Knowledge18 received over 18,000 attendees. The conference theme was Spark your Transformation, focused on providing a new era of customer experience. The week was packed with keynotes, hands-on labs, customer breakout sessions, development hub, Creator Con sessions, Pavilion booths, and a lot more.
Ray Wang has a great summary of the conference on his blog.
ServiceNow leadership shared their vision towards delivering a new experience to customers to drive their success. Some of the key announcements were:
- Agent Workspace that brings innovative customer experience across all products leveraging the Now Platform. This new experience will be a core feature of all products from London onwards, enabling faster resolution to their customer service, IT operations, HR, security, service operations challenges
- Virtual Agent gets a massive uplift with Parlo acquisition combing Artificial Intelligence capabilities.
- Enterprise DevOps enables new apps portfolio built on top of the Now Platform. This cuts across all ServiceNow products
IT Operations Management (ITOM) product line leverages these enhancements in many ways.
Here are some observations based on the interactions at Knowledge18:
CMDB and Discovery are still hot topics- While both of these applications are widely deployed, IT operations vary in maturity when it comes to infrastructure visibility. Customers want to keep their CMDB updated using Discovery. IT teams often ask about best practices for ensuring Discovery is set up correctly so CMDB is updated with accurate data at all times. See latest best practices on CMDB and Discovery to start off on the right foot.
Service Mapping is challenging, but worth the effort - A solid Discovery foundation alleviates a lot of initial pitfalls on Service Mapping projects. However, customers struggle to grasp the full value, if Discovery is not set up properly and business/ application owners are not fully integrated into the overall process. We recommend clients first get Discovery automated, use bulk service map import, and then work with application owners to identify top services for the production environment.
CBRE had a wonderful session at Knowledge18 on their experience. Download slides here to learn more.
Event Management and Operational Intelligence wow everyone – Both of these applications are instant value generator for IT operations. They allow operations to identify service issues faster and significantly reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). IT teams benefit by reducing over 90% event noise to just a few meaningful incidents using Machine Learning.
There were many great customer sessions on these topics. One of my favorites was H&R Block, see it here.
The Orchestration is a hidden gem – It’s a powerful Platform feature that enables much more for operations. It empowers operations to automate fixing issues once they’re identified. It’s an essential tool to eliminate service outages.
Cloud Management is crucial for enterprise success – Many attendees shared their plans of moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure. For those already using these cloud providers or have plans in the future, complete visibility into cost, compliance, policies, etc. is a must. Cloud Management Platform gives instant visibility across all of the cloud infrastructure and its health.
Key takeaway – There are many routes to eliminating service outages and managing the cloud. Whether you’re using ITSM, SecOps or other products, ITOM helps bridge service and operations silos. With one Platform and a single data model, working with - CSM, ITSM, ITBM, SecOps - is seamless, simplifying your experience. What’re your next IT challenges and how do you wish to solve it? Share with us your #Know18 stories.
