The ServiceNow Washington DC release is here! As always, ServiceNow has rolled out more advanced products and features in this release to empower enterprises across industries to accelerate digital transformation and drive business growth.
Solutions such as IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and others have become stronger with noteworthy enhancements. Additionally, to help organizations align with the current Generative AI trend and redefine their business operations, ServiceNow has made significant updates to its Now Assist applications introduced in the Vancouver release.
This blog post throws light on these future-aligned updates made to some of the common applications in the ServiceNow Washington DC release.
What’s New in the ServiceNow Washington DC Release for Businesses
Various ServiceNow applications across the IT Workflows, Customer Workflows, and Employee Workflows have been enhanced in the Washington DC release. Here are some of those new and exciting features:
1. IT Service Management (ITSM)
ServiceNow ITSM module has some important updates that enable organizations to improve their IT service management and enhance user experience. Some of these updates are listed below:
• Service Operations Workspace
The Service Operations Workspace for ITSM allows users to gain a unified view of their IT service management processes. The updates to the Service Operations Workspace in the Washington DC release include:
- Universal Request:
The ServiceNow Universal Request is now integrated into the Service Operations Workspace to enable service agents to efficiently collaborate with other departments and accelerate case resolution from their Service Operations Workspace. By providing a unified view of tickets created by users from different departments, it helps streamline the resolution process.
- On-call Scheduling:
On-call scheduling has also been integrated into the Service Operations Workspace. This integration allows agents to view and manage their schedules and team members’ schedules, submit leave requests, and set notification preferences through the Schedules Menu from the Home Page. Additionally, it helps managers gain visibility into their team’s on-call schedules and configure escalation policies, enhancing overall operational efficiency.
• ITSM Success Dashboard
ServiceNow ITSM Success Dashboard empowers IT leaders to evaluate the effectiveness of their ITSM implementation. Starting from the ServiceNow Washington DC release, it allows users to efficiently create dashboards that display three levels of performance metrics, which include:
- Performance Overview includes KPIs such as self-solved percentage (measures the proportion of issues resolved without agent intervention), call deflection (measures the frequency of actions), and more.
- Service Quality includes KPIs such as customer satisfaction score, MTTR (mean time to resolve), SLA (Service Level Agreements) compliance rate, first response effectiveness, and ticket reopen rate.
- Operational Success includes an operational KPI that tracks day-to-day operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Besides, the ITSM Success Dashboard enables users to track the performance of “Now Assist for IT Service Management” (an application introduced in the Vancouver release to summarize incident data and automatically create resolution notes).
2. Customer Service Management (CSM)
ServiceNow Customer Service Management, the module that helps enterprises resolve customer queries efficiently and build better customer relationships, has the following new features:
• Now Assist for CSM Data Summarization
The Now Assist for CSM application, powered with Generative AI, has been updated to enable users to set certain conditions within the case record fields. This ensures that Now Assist summarizes all the data only when specific criteria are met. The application also comes with role-based access control, allowing administrators to ensure that only authorized users can access the summarization feature.
• Customer Contracts and Entitlements
ServiceNow Washington DC release also introduced a new feature in the CSM module that allows users to create and manage customer service contracts and entitlements from their CSM Agent Workspace. It also allows for easy modification of the contracts and entitlements, streamlining workflows and enhancing user experience.
3. IT Operations Management (ITOM)
ServiceNow ITOM plays an important role in helping organizations gain complete control over their IT operations and infrastructure. In the ServiceNow Washington DC release, applications in the ITOM Visibility module are loaded with new features, such as Predictive Intelligence on the Discovery Admin Workspace, which provides suggestions to users for discovering applications within the IT network. New Discovery and Service Mapping patterns have also been added to enable a more comprehensive discovery of IT resources and services.
Moreover, the new centralized map allows users to get a more holistic view of the IT landscape, and the Content Service Framework enables the discovery of applications and devices not previously identified using patterns.
4. Employee Service Management
Next up, we have the ServiceNow Employee Service Management module, which consists of applications that help deliver a seamless employee experience and boost employee productivity.
The Washington DC release has added a new application called ServiceNow Mentoring to this module. The Mentoring application facilitates knowledge sharing and collaboration between individuals seeking mentorship and their mentors. Based on the information provided by both the mentees and mentors on the portal, the intelligent matching algorithm in the Mentoring application connects relevant individuals, creating a frictionless experience for both parties.
5. Source-to-Pay Operations
The ServiceNow Source-to-Pay Operations module offers three applications– Accounts Payable Operations, Sourcing and Procurement Operations, and Supplier Lifecycle Operations– to streamline sourcing lifecycle management.
In the ServiceNow Washington DC release, the Accounts Payable Operations application comes with exciting new features to help organizations transform invoice management. This includes the automatic matching of purchase orders during invoice processing workflows, which improves operational efficiency. Additionally, the intelligent grouping of invoices based on the user’s system settings allows effective management of invoices from diverse regions with different currencies and formats. Also, there is an integration framework to facilitate the integration between the Accounts Payable Operations application and third-party applications, enabling effortless invoice ingestion and processing.
Final Note
The ServiceNow Washington DC release is yet another testimony to ServiceNow’s commitment to empowering organizations to stay ahead of the curve. The new features powered with Generative AI & predictive intelligence capabilities across various modules in this release not only enable businesses to meet the evolving needs of their customers and employees but also empower them to make data-driven decisions.
Furthermore, the ServiceNow Washington DC release has also enhanced its developer-focused applications to boost developer productivity. Read our blog post on the developer-focused enhancements.
As a ServiceNow Premier Partner, KANINI has assisted many leading organizations across industries in upgrading their ServiceNow platform to the latest release efficiently. Reach out to us to learn more.
Author
Ravi Rajamani
Ravi is the ServiceNow Practice Lead at KANINI. He brings close to 18 years of experience in the IT industry and has strong program & project management skills spanning ServiceNow, Resource Management, Solution Design, and Service Delivery. He has a proven track record of helping enterprise customers leverage ServiceNow platform efficiently.
