ServiceNow have announced the features that are included in the Berlin release - check out the 50 tweets of Berlin from Product Manager John.
There are some really, really great things happening in Berlin - Coaching Loops, Scrum, Asset Management. I hope that customers enjoy it.
I just had to blog about one of my favourite features of Berlin that's enhanced my day-to-day work at ServiceNow - Document Live Feed
Traditionally ServiceNow and other ITSM vendors have had a modal user interface - that is whilst working on a record whether it's an Incident, Problem or Change the system keeps your attention focussed on just that one record.
It's a feature inherent in a form-based User Interface (which ServiceNow has) and modal user interfaces have some good and bad characteristics.
For example it's good to concentrate on one task at a time, to have focus on getting something done. But when you are a busy ITSM professional dealing with multiple ongoing Incidents, Problems and Changes this is a massive pain.
The process that your brain goes through when changing from one activity to another is known as Context Switching. It's a painful and expensive process to stop what you are doing, change to another activity and get warmed up again. The article I point people to that explains the penalties involved in Context Switching is over ten .... Absolutely worth 10 minutes of your reading time today, but finish reading this blog post first. Don't context switch!
I ran a quick report on our internal Incident Management process and found that on average our Support engineers have 20 assigned Incidents. Many of them have a number much greater than that.
So what has ServiceNow done in Berlin to tackle this evil productivity killer of Context Switching?
Document Live Feed to the rescue
Live Feed is a concept that has been in ServiceNow for a little while. It supports a Company Feed which is visible to all users in the system as well as Live Feed groups which can be private or public.
It's a great tool and used extensively inside ServiceNow. Maybe we haven't killed email just yet inside the company but Live Feed is very active and provides a permanent record that we are able to go back and refer to that doesn't grow stale in someones INBOX.
New in Berlin you are able to create a Live Feed group that is associated to any record in the system. This Live Feed group is synchronised to the records Comments and Work Notes and shares the attributes of regular Live Feed.
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That sounds cool as a concept, let me take you through it and I'll show you how it's changed how I work day-to-day in the system.
By installing the Live Feed Document plugin you get a new icon on the form header for Incident, Problem and Change.
Clicking the icon drops down the Live Feed for that particular group.
So far so good, but we are really still working in a modal User Interface here. Also, you could have scrolled down to see the Comments and Worknotes just as easily, right? Right click the form header and you'll see two new choices in the context menu
Clicking Follow on Live Feed is where you are going to get the real benefit of this new feature.
Now you have a user interface for dealing with your ITSM data that presents data in streams rather than forms.
Clicking the Live Feed icon on the UI11 Edge shows your Live Feed groups in a flyout.
This means you can see all of your activity in ServiceNow in a time-series stream, from colleagues in your team and customers. Previously you might have been ordering your open Incidents by the updated time and clicking through them. Now you can pop the Live Feed out - quickly see whats changed and dismiss it.
Even better - the Live Feed icon on the UI11 Edge also changes in response to the updates that you haven't seen yet.
How has this changed how I work?
Firstly - I have a lot of records assigned to me, dealing with Incidents, Software defects, SCRUM stories and tasks and keeping up-to-date with my work was a real pain.
I could either keep a list of My Work ordered by the Updated column and refresh that a few times a day and be unresponsive when people ask for updates. Or check it much more regularly, maybe once and hour and not be able to concentrate on my other work.
Now I follow all of the records I'm interested in and let a small, subtle red counter in the side of my user interface tell me how far behind I am.
On the way to work I click my Live Feed icon on my Android and scroll through Live Feed - catching up on what happened overnight.
In summary - consuming my ServiceNow data in a format that (a) isn't email and (b) allows me to view all of my data without context switching between screens has been a revolutionary for me. I'm updating more records, more quickly because the user interface makes it rewarding to do so - rather than punishing.
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