Hello Community,
Have you tried ServiceNow Smart Assessments powered by the Smart Assessment Engine (SAE)?
Your customers may be asking what it is and would like to know about its capabilities, how to set it up, and how to use it.
Here is a simple, quick guide to help you understand!
What are Smart Assessments?
It’s a new capability built on top of Next Experience that lets you create intuitive assessments with an improved user interface. You can set up automated responses, configure automation, track assessment progress, define scoring logic at both the question and overall assessment levels, define scope and enable real-time collaboration.
That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? Let’s look at each one.
We can't do these in the legacy Assessment set up, there is very limited scope for UI, no option for defining scope, no automation, and no real-time collaboration.
1)How to Enable Smart Assessments??
The Smart Assessment Engine feature is available out of the box for IRM, ESG, TPRM, and VR use case assessments. However it is not limited to these, as long as the Next Experience is available for a table, you can still set this up (you may need to configure a few mappings ex: Context item, template categories, Action Categories Mapping etc..).
The very first plugin required is Smart Assessment Core, which also includes the Assessment Designer and Smart Assessment Connected plugins.
This includes the following features:
- Multiple Assessment Templates
- Different Question Types
- Real-Time Assessment Submission Progress
- Define Assessment Scope
- Assessment Workspace
These are paid plugins. Please check your subscription model before enabling them in the production instance!
Let’s look at how it works after installing the plugin below: > Go to Workspaces > Assessment Workspace
Let’s create a new assessment template. Here, I will create one for Control Assessment.
A)Set up Assessment Details and Settings
B) Set Up Questions
The key feature here is the Scope. Assessment Reference lets you select which fields the assessor can see to provide more context around the assessment. For example, while taking a control assessment, you might need fields such as Entity, Description, Status, Control Objective, and so on. You can pull these from the control table.
C)Set up Initial instructions :
D) Set up questions add sections and subsections, choose from various data types, include guidance and request justification.
E) Now, if you would like to set up automated responses, enable the plugin below and configure automated responses as shown.
Example:
F) If you need to set up scoring logic, enable the plugin below.
You can set them up at the question, section, and subsection levels.
G) Let's publish this and see how it works!
# Let's set this up on the control objective
# Make sure the property below is enabled (if you need Assessment Field selection on the control objective and on the control):
sn_grc_case_mgmt.enable_smart_assessments: Yes
Assessment Generated
Let's open and take the assessment: Sample Assessment Instance.
Real Time Progress
H) If you need collaboration, enable the plugin and Add Contributors below.
Add Contributors
Real Time Visibility
I) Post-Assessment Automation: Example : trigger a follow-up assessment, create an issue record etc.
Example: Let's update the control record with a Control Assessment Explanation.
Go to the Automation section, give it a name and select either condition based or standalone automation.
In the "Set Actions" option select the action type.
What are action types? How are they populated?
These are basically Subflows, where the template category and Subflow category are mapped.
Create a Subflow with your automation and make sure to set the category as the template category in this case, "Control category." Double-check that these are mapped correctly here.
Subflow:
Configure and Activate
Now, let's complete an assessment to see this automation.
Result : 😍
Control Comments has been updated
Flow Execution :
J) If you would like to migrate existing assessment metrics to Smart Assessment templates, you can install the plugin below and complete the migration.
Finally, you can trigger these on the fly using Flow Designer actions. Below are the out-of-the-box actions available:
For some reason out of the box Trigger Smart Assessment is not setting appropriate inputs so i cloned and used the in the flow and it worked
Sample Flow and Flow Executions
Execution 😍:
Let me know if any questions!
Thank you,
Hemanth
Certified Technical Architect (CTA), ServiceNow MVP 2024, 2025
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