Automate Your Automatons with Flow Designer

Hello and welcome to K24's CCL1362, aptly named, and much easier to say, Automate your Automatons. This lab is the last in a series of labs known as the Builder Track. Every year for Creator Con, we put together this series of labs to take people who may be brand new to development all the way to a place where they can confidently start building custom apps on their own. For those who are already comfortable developing on the ServiceNow platform, this is your opportunity to hopefully learn about the new functionality we have in the Washington, D.C. release. The coolest thing about this track is that all the labs are gonna be using the exact same use case, and they pick up right where the preceding one left off. This gives you the best comparison to real world development that we can offer in three 100 minute sessions. And just like this one, all three are available on the digital experience. Simply search by these session numbers to continue your journey or type builder track into the search. I will be your final guide on this developer journey. My name is Scot Northern, and I'm a Senior Executive Enterprise Architect focusing on global business services and enterprise service management. This will be my third year at ServiceNow, where I've also worked as a creator workflow solution consultant. But prior to that, I was a service analysis admin, ServiceNow developer, and a customer just like yourself. It's 2024 and there's one thing seemingly on everyone's mind, AI and automation. It's grown past the state of being just a buzzword topic, permeating into not just everyone's work, but everyone's home as well. Your startup, Bot Butler, has noticed that there's been a massive uptick of smart homes worldwide. In fact, there are over 60 million in the U.S. alone and 300 million around the world. Between front door cameras, automated vacuums, color changing lights, and even wifi connected plugs, many households now have an arsenal of these types of devices. However, Bot Butler's researchers have also noticed a bit of a paradox. Each device, while automatic and smart, comes with a whole host of manual tasks people are now responsible for, tasks that are easily forgotten or missed. Filters need changing, lenses need cleaning, and warranties expire. Some of these smart devices proactively send push notifications to remind you of these tasks, but because all of these bots are manufactured by different companies, you now have to sacrifice space on your phone for all of their individual apps. That's a big mental load for something that should be making your life easier. This is where you and your startup Bot Butler come in. Your company plans to create an application on ServiceNow to help customers manage their smart home for all the devices they have. As lead developer, it's your responsibility to produce a beta test of Bot Butler that encompasses the following pieces of functionality. In Exercise One, you'll get an introduction to the new Workflow Studio application. This is included with the Washington, D.C. release and Workflow Studio provides a single location to access all of your process automation applications from Flow Designer and spokes to Process Automation Designer and decision tables. Best of luck on Exercise One. Please pause the video here and resume once you've completed the exercise. Welcome back. In Exercise Two, you'll construct your first flow for automating your processes in your application. This is done by creating a flow. Now, there are various ways that we could use to create flows on ServiceNow. In this exercise, we'll focus on one of the most common, and that's by using Flow Designer. What's a flow? Well, a flow is a sequence of actions to automate processes on the Now platform. A flow consists of a trigger and one or more actions. A trigger identifies what causes the flow to execute. Flows can be triggered by various different actions. The most common, record creation, and/or record update. Now, imagine this. Perhaps your robot vacuum cleaner has tipped over. Maybe the automated lights are simulating an EDM concert with unintended strobe effects. In any case, when there is a malfunction, we need to know. In this exercise, we'll create a flow that is triggered whenever the status of a device changes to malfunctioning. That flow will create a critical incident record, it will assign it to the service desk group, and then it will email the device owner of the situation. Let's jump into that. Best of luck on exercise two. Please pause the video here, and again, resume once you've completed the exercise. Nice job. In Exercise Three, you'll learn how to run a flow at set intervals by using the scheduled trigger type. Imagine this scenario. Warranties are a valuable piece of protection to have on all of your technology. If something breaks or isn't working as it should, a warranty can provide peace of mind that the manufacturer will make things right. As you can imagine, having a household full of smart devices means having a lot of warranties, and each warranty most likely has different expiration dates. Well, rather than manually checking expiration dates every day to ensure that they're still covered, we are going to create a scheduled flow that will check the warranty expiration date and alert the household if that warranty has expired. With that, it's time for Exercise Three. Best of luck, and once again, please pause the video here and resume once you've completed the exercise. Awesome work. One more exercise to go. In Exercise Four, we will explore the new proactive analytics trigger type. This trigger starts a flow when a proactive analytics KPI score or a KPI threshold value has been met or exceeded. Critical incidents are being opened whenever a device is malfunctioning, and it's very important that these get looked at promptly. If a critical incident stays open without being updated, the malfunctioning device will continue to malfunction and potentially cascade to other devices. In order to ensure that these incidents are updated regularly, we'll utilize the existing KPI, which looks at the percent of critical incidents updated in the last five days, and we'll escalate those incidents when our threshold is breached. Best of luck on your final exercise, Exercise Four. You know the drill. Congratulations. You have successfully completed not only Exercise Four, but the entirety of the final lab of the Knowledge 24 builder track. In summary, by completing this lab, hopefully you are walking away with these three takeaways. One, you saw a sneak peek of Workflow Studio, your single location to access all process automation applications. Two, you've learned how easily flows can be created and tailored to all of your workflow needs. Most importantly, you didn't write one line of code. And three, you learned about the various trigger types, and you used three of them, including the new proactive analytics trigger. Plus, you implemented some error handling to ensure a complete workflow which anticipates any issues. The functionality we covered here today is an integral part of the world of no-code/ low-code development on the ServiceNow platform. Again, as a reminder, this was the last stop on the builder track, a series of three labs all pertaining to this Bot Butler use case. Be sure to check out the digital experience further for Labs 1360 and 1361 to review how this fun story began. Thank you so very much for attending this lab today. Enjoy the rest of Creator Con, the builder track and Knowledge 24.