ServiceNow's platform can help to manage and deliver business services within many different parts of an organization. In order to deliver and provide a service, there are often many steps that have to take place from start to finish. Some of these steps may be more involved or complex than others, but ultimately, string them all together and you get the guts of what makes a business service. Often, there are many people and groups involved in providing a service so it makes sense to break the service into as many discrete parts as possible…let's call those "tasks." Why should we break things into tasks? Breaking a service down into tasks has many benefits:
- It is easier to change ownership of a task if an individual is not able to execute the task or cannot execute it quickly enough.
- A small task is easier to automate than a large one. If a task is too big that only a portion of it can be automated, then it cannot be fully automated until is it broken down into smaller tasks.
- Some tasks can be executed at the same time, which can speed up the overall execution time. If a task is too large, it can be extremely difficult to identify which parts can execute at the same time.
So how do you decide who (person) or what (automation) should do the task? In other words, who should own the task? A task can be assigned to a person or group. It is up to them to complete the task and when they are finished, close it. Then the next task is assigned to another person or group who complete the task and close it when done. Wash, rinse, repeat.How do we expedite the delivery of business services and increase customer satisfaction? How can we get a laptop on a person's desk as quickly as possible after they click "Order Now?" ServiceNow has the capability to track SLAs (service level agreements), determining the duration of each specific task and whether the task was completed in a pre-determined amount of time. The platform can also provide notifications when an SLA has been breached (taken too long to complete). One way to speed up the process is to ask a machine to do the heavy-lifting instead of a person. Typically, machines don't get sick, take long lunch breaks, or leave early because it's a Friday. When you ask a machine to do something, you are automating a task using software. The industrial revolution began when a transition was made from doing things by hand to using machinery to do those exact same tasks. The ServiceNow Orchestration application works in a similar manner, in conjunction with the Graphical Workflow editor, by providing task automation…among many other things. Why automate a task? A task may be automated for many different reasons, including:
- It is repeatable (it's well defined and is performed the same way every time)
- It encapsulates business logic (put important business processes in one place and re-use as needed)
- It is prone to human error (people don't like tedious tasks, machines don't care that much)
- It is very time-consuming (people can get distracted, machines not so much)
Controlling the order in which tasks should execute and whether they execute one at a time (serial) or at the same time (parallel), can be accomplished using ServiceNow Orchestration. As they say, the more the merrier, and if more than one task can execute at the same time (because none of them depend on the outcome of any other), the service can be delivered more quickly.
Below is a sample workflow written in ServiceNow's graphical workflow editor. Its job is to provide a business service, which is made up of many tasks. As it iterates through each task, it asks a simple question…"Is this a routine task?" In other words, is the task something that can easily be automated. If it is, let's let the machine do the work. If the machine isn't able to accomplish the task (i.e., the network is down, the password it's stored is old) then we need some manual intervention and that's not a bad thing. Once things are squared away, not to worry, the machine will step up again.
If you're ready to join the Automation Revolution, you can find out more here.
