The News: ServiceNow announced its Now Platform Washington D.C., its first platform release of 2024, which incorporates several new features that are designed to improve intelligent automation and deliver fast time to value. The new release includes the following new tools:
- Sales and Order Management (SOM) helps organizations increase revenue by uniting the sales and order lifecycles across front, middle, and back-office teams on the ServiceNow platform.
- Platform Analytics offers a secure, simple, unified experience for reporting and analytics across the entire Now Platform.
- The new Workflow Studio allows creators to create workflow automations quickly and easily from start to finish.
- Inclusion of a new Security Posture Control (SPC), and updates to the ServiceNow Operational Technology (OT) solution portfolio and Common Service Data Model (CSDM).
The platform also includes new features that enhance the Now Assist GenAI experiences, which offer responsible, intelligent automation embedded into the ServiceNow platform, including Now Assist for IT Operations Management (ITOM) AIOps, Now Assist in Virtual Agent enhancements, and Impact AI Accelerators. These enhancements are designed to help boost productivity and accelerate value from AI investments.
You can read the press release discussing these new announcements in detail on ServiceNow’s website, as well as the press release covering the new generative AI enhancements incorporated into the platform.
ServiceNow Releases Now Platform Washington D.C. Update
Analyst Take: ServiceNow’s first Now Platform release of 2024, named Washington D.C., incorporates several new features and enhancements to existing tools that are designed to bring more intelligence to operations across entire workflows, while also incorporating a more unified experience for cross-functional teams. According to ServiceNow’s product team, the focus within Washington D.C. is around focusing on simplifying automation experiences and increasing productivity by delivering a single, intuitive interface for end-to-end end workflow automation, reporting, and analytics, as well as incorporating generative AI across the entire platform.
The underlying approach taken by ServiceNow within its new Washington D.C. release is to unify complete workflows across the platform, to ensure that front-line agents, service agents, sales professionals, and back-office teams are all coordinated through a single platform. This enables entire teams to work in concert with one another to provide a better, more unified customer experience, because all stakeholders have visibility over opportunities and activities, and can complete actions within their flow of work. This reduces the time to complete, while also ensuring that all stakeholders remain apprised of any changes.
The new release also incorporates more intelligent automation across the entire platform, which is provided through a new Workflow Studio. This tool allows creators to create end-to-end workflow automations quickly and easily, simply by describing the process they’d like to automate, and Workflow Studio will visualize and create the workflows. ServiceNow says the solution integrates capabilities like Flow Designer, Automation Engine, Process Automation Designer, and Decision Builder into one view, so employees can collaborate and easily create, configure, and monitor automated workflows.
Linking Workflows Through a Common Service Data Model
The latest Now Platform release includes new pre-built, cross-functional workflows developed with ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model (CSDM). Through automation, CSDM allows organizations to collect data across hardware or software, cloud, or data center, into a trusted, auditable data model that can be used across multiple workflows and follows compliance guidelines.
These solutions can be applied across use cases in security incident management, human resources, and governance, by helping IT teams retain accurate, audit-ready data for executive and regulatory reporting, decreasing time spent on maintaining applications.
From Analytics to Actions
Another key element included with the Now Platform Washington D.C. release is Platform Analytics, which is designed to provide a secure, simple, unified experience for reporting and analytics across the entire Now Platform. Through this tool, users will be able to create data visualizations and dashboards that incorporate multiple data inputs into one, easy to understand experience to power faster, smarter decision making. The Platform Analytics tool is also capable of surfacing meaningful, personalized, and timely information directly within Next Experience workspaces and connects to Workflow Studio, so that customers can easily create condition-based workflow triggers based on analytics thresholds.
Similarly, the new platform release also includes new AIOps experiences in Service Operations Workspace for ITOM, which includes new enhancements to Express List and alert automation. ServiceNow says that Express List is designed to bring together historical alert trends and automated root cause analysis into a single, digestible screen view. Enhancements to alert automation include more contextual information, which can help operators to more easily understand and action events, so they can onboard more quickly and speed up resolution times.
The key commonality between these two enhancements is ServiceNow’s focus on providing relevant, personalized, and contextual information around data. Instead of forcing users to hunt down additional information, the platform surfaces these contextual data points and insights automatically, so that relevant actions can be taken more quickly and effectively.
New Updates for Industrial Environments and Smart Factories, and Operational Visibility
The Washington D.C. release incorporates updates to the ServiceNow Operational Technology (OT) solution portfolio to serve industrial environments and smart factories. According to ServiceNow, Operational Technology (OT) Knowledge Management adds to existing OT Visibility, Service Management, and Vulnerability products by accelerating the resolution of shop floor issues by capturing and sharing known resolutions for OT incidents and process deviations across sites.
Meanwhile, Security Posture Control (SPC) is a new solution in the Security Operations portfolio that is designed to provide more visibility into critical security tool coverage gaps, identify assets with high-risk combinations, and automate response workflows across the enterprise. This solution builds on customers’ existing investments in ITOM Visibility and Service Graph Connector programs. Ultimately, Security Posture Control is positioned to help customers gain a better understanding of their security posture, improving cybersecurity strength and resilience.
Delivering a Robust Platform and Embedded Generative AI to Improve Entire Workflows
ServiceNow’s focus over the past year or so has been around integrating generative AI to improve entire workflows, not just single tasks. Implementing generative AI on single, disconnected tasks can provide small benefits, but across entire workflows, generative AI can be a force multiplier.
ServiceNow’s integrated platform approach is a key point of differentiation, as it allows for intelligent automation of multi-step processes that once required a significant amount of effort and switching between applications to complete. ServiceNow’s Workflow Studio lets users create workflow automations by describing the process they’d like to automate using natural language, and then Workflow Studio will visualize and create the workflows. This enables users with domain expertise to improve efficiency without requiring the assistance of developers, and ensures that critical processes are completed consistently.
Another key integration of AI within the Washington D.C. release can be found in the enhancements ServiceNow has made with its Virtual Agent Designer. This technology makes it easier and faster to design AI-powered virtual conversations, which uses generative AI to create customized conversational automations. Today’s customers are digitally experienced, and demand both localization and personalization when interacting with chatbots. Organizations are no longer able to deploy bots that ignore relevancy, context, and personalization.
Furthermore, ServiceNow’s acquisition strategy has demonstrated that the company understands that generative AI is best applied to specific corpa of data. ServiceNow has made several acquisitions that are focused on specific verticals, including telecom (Atrinet), manufacturing (4Industry), and G2K (retail), which provide the company with the domain expertise needed to smartly apply generative AI to use cases within each specific vertical. It is this domain-specific, workflow-focused approach to deploying generative AI that will help them attract interest and win business as enterprises seek to deploy technology that can deliver ROI quickly.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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ServiceNow Q4 2023 Earnings Exceed Guidance, Driven by Generative AI
ServiceNow to Acquire Task Mining Company UltimateSuite
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
