ServiceNow excels at automating your business's processes and needs. This also includes the ability to dynamically route your tickets to the relevant technicians or groups. Assignment rules can be used for simple routing to assignment group or user definitions, or workflows could create records with predefined assignments. But what if we want to create something less static, more dynamic, in a quick and easy manner?
The answer is simple: Business Rules.
Business Rules allow for flexible assignments when it comes to automating the dynamic assignments of records inserted or updated in the system. This is because in the actions section of a business rule, you can use a condition builder to define the assignment. Assignment rules on the other hand, only offer a static user or group, unless a script is used. In addition, assignment rules only run when the assigned to or assignment group field is empty, whereas with business rules you can use the run conditions to determine if you'd rather overwrite existing assignments when the conditions are met (e.g. only run when assignment group is not empty AND assigned to is empty). In the example below, we will see a simple business rule used to assign the support group of the relevant Configuration item automatically. The screenshots are from Eureka, however the concept applies to later versions.
Example of using Business Rules for Dynamic Assignments
- Open the Business Rules module and create a New Business Rule.
- Select whichever table you want the assignment to apply to. In this case we will select the Incident table. Set Insert and Update to run when the record is first created, as well as anytime changes to the record are saved.
- Define the When To Run for the rule to run. Since we are taking the support group of the Configuration item, we will select the condition that the Configuration item is not empty. We will also add a check to see if Assignment group is empty, so that we do not override user entered information. If we do want to override any existing assignment, we could remove this empty check.
- Finally, define the Action to take. We will set the Assignment Group to be the same as the Configuration item's Support Group (Note that you may first need to select 'Show Related Fields', then click into the Configuration item's fields).
We now have a dynamic assignment setup that will automatically assign the proper CI support group for every CI incident!
Be mindful of Precedence between assignment rules and business rules. In the case you are using both in parallel, be aware that order number will affect precedence.
