ServiceNow Tokyo release: What’s new in ITSM?

Kon’nichiwa! The new ServiceNow release will take us to the Japanese capital – Tokyo. Let’s see what it brings for IT Service Management (ITSM). 

Admin Center and IT Adoption Journey

These tools – that are to be used by admins and/or platform owners – are promoted with the Tokyo release in order to increase the efficiency within your ServiceNow instance.

There is a set of recommendations defined in the IT Adoption Journeys module – e.g. Reduce incidents and keep services flowing with AI-Based automation and performance standards, or Deliver Extraordinary Employee Experiences, Resiliency and Productivity – each journey contains one to many subsequent sub-steps and they all provide a description with details how, why, and when should be the corresponding features and apps installed.

The ambition of deflecting the number of raised incidents, or delivering the best employee experience is to be led step by step following the journey’s details together with progress visualisation. This tool provides you with an overview of how many and what applications are already installed, which ones are subject to licensing or simply lists the applications that are available but not yet installed in regard to the particular journey. 

The Admin Center is a page dynamically displaying – among the others – the status of applications whether they are ready for update or installation, or the weekly notification digest from a security perspective, reviewing events such as the number of failed logins, external logins, security elevations, impersonations, antivirus scans, and many more. 

As a part of the Center, there are buttons for Dashboards, Knowledge Bases, and Visual Task Boards.

The difference between IT Adoption Journey and the Admin Center is in the linking of the applications. Journeys are bundle-like while the Center contains all of the apps with the possibility to filter them simply:

• by their status (Installed, Not Installed, Updates, Scheduled Installation),
• by subscription status (Paid versus Free),
• by product family (GRC, CSM, etc.).

Service Operations Workspace for ITSM

Service Operations Workspace for ITSM has finally arrived on the platform. This feature replaces the previous workspace, brings the missing configurability, and is UI Builder compliant.

This Workspace for L1 and L2 service desk agents and operators with a respective landing page, and with visibility of service outages and assignments allow you to prioritise and plan the agent’s work accordingly. Hence your managers can now define learning objectives for L1 agents to gain particular capabilities, knowledge, and skills.

Multilingual email notifications

Activating this plugin enables the customisation of email notifications. Translations can be static – translated via translator or dynamic – translated via localisation.

For example, a Swedish recipient raises a ticket for a Portuguese agent – both will receive notification in their preferred languages. 

It can be utilised also within group management:

• if a group email is defined, the notification will be in a corresponding language;
• if it’s an undefined group email, the notification will be translated to each user individually, as per their preferences.

Benchmarks and KPIs 

Benchmarks as analytical tools have been already present, but since Tokyo, you can use them for measuring ITSM Virtual Agent efficiency (e.g. call deflection, auto-resolution of incidents), or Virtual Agent CSAT (number of user calls, and number of redirections to agents). If you want a better analysis, you can also link them to Performance Analytics.

Change management

Tokyo release has presented a new Change Model Success (CMS) – an indicator of the success rate among each Change Type. It is available as a landing page and also enables you to review models by category with Performance Analytics.

Together with CMS, a new module called Success Probability has been introduced. It shows the percentual probability of success for each Change request type. Success probability is calculated based on the outcomes from CMS and the Change Success Score that use values that have been defined by system properties as minimum and maximum ones.

ServiceNow Mobile Platform

Accessing the ServiceNow platform from mobile phones has been moved from the ServiceNow Mobile app into the ServiceNow Mobile Platform which offers a low-code method to customise the mobile UI with rules and actions similar to UI Policies for the ServiceNow backend.

You can use the Mobile Studio to build and customise Mobile apps – layouts, landing pages, permissions, and many more. All the components are easy to configure. 

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