Knowledge 2022
227 sessions
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hack your environment to work for you ✶✩
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to hack your environment to work for you. My name is Maria Gabriela Ochoa Perez Waechter. Some of you may know me as MGOPW, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a 2022, 2021 ServiceNow Developer MVP. And I've got ADHD combined, PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depression recurrent with stress. I'm a Venezuelan-American immigrant, and I'm part of the LGBTQIA+ community. We're getting a little bit personal in this session today. So I wanted to get all of that out of the way. And I wanted to first share with you a quote that really helped me realize some things about myself. This is from the Disability Science Review, but developmental disabilities are not a disease. They are a mismatch between a person's capabilities and the requirements of their life situation and culture. It helped me realize that my ADHD is really only a problem because I live in a society where I'm expected to sit for eight hours straight and work, and I just can't do that. So it's story time. When I was young, I really struggled in school, and I had no idea why. I got perfect grades, but I could never focus on any one thing. And I could never make my mind up about what major I wanted to be in. I switched majors because I love doing everything, and I couldn't stick to one or the other. I went between advertising, psychology. My dad always tried to get me to do art, but I wanted to make money, so I want computer science in the end. When I was part of the computer science program at my school, I looked around me and I saw just a bunch of men, who could sit there and stare into the matrix and pull out lines of code and somehow just be able to work for hours on end, when I couldn't even focus for 30 minutes at a time. It took me a while to get everything figured out. I went to a couple of doctors and a whole bunch of therapy. And I was finally able to accept myself for who I am and really keep working on my own mental health. Somewhere through that, I ended up getting into a car accident, and I'm still going to school. One day, I'll finish it. And then I ended up getting to ServiceNow. I finally found a place where I could do all the things I wanted to do, and I could do them all at once. I could get to interact with people. I was getting to be creative to the Service Portal, and I got to write code like I had always thought I couldn't do. But how did I get there? A lot of coping mechanisms or alternatively, how the Job Accommodations Network calls them accommodations. Now there's a lot of things that you need to consider, and you should work with your boss or your manager when you do this. But you have to figure out what parts you're struggling in your career with. And I've been very lucky to have had some amazing mentors and role models in my career that have been willing to help me out. One of the hardest things that I just cannot do is prioritize tasks. I'm really great at taking notes, so I'm really great at paying attention and retaining information. But I don't know where to put it. I don't know how to organize it, and I don't know what needs to come first. So I've always asked my managers for help, figuring out which of these 37 tasks need to be done first. Other stuff that has worked for me in the past is being provided a structured breaks, being provided private workspace time, minimizing random things that I have to do as part of my job. To focus on specific things and specific blocks of time has really helped me out. An uninterrupted work time with no meetings has been just one of the biggest and best things ever. You can also do to-do lists or have meetings at the start of the week in order to prioritize the rest of your week and other assistive technology, like pomodoro timers are a lifesaver. They're little cubes or you can even have digital timers that you do pomodoro sprints with. So it could be 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break, and then 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break. And this has really helped me out because I've been able to just really hard focus on just working, and then I've been able to disconnect for a little bit and then be able to reconnect. And I found that I have been incredibly productive during those pomodoro times. Now there's something else that I ended up figuring out, and that takes me to this code. It's a lot of code, isn't it? It's too much for me sometimes, and this is only a third or a fourth of the final length of the script. And while I was working on this, it was awful because I just have to kept-- I just kept coming back and then leaving, and then coming back and leaving. And every time that I had to get my mind back in the coding mindset and back into the code, it took me at least 30 minutes to really figure out what the heck was going on. Because there's so many words on the screen, all of it makes sense individually to me, but it all doesn't make sense at the same time. So I started looking around because there had to be some way to figure this out. Somebody had had to figured something out with this by now. So that made me turn to Visual Studio Code. It's a great text editor. I highly recommend you use it. There's a bunch of awesome plug-ins, and one of them is called Highlight. Highlight lets you use regex to highlight different things in your code. The suite's called Highlight. So I used it and the help of some of my really good friends, thank you guys so much, to highlight previous, current, and my log statements and change their colors. You can make them be really obvious. You can use background colors. You can change the color, the font way. You can change the color looks on the sidebar, a whole bunch of stuff, and it will just do it automatically for you when you load your script. And it basically turns this giant block of text into something a lot more legible for me. To you, this might not make sense and in my look, even worse. But to me, it's really helped me out because I'm now able to-- well, first, I can look at the entire line of code. And that log line in line 4, it doesn't register in my brain because it's so close to the background color. But I know it's there when I need to reference it. So suddenly, the size of it looks a bit smaller. I also discovered that I could use emoji inside of ServiceNow scripts. So I now use emojis to figure out logic. With this script, I was working on a lot of previous and current objects inside of a business rule, and I kept getting confused about the if and else-if statements because they had to be compared to each other. One had to be empty. One had to be non-empty, and there was a whole bunch of different cases where I needed to do something specific according to the state of previous and current. So I created these little comments at outlines, where it tells me if it's two X's, I know they both don't exist. And if it's an X and a check mark, I know that previous exists, it doesn't exist, and then current exists, and so on and so forth. Because I don't know why, in my mind, I just cannot read if nil or dot nil and remember the meaning of it right away. It always takes me a second to read logic that out in my brain, and I've realized that that was just wasting a whole bunch of time. So when we compare the two, one of them might look better to you. One of them looks way better to me, and that's what this whole session's been about. It's been about you working to find what works for you, and what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. So I highly encourage you all to take a look at the Job Accommodations Network. A lot of us don't put a term to the struggles that we face day in and day out. Some of us choose to go with mental health therapy, and others choose to find other methods of treatment. But we all end up having our own individual struggles. Even if it looks like nobody else around you is struggling, trust me, they are. Look up imposter syndrome. And then look up the Job Accommodations Network to really figure out how you can help yourself succeed because there's only going to be one person invested in you, and that's going to be yourself. And you need to take that time for yourself. One last thing that I wanted to mention is something that a lot of people come up to me and say is that they can't find any jobs that are looking for people with their experience. They don't know how to get into the field. And they don't want to apply to this job because they feel like they'll be rejected. But what I want you to know is that I have never applied for a job that I was fully perfect for. I have never met the job requirements. They always asked for a degree, which I don't have. They always ask for 20 some years of experience for an entry level job, which nobody has. And what you really just need to do is just apply. You just need to do it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it. Yesterday, you said today, do it, and just join us over at SNDevs, where we all love to hang out and help each other. We're the largest independent ServiceNow community. You can find the link on the slide right behind me. And finally, make sure you go check out WomenNow.Dev. I'm going to be posting a blog post going further into my experiences, the specific accommodations that have really helped me out throughout my career. And I'm going to be posting a lot more resources that you can tap into and other blog posts to really help you in your journey in getting started or wherever you might be on helping yourself succeed. So thank you so much for watching. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
007 A bond strategy to enable citizen development
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Knowledge 2022. You're watching a brief session titled 007, A Bond Strategy for Citizen Development. In this brief session, we will give you an eagle-eye view of citizenship development methodology. By the end of the session, our main aim is to push the idea that is innovation is not invention. Also, improvement or automation of current processes has better return on investment. I am Ashutosh Munot. I am a certified ServiceNow Technical Architect and two times Dev MVP, four times Community MVP. Currently, I'm working with an end group in Netherlands as a ServiceNow architect. I'm accompanied by another Dev MVP and a good friend of mine. Dhruv, please introduce yourself. Hi, everyone. My name is Dhruv Gupta. And as Ashutosh mentioned, I am also a ServiceNow Developer MVP. And I currently work as a ServiceNow Architect at Accenture. We are pretty excited for two decisions, so let's start with the agenda. So today, we'll begin with an exploration of citizen development. What is it? Why use it? What are the advantages of using it on the platform of platforms that is ServiceNow for citizen development. Once you are settled with the theoretical aspect of the program, then we'll share our experiences, the challenges we faced, and most importantly, the mitigation strategy along with some key learnings. And finally, there are resources you can utilize along the journey of your citizen development program. So if that sounds interesting, Ashutosh, please guide us through why citizen development is important. Oh, that's a very broad question. And every new initiative starts with a problem, so let's start with the problem. I will summarize this with some numbers. Basically, need for citizen development can be broken into two things-- business challenges and IT challenges. Let's first read the mind of business leaders. As per the research by Mendix, it says 50% of business feel that they are unable to meet their key strategic goals. And then, almost same amount of business leaders find it hard to grab the opportunity of cost reduction, or I should say, scope of improvements. And the usual culprit behind this are IT challenges. Let's see not-so-shocking numbers. When we say not-so-shocking numbers, that means we have experienced this personally, where 77% of tech leaders think that they are struggling because the pipeline is too huge, and stakeholders tend to go away from the requirement over the period of the time. And to cater to those needs, we end up having external parties for our rescue so that they can help us to reduce the pipeline. If you see, 77% of business leaders think that it's very hard in today's era to reduce the cost because of the huge pipeline. Hence, it is very hard to neglect also. These are my thoughts. What do you think, Dhruv? Definitely, these numbers are not shocking for me as well. The reason that I want to highlight is that we always tend to ignore our internal resources who can be a better fit in our IT ecosystem because they're aware of the ecosystem. They know the ecosystem. They know the actual crux of the problem. B, they tend to be less costly-- I should say that-- than if you go for a specialist role. For some domains, you need specialization but not for all. You can cross-train or develop the culture of citizen development. That was an interesting point, Dhruv. So please tell us what exactly citizen development is all about. Sure, man. Citizen development is a business process that encourages non-IT trained employees to become software developers using, how should I say this, IT sanctioned low-code/no-code platform to create business applications. This approach to software development enable employees despite their lack of formal education in coding to become citizen developers. That was the official definition. But in layman's terms, citizen development is basically a process of identifying your citizen developers that can optimize and solve bottlenecks for you using a local platform. So Ashutosh, I know you have an experience on identifying citizen developers, so tell us who is a good citizen developer as per your. Oh, a citizen developer can be anyone within the organization-- a non-developer or a non-IT guy. So basically, our stakeholders can be also citizen developers who can tap into low-code platform to build a specific business application. Since they are facing problems on day-to-day basis, their response is more agile towards the problem, and they can build the app quickly, and they are very quick to the dynamic business landscape. So citizen developers are different from traditional developers. How? You can see on the screen, there are some differences between both developers. So I would say, citizen developers are empowered business users who create new or change existing business applications without the need to involve IT department. So please take a pause and read this slide for a minute so that you understand the difference between citizen developer and the traditional developer. Thanks. Dhruv, you have been an advocate for ServiceNow, especially for citizen development. Why is that so? Please tell us. Yeah, man, I have been recommending ServiceNow, especially for citizen developer and because ServiceNow has literally almost everything that you need for developing an app that run a low-code/no-code approach. And it is scalable. And you can go and ask for your compliances as well-- what else you want. I can talk about this whole day. But in the interest of time, I'll just highlight a few capabilities but the platform has made most of. To begin with, first one is your Flow Designer. This is the main contributor to low-code/no-code functionality, where NLU plays an important role. The drag-and-drop feature in Flow Designer requires no coding and makes it easy for new developers to understand it quickly. Second one is your Integration Hub-- major player to automate things with 200-plus [INAUDIBLE] available out of the box. Automation is the key aspect of why people want to go for citizen development. This is because they want to handle their own pipeline and catalog forms which can automate their tasks quickly. Next one is App Engine Studio. It's a development tool for creators of varying skill levels to build applications that meet immediate needs of your organization. Next one-- my favorite-- UI Builder, a platform for designing and engaging UI experience. Its capability grows exponentially with the level of skill set our developer has. But it definitely caters to more than what is required. Apart from this, we have low code capabilities like virtual agent, machine learning, process optimization, et cetera, et cetera. So it's basically enhanced the arsenal for developer. You can find more details about them in the Resource section. So in short, in short, ServiceNow and citizen development is a perfect match for my site. Great, Dhruv. So this was all about the theoretical knowledge for citizen development, who are citizen developers. Let's deep dive into practicality now. We started our journey a couple of years ago, and we stumbled onto various issues out of which we have got some must do to, make the process moot and extract the best return on investment from the platform. First of all, choose the right use case-- that is those can be developed with no or very less involvement of IT resources. Citizen development is very exciting. And because of that, we end up trying to involve or overdo a few things. Basically, identification of resources and setting up guardrails-- that is governance-- along with their initial trainings are the key to success. We need to understand it's a journey. It's not a one-time affair. So don't do a big code life or onboarding of the teams. But start with a small team and then build upon it. Sharing your success story is equally important because it acts as a catalyst to motivate other team members and citizen developers within the organization. Having the right tool does not always solve all the problems. You always need a right approach along with the right tool to get maximum return on investment. So Dhruv, please enlighten us with the recommended path for this. Yeah, as you mentioned, it's a journey. It's definitely a journey. It's not one-step process or one big goal life. I usually divided into four steps. Step one, prepare the environment and culture. When we say, put on the guardrails, we mean to clearly state what is expected from citizen developers and what they are not allowed to do. And the next step is the enablement of the team. Based on your organization's vision, set up a training plan for citizen developers. And in that training, don't forget to include some challenging activities. And once someone gets the basic skill set, I usually recommend-- or this is something that has been beneficial for us as well-- give them an instance to sharpen their skill set. They can use their PDAs as well. But give them an instance before putting them into some project work. It would be most important for their confidence. And now, it's time for bringing them into the mainstream, assign requirements to allow them to take responsibility. Make sure your IT team is there to help them out but not building on their own. And finally, it's time to scale up. We use the components as it's built. And don't forget to share the success of this journey. By the end, you will realize that you simply use your employee to build something that is cost-effective, quick, and, most importantly, it empowered your employee. Great. Thanks, Dhruv, for showing us the path. Now, as we are approaching the end of the presentation, let's take a moment to summarize some key takeaways of the presentation. If you remember, we had an issue of use pipeline, and we also saw how to solve it. And the answer is citizen development, which is the need of an hour. Also, we saw how ServiceNow will act as a tool or act as a solution to help implement citizen development and how it can help you to bring maximum return on investment. Also, change enablement governance is very important to explain the importance of citizen development and how ServiceNow can cater to this. On your screen, you can see one QR code. It will take you to one of the community articles that we created for this session. It contains link for all the articles that we read while doing this research, while setting up this session, and all the recommended webinar sessions-- whatever we want to pass on. Also, can use this article to put on your queries, and we would love to answer them. Thank you for patience. We look forward to interact with you all. Keep learning, and enjoy Knowledge 2022. [MUSIC PLAYING]
A ServiceNow discovery spoke to setup workflows for your IT operations
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. Welcome to this breakout session on the topic ServiceNow, Discovery Spoke. This session is about Discovery Spoke that I've prepared some time back. And with this spoke, it allows you to set up workflows for your IT operations. So my name is Alikutty Abdulrazak, and I work as a senior solution architect at Wipro. My functions include as a TUE lead for Wipro. I handle all the solutions and the prod offerings. Apart from that, I'm also involved in supporting the pre sales and delivery teams. But my experience, I have over 12 years of experience in the IT industry. I've worked in different roles as in service delivery and also in pre sales. On my expertise here, I have [? family ?] worked on different IP workflow products, employee workflow, as well as created workflow products. And I've been also part of community MVP for the past five years, and also part of the developer MVP for past two years from now. So something about by myself. Going to the topic here. So the discovery spoke. So this is a custom spoke which I have built, and this allows you to perform horizontal discovery via flow designer. So being working with different item implementation for a long time, there has been always a need to-- as you know, you have to set up workflows for your IT operations. There are different use cases that you can come across during your implementation. With this spoke, it allows you to set up no code, low code workflow for your IT operation. As a part of this spoke, I have two different actions that have been built. First action is about discovering any device in your infrastructure. It's called as discovered by IP address, and it allows you to discover any of your servers or your network devices within your infrastructure. There is also a second action within the spoke, which is get status details. It is the corresponding spoke related to the discovery, and with this it allows you to extract the discovery result and you can validate whether your discovery is successful or not. A couple of use cases where in real time you could use it. One of the main common use cases that we have is the infrastructure change. So let's say you have to make a change to your server, for example, adding more CPU or adding a disk. Whenever the specific change is implemented by your IT team, you can use this spoke to trigger a discovery to your infrastructure. Since you have the server as your CI on the change, you could access the IP of the CI and trigger this workflow. And with this workflow, what it gives you is the latest changes in your infrastructure. So let's say you have added more disk or more memory. The same things get discovered at the same time, and this allows you to validate that your change has been successful. You can set up such workflows for change. Apart from this, other common use cases that I've come across is when you have alert management. So if you need to remediate the alert by restarting a server, then this is a case where you could use this spoke to rediscover your server and make sure you know your server is back up to normal. That is another use case where you could use it. Another use case is regarding software installation and uninstallation. So whenever you have a software installation happening in one of your servers or any other infrastructure, this spoke would, again, be used to discover whether the software has been installed or not. It would act like a failover, for example, you have a CCM to do this. In case of that installation fail, with the help of this discovery spoke you could actually open a path to the asset team to validate it. So it's kind of an instance failover. Apart from this, you can have it used for any of your orchestration uses with your servers or within your infrastructure, or also on any other discovery request. Now this spoke is available in the share repository. You could search for ServiceNow Discovery and download it. You can also import from GitHub in your source control. Additionally I've also put up a documentation for this in the community blog. So this is the spoke, which is available in share repository here. You can search it for ServiceNow Discovery Spoke and download it from here. The GitHub URL and also the documentation related to the spoke is available within this repository, so you could access all the details regarding it. I'll now show you a couple of demonstration use cases on how you could use the specific spoke for your discovery, for infrastructure discovery. Coming back to my instance here. So I have the spoke already set up in my personal instance here. So you can see that this is the primary action that I have. This is called as a Discovery by IP address. So you can discover any devices from your infrastructure using this. You need to provide the IP address from your CMDB. So primarily, a prerequisite is you already have discovery set up in your instance. So I'll just show you how to test this. When you test it, you need to provide a specific IP address, so I'll be giving a sample IP address here. The second input that you have here is the source. You can specify any task number which is associated with it, which you are trying to relate it to. And also have the option to select an application. So this is a [INAUDIBLE] server that is associated with your discovery. For now, you select this as all and I'll try to test this. Once I click on Run Test, it would actually start triggering discovery on an infrastructure. A discovery status record would be created. If I open the results of this, you can see here that the discovery status has already initiated. The discovery of this device is in progress. Now if I navigate back to my instance here under discovery status, you will be able to see that a discovery is already started here, which is active, which has been initiated by the spoke. And if I go to it, you'll be able to see all the results regarding it. So as soon as this is triggered, system will try to access the device information. Once the discovery is completed you could use my second spoke, which I've built, to access the discovery result. So let's see what the second spoke is about and how you could use it. We're going back to the second spoke here. The second spoke is get status details, where you could provide your discovery status with just an output from your first spoke and then see what are the results. So let me show you how the results would be here. So I would be selecting a discovery status and I would click on Run Test here. I would start extracting the discovery of the results from my status record. And if you see the results here, you can see I will get the complete details of my discovery. This would primarily be an adjacent reformat here. You can see the sys ID of the CI which was discovered, the class of the CI, the IP address related to it. If there was any issue associated with the discovery, that information is also added here and you would also get that issue link, which would be in HTML format. Finally, you would also get the status of the discovery, whether it was successful or not. And depending on these choice values, these options, you could actually trigger your workflows for your IT operations. You can also get multiple discovery value. For example, if you are discovering a subnet of large number of IP, the second spoke would be used to get results of multiple devices as well. So that is about the second spoke. Now coming to the two different use cases that I have set up. So I would be just going through the first flow here, which is a use case for change implementation, and I'll also demonstrate a second use case which is regarding software installation. So this is a flow which gets triggered, the number you change is getting implemented. That's the trigger condition for it. As we do it, what we do here is we would call up the discovery spoke here and the discovery spoke would access the IP address of your CI, which is on the change. You would also see the source as marked as a change request number here. Once this is triggered, you need to wait until the discovery is completed. And once discovery is completed, you can use the second spoke here to get the status details. So depending on the results which we get back-- so let's say I have an issue in discovery the device status was not successful. I can open a task or an incident for it, or if it was successful I can update that the change was successfully implemented. So that is what the specific flow has done here. Depending on what output you get from discovery, the change gets updated. So this is the first sample use case that I've built. I have also another use case, which I will be demonstrating today. So this is regarding software installation. So whenever you install a software, either it might be depending on automation. You have automation enabled using a CIS-EM or any other product, or it may be a manual installation. So right now I've considered a manual installation because I don't have that automation tool. What this workflow does is whenever you have a software request on your server-- so let's say I have considered WinZip as an example here. This is a workflow that would be associated with your software request, basically your service catalog. What we do here is basically it first goes to the manager approval, depending on your process. Once the manager approves, it creates a catalog path for the asset team. Now this can also be an automation. If you are using a CIS-EM, you can use the out of the box CIS-EM spoke for this, which would automate it. Once the task is manually set up by the asset team, in our case here, the spoke would be automatically triggered here. So this would be, again, discovering your infrastructure. It would capture the new software installation information. It will bring it back to the instance here and depending on your software installation status, let's say if the study was a success and I was able to look up the software installation record, it would be a successful installation. If I was not able to discover the software, then the catalog task would be reopened and the asset team would have to handle it. So this is kind of an instance failover where as soon as you close the task, if discovery is not successful, the asset team would have to handle it again, giving a better user experience. So let's try this out. So I have set up a catalog item for this. So I would open my software installation catalog item for WinZip here. You can also request this from Virtual Agent, if you want. That's also possible. I need to select a server here where I would be installing this. So I select my server name here, which I have already access into, so I select the server. So before opening, before going to this, let me just go to the server once and I'll show you what is there currently in the server. Switching back to server here. So this are all the information regarding my Windows server that I have. And if you see correctly, I have around 25 softwares which has been installed in here, and you won't see the WinZip as currently installed as a part of this list. So once I do this workflow, you'll be able to see that the WinZip gets discovered, and automatically it would also help in setting up my IT operation process. So now the request is submitted. I would have initial approval for this, which goes to the manager. It's a normal process of a task setup. Now I have approval here, which I'm just going to bypass this. An approval. So as I approve it, a task would be created for installation. Since our case is a manual installation, task is created. If this was automated installation you could directly install it even without a task. So let's do one thing. Let's also install the software directly on the server. So right now I'm going to switch back to my server here, which I have opened up. I have switched back to my Windows server here where I will be installing the software. So I have the installer here for WinZip. Just take a minute to install it, so I'll begin installing it. So it's a normal process. As an asset team member, once you get the task you try to install it. Generally this would be an automation. You would have an agent set up which would automatically install it. But just for the sake of demo, I'm just installing it. Now if I try to close my task without installing it, it would trigger as a failure. It would reopen my task and it would notify the asset manager. Right now since I am actually installing it, this would actually be a successful use case. And when I close the task, it would trigger the discovery and let me know that the discovery was successful. So that is typically the use case that I have set up here. Now installation is almost getting complete here. OK, so this has been installed and that process is completed, and also we can see the software has got added in my Windows server list here. Now going back to my instance again. Now since the installation is over, I would actually be closing this task manually for now. So as the asset team member I'm just going to close this task. As soon as I close this task, the discovery for that specific device is triggered. So I just open the related flow here. So you can see the corresponding flow and how it is getting executed. So the flow is just opening up. So here you can see that as soon as I close the task here for the catalog task, the custom spoke for discovery is triggered. Now it is just waiting for the discovery to complete, a couple of-- might take a couple of minutes. As soon as it's complete, what it does is if the discovery is a success, then it tries to look up for the software record. Now the advantage here is the catalog of items linked to the software model, and the software model is also a part of your SAM process. In case you are using Software Asset Management [INAUDIBLE],, you can link both the software model and the discovery model together and you can set up your installation process for this. Now let's see if the discovery is getting completed or not. So now it's completed, and the process has also completed. Look up is completed. And if I go back to my device here, software device here, you can see that an additional software is also added. Right now we have 26. And if I scroll down, you can see the WinZip software has got added. It has been discovered as soon as I closed the task, and that has also been validated by my workflow there. So using these two custom actions that we have, you could actually set up any workflows for your IT operations depending on your use cases. It's possible to set it up. And you could use it for any kind of infrastructure validation. With that said, regarding this session, thank you all for watching.
Accelerate digital transformation with unified observability across cloud-native architectures
K22 K2022
Accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody. I'm Paul Morris. And today, I'm excited to talk to you about how you can accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. And I will also be sharing some of my tips and tricks for success with Catalog Builder. Now, I've been working on the ServiceNow platform for over 10 years. And typically, once a service catalog goes live, everyone is falling over each other to get their catalog items added to the service catalog. And us poor ServiceNow admins and developers, we can't get them in fast enough for the customer. No matter how quickly we try and get them in, it's never fast enough. You'll never find someone that wishes their cadence of catalog development was slower. Everyone wants more items in faster and better. So ServiceNow has a tool called Catalog Builder that's been sitting in every ServiceNow instance for quite some time that's just waiting to be used to help you guys accelerate catalog development. So what catalog development typically looks like. You've got a business owner, and they go out and gather catalog requirements to build a catalog item, which then gets put on the self-service portal. Traditionally, what happens, the business owner or someone on behalf of the business owner I gather there's those requirements. They give it to a ServiceNow administrator or a developer, and then they wait weeks or months. And eventually, they'll get a catalog item, their catalog item on the self-service portal. But that's just not quick enough in this day and age where everyone's working from home, and they want to be able to request things on the service portal. So here comes the Catalog Builder. So first, the catalog admin comes in and creates a template for the business group. And then the business owner, as they already are doing, they gather catalog requirements. But now with Catalog Builder, the business owner has empowered themselves to create the catalog item themselves rather than waiting for an admin or a developer to do it. They can even preview that catalog item in multiple channels after they create it to get that immediate feedback, and then take it through a pre-published flow, and then publish it to the catalog. This is done through a new user interface, which is a user-centric design wizard that takes the user step by step through what they need to do to complete a catalog item. It comes with a drag and drop form designer, which not even the ServiceNow admins get. And as I mentioned previously, they can preview what the form would look like in various channels. And best of all is they don't need to have a ServiceNow admin account to be able to do this. So is it a good idea to be giving every single business owner access to Catalog Builder to start building catalog items? Well, we want to pick who our builders will be quite wisely. Someone who understands the organization's fulfillment process. At the end of the day, they're not just building a form. They're also building the fulfillment process that comes after that form is built. We want someone that's going to be building the right items, not just what they personally want, really need to take into consideration what the business strategy is to make sure that the right items get built. Someone that has a sound understanding of process and a good understanding of ServiceNow so they can roll with the terminologies that are in Catalog Builder. They need to be motivated to build the items, because most likely they're busy and they've got another day job that they're doing. And they have the capacity to build those items. You're not going to be able to accelerate the development of catalog items if you've got a Catalog Builder that wants to build all these items for their particular business area, but they don't have the time to do it. So it's important to choose your builder wisely. So once you've chosen your builder, they're now going to be building catalog items instead of your ServiceNow admin that has a lot of experience and was probably doing a pretty good job. So how do we make sure that our new Catalog Builder is doing a good job? We create design standards. We need to first define what a good item looks like, put it in a document, and all agree that's what a good item looks like. So we can give it to our Catalog Builder, and they know the correct language to use. They know how to present the form properly, doing it in the same way every time. So you've got a catalog that is consistent across all your different items. We define the roles and responsibilities around the service catalog as well. It's one thing having standards. But if number one is making sure those standards are met, they're not going to be very helpful. So you want to make someone accountable for making sure that these standards are met within this service catalog and noting down what all the catalog rules are so everyone can work together. You may also wish to define what the Catalog Builder can and cannot do. The catalog Builder unlocks around 80% of the functionality in a service catalog. But the other 20% still needs to be done by an admin. So you want some sort of process on how to handle those edge cases if you want to design an item outside of what Catalog Builder would let you do. So without that design standards, you might get items of varied quantity, quality, and that's going to stop you from accelerating. So it's important to stop and have those design standards. So once you've got them, you can accelerate forward and increase your cadence on your catalog development. So it's not just about the Catalog Builder. The catalog Builder has access to this great tool. But there's a lot of other people that are involved in the entire process of managing a service catalog. So it's important that everyone works together. This includes other roles like the ServiceNow administrator, a catalog admin, and even the fulfillment team that are actually processing the items once they've been logged by end users. It's important to leverage the expertise of others, especially if you're a new Catalog Builder. Your ServiceNow admin already has years of design experience building this catalog items. So it's wise to leverage that experience. And let's not forget the domain knowledge of the facilities who are actually completing the requests. You need to talk to them and make sure that you're representing the correct process in your catalog item. So when the fulfillment team run through the process, it makes sense and it's correct. So we're working as a team, creating all these catalog items. But when it comes to building these forms, how can we accelerate the creation of these forms in Catalog Builder? One of my key tips for doing that is using question sets. So what is a question set? It's a set of predefined questions that you can just plunk on to the drag and drop form builder that might have a number of questions already set out for you to reuse across as many items as you want. So that saves a lot of time, so you're not constantly rebuilding the same form over and over again. And it also helps you standardize what these forms look like. Now, question sets can only be created by ServiceNow developers or possibly your catalog admin. As I mentioned in the third tip, you really all need to be working together and communicating to accelerate and push forward with your catalog development using Catalog Builder. So speaking of building these catalog items, where should we be building them? Should we be building them in straight into production? Do we need to test? It's a good idea to follow whatever your existing development lifecycle process is in ServiceNow. I know the key word there, development lifecycle, but development does include testing. Testing is still quite important. Yes, in Catalog Builder, you can preview what the form looks like straight away. But you can't test the workflow behind that without first publishing it, which then puts it on the service catalog for people to order from. And do you really want to be doing that in production? Probably not. As you're building questions on your forms, Catalog Builder lets you create dynamic behaviors to show questions and hide questions based on certain things, though the way those questions react to behaviors might be different in the Service portal to how it does in the agent user interface. So you really need to test it there as well. And again, you don't really want to be testing in production. The process behind the form, the fulfillment team are actually processing that needs to be validated end to end. So it is just best practice as you would with typical ServiceNow enhancements to migrate those changes through the environments from dev, test, and production. And that's actually a best practice today. Yes, you can build them straight into production technically. But just because you can, doesn't mean that you necessarily should. And your developer needs to be aware that there are some technical challenges around deploying updates with Catalog Builder. But you can read up on some of those in my ServiceNow blogs. So tip number 5 there, follow your development lifecycle process. So summarizing my top five tips. We choose our builder wisely. Once we've chosen our builder, we make sure that they have design standards before they start pumping out catalog items. Make sure they continue to work as a team, and don't work in isolation. Work with catalog admins, work with ServiceNow admins. You're leveraging question sets, so you can build those forms quicker and get more catalog items out. And you're following your development life cycle process, which is in the long term is going to get you more throughput of catalog items, because you're more likely to get them right the first time. Now, Catalog Builder has been around since Quebec. So if you're looking to speed up the development of your service catalog, leverage these tips and tricks that I've shared with you today, and begin your journey accelerating the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. Now, I'd like to thank everyone for watching this video today. If you want to get in contact with me, you can find me by email, LinkedIn, one of my favorite hangouts, Sndevs Slack. If you want to know or see more of my ServiceNow content, you can read my ServiceKnow-How blogs. And if you want to know more about, Kinetic IT, the company I work for, you can visit their website. Thanks, everyone, for listening or watching. And hope you have a great digital knowledge experience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Accelerate your implementation with ServiceNow leading practice guidance
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Accelerating automation in healthcare and life sciences
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Accelerating customer outcomes through value realization
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Align investments to implement strategy
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. I'm Debbra McGrath, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow. In this demo, you'll see how ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management enables an organization to align technology investments and work execution in order to implement business strategy. With SPM, you'll keep investments continually aligned to your strategies, so that your teams are always focused on the right things. You'll fund what matters most using a variety of planning methods to guide investments, communicate plans, and see work in the context of strategic initiatives. And SPM will help you to make work execution easier, even across diverse teams, methodologies and approaches, so you can ultimately meet and exceed your business goals. You'll experience all of this through the perspective of an executive leader, Jake Elliott, and see how Jake and his team drive the business forward by ongoing prioritization and funding of important initiatives. How they respond to inevitable changes with scenario planning that enables them to keep initiatives and resources continually aligned to business strategies. And how his project management and scrum teams efficiently execute work across traditional, agile, and hybrid work methodologies in order to deliver measurable business value. Jake begins by viewing his executive strategy dashboard, which provides an end-to-end view of his company's overall spend and benefits, which he can also view by portfolio and work execution type. The strategic spend tab shows him how much they're spending by strategy and goal, and how well their initiatives are aligned. The company leadership team has committed to improve alignment of their work and strategic spend to four key business strategies. They believe digital transformation is foundational to the continued success of their entire business. So Jake wants to review and prioritize the investments aligned to this strategy, and then connect team planning with work execution to ensure that business value is being delivered. He uses Alignment Planner Workspace to see a roadmap of all their initiatives. Roadmap planning shows their high-level enterprise investments on a timeline, filtered by their four companies strategies and, color-coded by priority. Jake can see how all these initiatives are tracking relative to important road map milestones, or he can hover over a single initiative to view the milestones specific to that investment. Next, he views the digital transformation portfolio roadmap to see the work that's been planned in support of their strategies. Here he can view the demands, epics, and projects that support their four strategies, altogether on a single roadmap, and he can easily adjust the information displayed on each planning item for quick, at a glance insights. Jake could also easily add new items or drill into an existing item directly from this view. For example, to adjust plan spend without having to open another ServiceNow application. Instead, he decides to use the investment funding application to review existing funding for the digital transformation strategy. Viewing all investments by strategy shows Jake the current strategies that have been funded by year and by quarter, including Capex and OPEX funds received, allocated, available, and total actuals. Here Jake can add or adjust funding for the digital transformation strategy as necessary. He takes a look at a top-down, bottom-up view of the funding for each of their four business strategies, and sees that digital transformation funds include 600,000 for business capabilities, 8.8 million for the digital transformation portfolio, and 600,000 for a Tiger team focused on digital transformation work. Any other type of ServiceNow entity could also be funded as needed in support of delivering business value. For now, Jake is confident they have adequate funding for the digital transformation strategy, and their portfolio of supporting work items. They use the ideation portal to generate a pipeline of innovative ideas that may ultimately be converted to new digital transformation projects. Jake filters the ideas by category to see those that are aligned to digital transformation. And then he sorts them in order of ideas with the most votes. The top idea is then promoted to the demand backlog, where costs and resources can be estimated. Ultimately, this demand will be added to the digital transformation portfolio for further consideration and funding. Jake will now look at several scenarios to determine what work his portfolio managers should include in their portfolios to best deliver on all their business strategies. Scenario planning enables them to consider different sets of demands and projects, as well as different budget amounts. Optionally, scenarios can also span across strategies, and across fiscal years. Portfolio managers can create new scenarios, such as focus on innovation to support their digital transformation. And they can add or remove projects and demands from the plan, such as removing this demand, which is more than the budgeted cost. As selections are made, the details for the scenario are automatically updated and displayed on the right, including total spend, number of selected investments, financial benefit, unaligned projects, over-allocated groups, and any amounts left over by actual spend from unselected projects that would not continue in this scenario. He can also track resources to see if they would be over or under allocated by looking at all resource groups or just over-allocated groups. And viewing them by quarter or month. Finally, he'll compare scenarios, and select the best one. When he confirms this scenario, budget will automatically be allocated to the selected demands and projects in this scenario. Jake then works across their diverse teams with project managers and scrum masters to make sure that the work included in the selected scenario is being executed properly. And with ServiceNow, Jake doesn't have to chase them down for these updates. For example, to get the latest status on the Acme customer sales product, Jake selects the planning console to view the project workspace for this hybrid project, where he can see a Gantt chart showing the project schedule and dependency relationships between tasks. He can add, remove, and arrange columns, and easily adjust the list in the Gantt view. The Dev execution phase is an agile development methodology that's being managed by a scrum team, and the agile board enables Jake and his scrum masters to view all the work that's planned across multiple Agile teams. They can see work dependencies across teams, and each team's backlog of work. A red bar lets Jake know that the integrations team is overcapacity in sprint 2, and red lines with arrows indicate dependencies that are out of sequence. Jake or the scrum master can immediately fix the capacity issue by dragging a story to sprint 3. And they fix the sequencing by moving this story to sprint 3 as well. By quickly making these changes, now all their agile teams have the proper load to deliver their work as scheduled. Of course, Jake needs to continually measure how much value the company is getting out of the investments they're executing on. So he returns to the executive strategy dashboard, and selects the benefits realization tab to see results to date of all their companies benefits by strategy, including what they've achieved for digital transformation. And finally, back on the enterprise roadmap map, Jake toggles the tracking mode to continually monitor how each of their initiatives is progressing toward enabling them to achieve their strategies. You just saw how strategic portfolio management provides Jake and his team with a single unifying solution that gives them complete, accurate, and timely insight into every aspect of their business, enables innovation at scale and speed, and helps them align investments to implement strategy, and deliver measurable business value. For additional information, visit servicenow.com/spm. [MUSIC PLAYING]
An App Engine journey at General Mills
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Application Lifecycle Management and you
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Automate and connect anything to ServiceNow with Automation Engine
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] In a world where going faster with greater consistency is a desired outcome, automation is one of the most pivotal factors differentiating high-performing businesses from those struggling to keep up. Market leaders are automating two to five times more work than their lagging counterparts, giving them the competitive edge to realize higher revenues, improved workforce productivity, and fewer business continuity disruptions. ServiceNow provides a comprehensive cloud platform to drive end-to-end automation that can help your business realize new levels of efficiency, integration, and productivity. Automation Engine is the key to this potential, offering a native low-code suite of automation and integration capabilities that work cohesively with both your modern as well as your legacy enterprise systems. Let's take a look at an evolving partnership between two fictitious companies and see how quickly Automation Engine can make a valuable impact. Acme Inc. has recently established a formal partnership with one of their key suppliers, Vendor Co., in order to optimize the way they jointly meet the needs of their customers. To kick off this new partnership, the two businesses need to navigate the initial agreement and documentation phase, hold a kickoff workshop to commence planning, and establish technical linkages between their key information systems. In the past, Acme Inc. struggled with a cumbersome partner onboarding process that involved a great deal of human latency and manual steps. This process required coordination between finance, legal, and operations teams associated with both companies, resulting in an interaction that could take weeks, if not months. App Engine allowed Acme Inc. to quickly build an app to address this problem, allowing their team to not only easily create a data model and an array of stellar user experiences but also leverage the power of Automation Engine in a structured low-code environment. Using Automation Engine, Acme Inc. now has a streamlined approach that automates the onboarding process, providing an automatic mechanism to coordinate with each constituent in parallel. The heart of the solution is Flow Designer with the IntegrationHub spoke for DocuSign, which allows the flow of work to move forward autonomously, requiring a minimal amount of human interaction. Using a catalog item, a member of the operations team can easily kick off an onboarding request, which will then dynamically generate the appropriate documents in DocuSign. From there, automation in Flow Designer will handle the rest, ensuring that all appropriate parties complete the necessary steps, and that management approval and notification is incorporated as needed. This automation enabled Acme Inc. to expedite the traditionally lengthy onboarding phase and allow them to focus on their impending strategic kickoff. Thankfully, this event was also streamlined thanks to the use of Automation Engine's robotic process automation capabilities. For many of the Acme Inc. employees, this kickoff will be their first time in the corporate offices, which means they need to obtain an ID badge. Similarly, the guests coming from Vendor Co. will need temporary badging to ensure they can access the necessary facilities. Acme Inc. uses a legacy badging application built on the Microsoft .NET framework, which unfortunately doesn't have any API access. This tool requires the lobby ambassador to manually confirm and transfer employee information from their directory to the badging tool. When a guest arrives, the lobby ambassador performs a similar process but also has to confirm with the guest sponsor. Normally, this doesn't present an issue, as the lobby ambassador can handle a few guests at a time, but with such a large influx of guests coming on such short notice, it's pivotal that the access and authorization process be as automated and accurate as possible. Robotic process automation solves this problem with ease, enabling sophisticated workflow automation that connects with this legacy tool, eliminating the need for manual repetitive work. The beauty of the solution is that all the automation is unified on a single platform and is using Flow Designer as well. Using the ServiceNow platform, employees can use the Service Catalog within Employee Center to request that badges be available for them at the location and time of their choice. The Service Catalog can also be used by the kickoff coordinator to proactively request guest badges. These requests will then trigger a flow in Flow Designer that automatically interface with the badging system using an RPA robot, or what we call a digital worker, while simultaneously keeping interested parties informed. Once triggered, the RPA robot springs into action, equipped with the data flowing from the ServiceNow request. It will first log into the badging app with appropriate permissions, select the appropriate badge type, enter the necessary details, and determine the completion states that it can send that status back to the ServiceNow instance. As you can see, not only is this automation massively faster. It also provides greater accuracy and traceability. Back in the ServiceNow instance, admins have full visibility to the activities of the RPA robots. RPA Hub serves as the central management interface through which admins can build, administer, and monitor their RPA activities. Admins can manage the lifecycle of their RPA automation, package them for distribution, manage their plug-in library, and more. Another great feature of RPA Hub is the ability to track business application dependencies so that your organization can tactfully manage upgrades to applications involved with your automation. The RPA Hub spoke is a native component of Flow Designer, so you can incorporate robotic process automation in nearly any process or workflow. This flexibility allows you to create truly complete automation that can integrate via API with modern systems using Integration Hub's out-of-the-box spokes or via tight coupling using RPA, all orchestrated on a modern, intuitive, low-code platform. With this badge generation automation in place, the lobby ambassador can focus on what they do best, and the attendees can rest assured their kickoff will start on time. While the leadership team of these two companies strategize, their respective IT teams are already hard at work integrating and streamlining their backend systems. The integration capabilities of Automation Engine encompass more than individual low-code spokes. They also include powerful mechanisms to link disparate systems. One such capability is Integration Hub Import, a low-code tool that provides a structured framework wrapped in an intuitive user interface that walks you through everything you need to execute and monitor even the largest import jobs. Acme Inc. has a critical dependency on issues tracked via Vendor Co.'s Jira instance. In the past, major impacts to Acme Inc. could have been avoided if an automated linkage between systems of record had been established. Now using integration of Import, issues in Vendor Co.'s Jira instance will be automatically synchronized with Acme Inc.'s ServiceNow instance, enabling a bevy of dynamic updates and flags to be triggered should a specific condition be met. This solution provides a reliable way to extract just the information Acme Inc. needs from Vendor Co.'s system, eliminating the need to give Acme Inc. full access to their internal information. To amplify the efficacy of this new integration, Acme Inc. has also established an automated notification system to provide their teams proactive visibility to Vendor Co. issues of interest. After the issues have been imported from Vendor Co.'s Jira instance, Acme Inc.'s automation will kick in any time an issue surfaces with both high impact and high customer usage. Once triggered, this flow will use ServiceNow's automated email notification to update key aliases along with the Microsoft Teams spoke to notify on-call staff and triage Teams Rooms. There are near countless ways these two businesses could take advantage of the out-of-the-box integration of spokes available with Automation Engine. With an ever expanding library of over 175 spokes and over 4,000 pre-built data actions, there's a good chance these two entities will rarely find themselves needing to write a custom integration, but if they do, ServiceNow has got them covered. Automation Engine's solution portfolio offers not only low-code tooling but also a deep range of sophisticated tools for pro developers. One such capability is Action Designer, a robust framework that allows you to create custom integrations for differentiated use cases and package them as spokes for reuse by anyone. Action Designer supports JavaScript, REST, SOAP, PowerShell, SSH, and more. You can even copy and extend existing ServiceNow spokes to give your company even more flexibility with the way they connect external systems. Using Action Designer, Acme Inc. and Vendor Co. can rest assured that by using ServiceNow as their platform of platforms, they'll be able to quickly and easily address any business challenge or opportunity that comes their way. This single-platform approach will help them not only automate their current business processes but truly reimagine the way work gets done. ServiceNow's relentless focus on ease of use and innovation means faster time to value due to the ever-evolving catalog of solutions and capabilities, allowing these two customers to leverage best-in-class, cloud-based functionality with little to no operational overhead. Leveraging ServiceNow also means substantially lower total cost of ownership, given that all of this automation runs on ServiceNow's Cloud Infrastructure. It's easy to see how much of a difference Automation Engine can make and how rapidly this technology can be integrated into nearly any ecosystem. But to make things even easier, we invite you to partner with us to amplify your automation journey. Engage your ServiceNow account team to identify and prioritize automation opportunities within your business and then address them head on with Automation Engine. And as always, be sure to visit servicenow.com for detailed information and product documentation. Thanks a bunch for checking out this demo. Have a great day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Automate provisioning and entitle users in three minutes with Integration Hub Spokes
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Today we'll be talking about automating provisioning and entitling users in three minutes using integration hub spokes. So to start off with the introduction, I am myself, Ishaan Shoor. I'm a senior technical consultant working with a ServiceNow partner, Thirdera And my primary function is ServiceNow development and consultation. I've got around four years of experience in ServiceNow and seven years experience in software development and IT. My favorite part of ServiceNow is working with integrations, orchestrations, custom applications. And that is why we are here. So again, the topic relates to integration of our Flow Designer. So in today's agenda we'll be covering the following topics. We'll be going through the overview, process flow diagram, use cases, benefits, key highlights, and demo. So I'll start off with the overview. So overview-- we, as every organization, uses Active Directory and Azure AD. but the provisioning in the Active Directory and Azure AD is pretty much limited to provisioning of the users or de-provisioning of the users. But there are a lot of other activities that take place around this, which is giving users access to a particular group, a particular application, having some shared mailboxes, some distribution list, and updating some user details-- might be a phone number, might be a second name, first name. It can be anything-- or just starting an email alias to a user. So a lot of other activities are involved, but they are all manual activities that the team do while the-- they get a request, and they get those requests as a manual-- using manual intervention. So using ServiceNow platform, we can automate all these tasks. And we can fully cater these identity management requests. So this automation can be done in two ways again. So the first one is having a third-party software and ServiceNow as a middleware and having connections with AD, Active Directory, and Azure Active Directory and leveraging the integration of spokes and the Flow Designer. The second one can be where we don't have a third-party tool, and we go to the Forms Automation. So, we'll be covering Forms Automation in this demo, as I don't have a third-party tool with myself. So this is a process flow diagram. This pretty much covers all the use cases that we were discussing in the last slide. So as you can see here, there can be some third-party systems involved in this process, where we have got a third-party system, like Workday, SuccessFactors, which generate an event and create a request in the Microsoft product. And again, Microsoft is Active Directory and Azure Active Directory. And from these, the request goes further down to ServiceNow. And then we have got some capabilities to enrich the accounts through ServiceNow, add the users to a particular group, or we can also notify the account details to the manager. So this is one process. And the second one is we don't need the Microsoft works in the middle. So we can also have a direct connection with the third-party tools and ServiceNow. And then we can go around with the enrichment of the user accounts, adding the users to the group, and a number of use cases that we have there. And there's a third step, where we don't have a third-party tool. We don't have any requests coming in through the Microsoft products. We have got ServiceNow just acting by itself, where we can use the service catalog, the ServiceNow forms. We can automate those forms to fulfill these active user account requests or updating some user account, adding users to group, application access, remote network access, employee onboarding/offboarding. So this is where ServiceNow comes into the picture. And we have got all the capabilities to pretty much get a lot of flavors of employee profiles sorted just by using ServiceNow automation. So this pretty much wraps up the process flow diagram. I'll move over to the next slide. Again, I've been [INAUDIBLE] it all over. So for some possible use cases that we have here is updating my cell phone number, updating group membership, user account creation, creating a new shared mailbox, creating a distribution list, rehiring an employee, offboarding an employee. And there can be plenty of use cases that we have here. Now, some of the benefits that we have realized over time-- so I have worked with a lot of similar projects. And plenty of clients are moving towards the ServiceNow or are involving ServiceNow automation in their onboarding/offboarding and user update requests. So basically they are doing this to reduce the manual intervention and fully cater the identity management requests. So what happens when this manual intervention is removed? So in turn they also remove the errors, so reduce errors in processing. Also, dependencies are removed of in-house legacy automation scripts. So these scripts are basically which the AD team or the Exchange team or Active Directory team is having in their systems. So those dependencies are also removed. After all this, the biggest factor is a quick turnaround time. So we'll be coming to that. I'll be circling back to that later in the slides. But the turnaround time is the biggest change that we have here-- reducing the errors, no manual intervention, and also a quick turnaround time. Moving on to some key highlights-- OK. So some of the key highlights here, a number of employee profiles can be digitized. So, as we have got, we can create a user account. We can add users to the group. So many times we just, if we want to give a user access to an application, maybe Workday, we are creating an HR profile. We can simply add that user into the Workday group, and other automation will take place around it. And we have set up a HR profile. And similarly, we can set up a service desk profile, where we are adding user to a service desk group in the Azure AD. So there are a number of levels that we can set up using the ServiceNow platform. And a request form can be configured and automated. And again, this all can be done through the service request form that we have been using all around, all the time. And the design is future proof, configuration friendly, and robust. So why this is the case? Because ServiceNow is highly moving towards Flow Designer. It's promoting Flow Designer and the use of it because it's easy to use, it's user friendly, and in terms of the debugging of the logs and everything are pretty straightforward, if you can just read and see what they show is. And every six months, we are getting an upgrade for ServiceNow, which is again a plus point. We don't have to worry about anything. So there is no technical depth. So if we are having some kind of custom integration, it is on us improving and maintaining the code. But here we don't have to worry about it. So automatically everything is getting upgraded. It's getting better every day. And the biggest point that we have here is the average fulfillment time. As I was just speaking in the last slide, it gets reduced to around three minutes from around 24 hours. And again, these 24 hours can be even more so, if we have got some approvals and they are just sitting there to be approved. And once they are approved, they might take a couple of more days to fulfill those requests. So in those terms, this time can be even more. But when we are using this automation, once the request is approved it just goes in and it's done within a few minutes. So this is a drastic change. And also, the return on investment on this one-- like, if you are having a manual employee sitting there fulfilling these requests, you can get a big turnaround, maybe save a-- so one of our clients had emailed me that they were saving of a full-time employee using this automation. So they were saving a lot on that one. So these are some of the key highlights. And where this can be applied to? So this can be applied to HR systems, as we have already seen in the process flow diagram, some HR systems where we want to automate the identity management requests and also streamline the requests by removing manual intervention errors and unstructured time-consuming processes, also customers who want to transform manual processes into self-service forms automated by ServiceNow workflows. So these are some of the places it can be applied. So before we go off to the demo, we have got some prerequisites that we need for this automation to happen. So first of all, we need a ServiceNow instance with the Integration Hub subscription. The second thing that we need on the instance is we need to install a Microsoft Azure Active Directory Spoke. Again, this can be different for different use cases. But the demo that we are going through today, we'll be using the Azure Active Directory Spoke. And also we need access to the Azure Portal and also the credentials to build a connection between ServiceNow and Azure. So I have got my ServiceNow instance with me. And I have already sorted out the connection between the Azure Portal and ServiceNow. So that's all good. So what I'll be doing the first thing, I will be raising a request for a new user account. And this user account is a fully automated form that we have. And once this form is submitted, it will go ahead and create a user for which we are requesting in the Azure Active Directory. So let's start off. No problem. Now look for-- we'll put 567. And we don't need to worry about the comments. We need to press Submit. So now, once this request is submitted, if I click on it, and as you can see, just within a minute it has actually gone to complete. So if I go to Azure and go to the users, we do have that user created here. So Tom Molly-- and we have got the job title. We also do have the phone number that we have entered. And that's how quick it is. And also, I have got the user provisioning setup from Azure to ServiceNow again. So I think every 30 minutes the users are synced back to ServiceNow. So all the new users that come in are also going back to ServiceNow at the users. So we are also provisioning a ServiceNow application for those users. Now, if I go to the back and backend of this one and check with the executions, so this is the flow that was executed in the catalog item was requested. We updated the record. And Work notes has request-- work in progress. We get catalog variables. So this is a custom action that I've created. I'm building out the account name and password for the user using this. So it's a basic script action that we have, which takes the first name and the last name of the user and generates an account name with first letter and the last name of the user and also gives out a generated password text. Now, once I've got this, I'm again updating the record with the account name-- the requested item record with the account name of the user that we get out of that action. [INAUDIBLE] the next action that I'm executing is create a user. So I am almost setting every attribute that's required for the user. So I'm setting the account enable to True so that the account is enabled for the user, and he is able to log in. So display name is set up through the catalog item, first name, last name, user IDs. We have got it from the previous step [INAUDIBLE].. So this is a servicewow.onmicrosoft.com. So this is my application on the Azure. And we have also got the email alias as Tom Molly. And we've also got the password. So we are also changing force change password for the user. We can set it to False as well. And we also got the other attributes, given name, surname. We've got the phone number, job title. We can set a lot of other attributes, but for this demo I've just used some of them. And once it has success, it gives out a user ID as the output. Now, once this is done, I'm also sending out an email to the manager, so Adam Haro. I'm sending out this email. If I go to the email logs, we should be able to see that there. OK. Let's look. I'll go back to the email in a bit. And, yep. At the end I am marking the request as complete. OK. Yep. So we have got the email there. So, Hi Adam. The account details of the new user request, RITM-- full name this, network account name, and username, and the password. And the manager can, further down, share these credentials with the user to log in. And, yep, post that, we are just marked the request as complete. So once this is completed, it's all good. We're done. We're done within, I think, less than three minutes or so. It was completed. And just in case if something goes wrong, I am also having a error handler, where I'm creating an incident and assigning it to a team, to action, just in case if anything goes wrong, to look at the logs and see what has gone wrong. And they can reticket the flow or the request for that particular user. And, yep, I think that's quite magic. And also just one more thing-- this was just a create user. Again, if I search my Azure, we have got around 39 actions with us. We can look up user stream. We can add users to group, reset user password, disable user, and delete a user, and also update a user, create a user, enable a user. So there are a number of use cases that we can get at. So it's just a small thing that I showed you. But there are a lot of possibilities around this. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your time. If there are any questions, do reach out to me or my email address, LinkedIn, Twitter, SN Devs, Slack. And Flow Designer is the way to be. So I have been using it since 2018, and I think it's just awesome. And there are a lot of other spokes that we have outside of this use case, Azure AD and Active Directory, that can just do brilliant stuff. And it can be done in hours. So that's also an amazing thing. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Boost employee productivity and organizational efficiency
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] ServiceNow continues to help organizations to create a great employee experience by boosting employee productivity and driving organizational efficiency. In this demo, we'll focus on how employees communication and take action through the devices and channels that make sense for them, how HR teams can work efficiently through intelligent purpose-built workspaces, and how the experience can be continuously improved with real-time data. Let's start our journey with Emily. She works remotely. So it's critical for her to have access to her company's resources wherever she is. Today, while taking her dog for a morning walk, she opens her Now mobile app to get the help she needs. Here, she sees pertinent communications from her company pushed directly to her as well as other info like upcoming space reservation, tasks, or requests. Today, she needs to get some help understanding her company's policy for reimbursing tuition expenses since she hasn't done this before. And since she's out and about, she simply starts a chat with the Virtual Agent. By using natural language, it's easy for her to type in what she needs to get help with. It looks like the Virtual Agent has found a couple of things for her. To make sure her program is covered, she first wants to review the policy. Since it's all housed within ServiceNow, Emily can review the policy right from her device, and after confirming her course is covered, open the request right from here. All she needs to do is populate some basic information, like what course she's taking and how much it costs. And then she can submit it. Now she's automatically kicked off a workflow to get the process started all from her mobile device. And when she gets back to her home office, Emily logs into her company's modern internet built on the Employee Center to get her day started. Here she sees additional announcements specifically for her, as well as information from across her company, like news, recommended content, upcoming holidays, frequently used applications, and more. But right now, Emily wants to check on the progress of her reimbursement request. The good news is, since where she starts her day is built on the workflows of the Now platform, she can pop right in and see her request alongside the others that she might have opened. Right away, Emily can see all the details at a glance, including granular info like how long this will take to resolve based on the machine learning of similar cases. So not only does she know who is owning the process where it stands, but also has peace of mind that this will be wrapped up in plenty of time. She notices the workflow has assigned her a new task to complete as part of the process. All she needs to do is review and sign a document that is automatically populated with the details she provided when submitting the request. By leveraging the data she has already provided, it cuts down on duplicative effort and drives a more seamless employee experience. And with a quick e-signature the task automatically closes and drops off her list of to-dos. And in case she ever needs to access this document again, it is automatically added to her employee profile for quick access. Here, it is housed alongside other info like her PTO balance and pay stubs that have been fed in directly from her HR and payroll systems. Now she has one spot where she can go get info and take actions across ServiceNow and other systems. And before getting on with her day, she wants to double-check what the next step is. She sees that it's now waiting to be approved. Because all of the details were clearly laid out for her, Emily sees that it needs to be approved by her manager Maria. So she decides to ping her quickly to keep the ball rolling. From Maria's perspective, when Emily reaches out through Microsoft Teams, she can chat with her and move Emily's request forward without navigating away. Instead, because the Employee Center is embedded natively within Teams, she can pop right in. And just like Emily, Maria's content is personalized to her. Since she is a manager, she's pushed manager-specific communications directly to her. And because the embedded experience is the same as what she would get outside of Teams, all the content and action she needs to take are right here at her fingertips. So she can easily see the details of Emily's request and approve right from her home page. And picking it up from the point of view of Harry, our HR agent that was assigned to Emily's case, we can see that his workspace makes it clear what other cases he has assigned, any high priority cases, and if there are any at risk of breaching SLAs, making it easier for him to prioritize and take action on all these moving parts. But for now, Harry wants to tackle Emily's case. So he clicks into the case tile to see the details. From here, Harry has granular detail about Emily's tuition reimbursement case, such as the channel she opened the case from, what service is tied to, and more. Of particular interest is the skills section, which is what was used to auto-assign the case to Harry based on machine learning. This helps cut down on errors when managing a case like this by ensuring it is only rooted to the right individuals based on skill, geography, service, and other criteria. And his HR Agent Workspace provides all the info he might need to help manage a case like this. At a glance, he can see all the biographical info about Emily as well as see that her manager is Maria. Because this info is critical to ensure an excellent experience, it is served right up to him. To make Harry's life even easier, Agent Assist provides him with the intelligence selection of knowledge articles from across the company that are directly related to this case. So if Harry needs further information about how to handle this case or to confirm Emily fits the criteria for reimbursement, he doesn't have to leave the workspace to find the right information. And because the document Emily signed is tied to the case itself, Harry doesn't have to go searching in an outside document repository. Instead, he can tell right away that it's been signed and uploaded by Emily. He also has access to prebuilt response templates as well as step-by-step fulfillment instructions. So that no matter who receives this case, the service they provide is the same. He sees that since Emily has uploaded the signed document, all that's next is approval from both her manager and himself. If Harry needed more info from Emily, he could always open up a team's chat directly with Emily from the workspace. No need to reach out via email or phone, but rather connect with Emily in the channel she's most used to collaborating in. But in this case, Harry has all the info he needs to move the case forward. So he clicks into the approver's tab to confirm Maria has already approved the case. Since Maria has already approved, the workflow automatically assigned an approval task to Harry for final approval. Since everything is looks to be in order, he updates it to approved. Now when he returns to the Details tab, he sees that the case is fully approved. So Harry saves the case and it will await Emily's final transcripts before reimbursing her expenses. And before wrapping up his work for the day, Harry wants to prepare for an HR leadership meeting he has in the morning. So he wants to check out how the HR team is performing across a number of KPIs. With the unified navigation menu, it's simple for him to pop into the leadership dashboard without navigating away. Here he has real-time data on how the HR team is performing holistically. Not only does he have data about HR service delivery, but also insight into the broader employee experience, like net promoter score, attrition rates, which channels employees are engaging in, and more. He can also see voice of the employee data, which helps leadership keep a pulse on what employees need and where HR can continuously improve. With ServiceNow, it has never been easier to boost employee productivity and drive organizational efficiency, all to deliver a great employee experience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Build developer friendly APIs with JSON Schema Validation
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. I'm Jarod Mundt, vice president of engineering at Clear Skye. I've been working on the ServiceNow platform since 2014, and I've spent time at customers, implementation partners, and am now working at a product partner where we publish identity security and governance solutions into the ServiceNow store. Today, we'll talk about JSON schema validation and how you can take your APIs to the next level. Now, this is not going to be a deep dive into schema validation and also not going to be a deep dive for importing external JavaScript libraries into your instance, but we will look at the JSON schema validation concepts and why it will be worth the investment to implement this into your instance. We'll also take a look at some scripted REST API examples, but this validation can be used in any other server-side or client-side code in your instance. Both the schema and input object are both written in JSON. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and it's the data format that powers most of the internet's APIs, including ServiceNow. There are things like curly brackets for objects, square brackets for arrays, and things can be nested inside of other things. Now, the schema on the left we see has a very specific format so that the validator code knows where to find each object. There are many validators available online in a variety of programming languages. For these examples today, I'm using Tiny Validator a.k.a. Tv4 out on npmjs. I'll show a link to where to find this library at the end of the presentation. Now, in our first example, we have a very basic flat object. So hypothetically, in this example, we have a client that is sending the input object into our system, and the result of that will be some expensive database long-running queries and a variety of inserts and updates across multiple tables. So ideally, this will be an all-or-none transaction. We don't want to get half of the transactions completed and then find out that some of the data is missing or in the wrong format. So what we do is we pass both the schema object and the input object into the validator, and then we'll get a third JSON object that we'll call the validation result. Now, in this case, valid is equal to true. Great, we won't have to stop processing or send any errors back to the client. We can begin our processing. But what if our input object-- what if we had an age of negative 21? Technically, according to this schema, that's still an integer, but that may cause errors when we start processing. So in example two, we've added a few more attributes to the schema definition. Now, if we try and process it now, in theory, negative 21 is out of the scope so we'll receive an error. Notice the message and data path attributes of our validation object. We see that it says specifically that the parameter of age is less than a minimum of zero. And we did this with very limited code. This is part of the JSON schema validation standard. Also notice that we're on only example two and both the schema and the validation result are starting to get rather long for a relatively simple example. The definition on the left is 22 lines long and the validation result is 17 lines long already. So pretty quickly, when we start nesting objects and arrays, both our input object is going to get big but also our schema validation or our JSON schema definition also start to get pretty big. So for the next example, I'll only highlight the things that have been added or changed so we won't have to shrink down all of that code to get it to display all on the screen at the same time. So here we've added a few more items, specifically favorite movies. So in the schema, we've added a type of array, and the items inside of that array must be strings. On the input object on the right, we see that we've added some favorite movies, but one of them is in a integer format and not a string. So let's take a look at that. We now get valid equals false. And specifically, back to the message and data path portions, we see invalid type, number-- it wanted a string-- and data path, under favorite movies, position one. So arrays start at zero, so that would be the second item that was submitted is the problem item. Now, there are quite a few other additional JSON schema attributes to add value and to fill out the schema definition. Specifically-- I won't go into a variety of them, but one to look out for is called additional properties. So if we set that to false, any extra items that are submitted in the input object, if they don't have a specific definition, we can error out on those. Now let's move this stuff out of theory, get it into our instance, and build some scripted REST API checks and responses. So prior to this step, we must import a library into our instance. So like any good TV baking show, I'm going to skip over that step of selecting the open-source library and also the import to script include process and I'll go right to the code execution. Now, as a side note, if you don't recognize this interface, it's called the Xplore toolkit and I do highly recommend it for scripting and working with data on the platform. It's available from the ServiceNow Share out on the Developer Portal. Now, once our script is proven to work, we can just start coding away and start creating scripted REST APIs, right? Well, not so fast. I want to have a quick chat about architecture standards first. So when I've demoed this and implemented this in the past, one of the common questions is, why not just use the table API? That way, if somebody wants to integrate with ServiceNow, we just point them at the docs, give them a service account, and then they do all the work. We don't have to do anything as the ServiceNow team. My response to that is, as a whole, what needs to happen is the organization has a requirement, the organization needs to get some work done, and the organization needs to support it. So we get to kind of think about which teams should best pick and choose to support that. So I typically recommend centralizing as much of the development and centralizing as much of the pain as possible, and that allows us to reduce friction. What we don't want to have is making a junior Linux admin on another team that's writing an integration inside of a Python script have to learn the table API, do four lookups to get various sysIDs of locations, users, change request numbers, CMDB CIs, other things like that. We want them to just go right to building their query. What this also does is it increases happiness, can reduce the time to value, and also reduce costs and time on the other teams. Another advantage to building things in scripted REST APIs is that you can conform to the culture of your organization. I've worked at places where they had shorthand codes for locations. Everyone referred to people in every system by the employee ID. And so, by building it into a scripted REST API and not the table API, we get to choose which value we use for each of these things. And third, we get to continue turning ServiceNow into the control tower. We get to put ServiceNow at the center. Now, whether that data lives in ServiceNow or only an up-to-date copy of that data lives there, it allows all the developers across your organization to have access to all that data with a single service account. A fourth thing is also that it makes people love and trust the platform more when it's easier and lower friction to get access to the proper data. So don't underestimate that part either. I've seen, at some organizations, where the data center operations people get tired of the table API and they just want to-- they go the other way with their APIs. They replicate CIs, incidents, and changes out of ServiceNow into their custom database, do all the work in that custom database, and only feed back the very minimum updates and states into ServiceNow. So that way, the ServiceNow record only has the bare minimum of updates and activities. Also technical-- flow triggers are great, but everything's asynchronous and you have very limited control over your inputs and your outputs, especially for a flow trigger that uses an HTTP GET. So here, we get better control, better logging, better error handling. For example, if we wanted to open up an incident or an event or alert when APIs are sending in bad data, in a scripted REST API, we'll have control over that. So overall, before implementing this, I do want to recommend getting buy-in from the top technical people responsible for your instance to make sure that what we're doing here conforms with the roadmap for all internal and external data flows. So anyway, back to the tech demo where we'll be doing some validation directly in a scripted REST API. So here we have a HTTP POST example. So above, what we're doing is just grabbing the body that's sent into the POST body. We're loading up the schema definition that's stored somewhere in the instance-- it could even be directly in the POST record here-- doing the comparison, and then checking to make sure if it's valid. So again, here, we'll take that next step that we didn't do in those earlier examples and build out our error message. So I'll zoom in on that part. And notice, again, we're using the data path and message fields. One of the favorite features that I have inside of a scripted REST API is the ability to control specific error messages. So there's a one-line command that gives you the option to just send a error, but here we see the four-line option to set specific HTTP status message and the details of which is the concatenated string of that error array above. So if there is no error, we can begin processing away. If there is an error, we stop the transaction and reply very specific things back to the developer. So let's take a look and see what the remote developer sees during this error process. So when I'm coding integrations, I always make sure everything looks good using Postman and, like we saw, the Xplore toolkit to make sure all the data and authentication works. Now, in this example, I've set three errors intentionally in what I'm submitting. And what comes back from our scripted REST API is exactly this, the HTTP 400 error. What we see is, under the message, we see that static string that we programmed in. And then, under detail, we see the specifics. Where was the problem? Under first name. What happened? The string is too short. It was only one character long. It needs to be at least two. And then it loops through all the other errors as well. So this was a basic scripted REST API example, but like I started with, this could be used outside of these APIs and could be used anywhere on the platform where you want to validate parameters. For example, critical script include function, we can validate that everything's within range before we do any expensive processing or any record inserting or updating. Thank you for watching. If you want to continue the conversation, please reach out to us out on the ServiceNow Community Forums, out on the SNDevs Slack community at sndevs.com, or find me on Twitter. I'll see you around the community. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Build new flows with Flow Designer diagramming
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey there. And welcome to this session. In this video, we are going to be talking about Flow Designer and how to build flows with the new Flow Designer diagramming view. My name is Brian Bimschleger. And I am the product manager for Flow Designer as well as a few other workflow automation products here at ServiceNow. I've joined ServiceNow about two years ago. And since then, I have worked exclusively with our workflow automation products, notably Flow Designer, Process Automation Designer, and a few of our new automation builders that we are working on. Currently, I'm working extensively with Flow Designer diagramming as well as new workflow automation products that are unannounced. In this video, we're going to talk about three things. The first is the goals of Flow Designer Diagramming. Then we'll show a demo of Diagramming in action. And then finally, we'll give a preview into what's coming next for Flow Designer Diagramming. This is the current view of Flow Designer that many of you know and hopefully love. Over the course of its implementation, we've heard a lot of feedback from customers about how we can improve Flow Designer, specifically as ServiceNow caters to more of a citizen developer and low-code audience. There are several things that we can improve upon here within Flow Designer, notably logic, how we visually represent sequence and logic in a flow; obviousness in terms of placing your finger at the top of a flow and tracing your way to the end. This is a big issue in the current implementation of Flow Designer as certain pieces of Flow Logic, like an IF statement, are not as intuitive as we would have hoped in terms of communicating to the end user what their flow does next. And then finally, for Diagramming, we had a third goal of clarity. If there is ever a possibility where your flow can have multiple paths, we want to make it as clear as possible how the user advances down those paths. Here's the same flow that we just looked at in a diagram view. If we look at how we visualize sequence and logic here, we can see that our IF statements have a different shape, a different color, and have different paths that come out of that. Additionally, if you were to place your finger on the record updated trigger at the top, you would be able to successfully trace your way through the diagram to the end. And on our IF statements, since there are multiple paths, you can see that we have labels that indicate to someone who's reading the flow how you take each path. Well, Flow Designer Diagramming is a new version, a new view of Flow Designer. We've received a lot of positive feedback from our early adopters of this product. One of my favorite quotes is the term gentle on the eyes keeps coming up. It's very approachable and really easy to see what I'm doing. I like this quote for a variety of reasons. One, it's obviously nice praise from a customer who has been using this in a real environment. But secondarily, it's because this customer was someone who was previously critical of some of the usability and performance of the Flow Designer product. So seeing how she has viewed the diagram view very positively that was great feedback for our team and good indication that we were progressing forward well. Now that we've talked about the goals for Flow Designer Diagramming and generally what Diagramming View looks like, let's see a demo of it in action. All right. Let's see how Flow Designer Diagramming works. First off, in the San Diego release, once you enter Flow Designer, you'll notice this toggle in the top right. When I click on the toggle, that is how we switch into the diagram view. Once you're in the diagram view, a lot of the diagram view functions exactly like you would expect if you're familiar with Flow Designer. We can click to add a trigger. And when we select a trigger, that trigger gets added to the canvas and we are then able to modify the details of the trigger just like we would in standard Flow Designer. What's nice about this panel on the right hand side it is it allows you to configure details of the item on your canvas while still understanding what comes before that trigger or action and what comes after. Now let's actually try and add something to our Canvas. In this example, we will go in and add a log. We can still use our pill picker to use data that was generated by previous steps in our flow. And in this example, we're going to grab the short description from the incident that was created. Once we click Done, we can navigate back to the standard Flow Designer view, click on the log, and see that our data pill that we added in the diagram view is now visible within the standard Flow Designer view as well. Let's go back to our diagram view and continue building. In this example, we may not want our log anymore. So in the diagram view, we support the ability to delete content as well. Now let's say we want to perform some logic within our diagram. In this example, the first thing that we're going to need to do is we're going to need to look up some data. In this example, we'll reuse the table from our trigger. And we will add a condition that says we're going to look up any incidents that were created by the person who created our initial incident that kicked off our flow. Now just for fun, we'll navigate back to our standard view real quick. We can see that all of our configurations are still here for the lookup record. Now let's say hypothetically we wanted to loop through these records that we just found or we want to perform some action on all of these records at the exact same time. In the San Diego release, we are supporting a limited set of Flow logic. And if you attempt to add any particular flow logic to your flow that's not supported by the diagram view, if you attempt to navigate into the diagram view, you'll receive a little tooltip warning that informs you you cannot enter the diagram view right now. And it also tells you why. There's an unsupported flow logic type present. Within documentation online, we have a list of the supported flow logic types as well. In this example, do the following in parallel is not supported yet. And once we remove it, we can see that now this toggle to go into diagramming is re-enabled. So if we're in Diagramming View, now let's see what type of Flow logic is supported. By going to Flow Logic, we can see what's available for me now. And it's a more limited subset. For this demo, we are going to add an IF statement. Now what we're going to do is we're going to route our flow based on how many records we get back from step one. So we'll take our lookup record step and the count of records. And if it's more than 10 records, we're going to do something. Once we click Done, you can see that our condition for our IF statement is represented now on the body of the card. If I want it to be a little bit more human readable, I can come in and edit the condition label. And once I do that, you can see on the canvas on this component the text has been updated to make it easier to understand what is happening. Now in this example, if someone creates an incident and they have more than 10 previous incidents, we are going to want to send an email. Don't worry about the configuration for now. But we can see that once we hit this logic point, if there are more than 10 records, we advance down the true path and we send an email. If you're familiar with the standard Flow Designer product, you know that if we just have an IF statement and then perform an action, this is how we represent that content. The standard view of Flow Designer doesn't force you to define what happens if your IF statement is not true. It's kind of implied. Once we got into Diagram View, specifically since this is targeted at citizen developers or lower code users, and one of our principles is obviousness and clarity, we wanted to make sure that there was a false path even if the user didn't define the ELSE statement. But what's nice and what we think is pretty handy is that as soon as I add in any action onto this false path, if we go back to our standard view here, the system is automatically populating your flow with the ELSE action. So even though you didn't manually add in that step, the flow is building in a way so the flow itself will run properly and allow you just to get on with building your flow. Now that we've seen what's possible within Flow Designer diagramming for the San Diego release, let's talk about what's upcoming. In San Diego, it was our initial release. We are supporting all actions, all subflows, and most flow logic out of the gates. In the Tokyo release, we're specifically focusing on support for Service Catalog. This includes the service catalog trigger as well as the ability to add, remove, update flow stages into your flow in the diagram view. In the Tokyo release, we are focusing on additional types of Flow logic, specifically do the following in parallel and make a decision. And then after the Utah release, we have several items in consideration, including the ability to add annotations in the diagram view, supporting error handling, and building subflows as diagrams. Thank you for attending this session today. I hope you enjoy building with Flow Designer Diagramming. And if you have any questions, feel free to post on the community. And I am always listening for feedback on Flow Designer Diagramming. Enjoy the rest of Knowledge.
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Deliver effortless customer experiences with Customer Service Management
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] To be competitive in today's market, marketing efforts can no longer be based solely on product or price. Customers evaluate brands on the experiences they have and how easy it is to do business with them. You might have heard the saying it takes a village and that's the truth, even when it comes to providing exceptional customer service. By connecting people, process, and systems, you have a powerful system of action. Enabling companies across their front, middle, and back offices to deliver frictionless experiences for both customers and employees. With ServiceNow's customer service management, you'll have the right products and processes to improve the journey from end to end. We're going to highlight these features with Solana, which sells home and office security systems, and boxio to their business customer with branches across the country. Let's start with our customer Julie, a boxio. She's here on her business's portal where she can review their products, check out the support portal, and get updates on all her current orders. As she's browsing the portal, she gets a notification about some recent support tickets needing attention and this is powered by Engagement Messenger. Engagement Messenger allows you to create, configure, enable, and disable modules based on your customers' needs. You can include modules like those support reminders, special offers, access to the knowledge base, and even incorporate your field service offerings, but the reason Julie's on the portal today is she recently learned about the next generation of security camera Solana offers. She starts a chat with a live agent wanting to see if she can add these cameras to her recent order before stepping away for a meeting. When we transition to our agent's view, John, we can see that with his CSM configurable workspace, he's able to get a full view into Julie as a customer in her orders. He lets Julie know that she can still add to her order and waits for her response on quantity. When we switch back to Julie's portal, we can see that even though she left earlier, the chat that she initiated was not closed or canceled and there's a notification that John has responded. She lets him know that she wants to go ahead and add 100 cameras to her order. Similarly, when John returns from his break, he's notified of that ongoing chat from Julie. And this is great because it means he doesn't have to search for old chats. With Order Management for customer service, agents are able to get a more complete view into the order lifecycle. Agents are now empowered for the very first time to make changes to orders, addresses, and more. And they're able to make these changes right away, reducing the amount of time from initial order to final fulfillment. John drills down into the recent security order and clicks new to add the camera line item. With a few clicks, he easily adds the new security camera, its options, the order quantity and hit Save. These details are immediately reflected in the order details. And because the other routine work and common requests were already automated, John's time was freed up to help Julie with this more high value request. Now, as you might have noticed, we've got a brand new view for our service agent, which has been enhanced with our next experience. With the next experience, agents have everything they need in a modern accessible user interface. They start at their configurable workspace, showing their important daily case information. They can pin and unpin menus as needed, their favorites tab features pages that they access frequently, and their history tab allows agents to return to recently visited pages and workspaces quickly. Dark mode is another enhancement that we've brought into the next experience. John spends a lot of his day in the UI and dark mode helps reduce fatigue and eye strain. All of these features help make agents more effective. But as we know, things don't always go as planned. What happens when companies struggle to service customers? From onboarding new accounts to resolving complaints or processing claims, processes span disconnected teams and systems. This is where playbooks comes in. With playbooks for customer service management, organizations can automate complex customer service processes that span siloed teams and systems. It's a few weeks later and Julie has not received that recent order even though she was promised quick delivery. She calls in and is connected to a complaints agent. With the complaints playbook which is available out of the box, our agent is able to collect Julie's complaint details quickly. She has a focus layout providing her with a visual guide of the tasks required to resolve issues. Related records are dynamically populated with each executed step and the playbook automatically gives the entire company cross team visibility, meaning, agents can resolve cases faster and organizations can scale their customer service with demand. But service doesn't start and end when the customer reaches out, the best service can be proactive. Customer service and IT operations management or ITOM, together allow for proactive monitoring and notification before problems grow out of control. We can switch over to our network engineer, Amelia, who is logged into the operator workspace. Amelia notices that there's a problem with the video streaming event services. By diving into the product and the alert, Amelia is able to learn a little bit more about the issue and how many customers are impacted. She can click into the related alerts to see how many other services are affected. There seem to be quite a few, so Amelia is going to create a case describing the issue, adding some details, and saving it. This case is suggested as a major case. So when our manager is able to go in and review it, they're able to see all the relevant details and approve it as a major case which starts a workflow. The benefit of having a major case is that child cases can be added. So if a customer calls in with a related issue, the agent is able to attach it to this major case, meaning that the customer has access to and receives updates on the status. And that is a high level overview of how you can deliver frictionless end to end service with ServiceNow's customer service management. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Deliver extraordinary employee experiences, resiliency, and productivity
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 So who is this video for It's really geared towards it and service operations leader anybody who provides a service and want to provide amazing employee experiences. And so what is the problem we're trying to solve in this video. Well employees do not have always on consistent methods to request all the technology services they need and in this video through the eyes of our requester storm we will see how ServiceNow can easily address this how by offering storm 24/7 AI powered cell service with VA and NLU really simplifying technology requests and beyond with Employee Center service catalogs and you will see that these experiences can be embedded into third party applications. Finally employees like storm get faster resolutions with predictive intelligence as well as dynamic translation solutions. So here it is ServiceNow is Employee Center now IT leaders this is request management made simple with a unified portal across departments so employees can stay engaged, productive, and informed and request the services they need from anywhere as we can see air request it request any requests it needs in one place even out of the box internal and external employee forums really a peer to peer network to help engage and inform our employees and storm can drop into employee communities like this where it empowers employees to participate in internal discussions and discovery forums via their searches they can even look at leaderboards and reach out to those leaders as well as the ability to post to events and ask those questions here storm has action plans request and these can be showcased in the top area as well as we can see this banner slide show information that uses machine learning to drive personalized content and this can be found throughout storms portal information such as the local hybrid workplace knowledge base articles are presented front and center and storm has the ability to rate how useful this KB article and information is this really better helps our back end teams with the content as we can see this information can be added to my favorites tab on the left so the information is at the ready whenever storm needs to access it the my active items widget once again places information in focus so storm can check on what's important to storm ServiceNow Employee assistant around knowledge management as well as out of the box set surveys can help teams keep a better pulse on what's important to these end users like storm further driving overall experience and engagement to find out more about paid time off storm doesn't have to search through various directories look through emails by simply typing paid time off a query of helpful articles are populated for storm ServiceNow offers a full service employee experience even a live walk up kiosk and scheduling needs are front and center for storm to take advantage of storm can jump in the queue from his desk or if there's a last minute meeting that pops up can easily jump out of the queue and enabling the slot for someone else as we jump back into the queue we can see it's simple now storm is third in line we can see also the hours of operation where the tech lounge is located scheduling anything around that and again, we're really just highlighting that this is storm's portal we can see content is targeted towards storm's needs such as product catalogs recommended content quick links upcoming events, videos even local cafe menu information now let's get into the VA with NLU so if the kbs's the targeted content employee communities are not enough meet our Virtual Agent with natural language understanding storms and yours quick answer to questions and needs. Now with natural language understanding there's not a need to look up topics we can simply type in the need and the Virtual Agent takes over from there no live agents needed password reset is still a challenge for many departments today and with consumer grade security verifications on the back end agents can continue to work on more complex challenges also if the VA is ever uncertain of the direction of our end users need like storm. It can clarify what is needed. Thanks to some of the AI and ML that supports this chat bot in this case storm's request status is parsed out in a few options. One of them being an IT typekit submission as we can see storm's request is still in process and he can jump in add some comments directly right into the ticket from the chat last we realize that ServiceNow that there are instances where the chat bot is not enough this process is also expertly handled for storm Thanks to ServiceNow platform something as specific as ordering issues may have not worked itself into a Virtual Agent topic or the recommendations or NLU suggestion aspects nevertheless it is easily addressed requesters like storm can submit a ticket right in the chat so no phone call, email, or walk to your smartest it guy is needed as we can see storm continues to get kb information to further support him in whatever his needs are now with a few clicks. Virtual Agent automatically routes assigns the ticket to the next live agent based on availability and their skill sets please note that storm can also reach out to a live agent directly via the chat with wait times or phone or email everything is built right into the portal now note that storms experience is not limited to this desktop browser ServiceNow is native mobile app seamlessly carries any of this information this full experience into the palm of the hands of storm this eye search targeted content self-help virtual agents all front and center for storm and this experience is not limited to ServiceNow solutions once again third party messaging apps and platforms are part of the Virtual Agent and incident auto resolution process proactively helping storm in the tools of his choice now some of you watching storm's journey may be saying sure but how long does it take to get this up and running is I always on AI powered service. Let's start with knowledge based information that you saw populated in every aspect for storm ServiceNow offers guided setup for knowledge management. Now knowledge management guided set up provides a sequence of tasks to help you configure knowledge management offering ways to define requirements the ML and really align to the company strategies either offering kicks methodology knowledge demand insights and translation management each section is broken down to a specific task that can be assigned to key individuals and/or groups. So let's talk about the service catalogs that we saw items such as hardware software onboarding requests we saw served up to storm in the Employee Center meet ServiceNow catalog Builder a visual and guided experience where service owners like you can create or edit catalog items along with departmental and roll restrictions very simply now the catalog Builder experience enables you to delegate the creation and maintenance of one catalog or many catalogs and finally let's dive into chat bots virtual agents setup and hopefully demystify some of the perceived complexities around the setup and the maintenance of natural language understanding AI or machine learning around these virtual agents ServiceNow is listen to customers like yourself and we've created a conversational interfaces Workbench this includes guided setup around general conversation setups virtual agents set up agent chats and this really puts it all in one place helping teams to get started in days, not weeks or months. So with that this concludes the video with ServiceNow requesters like storm get 24/7 AI powered self service on a single platform that simplifies technology requests and beyond even the ability to use third party messaging tools such as MS Teams. And finally employees like storm get faster solutions with predictive intelligence if you like what you saw or if you have any questions, please see some of the information you here or even better, please reach out to your local representative and see how ServiceNow can deliver this for your company. And with that, I want to thank you for spending your time with me.
Deliver frictionless field service experiences with Field Service Management
K22 K2022
Delivering a unified employee experience for your hybrid workforce
K22 K2022
Dev-ternships: The best way to grow your ServiceNow Team
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for joining me for this talk about creating Dev-ternships as a way to grow your ServiceNow team. Finding the right talent for your team is always a challenge, no matter the industry. Now, I am Sharon Barnes. And nowadays, I am a developer MVP with two years of ServiceNow experience, as well as over 12 years of training and management experience. Now, my previous career, I was a training manager and branch manager for Eastern North Carolina ALM insurance company. And I transferred from that non-technical career to ServiceNow, because I felt overworked and underpaid. I'd had a friend working on the Now platform, who had talked about how much he enjoyed it for years. But I always assumed that it was out of reach for me, that the career was just for people with specialized skills or technological genius. Well, that friend asked me to help review his k-19 workshop for wording and screenshots. And I ended up completing and understanding the workshops content. I had just built a virtual agent with no degree or intensive training. I realized that this was learnable. And within one year of study, I was employed with a partner, New Access Innovations. And New Access allowed me to leverage my skills as a trainer and as a ServiceNow developer to found a Dev-ternships. Now, we're going to go over several points today. First, why we built a Dev-ternships. Second, what we built for version 1 and the structure around that program. And third, the future improvements that New Access will use for its next iteration. Now, why we built it. Well, I've participated in hiring for technology, insurance, and retail industries. And I see some of the same trends across all of them. First, great talent is rare and expensive. I'm sure you know of multiple openings that have been unfilled for months. Second, cultural fit is essential. Now, most businesses continue to scour resumes or search LinkedIn for the person with the most experience and certifications. Hiring firms and researchers are beginning to realize that in many industries, the most qualified candidates can actually damage a firm when they don't jive with the company's culture. And third, what people claim as their skills does not always equal reality. With a good interview process, you can help prevent this, but a few can slip through. Now with a Dev-ternship, you can train entry level admins and developers with precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as make sure that they are a fit for your company culture and the team that they will be working with. Now, beyond these programs, New Access identified one more issue they wanted to solve, a lack of diversity in ServiceNow candidates. According to Nelson Frank's career and hiring guide, individuals of Black, African, and Caribbean descent represent only 3% of available developers. Studies have shown that diverse organizations have better outcomes than their less diverse peers. And the industry of information technology is limited in that regard. Therefore, it's in our own best interest as leaders of our organizations to encourage and empower minorities and women to enter into our industry and grow the diversity of the ServiceNow ecosystem, so that we can achieve those better outcomes. Now, what we built. We created a network to recruit from historically Black colleges and universities. Second, we created a repeatable system to train interns on specific skills. And the system is flexible enough to allow substitution of different curriculum, forum, different departmental internships. And third, we created survey metrics for continual improvement of the program. Now, the first step to a great internship is recruiting. Getting quality people into your program. And recruiting takes more time than you think, because the go-getters apply early. So three months out to get approval from your schools, get the job posting up, distribute flyers to the students via that university's regular communication system, and schedule info sessions. About two months out, hold those information sessions. These should be led by somebody passionate about the program. And at the same time, start collecting resumes. Around six weeks out, you're going to want to run the interviews with your selected candidates. And by four weeks out, inform the interns that they've been selected for the program. And that at the start of the semester, they're also going to be starting working with you. Now, the overall structure for our internship was broken down into three phases. The first was eight weeks focused on learning the fundamentals of ServiceNow development. Then, we had one week of exam prep to help them earn their CSA. And the last three weeks were for building their capstone project, an application based on their interests. Now, we covered 10 topics. And our goal was really for them to gain more than their CSA. We wanted to ensure they had the experience to become effective admins. So we included a variety of topics, including ITIL practices, gathering requirements, participating in sprint planning, and just overall, understanding the development skills needed for the bigger picture of how ServiceNow allows people to work better. Now, our course was set up with a weekly tempo. We created a scoped application on the Now app platform, incorporating knowledge articles of the weekly curriculum. And the interns had a primary instructor throughout the entire program for a main point of contact, as well as having weekly lectures for members of our team to act as subject matter experts for each of the topics. We added gamification to the midweek review session to increase engagement. And just overall, we wanted to ensure that there were interactive elements, so that it was more than just instruction to go study remotely, but a constant feedback and engagement throughout every week. Now, we got our content from a variety of sources. And this is the most common question I get asked. We combined hands-on exercises from the developer site, as well as Now Learning with readings, videos, and lectures, as well as making sure that the students had that one on one mentorship to guide their learning. Overall, it worked. But you can constantly improve from experience. And I want to call out several points where we found for improvement, so that you can avoid them when you build your own programs. First, target schools with a solid science and technology programs. We noticed that the number and quality of applicants from these schools with that focus was better. Second, we wanted to make sure there was more practical experience. Make it feel a little bit less like a class with fewer theoretical exercises and more time on the real work needed by businesses. Third was business value added. Having the capstone driven by actual business needs. By having it driven by their interest, well, we ended up with a 100% sports related projects, which are fun but not exactly applicable to our customers. Now, looking at how this changed the format of our internship from the three phases into four phases, with the first three weeks focused on CSA prep. Consolidating that foundational information down to a shorter period of time. Six weeks of shadowing their mentor, being able to complete some of that same work and stories that their mentor is doing. The next two weeks are all about that capstone program tailored to that business scenario. And then, the last week is for the certification. And we placed this at the end, because we had noticed that some of the interns were demotivated by the difficulty of earning that certificate in the middle of the program. Now, these changes mean that for our first three weeks, we had to really consolidate the information down. So rather than it being a weekly schedule, we've switched to three times a week going through that lecture cycle of labs and quizzes. Now, overall, I want to thank each of you for your time today. Because with Dev-ternships, you were training entry level admins and developers in precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as making sure that they are fit for your company culture and the team that they'll be working with. And while they're gaining these skills through the paid internship with the company, your company is benefiting from the opportunity to grow their ServiceNow practice. Thank you for your time. And I hope that this information will help you in creating your own Dev-ternships programs. If you're interested in a little more information later, feel free to contact me, Sharon Barnes at SN Devs. And I look forward to hearing about the success of your programs. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Digital Marketplace: A unified communication service provider marketplace
K22 K2022
Discover how Kraft Heinz uses ServiceNow to streamline their operations, from product development to the factory floor
K22 K2022
