With every ServiceNow release, I like to learn a little bit about the city the release is named after. I’ve been to Vancouver, so I have some real-world experience for this one.
On my visit, I started asking around about what I should do as a New Yorker, and it was suggested that I rent a bike and ride around Stanley Park. Going into the ride I had no idea that Stanley Park was 10% larger than Central Park - this is a fact I learned with
my recent research - but that day I probably covered 150% of the park’s paths and roads (I saw many of the same things repeatedly). The ride was more than I bargained for, not just because of the all the hills, but all of the unwritten rules of how to navigate them. Many of the locals felt the need to politely honk and let me know I was going the wrong way (many of them I saw more than once). While it was beautiful, it wasn’t exactly the most efficient or enjoyable experience for everyone involved.
While Process Mining might not have been able to help me on my journey through , it certainly can help organizations create more enjoyable and productive experiences for their customers, partners, and employees by identifying opportunities to eliminate hidden process inefficiencies. (Yeah, I think you all knew that segue was coming soon enough.)
In the Vancouver release, we’ve added a number of enhancements to Process Mining to help our customers on their journey to continually optimize their business processes.
The first thing you need to be aware of is that from Vancouver onward Process Optimization will be known as Process Mining. That name change will be reflected in the documentation and the product interfaces itself moving forward.
We are always focused on accelerating our customers time to value, empowering everyone with Process Mining insights, and providing end-to-end process visibility. The enhancements in Vancouver align to those core themes.
There is plenty to be excited about with the Vancouver release. Let’s dive in.
For most of organizations, there is no shortage of process improvement opportunities. But identifying them all and then prioritizing which ones to focus on first can be a daunting task. With the new automated findings capability in the Vancouver release, we help streamline that process.
Prior to Vancouver, we offered some out-of-the-box improvement opportunities via content packs that provided rule-based insights based on finding definitions. In addition to the definitions ServiceNow provided, customers also had the ability to create their own definitions based on their knowledge of their own processes. These are still important and aren’t going anywhere. But in Vancouver we now provide automated findings for common process inefficiencies like rework, ping-pong and extra steps. These are all situations that slow a process down and impact overall productivity.
With these automated findings you just mine your data and Process Mining will automatically surface these inefficiencies:
- Rework - meaning a record progressed through a number of steps in the process and then went back to one of them.
- Ping-pong - scenarios where work is bouncing back and forth between steps, groups, or individuals.
- Extra steps - situations where we have a variant of the process with one additional or “extra” step that could be slowing us down.
Screen above is showing the Improvement Opportunities section of the Summary and Insights tab. Note the Type column calling out which type of automated finding was triggered.
Those automated findings will be available on the revamped summary and insights page. Will they all be things you’ll need to act upon? Maybe not, but by automatically surfacing them and flagging the ones worth following up on significantly accelerates your ability to identify process improvement opportunities.
With the addition of these new automated findings, it was important to update the summary and insights page to more effectively communicate the opportunities and their potential impact. There is a new improvement opportunities overview section that groups and summarizes the improvement opportunities by category, type and the KPIs they impact.
Notice the Improvement opportunities overview section and the groupings by category, opportunity type and KPIs.
In addition to the summarized view, users can act on the individual opportunities by either viewing the process map for the opportunity in the Analyst Workbench generating some additional machine learning-based insights like root cause analysis, adding a few notes, or maybe simply determining this isn’t an opportunity worth digging into and archiving it.
In Vancouver we also start to extend the reach of the powerful process insights that Process Mining provides. There is now a process map component that can be incorporated into persona-based dashboards customers create on their own. Business users will now be able to get a complete view of their process KPIs, operational data, and process performance in a single view, enabling them to make quicker decisions about where to make people and process adjustments.
This dashboard was created in the Platform Analytics Workspace and is a mashup of Performance Analytics KPIs and the Process Mining Map visualization.
There are also a few enhancements that have been made to support more advanced uses cases.
For example, we could be doing some assignment group transfer analysis and we are interested in understanding how long it takes for the first group to get assigned after the ticket is created, the time between any group transfers, and then how long it takes the last group to finish the work. The ideal map would have both state and assignment group as activities, but we would only show the resolved and maybe closed state.
Notice the only two State values you see on the map are Resolved and Closed.
In Vancouver, analysts now have the flexibility to choose which activity values to include in their projects to support these types of specific scenarios.
This is the updated Activity configuration screen where you would choose the State values you'd like to surface on the map.
The second enhancement allows an analyst to represent a related activity on a process map even if that activity isn’t included in the records audit log.
For example, an incidents breach time might not be stored on the incident record itself, but for certain analysis it is valuable to show when that occurred on the process map. Analysts now can incorporate those time stamped pieces of information from related tables in their projects.
The screen above is showing when the breaches occurred in the process and the Breach Time panel will allow us to get more detailed statistics about the volume of breaches, repetitions, and get to the records themselves.
The third enhancement improves our visibility into processes that have parallel or subprocesses. We can use our multidimensional maps to visualize these types of processes. In Vancouver, we’ve made it easier for process analysts to understand exactly when and where these connected processes intersect or interact by giving them the ability to an activity on the primary or parent process map. This will also allow them to use the activity in analysis to isolate specific inefficient routes.
Notice the Incident task Attached node on the Incident map. The Incident task attached panel gives us both detailed stats and ability to take action.
Speaking of ad-hoc transition filter analysis – in Utah we added a capability called “activity of interest” which allowed process analysts to create more advanced finding definitions using contextual activity data which didn’t need to be displayed on the map. This allowed us to analyze situations where maybe a priority was changed during the process, but it didn’t require us to visualize the priority values on the map. We’ve now extended that capability so analysts can use “activity of interest” values in ad-hoc transition filter analysis right from the Process Mining Workbench. If you aren't familiar with "activity of interest" check out our What's New in Utah session.
Let’s wrap up with end-to-end process visibility. Every customer who has seen Process Mining in action recognizes the value it provides. The wheels start spinning, and they get to thinking about all the different opportunities and processes they’d like to have this level of visibility for. The conversation usually turns into “what about this process?” and "what about this process?”. Our goal is to be able to answer “yes” and provide that end-to-end process visibility to our customers. In Vancouver we take another step in that direction. Prior to Vancouver, we offered in-platform process mining coverage for ITSM, Customer and Industry Workflows, HR Service Delivery, Field Service Management, and applications customers have created on their own with App Engine. In Vancouver we’ve added coverage for Strategic Portfolio Management. Find the Process Mining Academy Session on SPM here.
Sample Demand Management Process Map.
For these in-platform workflows customers not only get the advantage of direct access to the data needed for mining which , they also get value added content packs with prepackaged Improvement Opportunities to jump start their analysis.
In Vancouver we will also be making our process mining capabilities available to process data that was generated by applications external to the platform. This is a pretty big step and opens up a lot of opportunities. Process mining admins can use a guided experience to import file-based event data generated by third party applications. This easy import experience combined with the automated findings will allow process stakeholders to quickly identify process improvement and automation opportunities. In many cases these mining exercises will lead to opportunities to reimagine the process on the ServiceNow platform. See Process Mining for External Data in action in this recorded Academy session.
Every ServiceNow release presents many opportunities to get more value out of your investment in the Now Platform, it can be a bit overwhelming, and you can’t take advantage of all of those opportunities all at once. Unless you happen to be this one-man-band street performer I saw on my trip to Vancouver. He had multitasking skills I’ve never seen before and probably never will again.
To get a deeper dive into some of these Vancouver Process Mining enhancements please watch the Process Mining Academy session.
Merry Mining Everyone
Other important Process Mining content:
Process Optimization NowLearning Course
Process Mining Use Case Series
Interested in additional blog posts on Process Mining, Performance Analytics, Predictive Intelligence and the Virtual Agent? Check out this Now Intelligence blog carnival.
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