Incident Table Customization

[Bolaji Oladunmo]

In the future, we plan to automate service desk operations, what could be the possible impact of our incident customizations fields and business rules for our automations. We plan using Virtual Agents, Interactions and the likes

[Abbas_5]

Hello @Bolaji Oladunmo,

When automating service desk operations in ServiceNow, incident customization fields and business rules can help improve the speed, accuracy, and quality of IT services: 

• Faster operations

  Computers can process information faster than humans so IT automation can reduce service and delivery timelines 
• Improved cost management

  Automation can help manage costs. 
• Better customer and employee experience

  Automation can help deliver a high-quality experience for customers and employees. 
• Reduced manual work

  Automation can eliminate bottlenecks created by manual incident triaging. This can free up IT staff to focus on more meaningful work. 

  Here are some other ways to automate incident and change management in ServiceNow: Establish clear dependency mapping, Proactively identify service issues, Automate incident response and resolution, Automate change management, and Measure impact and tune.

  
  If it is helpful, please mark it as helpful and accept the correct solution. In future, it might be helpful for someone to refer to this solution.

  Thanks & Regards,

  Abbas Shaik

[Amit Verma]

Hi @Bolaji Oladunmo 

Updating a baseline record like a business rule i.e. a record which is OOB will mark that record as customer updated. In the XML of the record you will find a flag called sys_customer_update which will signify this.

In case of a patch or upgrade, this item will be skipped from an update. You can then decide if you want to keep your version or if you want to revert to the original version so as a best practice, whenever you need to touch a baseline functionality, set active to false on this record and create your own copy, which you can then customize.

Setting active=false will not set the sys_customer_update flag to true and you will benefit from future enhancements of this logic and it will not show as skipped during upgrade/patch.

Thanks and Regards

Amit Verma