The ServiceNow Dublin release was announced to the world on November 12, 2013 — the second release of 2013 following Calgary earlier this year. And, in case you're wondering, ServiceNow releases are named after cities, alternating between North America and Europe cities to date — that's Aspen, Berlin, Calgary, and now Dublin.
Pre-Dublin release, i.e. Calgary, the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite looked like this:
Figure 1: Pre-Dublin release, the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite.
A portfolio of IT management, not just IT service management (ITSM), capabilities built on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. The newest application being Performance Analytics an easy-to-use, cloud-based BI application designed for reporting and analyzing performance. With the platform not only providing shared capabilities, such as knowledge management and graphical workflow, to the discrete applications but also the ability to create bespoke business applications through App Creator.
The Dublin release explained
Post-Dublin release, the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite looks like this:
Figure 2: Post-Dublin release, the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite.
With the addition of:
- Vendor Performance Management
- Resource Management
- Password Reset
- Configuration Automation
- An optimized HTML5 smartphone interface
- App Creator enhancements
- A new HR Service Automation Application
- ServiceNow Notify — a new alerting service
What this means from a capabilities POV
Starting with a visual overview, Dublin adds in new and enhanced capabilities across the board — from the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform through to the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite management applications tier.
Vendor Performance Management
ServiceNow Vendor Performance Management is designed for the changing IT sourcing and vendor management landscape — especially as enterprise adoption of the SIAM (service integration and management) model increases. Where, driven by the need to manage portfolios of disparate service providers, enterprise need the ability to better understand the performance of these vendors from both contract and service management perspectives.
The application leverages the ServiceNow single system of record to pull in information about supplier-related costs, incident and problem records, usage, and warranty and service contracts along with ServiceNow's surveying capabilities to allow customers to evaluate, score, and compare/rank vendors across a variety of categories such as compliance, product reliability, and user satisfaction. Do you really know how well your vendors are performing?
More information can be found here.
Resource Management
ServiceNow Resource Management again leverages the single system of record. It extends what enterprises have traditionally done with project-based resources and activities to take a business-wide view of people activities and costs. After all most enterprises spend more on keeping-the-lights-on people and activities than they do with projects.
The application pulls in information, including costs, from incident and problem management, change and release management, configuration management, service catalog, work management, application development, and project management activities to give project managers, resource managers, and IT and business executives total resource visibility.
ServiceNow Resource Management allows project managers and resource managers to create resource plans, request staffing for projects, see where demand exceeds supply, and assign people to specific tasks. It's a consolidated view of staff availability, allocation, and capacities for all work tracked in any ServiceNow application — a better way to manage scarce and potentially expensive people resource.
More information can be found here.
Password Reset
Password resets are the bane of many IT service desks — different analyst firms and industry bodies often quote that password resets account for 20% and upwards of service desk workloads. More importantly the inability to access IT services is an impediment to employee productivity and business operations.
ServiceNow Password Reset significantly reduces the overall volume of IT service requests by enabling employees to reset their own passwords using self-service and automation. It brings the familiar password reset experience of consumer Internet applications to enterprise IT, optimized for Active Directory and extensible to support custom credential stores and verification methods. It gets employees up-and-running again more efficiently.
More information can be found here.
Configuration Automation
ServiceNow Configuration Automation is an orchestration application that automates the configuration of data center infrastructure. The application integrates ServiceNow Change Management and CMDB with Puppet, from Puppet Labs, a server configuration solution, can be used to simulate, enforce, and report on infrastructure configuration changes.
Together, ServiceNow and Puppet create a unified system that drives automated, governed configuration changes. Modifying the configuration of physical, virtual, or cloud assets is now as easy as: following established corporate change management processes, updating the agreed change to the CMDB, and then allowing automation to effect the change.
More information can be found here.
HTML5 smartphone interface
ServiceNow has long had a mobile interface. The Dublin release enhances this capability as well as adding an Android-tablet optimized interface to that for the iPad.But the real beauty of the new interface is that all applications are instantly mobile — whether ServiceNow apps or bespoke apps created on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform by customers and partners — there is nothing additional to design, build, and configure or to purchase to make apps mobile.
There is no need to configure multiple mobile apps, workflows, or gateway servers. Furthermore, applications are automatically optimized for display on tablets and smartphones, providing enhanced interface features specific to small form-factor mobile devices. You now truly have the ability to provide instantly available mobile applications to employees and customers through ServiceNow.
App Creator enhancements
As with the mobile interface, App Creator isn't new — it has been enhanced driven by customer needs. Firstly, Team Development extends the custom app creation capability to allow teams of "creators" to work together on creating applications on the Service Automation Platform. This improves the ability of teams of developers to work in parallel, reduces rework associated with feature conflicts, and ultimately improves release visibility and velocity.
Secondly, as service catalogs continue to play a more important role in IT service delivery and management, App Creator now delivers one-click publishing to the service catalog. When you add this capability to the HTML5 mobile interface, the IT organization can now deliver new capabilities to the enterprise at a speed more in line with its expectations.
More information can be found here.
HR Service Automation
ServiceNow has long delivered capabilities to support non-IT operations. This is a formalization of HR service automation which has been driven by customer needs — it's part of ServiceNow's vision to support IT organizations in enabling other corporate lines of business and their service relationships.
The enterprise IT organization can help transform HR service provisioning and management capabilities by leveraging IT's service relationship ecosystem, experience, and service automation capabilities. Where extending IT service models into HR finally gives the HR function the ability to meet employee expectations of HR support and customer service through more efficient HR operations.
An associated white paper, available here, shows the similarities between HR and IT operations, and how IT can help its HR peers improve.
More information can be found here.
ServiceNow Notify
Last but not least — this new notification capability is built in conjunction with Twilio and adds SMS and voice notification capabilities to existing email notification facilities. Simply put, ServiceNow identifies issues and invokes Twilio to notify the people that need to know using the communication channel or channels of their choice. A popular use case will be for major incident management but it could be used in a number of other scenarios.
Want more detail on Dublin?
If you want to know more than the detail above, please speak with your ServiceNow rep, follow this blog's links to the website content (which includes demos, white papers, and data sheets), or read the press releases.
Press releases are available, listed below:
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