hello and welcome to service now's low code capability deep dive in this nine-part series we're going to take a look at the various aspects of the service now platform that Empower creators of all skill levels with the ability to rapidly build highquality scalable and easy to govern apps let's turn our Focus now to process and business logic design workflow automation is at the core of nearly every service now app and for that reason we offer a breadth of options to our customers to help them address any process need before diving into specific capabilities let's briefly touch on the options we provide to various personas involved with process and business logic design as mentioned in the developer tools section our Flagship loow code IDE app engine Studio brings together everything necessary to build any type of automation on the service now platform while also providing context to other aspects of low code appdev like data and user experiences and security we have also recently introduced a new automation specific studio called workflow Studio designed specifically for automation designers and admins this facilitates collaboration between subject matter experts as individuals focused on low code app development will have the complete Suite of service now capabilities at their fingertips while individuals focused on select portions of an app like Integrations or decision matrices can leverage workflow studio for a focused perspective both app engine studio and workflow Studio use the exact same technology under the hood so all automation created in workflow Studio can be used in low code apps and any automation developed in app engine Studio can be opened in workflow Studio service now provides a modular approach to automation facilitating a high degree of reuse and ease of Maintenance we offer a variety of automation options but at a glance here's a common scenario at the highest level of process orchestration our customers can leverage playbooks these playbooks can contain any number of automated actions compartmentalized in an entity we call a flow these flows can make calls to low code integration connectors automated functions we call subflows and actions or an automated decision Matrix these modular components can be used together as outlined by this example or stand alone to serve any type of function let's dive into each capability starting with process orchestration using our playbooks this is a no code Builder designed for process owners to create and manage complex workflows using a bpmn like experience playbooks are suitable for quick facilitated actions or even very long running processes spanning months or even years using either view users can add conditional logic and activities playbooks are broken up into two main parts stages and activities with stages being the container for activities both stages and activities support any degree of parallel or sequential execution the activities can range from simple outof the-box service Now actions like creating a task or sending an email all the way to complex function calls with nested references by using this option to include all automation assets we get the full range of low code automation options on the platform including direct access to our library of over 210 low code spokes or integration connectors we also provide a nice placeholder option that allows process own owners to stub out their entire process upfront and easily swap it out for working automation as it becomes available playbooks can be used in the background to facilitate process execution but are most often used to handle both structured and unstructured cases and work completion we saw earlier how these playbooks can be surfaced in the service catalog to facilitate fulfillment but they're most commonly used in the context of our workspaces as you can see here the Playbook gives the end user a streamlined user experience to complete any type of task with Automation and guidance infused throughout this approach takes a low code application far beyond a form and can drive immense levels of consistency and efficiency with any type of work to handle unstructured cases we offer a concept called optional activities which can be configured at a global level or for a specific stage during runtime if a user encounters something that deviates from The Standard Process they can use these optional activities to handle any circumstance these are most most often used to provide catchall automation sometimes involving manual intervention to address Edge case scenarios next let's look at the building blocks of automation are flows and subflows flows are trigger based so in this case the automation is activated whenever a lease record is created or updated subflows act like low code function calls they can be sent input objects like strings or references and then can return outputs once run these objects execute a series of actions and conditional logic our comprehensive set of flow logic gives low Cod developers access to all of the sophisticated options available to Pro developers in an easy to use graphical capacity the actions available here span outof the-box service now functions low code connectors to external systems and custom automation built by the customer using this action object you can easily incorporate our intelligent document processing robotic process Automation and even generative AI into any low code app automation with ease one important note is that we have testing built directly into flow designer so you can run your flow on a sample record of your choice to ensure it's working as expected we also provide a way to download an image of your flow should the need arise another great part about working with flow designer is that we have generative AI recommendations built right into the tool depending on the context of your automation flow recommendation will provide potential next steps whether that's an action or conditional logic we give our customers a low code IDE to create custom actions with the ability to leverage a wide range of options including service Now actions like record lookup handy utilities like logging and Json and payload Builder along with a number of integration capabilities like parsing Json interacting with po shell rest SFTP jdbc SSH and more as we can see by this action for creating an invoice line we make an initial rest call using our easy request Builder the response to that call can be easily viewed and leveraged in subsequent steps using our Json parser and then we can perform additional actions as necessary such as a script step to work with the data the final stages of an action until error evaluation and an output which can be used in a low code capacity within a flow or a subflow once created anyone with appropriate permissions can call these actions in their own low code app allowing our customers to build custom libraries of unique reusable actions specific to their business for the most custom code-based automation our customers can leverage scripting in a variety of places throughout the now platform you saw a moment ago how you can embed custom code into a modular action but we also provide the ability for our customers to create business rules UI policies server side scripts and client side scripts a business rule is a server side script that runs anywhere a record is displayed inserted updated deleted or when a table is queried a typical business rule might execute a script after a user updates an incident or escalates the priority of a change request a client script runs custom JavaScript on the client side to apply logic based on user actions or form events UI scripts are reusable JavaScript code that can be included in pages and forums across the service now platform there are more areas where custom code can be used based on business rules but these are the primary mechanisms now that we've covered the traditional way to build playbooks flows and low-level automation let's look at how generative AI is completely transforming this process for our customers service now's generative AI offering is called now assist and it spans all of our out-of-the-box workflows we have a curated selection of gen skills designed for our creators that we package in an offering called now assist for Creator this cludes the app generation and catalog generation capabilities we covered earlier in addition to a variety of automation capabilities we have Playbook generation which allows users to enter a text prompt to derive an entire business process via our playbooks this lets users get started extremely fast and can help bring a manual process perhaps one maintained in a standard operating procedure document into the digital world in just a few moments we also have flow generation which offers even more functionality after providing a prompt the user is presented with a visual preview of their flow along with the ability to reprompt if they so desire this flow generation capability allows users to specify connections to external systems like Microsoft teams or jira and can even incorporate their own custom actions and subflows Via our retrieval augmented generation or rag capability we also offer code generation which allows users to enter a comment in any service now code editor and generate suitable code based on service now proprietary model called the now llm this gives our customers access to not only highly capable code but code generated with a high degree of adherence to service now best practices let's shift our attention now to decision modeling and automation we offer a tool called decision Builder that allows our users to create a decision Matrix of any complexity to take a series of inputs process a decision based on conditional logic and then Supply an output as you can see in this example we take a record reference on a material Master data task and then move it to the correct assignment group and state based on the con the contents of that record this decision table can be easily exported to excel managed by a process expert and then imported back into the now platform to enable simple distributed ownership over decisions these decisions can then be referenced anywhere on the now platform whether in a Playbook flow or even custom code to manage all of these various processes we provide a Consolidated operations view this provides a rundown of both Playbook and flow executions allowing admins to dive into full low-level detail as necessary for instance we can view every aspect of this flow and see the exact state of every step in the execution we also offer a more comprehensive solution to manage an entire automation Center of Excellence via our product automation Center this unified Command Center helps our customers boost multivendor automation value simplify automation life cycle management monitor their entire hyper automation landscape and support business outcomes by maximizing uptime and preventing automation failures the automation Center homepage is divided into three main parts the overview page which provides a highlevel summary perfect for automation leaders the executions dashboard which outlines the status of all monitored Automation and the value page which allows our customers to align automation projects to realized business value in the way of both cost and Time Savings automation Center works by supporting the full life cycle of automation activities from the intake prioritization and buildout of new automation requests to the monitoring maintenance and retiring of active automation automation Center currently supports monitoring both RPA based automation including service now and third party along with service now flows all of these objects are tracked using our industry leading configuration management database also known as the cmdb this is achieved by making each aspect of automation a configuration item allowing admins to treat automation components just like any other Mission critical piece of infrastructure this means our customers benefit from all the monitoring and dependency mapping capabilities we offer with our off-the-shelf it products in the context of their custom low code apps and automation for instance you can track upstream and downstream applications inde dependencies and receive proactive notification if a business service your low code app relies on is experiencing service degradation from the service now perspective low code app development is not a point intime activity but rather a continuous process involving feedback prioritization and iteration one of the best tools we have to support this approach is process mining using process mining our customers can unlock hidden inefficiencies in their processes whether that involves an activity existing purely on service now a third party system or a mix of both by leveraging our graphical process analysis tool the analyst workbench one can easily identify bottlenecks in the flow of work and use that insight to improve a low code app or workflow here we can quickly see the most prominent lag in our process occurs between the pending sales data and pending purchasing data stages with an average completion time of one day you can even use various types of filtering to determine if this is a spefic specific problem in this case we can evaluate the differences between GEOS this can provide the perfect data-driven insight to fuel feature development on a low code app users can even open an automation request from within this view that flows directly into automation Center a great example of transforming a manual bottleneck using service now can be seen using our intelligent document processing capability document intelligence this capability combines Advanced optical character recognition technology with AI and machine ma learning to power semi and fully automated document workflows admins and low code developers can set up document processing jobs that can learn the structure of documents over time you can use this interface to confirm field accuracy and using machine learning it can adapt to even major changes in document structure in the instance that a document template is modified doc Intel will provide a confidence level upon completing a processing job and you can then specify a confidence Threshold at which point fully automated processing will kick in Doc Intel can be incorporated into any low code application by simply leveraging its actions within playbooks or flows we even provide an automatic mechanism to generate flows based off document processing jobs in the case where intelligent document processing outof the-box workflow automation or even API based Integrations can't do the job we provide robotic process automation capabilities as well our RPA Solutions help our customers automate Legacy system integration and routine actions truly unifying their automation landscape on the service now platform we provide a rich set of tools to develop bot automation using a low code designer similar to our other builders this tool provides a range of easy to use tools including connectors to Common desktop applications templates and of course integration to flow designer using flow designer it's easy to pass data to and from these Bots using our secure and reliable desktop agent we also provide a purpose-built RPA Hub that allows admins to manage the specific details of their service now RPA deployment including Focus areas to manage the build Administration and monitoring of their Bots regardless of the process or business logic need service now provides a comprehensive set of tools to help our low code developers transform their workflows with ease thanks for watching and join us for part four of our series as we explore application and data connectivity