B2B client’s instances. This will help you engage your clients more, provide better service while keeping development and maintenance costs low. It fosters your client’s self-service by allowing them to request services directly from their instances.
Dedicated, network-based workflows are best-practice workflows designed based on the experience of the biggest players on the market. They support the resolution of network-initiated Incidents and Changes to services. They have the necessary support for multiple API interfaces as well as sufficient business logic to maximize your time-to-value potential.
10/12 Agent Workspace for HRSD
We will just mention here that HR Service Delivery now has a dedicated Agent Workspace. This should facilitate turning your HR cases into success stories even more. HR Workspace increases your HR Agent’s efficiency and comes with other nice additions like the HR Playbook or AI-powered Agent Assist – helping them to close the cases faster.
11/12 Single Sign-On: OpenID Connect (OIDC) support
This is a pretty cool addition, allowing you to create “Quick SSO login” options directly on your login page. By doing this you allow your users to choose an external Identity Provider they would like to use, in the same way, a lot of commercial services allow you to log in using your Facebook or Google account (…not that we recommend using Facebook as your ServiceNow IDP. But it should work).
12/12 Mobile Apps – new components
The Paris release adds a couple of handful new Component types for your native mobile apps:
- Campaigns – create content-rich, complex, targeted communications for your Users to keep them engaged.
- Native Dashboards – support for mobile-optimized charts & KPI dashboards.
- Scheduled Offline – manage regular app caching intervals, includes mobile app settings to handle the offline mode.
- Actionable notifications – this is really good. Your Users can now take quick actions from their main phone screen whenever they receive new push notification – no need to even open the mobile app! Approving tickets has never been so quick.
- Mobile filters – similar to standard UI, you can now filter which records should appear on your mobile screen.
If you’d like to compare Paris to the previous ServiceNow Platform releases, you can check them here: Orlando (Q1, 2020) | New York (Q3, 2019) | Madrid (Q1, 2019).
