What's the deal with the "More Information Required" approval state?

[cloudyrobert]

I've been working with ServiceNow for over seven years, and I didn't know this was an out-of-the-box state. Don't judge.

I'm still perplexed by it, though. It's not in my developer instance (fresh Kingston), and it didn't exist as of December 2013 per this TechNow episode: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=4fcda2e9dbd0dbc01dcaf3231f961990. It is in a Kingston developer instance of a friend of mine, and it's in several client environments of which I'm aware--one from early 2014 (now on Jakarta) and another from early 2016 (now on Kingston). I'm not sure of the original versions of those.

The docs site goes back through Geneva and has it listed on this page for each version: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-it-service-management/page/product/planning-and-policy/c.... I'm not motivated enough to dig through the archived zip files of documentation for pre-Geneva releases.

Can anyone provide any history or context for this one?

[ccajohnson]

There may be times when simply Approve or Reject is not appropriate. There may be workflow examples where they need more information in order to make an appropriate decision. I have seen this in some workflows for Change whereby the CAB needs more information. Within the workflow there is an additional branch that will allow for a different path before proceeding.

I will leave it up to the ServiceNow developers to answer the history behind this choice.

[cloudyrobert]

Thanks, I appreciate the response. I do understand the potential use cases; I'm just perplexed by the source of it (OOB?) and the seeming lack of consistency of its existence.