The road to Jakarta: ServiceNow products and roadmap extensions

[adrianbridgwate]

The ServiceNow Knowledge 17 day two keynote was this year kicked off by Chief Product Officer CJ Desai and thought leader at Chris Pope, VP Strategy. Using a real-world example of how complex employee onboarding can be in a typical enterprise, the audience were drawn into the world of service action in motion using a football juggling demo that was designed to represent the action of 'passing the ball' of service responsibility in real business.

Desai himself spent a period breaking down the ServiceNow platform's functionality in terms of its ability to be able to program dedicated applications on a specific customer's instance. Looking at how the ServiceNow Intelligent Automation engine works to uncover anomaly detection alerts, Desai showed how the platform has the ability to analyze the events of the past and put firms in a position where they can take proactive action based upon predictive intelligence.

Intelligent Automation engine power

ServiceNow is also bringing supervised Machine Learning to the way customers can now bring Intelligent Automation engine power to their business processes and workflows. The central concept here is that every single cloud service should be able to benefit from Intelligent Automation.

The Nonstop Cloud service from ServiceNow is the always-on multi-instance architecture that underpins the provision of all these services. ServiceNow explains that its multi‑instance architecture ensures that customers can fully configure cloud services and perform upgrades according to their own schedule.

New products showcased at Knowledge 17 include a new security dashboard focused on keeping firms secure and compliant across their cloud instances. Users can log in and see what is happening at any time with their specific workloads in order to meet compliance requirements in live production environments, even when compliance requirements change.

User experience in Jakarta

In the new release of Jakarta, ServiceNow is looking closely at user experience. Performance across Forms and lists will be boosted by an overall performance figure of some 30% across all functionalities. There is also a focus on expanding capabilities in Customer Service, HR and Security. A new product in the area of Vendor Risk Management allows enterprises to onboard and assess third party vendors more quickly and manage the amount of information shared with them at any one time.

Also new is a Software Asset Management product from ServiceNow. The firm says it knows that license compliance is a huge headache for so many enterprises today that need deeper visibility into working operations. Firms need to know what their asset management state is it at any given moment in time and be able to free up unused software licenses.

Also announced was a new Cloud Management product. Designed to allow firms to look at cloud usage and operations,   and examine what is working where, this product has a consumer-like self-service experience to allow insight into on-premises and public cloud instances.

Incident management functionality

Farrell Hough took to the stage in her role as GM and VP, ITSM and Product Operations at ServiceNow. This element of the keynote focused on how Jakarta will now make it easier to set up ITSM functionality at a more automated level. She also described the multi-cloud blueprint designer and new abilities to provide cloud service mapping that spans both on-premises and public cloud instances.

Looking at the way these technologies work, ServiceNow has developed algorithms that will be applied against enterprises' historical operational data loads. Being able to deconstruct the behavioral patterns of the past and perform anomaly detection will open up a route cause analysis function that can ascertain where a business might have a systemic problem. It removes the huge pains and headaches associated with the administrative triage that occurs with incident management.

Knowledge engineering

Diving deeper into the IT section of this day two keynote, a hands-on customer service session was hosted by Abhijit Mitra, General Manager for Customer Service Management Business Unit at ServiceNow.

Mitra showed off the ServiceNow Communities product. This tool delivers the ability to provide every customer with a new level of personal interaction with peers and customers. This technology is based on the same technology as the core ServiceNow platform so that users can directly react to the information being presented and exchanged. All of this technology ultimately goes towards helping customer service agents do their job more effectively.

A single system of action for HR

Also speaking on day two was Deepak Bharadwaj, General Manager, HR Business Unit at ServiceNow. Describing how ServiceNow has built its HR system of action on the ServiceNow platform, Bharadwaj looked at how the company is now working hard to consumerize the employee service experience that the HR department seeks to deliver.

Again looking at the critical HR function of employee onboarding, Bharadwaj reminded us again that this function is a multi-department experience. The process starts in HR where all the information exists to detail what an employee needs to do their work. This initial point of information in HR is where a firm records an employee's personal preferences in terms of the platforms and devices they feel they need to do their job most effectively.

The difficulty is that that the information here is held in a silo inside the HR department. ServiceNow has worked to build what it calls a single system of action called Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions to exist as a multi-functional HR system that can perform onboarding, offboarding and other related HR functions all delivered through a consumerized user experience.

Finalizing this session was Sean Convery in his role as VP and GM, Security Business Unit — ServiceNow. The central message here was that, in order to respond at lightspeed, security needs to be integrated throughout the IT function. ServiceNow is working to integrate vulnerability management reports and security threats into its operational platform. As incidents are ultimately orchestrated into the remediation, we can then ultimately input these incident learnings into an enterprise's total knowledge base.

This packed session provided an overview of just how broadly ServiceNow is working to expand its total platform technology offering. With new and expanded service tools now coming forward from the company at such force and with such diversity, there is comfort in the knowledge that ServiceNow is working from a single central base of software architecture to ensure consistency of service and interoperability throughout.