Collect additional information for catalog item

Leonard Ambos · ‎02-02-2022

One of our stakeholders has asked to collect additional information from a third party (eg not the requester or fulfiller) partway through the workflow for a catalog item. The example they gave (although final requirements may vary) was something like this:

Employee submits a request for equipment, filling out information about equipment make, model, count, etc
Fulfiller reviews request to make sure equipment is in stock
Request goes to manager for approval
After providing approval, the manager submits additional information for the request such as what account the equipment payment will come from, delivery location, who will receive delivery, etc
Fulfiller processes request based on information submitted by employee and manager

In this situation, neither the employee nor the manager have fulfiller access in ServiceNow. I'm not aware of a way to allow the requester (or others) to provide additional information for a request outside of adding additional comments. We may need to make workflow decisions based on information provided by the manager, so I believe we'd need to capture the manager's additional information in catalog variable, and not just a comment.

Is there any official support for this, and is this something anyone else has handled before? Some of the ideas we've floated to address this requirement are:

Create a second "part 2" catalog item with a User Criteria of "You are the manager of a pending Part 1 request". The workflow for Part 1 would send a notification to the manager prompting them to complete the Part 2 catalog item, and the Part 2 form would include a Reference field where they need to select the active Part 1 request they're following up on (in case they have multiple). Once the information is collected, the Part 2 workflow pushes the collected information to variables in Part 1, moves Part 1 to the next stage so its workflow can continue, then closes the Part 2 req item (since the fulfiller doesn't want to track 2 separate req item records).

Similar to the "Collect Employee Information" feature from HRSD (https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/rome-employee-service-management/page/product/human-resources/con...), use the catalog item to send out a survey to the manager to collect the additional information, and run a business rule once the survey has been completed to populate the information back into the catalog variables and move the requested item to the next stage.

Send a notification asking the manager to reply with their additional information. Once they've responded, either try to parse the email/additional comment for the data and add it to catalog variables OR have the fulfiller manually enter the catalog variables based on the response. Since this would be prone to user error or require manual intervention, this is our least favored option.

Jan Cernocky · ‎02-10-2022

Similar scenario but stayed unsolved here. But my input there may help you a bit

Leonard Ambos · ‎02-10-2022

It sounds like your idea C is a lot similar to my first idea. I think my largest concern was how difficult it may be to push the details to the original ticket on submit; had you done anything similar to this in the past, or is this entirely theoretical?

Jan Cernocky · ‎02-10-2022

Hi Leonard,

it stayed in theoretical area, however since the first idea I had several months ago I can now see more clear how this can be done.

Just to clarify - in your step 4, the requested information would be always the same, right? So you can actually use 2nd catalog item.

Prerequisite: define new catalog item for the second part of the process and do not put it in categories so it is not visible

1. In the first workflow, at certain state (I guess after approval) trigger notification to the original requester with link to the second catalog item with. Either it can be blank or if some of the parameters you want to show for reference, you would read it from the current RITM by querying current.variables.variable_name and put it in to URL ...

e.g. instance.servicenow.com/sp?topic=blabla

2. On the second RITM you may need to use catalog client script to read the parameters from URL and populate them in the form (I guess you at least need to handle the reference to the original RITM)

3. Once 2nd RITM is submitted, you can just make a simple script in the workflow/flow to get the variable values and insert them to variables of the original RITM. If successful the 2nd RITM can be set as resolved.

It may need some playing but I think it's definitely feasible.

Once again, I am unsure about the licensing. However I understand that both RITMs will be filled with the same person so it might be safe. But I am not a licensing person so better check with you SN account manager.