What is the value of the Business Processes in ServiceNow?

[markterringon]

Hello,

I wanted to ask your view on the value of adding "Business Processes" to ServiceNow?  Or what these are used for?

My initial thought were they could be akin to Value Streams, and that you could assign Business Capabilities to each stage of the Value Stream that are the primary, supporting, and enabling capabilities.   But the field set suggests this is not the case.

All the form has are data groups for name, lifecycle stage, ownership, and business impact.   It seems very much as if this is standalone.  You cannot assign business capabilities, nor reference stages within the "business process".

: Manage business processes

The documentation states the business processes are a sequence of tasks, but you are not adding the tasks in the sequence. 

You also cannot assign business capabilities to a business process (that I can see), so again I do not see the value or use of.

Basically we would like to show what business capabilities support specific areas of the business.  If a business capability map (or list) defines the business in a static snapshot, value streams describe the business in motion. 

So, understanding how "Procure-to-Pay", or "Source-to-Contract" is underpinned by services with the business capabilities would be really helpful.  We could show the primary, supporting, and enabling business capabilities for each stage of the value stream.  That was my expectation of what you might be able to do with adding business processes into ServiceNow.  But it very much seems a standalone area for data entry that you cannot link to.

I hope I am wrong and I haven't found the right documentation, but the lack of fields on the "Business Process" form suggest otherwise.

Could anyone help confirm my view or help me understand the value you gain from this?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Kind regards,

Mark

[Doron Orbach]

Hi, I suggest to review the BPMN modeling, as part of the Enterprise Modeling [was released in the EA Workspace April release]. It enables you to model and see the activities that occur as part of a business process, and also to connect these activities to other elements in the CMDB. As for connecting to capabilities, this will be via CMDB relationship, not via references.

[mkeeney]

I'll add to @Doron Orbach 's great comments... Business Architecture is a best practice, but not all companies have invested in this practice. You'll need to self-assess if your company has this practice already or should consider adopting it. Otherwise, you'll have no practitioners to take advantage of the value the capability brings.

[markterringon]

Hi Doron,

I appreciate you replying, so thank you for your time.

Being frank the BPMN modelling isn't the best, and you spend a lot of effort for little value modelling such things as Procure-to-Pay in ServiceNow as a diagram.   You can't even have options on how you "connect" shapes as you would in Lucid, so the diagramming functionality is also very limited.

For me, the best value would be the same pattern as associating Business Applications to Business Capabilities.  But the "Business Process" doesn't allow for stages within the process, so you cannot use that approach, nor is there a connection to anything other than Business Impact.

Having to add the "CI Relationship" between  tasks on the BPMN diagram is again time consuming and mostly moot when considering the options.

We use Lucid for diagramming and will be using integration hub to help with that connectivity and bringing in Artefacts.  But again, it's just a diagram.

If we wanted to understand the Primary, Supporting, and Enabling Capabilities for each stage within the Value Stream, and the common Enabling Capabilities across all Value Streams we cannot do this.

Being able to easily understand cross-functional flow means reverting back to spreadsheets. I have also yet to find a good use case for actually using "Enterprise Modelling & Visualisation".  The Business Capability Map is clunky and poorly visualised, and the Application Hierarchy for something like an ERP is very messy and again a lot of effort to read, and you cannot re-organise, and all the "Provided By: Provides" / "Used By: Uses" just get in the way.

To @mkeeney 's comment- I don't really understand your point.  I understand Business Architecture and the benefit of this, but it's not something you can do effectively in ServiceNow.  We have our vendors, contracts, applications and interfaces in ServiceNow, but this is not Business Architecture.

All companies buy things, and all companies sell things or provide a service.  Maybe if you have examples that showed the Business Architecture side in the documentation it might increase the uptake.  But I cannot see SN being used for Business Architecture.

I do appreciate your time and hope you both have a good weekend.

Thanks

[mkeeney]

Thank you for your feedback, Mark. In order to respond, I'd need context about which ServiceNow version you're using. The upcoming versions bring significant improvements.