For each ServiceNow release, I like to learn a little bit about the city that it is named after.
Turns out that Xanadu is north of the Great Wall of China and was Kublai Khan’s capital ciy. Not familiar with Kublai Khan, neither was I. Kublai Khan was a Mongolian general and grandson of Genghis Khan. He also became the first Yuan ruler of all of China.
Over time Xanadu has transformed from a historical city to a mythical realm synonymous with an idealized, dreamlike paradise. The city was known for its legendary gardens, designed with advanced irrigation systems, elaborate waterworks, and fountains. The exact layout remains somewhat mysterious due to lack of detailed maps.
This is how many organizations feel about their business processes – they would like them all to be streamlined to an ideal and optimized state, providing a dreamlike experience for their stakeholders but that is not the case for most and understanding exactly what is going on within these processes remains somewhat of a mystery.
ServiceNow Process Mining can remove the mystery, provide the necessary detailed maps of how a process is performing and where the opportunities are to improve.
In the Xanadu release, we have added a number of enhancements to Process Mining to aid our customers in their pursuit of process paradise.
We are always focused on accelerating our customers' time to value with Process Mining. One of the key aspects of the solution that supports this mission is the rule based and automated Improvement Opportunities that surface things like process bottlenecks, rework, and non-conformant scenarios. You can learn more here. While we provide several Improvement Opportunities as part of the workflow specific content packs, customers also can create their own Improvement Opportunities to align with their organizations use cases. In Xanadu, we have added a guided setup experience to help lower the barrier of entry and streamline the time it takes to add these Improvement Opportunities to a Process Mining project.
New Improvement Opportunity guided experience landing page. From this page users can easily configure new rule-base or automated Improvement Opportunities for their projects.
In addition to the guided setup experience for Improvement Opportunities we have also added two use case templates for two very common types of analysis customers use Process Mining for: Approval bottlenecks and SLA Breach analysis.
Use cases section of the Process Mining project guided setup experience. It is from this section process mining project creators can quickly include approval or SLA breach analysis content.
Both use cases are best analyzed by creating a multidimensional map. These new toggles in the project guided setup experience, immediately configure the connection between your parent table (like Incident or Requested Item) and the associated child table for the use case. The template also adds some default Activities and Breakdowns to help you get started. A definite time saver.
When a use case is activated the child table is automatically added along with some default Activity and Breakdown fields.
That one click will add so much additional visibility – you’ll be able to quickly identify exactly when in the process the SLA breaches are occurring so you can make the necessary process adjustments.
Output of an SLA breach analysis on the Incident table. The incoming and outgoing arcs indicate exactly where in the process an SLA breach occurred. The breakdowns on the left allow us to see details about the SLA breach.
In the Xanadu release, we are also introducing the concept of “Views.” Views allow us to consolidate multiple Activity Definitions (like State, Assignment Group, Priority) into a single map and then allow us to toggle different “Views” of that map on and off. Views will help on multiple fronts. First Views will accelerate our time to improvement by allowing us to surface more Improvement Opportunities and process insights from a single project. This in turn will reduce the number of projects needed per process and help us better govern and scale Process Mining in our organizations.
Example of a Process Mining map that has State, Assignment Group and Priority configured as Activity Definitions. The Model Options panel on the right will allow a user to filter the map to focus on any one of those individual Activities.
Speaking of scaling Process Mining in your organizations. One of the primary ways to raise the awareness of any analytics solution is to put the insights directly in the flow of stakeholder's lives. Since the Vancouver release, ServiceNow customers have had the ability to embed Process Mining powered process maps as a visualization on their dashboards to expose process owners to opportunities to improve. In each release we have enhanced this process map visualization. In Xanadu we have added a big piece – the ability to drill down to the detailed records behind an inefficient transition on the process map.
Example of a process map widget that has been added to a Platform Analytics dashboard using the new “horizontal” layout. You will also notice the “Show records” option on the arc pop-up.
This might seem like a small enhancement, but it is a critical one. Process Mining is great at helping us identify areas of opportunity but to understand the corrective actions we could take will involve digging in and understanding what people on the front lines are doing in these inefficient scenarios. That information lives in the records themselves. That is one of the biggest benefits to using an in-platform process mining solution – the direct access to this level of detail to take your analysis to an actionable level. This recorded session details the linkage between Performance Analytics and how to add a visualized process map to a dashboard.
Which brings me to the last enhancement I want to touch on in this post.
Work notes Analysis.
Since much of the actionable information comes from the details of what people on the front lines are doing, how can we make it easier to surface those insights?
We can apply the ServiceNow platform’s machine learning based clustering solution to those unstructured work notes to help us identify common patterns on inefficient transitions.
Work notes analysis clustering the work notes on a specific inefficient transition on the map. From this dialogue you will get details about the clustered records and the ability to drill down to the detailed records for that cluster.
So rather than drilling into hundreds of individual records the solution will package up records with common themes in the work notes around the inefficient transitions. This will significantly streamline our ability to identify actionable next steps.
Those are some of the highlights of what is new for Process Mining in the Xanadu release. There are more like the return of the Variation Analysis to the Summary and Insights page and ability to toggle on incoming and outgoing arcs in a multidimensional map.
We will be covering them all with live demonstrations in our upcoming Process Mining Academy session. You can watch the recording here.
Every organization is in search of their Xanadu, their ideal state, their perfection where all their processes are optimized and run as efficiently as possible.
But as Vince Lombardi famously said – “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
These new enhancements to Process Mining are going to positively impact our ability to achieve excellence.
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