Like all of our releases, it’s chock full of enhancements to existing workflows, plus some brand new applications. There’s a real focus on automation (especially our Gen AI capabilities branded as “Now Assist”), but also on simplifying and enhancing the experience for end users, agents/fulfillers and admins.
Interesting facts about Washington, District of Columbia:
- Washington D.C. was in fact NOT built on a swamp. Urban historians have debunked this myth by showing that, despite it being built on a riverside, the area George Washington chose was well-drained, and only 2% of the total landmass could even be considered a swamp. Chicago and New Orleans on the other hand were actually built on swampland.
- When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they didn’t want a single state to have the disproportionate power that they believed the capital would have. So they resolved that the seat of government would be a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress. The district is not a state and therefore has no federal voting representation in Congress. The district elects a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, and there is no district representation in the United States Senate. And district citizens only received the right to vote for president in 1961.
- The district was named after George Washington and Columbia, which is a feminine form of Columbus and was a poetic name for the United States commonly used in the late 1700’s.
- The airspace around Washington, D.C. is more restricted than in any other part of the country, with rules put in place after the 9/11 attacks to establish a "national defense airspace" over the area. All drone flying is banned within 15 miles of Regan National Airport.
- It is illegal to swear, sing, whistle, dance, or skate in the district’s public restrooms.
Some highlights from the Washington D.C. release:
- Now Assist (our Gen AI functionality) is now easier to access via Virtual Agent, through integration with Microsoft Teams and LLM-based workflow topics in VA Designer.
- New Now Assist for IT Operations Management. Empower your technical teams with better, faster understanding of machine-generated data, leading to faster resolution with technical context, probable root causes and suggested remediation.
- A new IT Operations Discovery Admin Workspace to help configure and manage the discovery of devices, systems and services.
- A new Workflow Studio workspace so you can work with playbooks, flows, subflows, actions, data streams, and decision tables from a single consolidated interface.
- EMR Help (integration with Epic EMR) is now part of Healthcare & Life Sciences Service Management, allowing clinicians to easily open incidents & cases from within Epic.
- Seamless integration of On-Call Scheduling with the Service Operations Workspace.
- A new Platform Analytics experience provides a unified interface for visualizing data from multiple sources. Includes seamless integration with Flow Designer to create condition-based triggers to kick off actions.
- Automated Test Framework can now run performance tests as well as tests for configurable workspaces.
- New Digital Product Release Management to manage software releases with end-to-end visibility and automated compliance validation.
- New Mentoring application that connects individuals seeking mentorship with experienced mentor.
With today’s release, customers are requested to upgrade to either Vancouver or Washington DC within 60 days (May 19, 2024). If you have a plan to upgrade after May, coordinate with Support and your account team (myself and Jason Daley).
Key resources to help with your upgrades:
- The Washington DC Upgrade Kit is a great way to review the release highlights, plus links to demos, upgrade advice and more.
- Check out overviews of what’s new for each product area.
- There are a bunch of webinars over the next few weeks highlighting what’s new for specific workflows; check out the schedule and register here.
- A recording of a recent webinar on general tips and tricks for successfully upgrading to Washington DC.
- Videos overviews of what’s new in Technology Workflows (Strategic Portfolio Management, Software Asset Management, SecOps, etc.)
- The release notes on our Documentation site. Start with the highlights then deep dive into the release notes for the features and products you have deployed. If you’re upgrading from Utah, the release notes are combined here.
- The Community Forum for Releases and Upgrades is a great places to get help from peers and advice from ServiceNow gurus.
Thank you for reading to the bottom, check out this timelapse tour of Washington DC.
