What's new in Utah?

ServiceNow Utah New Features Summary

“Create value faster across your organization with simplified experiences, targeted automation, and organizational agility.” That is the quote used by ServiceNow to present the new Utah release launched in April, this release is aligned to solve common challenges across organizations during their digital journey by adapting the technology to new market requirements, being agile, and automating the business process.

Key strategies highlighted by ServiceNow for this new release are the following.

• ?Simplified experiences- Deliver simplified experiences that drive productivity and satisfaction and,
• Purposeful automation - Drive purposeful automation, optimizing processes to reduce cost and maximize efficiency and,
• Organizational agility - Create organizational agility to innovate faster with flexibility and scale

This article is an extraction of some of the information published by ServiceNow, customized by my personal experience, on what I consider to be the most important features to help Eviden customers improve their experience and automate according to ServiceNow’s key strategies for the Utah release, since most of Eviden’s customers have consolidated their operations with the capabilities offered by the current version of ServiceNow, However, by integrating the enhancements offered in the Utah release, such as Advance Search, or using the workspace enhancements, customers can optimize their current operations without making any process improvements, and simply use the IA capabilities to do all the work, enabling the customer to get the information they need faster and with greater accuracy. This allows Eviden’s customers to move forward in their maturity process (many of which have been defined because of defined roadmaps) and optimize their resources.

Simplified experiences

Simplify customer, employee, and user experiences by providing an intuitive and unified interface with all the relevant information to complete their day-to-day tasks so users can see what's happening in their environment and take informed decisions.

Key features and enhancements added in Utah to simplify the experience include:

• AI search enhancements: Enable teams to easily find issue-related information and suggest possible solutions to resolve issues; new features include auto-complete suggestions, typo matching, and exact match.
• Document Intelligence Enhancements: Allows users to extract data from documents. With the new features, you can speed up and automate text extraction. Track the entire extraction process with specific views, Extract long tables, and extract information from checkboxes.
• Workspaces enhancements: Enhanced workspaces will enable users to have all the information in a single pane. Some of the improvements of workspaces for the technology excellence pillar are the following:

1. ITSM Service Operations Workspace enhancements: Incorporate the full change lifecycle experience with dynamic pages for all states. Simplify change scheduling with access to all aspects of the process in a single view and investigate incidents, in-context, with metrics and data from Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
2. ITOM Cloud Operations Workspace enhancements: Explore Kubernetes in context with other cloud resources from the Cloud Operations Workspace. Visualize cloud discovery, resolve errors, track progress, and integrate AWS, Azure, and other cloud data with plug-and-play connectors.
3. Security operations Vulnerability Response Workspace: Create watch topics, remediation efforts, and tasks for all vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from a single view. Schedule the recurring creation of remediation efforts and remediation tasks.

Purposeful Automation

Automation has become a priority, as companies need to optimize processes and reduce costs. ServiceNow has made important improvements to low-code automation solutions. In addition, Process optimization and workforce optimization has become differentiators included in Utah to optimize workloads and resources.

• Process Optimization expansion: Process Optimization helps process owners improve their business processes by identifying hidden inefficiencies through in-platform process mining. It provides deep insight into processes to understand the root cause of how and why issues occur and allows you to view and analyze team performance across your organization to improve results by eliminating redundant tasks and bottlenecks in business processes. Principal enhancements for Utah release are the following:

1. Use multidimensional mining breakdown and variation analysis on child entities
2. Define integrated performance analytics experience > KPI dashboard per project
3. Enable interactive histogram for drill-down analysis on duration and repetition
4. Move rule finding logic into advanced transition on workbench
5. Use attributes of interest to support advanced finding definition
6. Made finding rule category configurable with ping-pong analysis
7. Conduct variance analysis with breakdown analysis

• Workforce Optimization expansion: Develop high-performing teams across the enterprise with real-time visibility into performance, an intuitive interface to optimize scheduling and time-off requests, and demand scenario modeling to forecast scheduling needs with precision. Workforce optimization has made enhancements for ITSM, FSM and HR.
• Stream Connect for Apache Kafka: Simplify and scale Kafka event streaming. Leverage Kafka message flow trigger to consume and process messages, transform, and insert data into ServiceNow tables. Use low-code flow action Kafka producer step and build to push messages using drag-and-drop data pills.
• Integration Hub Usage Dashboard enhancements: Gain complete visibility into spoke usage and license compliance and understand adoption as a proxy for business value. View transactions by top spokes, custom spokes, and licensed/unlicensed transactions for compliance purposes.

The new version of Utah will undoubtedly help companies achieve their goals, as it has a wide range of features based on its AI engine and low-code automation that can be adapted both to companies that are starting their digital journey and to companies that want to optimize and automate their processes.

The full list of new capabilities can be viewed by following the links below:

?

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-release-notes/page/release-notes/reference/release-highlights.html

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/upgrade/utah/utah-upgrade-kit.pdf

About the author:

Oscar Franco

Pre-Sales Solution Architect

Oscar Franco is a Pre-Sales Solution Architect at Evidian with more than 15 years of experience in the design of IT solutions with strong ITIL experience to help customers achieve their business goals. He is a certified ServiceNow System Administrator. He enjoys learning new ServiceNow features.