Getting Started Guide for Service Operations Workspace

nkaura · ‎08-02-2023

Welcome to ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace

Are you ready to start your Service Operations Workspace implementation journey? This guide gives you valuable information you can share with your team, including proven guidance and links to key resources—all designed to set you on the path to success. While this guide is primarily designed for ServiceNow platform owners, it also contains useful information if you have a different role in your organization.

Let’s get started!

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

Service Operations Workspace Overview
Achievable Business outcomes from Service Operations Workspace
Chart a path to successful implementation
- Work with ServiceNow experts
- Prepare for Self-Implementation
- Make your implementation smooth and easy - check out our Service Operations Workspace Adoption Playbook for key resources, recommended maturity model for adoption and where to get started.
Before Getting Started
Steps to Quick Success
Join the Service Operations Workspace community
Understand ServiceNow releases and upgrades
Other Helpful Resources

Start by familiarizing yourself with Service Operations Workspace

Service Operations Workspace comes with many applications that let’s you transform how you deliver IT services. SOW provides a single pane of glass for both Service Agents and Operators, enabling a seamless flow of incidents, problems, changes, alerts, and logs to predict and resolve service degradations. But don’t worry! You don’t have to implement everything at once. Here are some key Service Operations workspace applications to focus on first:

Incident Management: Ensure employees can easily contact support to report, track, and fix issues. (servicenow.com overview) (product documentation) (Incident Management in SOW)
Change Management: Tackle change to your infrastructure, application service, business service, or process in a streamlined fashion. (servicenow.com overview) (product documentation) (Change Management in SOW)
Virtual Agent: Deliver responsive customer service and increase service desk efficiency with an automated, conversational chatbot. (servicenow.com overview) (product documentation)
Configuration Management Database (CMDB): Build a consistent, up-to-date single system of record for your IT infrastructure and digital services.  (servicenow.com overview) (product documentation)

We also have a IT Service Management (ITSM) fundamentals course, as well as an IT Operations Management (ITOM) overview course. If you are new to ServiceNow, we also strongly recommend that you take this very short What is the ServiceNow Platform course (free account required) to learn platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into using the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Administration Fundamentals course is also available.

ITSM Standard applications include:

Incident Management Problem Management Change Management Request Management Asset and Cost Management Walk-Up Experience

Now Mobile Mobile Agent Knowledge Management Configuration Management Reports and Dashboards Service Level Management

Benchmarks Surveys and Assessments Virtual Agent Lite Digital Portfolio Management Service Operations Workspace

ITSM Pro includes:

Virtual Agent Full DevOps Predictive Intelligence Dynamic Translation Performance Analytics Continual Improvement Management Digital Product Release

and ITOM includes:

Configuration Management Database Discovery  Service Mapping Certificate Management Firewall Audit Service Graph Connectors Agent Client Collector

Achievable Business outcomes with Service Operations Workspace

Service Operations Workspace allows you to deliver many positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all of this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals. Some of the achievable business outcomes would be:

Use a single highly configurable platform for IT in the cloud to gain a shared understanding and view of infrastructure and services. Pin-able/pop-over navigation experience with an extensible top menu enables agents and operators to graphically organize work.
Leverage an up-to-date common service data model to automate core Service and Operations processes (i.e., incidents, changes, and common requests).
Streamline collaboration by leveraging integrations with common collaboration tools (e.g. Microsoft Teams, Zoom) to call and chat with stakeholders or subject matter experts to accelerate issue resolution.
AI-based recommendations help jumpstart troubleshooting issues. AI-analytics applied to events, logs, and metrics, reducing noise, providing anomaly detection and alert correlation to predict outages.
Gain visibility of resources, applications, and assets – across on-premises, mobile, and cloud environments – all in one location.
Scale cloud processes with greater visibility and automation.

To successfully deploy Service Operations Workspace, you need your business to understand and use Service Operations, and to recognize its benefits. With many different stakeholder groups, it is essential to ensure everyone understands the benefits for them, and how to get the most value out of the system.

This webpage provides detailed guidance on how to plan for organizational change. If you need help creating a winning communications plan, this communications plan template also provides useful advice.

Chart a path to successful implementation

Working with a ServiceNow expert can reduce risk, reduce time to value, and maximize the overall value of your investment. Work with your ServiceNow account representative to choose the best path for your needs.

ServiceNow partners

ServiceNow partners are a great place to start.

You can learn more about the ServiceNow partner program and find partners here.
To accelerate value and reduce risk, make sure your partner uses Now Create, ServiceNow's libarary of more than 700 leading implementation practices.

Expert Services

ServiceNow also offers Exert Services. You can find more information here.

Impact

Adding a ServiceNow Impact package provides dedicated resources, discounted training and jumpstart services to help you get the most out of your ServiceNow investment. Read more about Impact hehttps://www.servicenow.com/impact/accelerate re.

Prepare for self-implementation

Build your team’s skills

If you are planning to self-implement, you need to give your platform team the skills they need to succeed. The best way of doing this is to become a certified ServiceNow professional. We offer several certification paths for different roles on your team.

Check out the links below:

Pro Tip: Stick to out of the box ServiceNow functionality wherever possible. The process guides below provide detailed descriptions of "as designed" ServiceNow functionality for key Service Operations features.

Incident Management

Change Management

Knowledge Management

The following courses are a great starting point for training your agents and other Service Operations process users:

Make your implementation smooth and easy

For a comprehensive implementation process framework that is proven to scale to the largest, most complex global deployments, take a look at our Success Packs on Now Create. Success Packs tailor our core Now Create methodology of more than 700 leading practices to deliver business outcomes aligned with specific product sets.

There are several Success Packs for Service Operations, including the following:

Modernize IT Service Management supports a modern comprehensive ITIL-based ITSM platform to replace legacy tools.
Operate IT as a Service: supports running IT as a service, increasing visibility across the service portfolio to manage the performance and investment of services, manage vendors, and drive continual service improvement based on industry-leading benchmarks.
Configuration Management Process Guide: Detailed guidance on how ServiceNow intends the configuration management process to work.
Discovery Process Guide: Detailed guidance on how ServiceNow intends the discovery process to work.
Service Mapping Process Guide: Detailed guidance on how ServiceNow intends the service mapping process to work.
CMDB Design Guidance Whitepaper: Provides advice on how to design and maintain your CMDB.
Service Mapping Whitepaper: Describes different service mapping methods and how to choose the right ones for your needs.

Before Getting Started

Customer Type	Are you a new or upgrade customer? New customers of ITSM and ITOM will have Service Operations Workspace enabled by default and can begin configuring and working in their instance powered with our Next Experience right away. Upgrade customers will have to install Service Operations Workspace upon upgrade to Vancouver, Xanadu, or Yokohama and may need to remediate customizations.
Configurations and Customizations	If you're upgrading from Agent/Operator Workspace, you need to validate the level of customization you've made to your instance. We suggest performing normal upgrade and/or regression testing when activating Service Operations Workspace in a sub-production instance. For more information on customizations see the product documentation or start with these basic configurations: Customize the greeting text on the landing page. Customize the data displayed in the first-level cards in the Overview section. Configure record creation, task record, and incident record forms Refer this community article for configuration guidance.
Feature Support	Check the product documentation for functionality that is not supported, and verify your instance is not using this functionality or there is a migration plan to replace unsupported functionality. Also, check out our new Product Updates Articles that will contain features released in each release so you can make more informed decisions.
Workspace Status	Identify whether you have teams working in a Agent/Operator workspace or not. As of Utah family release, we have begun the deprecation process for the classic ITSM Agent Workspace and ITOM Operator Workspace. We recommend that all new/existing customers looking to implement Agent or Operator Workspace start with Service Operations Workspace, as support for Agent Workspace and Operator Workspace will end by the Washington DC family release.
Release Strategy	Consider how you will deploy Service Operations Workspace to your production instance. It is highly recommended to activate Next Experience in your sub-production environment and perform upgrade/regression testing to ensure your instance is operating as expected. Remediate any prior user interface customizations and activate Next Experience with any remediations as part of your organization's normal release process to make the configuration changes in your production instance. Refer this community article for planning your deployment.

Steps to quick success

Step 0: Learn ITSM and ITOM Terminology

Learn about ITSM and ITOM SOW terminology either via our product documentation or free NowLearning courses. Get familiarized with Next experience that the Service Now platform provides with Service Operations Workspace.

Step 1: Upgrade to Washington, Xanadu , or Yokohama

Upgrade on a sub-production instance if you haven't already. Service Operations workspace was launched as part of San Diego release, but has seen significant enhancements over the past releases – Xanadu and Yokohama. We encourage you to read the family version release notes and follow your normal upgrade process. For helpful information see the upgrade planning checklist. If you're new to upgrades, check out our NowLearning course: ServiceNow Upgrade Essentials.

Step 2: Activate the Next Experience in Service Operations Workspace

Review the product documentation for considerations for activating Service Operations Workspace. If you are migrating from Agent Workspace/Operator Workspace to Service Operations Workspace, chalk out the transition plan.

Step 3 : Configure Landing Page

If you're a new customer and haven't already, begin tailoring your landing pages to your user's personas. If your organization has Agent/Operator workspaces and hasn't replaced them yet, begin your strategy for migrating to configurable Service Operations Workspace. Upgraded customers can begin exploring configuring landing pages at this time according to their needs.

Step 4a : Learn about the roles

Service operations workspace caters to multiple personas such as agents, operators, service desk professionals, managers, and other process users.

Step 4b: Explore our core capabilities

We've released multiple core capabilities with each release of Service Operations Workspace. See our Product updates to stay updated with key product capabilities released in Xanadu and Yokohama. We enhance our workspaces to enable you to deliver personalized, configurable experiences that engage teams and enhance productivity.

Step 5: Explore further with Service Operations Community

Now that you've explored all the possibilities of Service Operations Workspace in our Getting Started Guide, continue on to our FAQs to get detailed answers about configuring Service Operation Workspace.

Refer this Community article to get more implementation guidance.

Join the Service Operations Workspace community

Visit the Service Operations Workspace community page. You’ll find best practices and other useful resources for the workspace implementation, and it’s also the forum to talk to ServiceNow experts, get your questions answered, and connect with other community members.

Understand ServiceNow releases and upgrades

If you’re not already on the latest ServiceNow release, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before you go live. By upgrading, you get new ServiceNow innovations into the hands of your users faster, get access to the latest performance and security enhancements, and ensure that support is there when you need it. To make your upgrade smooth and successful, look at these upgrade resources.

Bookmark these resources!

ServiceNow Customer Success -- Service Now Impact provides the support and expertise you need to get to value fast.

NowSupport -- You can get technical issues resolved quickly by contacting our team comprised of ServiceNow employees with deep product knowledge and real-world experience. Read more here on how to use support.

BhupeshG · ‎11-23-2023

Can we install this on PDI

BhupeshG · ‎11-23-2023

Do we know the limitations like flagging an VIP filed on Workspace . Will it work?

Aniket Gaurikar · ‎02-09-2024

Can someone send me simple steps how can I make service operations workspace available in the instance.

Eric L · ‎06-17-2025

Good content