ServiceNow Rome: What’s in it for ITSM?

Another 6 months have passed and it’s time to present ServiceNow’s Rome release for the ITSM domain.

ServiceNow didn’t shift their focus from the topics improved in the Quebec release and they are continuing to push the limits of what IT Service Management can offer to business. The biggest areas where the Now platform has been strengthened this time are:

• Employee Center, allowing customers to combine all employee experiences in a single portal;
• Workforce Optimization, improving performance with coaching options; 
• Process Optimization, with stronger focus on the process efficiency; 
• Vendor Management Workspace, a landing page with all the needed metrics such as performance score, vendor satisfaction and much more.

Employee Center

Employee center application is a unified multi-department data-driven dynamic portal made for service delivery and employee engagement. Its main goal is to improve employee productivity by cutting the time and effort spent looking for services, updates and other information. 

It is easily scalable, available for all ServiceNow customers and provides a tailored experience thanks to a unified taxonomy. The portal delivers meaningful experiences especially across Legal entities, Human Resources, IT department, Procurement and Workplace Services.

Here is the overview of Employee Center features from the Rome release:

• Easily scales to support multi-department service delivery
• Enhanced Employee Center portal home page with pre-enabled widgets for multi-department tasking​
• Curated micro-sites for popular topics listing
• Unified browsing with AI-enabled search

There are two possible packages for the Employee Center:

• “Employee Center”, enabling employees to perform most common tasks like reporting issues, finding answers, requesting different services. And all of that across multiple departments. 
• “Employee Center Pro”, extending the standard Employee Center with the engagement capabilities. For example, to be informed on the news and events, or to find cross-enterprise answers.

The Employee Center is available for free via the ServiceNow Store. ITSM Standard license is required. Customers who are using the Service Portal have the option to migrate to the Employee Center and take advantage of the improved OOTB experience.

Workforce Optimization

And again, in the Rome release, same as in Quebec, we simply have to mention the enhancements done to the Workflow Optimization.

Here is an overview of the ServiceNow® Workforce Optimization for our new readers:

Leveraging ServiceNow’s Workforce Optimization allows companies to effectively manage its most important asset – people. With Workforce Optimization, team productivity can rise dramatically – it enables a proper management of schedules, work shifts, assignments and skills. Additionally, it provides a well organized performance overview which helps improve the team’s work quality even more. 

One important thing to mention – such capabilities of holistic workflow management  are not currently offered by other IT Service Management platforms and are managed by Excel or some Workflow Engagement Management systems.

Workflow Optimization is available as part of the ITSM Enterprise package.

Rome release highlights for Workforce Optimization are provided below:

• Coaching with Learning, a new application in the Rome release that is integrated with the existing Coaching app. Use this application to train your agents with internal or external content, e.g. Cornerstone or Pluralsight. Or, as an agent, complete learning tasks. 
• Scheduling enhancements. Integrated on-call application made for team calendar to create and manage on-call shifts.
• Teams enhancements. Set key performance indicator (KPI) goals for an agent or a team and monitor their performance over time. View the top-level KPIs for each of the teams or drill down into them to analyze their productivity. For example, by setting the targets for the incident resolution times and monitoring the quality of agents’ incident resolution.

Process Optimization

Process Optimization was enhanced and updated in the Rome release. Among the main enhancements are cluster analysis, summary and insights dashboard, median and standard deviation metrics and more.

There’s a quick overview for our new readers on ServiceNow® Process Optimization presented in a previous article:

ServiceNow’s Process Optimization feature helps analysts measure effectiveness of the company’s business processes by using automated business process flows. It provides the workflows visualisation using data from the ServiceNow audit logs, which gives companies ability to monitor and analyze the performance of the processes and continually improve them. 

With the new application enablement, ServiceNow seeks to challenge the existing process optimization practices, where process analysis sometimes takes months to complete because of incomplete understanding of the process, and the output of the analysis does not provide automated insights and solutions. 

There are plenty of use cases one can think of when using Process Optimization. Let’s introduce some of them: 

• Reduce MTTR
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Improve service availability
• Increase First Call Resolution

and there are many more.

Process Optimization highlights for the Rome release:

• ML Cluster analysis insights 

Get intelligent process analysis insights by using machine-learning (ML) clustering on process data. You can understand the theme behind an ML cluster by quickly identifying its top three most representative records.

• Summary and insights dashboard

View a summary and insights dashboard to quickly comprehend what’s causing process inefficiencies. 

• A view of on-demand mining tasks, such as breakdown, transition, or routes filtering, cluster analysis request and linked process mining.
• It is now available to use median and standard deviation metrics to analyze routes. 

Process Optimization is available as part of the ITSM Enterprise package.

Vendor Management Workspace

ServiceNow® Vendor Management Workspace is a tool where you can manage and optimize services delivered for your vendors. It is a single source of data that consolidates the insights from your vendors’ performance and enables you to make data-driven decisions to maximize value for your organization.

The performance is assessed by using key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be configured and created as vendor metrics. The Vendor Management Workspace allows integration with many ServiceNow applications: Service Portfolio Management (SPM), Contract Management, Assets, SLA Contracts, Vendor Risk Management, and Continual Improvement Management (CIM).

Vendor  Management Workspace is a unique tool offered by ServiceNow in its Now platform, since vendor performance management is not offered by other IT Service Management tools.

Main features of Vendor Management Workspace:

• Single source of Vendors’ data. It is possible to track vendors’ performance and manage it in a unified location. For example, vendor managers can identify poorly performing vendors and tally refunds due to failures in performance by the vendors.
• Integration with Vendor Risk Management application, enabling to aggregate and analyze data from it.
• A comprehensive vendor information layout that keeps track of vendor’s performance over time and provides a historical vendor health analytics.

Vendor Management Workspace highlights for the Rome release:

• Vendor Management Workspace is now configurable using the Now Experience UI Builder, since being a replacement for Vendor Manager Workspace,.
• Use service agreement breaches to track and manage the compensation that your vendors owe to your organization. 
• Use the Vendor Management Workspace landing page to monitor vendor metrics and characteristics (f.e. the number of active improvement initiatives). 
• Create Continual Improvement Management initiatives from vendor success indicators.
• Add KPI groups to your vendors and analyze the performance of indicators that matter the most.

Vendor Management Workspace is available as part of the ITSM Professional package.

Closing Notes – Rome ITSM summary

ServiceNow continues to boost its Now Platform and enhance the service experience of users by improving the productivity of IT, enabling more flexibility with support from Mobile applications and giving more visibility options to the processes. The Rome release introduced us mainly with strongly empowered but already presented features in the previous releases. These features, such as Workflow Optimization or Process Optimization, were provided with the new capabilities that tend to maximize its value.

Don’t hesitate to Contact Us to receive the most actual information regarding ServiceNow and its products. Feel free to reach out in case you are interested in a demo or professional services.

Disclaimer: Information and screenshots used in this article are coming from official ServiceNow documentation released for the Rome upgrade.