Perhaps known by a select few as that one idyllic place in China by Kublai Khan and of course also the latest and greatest ServiceNow upgrade.?Intended as next-level technological innovation for bringing harmony between efficiency and innovation.
ServiceNow upgrades are often seen as necessary tasks, but they’re also opportunities for growth. Few of us would call them ‘fun and games,’ but technical aspects of a platform upgrade are just the tip of the iceberg and there’s real value in embracing these changes. Staying on the latest version is key to maximizing platform potential, but understanding what’s going away and what’s new is equally crucial. And let’s not stop there—the real value lies in understanding how to integrate these new features into your organization and, more importantly, how to embrace them.
Let’s explore the exciting updates that come with the latest ServiceNow upgrade. We’ll take a look at the new features that can help your organization grow, as well as the legacy tech that’s on its way out or already completely removed. We hope it will help you prepare for a smoother transition, ensuring that you’re not just keeping up with the changes, but actively benefiting from them. Not only from the exciting new features such like the A’s and the I’s together, perhaps with a ‘gen’ in front. But let’s also explore what else is changing, why it might be exciting to you and how it can add value to your organization. For now, we will focus on the core platform, technology & employee workflow areas.
Some enhancements at platform level which you might love:
- Stating the obvious gen AI enabler: Now Assist patch 1 & 3. You might wonder, why this is a big deal in the first place? Well, this gen AI technology will help your teams to deflect incidents by quickly generating knowledge articles, reduce resolution wrap time by automatically generate resolution notes and thus lower the mean time to resolution. It will provide your agents to ability to focus more on the more important matters by letting this technology give them the ability to get a quick overview of the issues, summaries of actions taken, and recommended next steps. All the more important to stay up to date!
- Employee Center, which you should have already migrated to in case you are still on the legacy service portal (wink) has also received some good enhancements: you can capture quick feedback from users with the Experience and Service Feedback feature. Your employees can now interact better with news articles as they can now share, comment or place reactions to them.?
- Next experience brings a lot of joy for the eyes: multiple themes can be selected from Theme Builder to be applied to the instance. UI load times can now be analyzed with a new client interaction table.
- Instance Observer - UX Insights: nobody likes a slow instance, for sure your users. With this feature you can identify how the performance or lack thereof is causing a pain such as URL’s with long response times, users impacted by an outage etc.
- User authentication technologies (FIDO2, biometric or hardware security keys) no longer require an authentication app set-up.?
New features at technology workflow level (so ITSM, ITOM and the likes):
- Thanks to the External Routing feature, Advanced Work Assignment can now be integrated with third-party providers. I can also look fresh as the AWA dashboards can be migrated to the Next Experience.?
- Whilst using Agent Chat, Now Assist can make life easier by providing recommended responses.?
- CMDB has also received a bunch load of updates: The Now Assist technology has a dedicated application to bring generative AI to your CMDB, enabling smarter data management and more accurate insights. Another feature is the ability to change the performance settings on CSDM and the CMDB Data Foundations Dashboards so that the impact can be limited.
- Event Management almost wins the race with over a dozen new features: chain of events can be visualized by viewing the alert group timeline. Gain insights by seeing relationships between various alerts thanks to the Alert Assist AI capabilities. You are also able to do bulk actions or remove alerts from an alerts group with the Express list.?
- Knowledge Management is now easier thanks to knowledge article editor upgrades, AI search to provide more accurate search capabilities and Now Assist Gen AI features to shorten or elaborate specific content in knowledge articles.
- Service Operations Workspace for ITSM: this would deserve an entire summary on its own, I am not even brave enough to list them here. They clearly won the race. Which makes perfect sense as this is where the newest tech will get its place and interaction with the users. Be prepared for the deprecation of the classic forms to be substituted by the SOW. Some noteworthy things are being able to see the CI dependency map for reference fields in an incident record, notice VIP callers easily, ability to broadcast communication messages as announcements in major incident management, ability for an ITSD agent to reset a user’s password via an incident record, support your ITSD organization to find answers more easily and quickly thanks to the AI-powered search, increase user adoption with the help of new guides tours within the SOW and much much more.
And at employee workflow level (HRSD):?
- ServiceNow is embracing the Healthcare sector customers by introducing HR Service Delivery for Healthcare: this brings a new data model to manage healthcare professionals’ data securely. Also, the embedded Healthcare Employee Onboarding workflow makes the onboarding process of new healthcare professionals smoother than ever.??
- Journey designer has a couple of new things such as new dashboards, ability to change the manager during the configuration and a new guide for parental leave.
- Agent Workspace for HR Case Management brings a lot of joy for your HR teams with a bunch of new features such as response templates at HR task level, decision trees, recently updated cases view etc.
- In Document Templates, the date on which the employee signs a PDF document is now recorded.
What’s going to disappear or planned for sunset:
KB0867184 comes to the rescue to shed light on the deprecation phases and what to do exactly if you are impacted.?
- Removed: a lot of dashboards such as CMDB Health dashboard, CI dashboard not available on new instances and not supported anymore on existing instances. The event management mobile app has been removed. Some UI buttons were removed but nothing dramatic here.??
- Deprecated: CSM Agent Workspace, use the CSM Configurable Workspace instead. For HRSD users the HR document templates are getting ready for deprecation, Document Templates will be used going forward. A lot of dashboards within event? management will no longer be supported such as EM scorecards, insights, overview and health log analytics overview.?
- Some Performance analytics artifacts: PA widgets, analytics hub and PA admin console won’t be available on new instances. Consider using platform analytics data visualizations with indicator data sources instead for PA widgets and KPI details to substitute analytics hub.
- Deprecated plugins: HR agent workspace will be deprecated, to be replaced with HRSD Configurable Agent Workspace for Case Management. HR agent mobile is also on the list without any replacement tech for now.?
For sure, this is just the gist of it and not all might be applicable to you. For full details we refer you to the sources which are worthwhile to go through during your upgrade endeavor: Xanadu upgrade kit, and release notes. Happy sailing on your upgrade project to Xanadu!
See you next time, when we sail onwards to Japan, Yokohama. The next upgrade is planned in Q2 2025.?
