ITSM Product Roadmap

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One of the deliverables of my role, as a leader in ITSM Product Management, is delivering roadmap enablement sessions to our customers and partners. This is a part of the job that gives me immense job satisfaction; showcasing some of the latest features and capabilities that will be coming out in the next few releases (a glimpse of the future). More importantly, I love the feedback I receive and hearing how our customers are implementing their own ideas and migrating applications and business services onto the ServiceNow platform. Hearing common themes empowers me with a great opportunity to help influence our product roadmap and define priorities for our core product development teams.

ITSM Customer Needs and Market Trends

Let’s talk about drivers of ITSM investments. What we’ve seen in the market and hear from customers like you is that organizations are under pressure to deliver more business value with less – a challenge that is age-old.

And horizontally disrupting all these areas is GenAI, serving as an accelerator in realizing outcomes from these trends.

Focus on employee experience and productivity.

This trend applies to both service agents and employee end-users. Organizations want to provide agents with exceptional experiences (via a modern user interfaces, AI/ML augmentation, streamlined collaboration), that drive productivity gains. And at the same time, organizations are striving to provide employees with consumer-like experiences to help them resolve their own issues without needing to contact IT.

Intelligent Service Delivery

The number of human and, increasingly, machine-generated incidents is growing; to keep up with this increased volume, intelligent automation of workflows and repetitive work is necessary.

To accomplish this, service and operations teams and tools need to collaborate using a platform and data model. This alignment and collaboration drives service stability and quality (single data source of truth, proactive service issue identification and remediation).

In addition, we hear increasing interest in AI-powered virtual agents and assistants to deflect incidents and requests and further boost service team and employee productivity.

Enablement of agile product teams

To keep pace with the need for innovation, more and more companies have embraced agile methodologies and standing up product teams. As a result, IT teams must adapt their approach to collaborate and enable product teams, with non-intrusive governance and compliance guardrails (e.g., standing up Centers of Excellence, embracing Site Reliability Engineering)

The final trend is Value Realization

Solution owners and leaders seek to demonstrate measurable and meaningful value from their investments and initiatives.

This entails being able to assess their own performance (e.g., trend analysis, peer benchmarking), identify areas of improvement/optimization (e.g., process mining), and appropriately forecast and report progress against business objectives.

Also core to this trend is the desire for faster time-to-value, as organizations don’t have the luxury of waiting several years before seeing an ROI.

So how do we, ServiceNow, think about IT Service Management?

ServiceNow’s approach to IT Service Management centers around three distinct investment themes, as well as one horizonal theme, which drive meaningful outcomes for your business.

Theme 1: Expanding technology services while increasing resiliency and reducing costs

Our focus here is in helping customers modernize their legacy or disparate services so that they can better understand and manage the health of their technology estates and be able to scale their services without ballooning costs.

This involves bringing disparate systems’ data into the single ServiceNow platform so that you may gain visibility into your estate and be able to evolve your ITSM practices to become more proactive (e.g., issue self-remediation, addressing issues before they become incidents).

In our Vancouver release, we have rolled out new capabilities help customers to streamline incident resolution with increased automation, as well as to enable DevOps and accelerate change with multimodal change support.

In future releases, we will introduce Major Incident Management to help you address business-critical outages with end-to-end visibility across impacted services and teams, while supercharging collaboration through automated MS Teams conferences for Major Incidents, all within the Service Operations Workspace.

Theme 2: Deliver extraordinary employee experiences

The key to moving IT from a cost center to a value center is building out capabilities to boost the productivity and satisfaction of your employees. With this theme, we aim to help you realize value by leveraging purposeful automation, powered by AI/ML, to supercharge your employee workflows.

Some capabilities and features that support this are: Now Assist for ITSM (our Generative AI capability), ML-based playbooks and recommendations, modern UX with Service Operations Workspace, peer-to-peer recognition with Workforce Optimization, and Digital Employee Experience.

Now Assist for ITSM was the star of our Vancouver release. The first release of Now Assist helps increase productivity by closure. In future releases, we will be empowering IT with the perspective of end users by including Digital End-User Experience (DEX) in the Service Operations workspace.

Theme 3: Drive technology best practices with optimized processes

In Vancouver, we introduced a way for customers to import external data through Automation Engine. In future releases, we are expanding this to merge that external data with internal data and create joint process maps for deeper analysis in Process Mining, which enables end-to-end process visibility across your organization to unlock opportunities to streamline and reduce waste.

Simplifying the product and speeding up time-to-value

One prevalent strategic investment area that cuts across all our ITSM investment pillars is simplifying our product to make it easier for you and your teams to use and to ultimately speed time-to-value.

We are continually investing across these themes to provide our customers with growing value as they seek to achieve these business outcomes.

In Vancouver, we introduced the ServiceOps Workspace Admin Console onboarding experience that provides SN admins with a simple UI that guides them through the initial set-up of SOW through “getting started” documentation, configuration instructions, and best-practice guidance, all within the platform itself.

In future releases, we are planning on improvements that allow teams to deploy the Service Catalog faster with no-code and drag-and-drop enhancements.

Finally, we are focusing on weaving Generative AI via Now Assist across all these investment areas to accelerate the outcomes you can achieve using ServiceNow ITSM.

To learn more and see a preview of recently-released and pending enhancements, please attend our next Roadmap webinar, airing on November 14^th at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT –  Click here to register