Quick Start Guide for Incident Management in SOW

[Daniela Kutryan]

Welcome to ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace for Incident Management

Quick Start Guide 

If you’re just starting your incident management in Service Operations Workspace (SOW) journey, then you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you get up to speed on activating and realizing value from SOW and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time. 

Let’s get started! 

 

Guide Overview: 

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

• Incident management in SOW
  
• What are the business outcomes you can expect?
• What to know before getting started?
• Steps to quick success 
• Other helpful resources 

Incident management in Service Operations Workspace

Service Operations Workspace delivers an intuitive and streamlined incident management experience for faster incident resolution. Incident responders can efficiently manage the incident queue and work assigned to them and their team and then manage the end-to-end lifecycle of an incident with access to contextual features to simplify and streamline the process. 

Service Operations Workspace makes incident management easier with features that include: 

• An insightful landing page for incident responders where they can view incident assignments to prioritize and streamline work within their team 
• An enhanced incident management experience that enables a quick overview of the impact of the incident 
• Easy access to on-call experts for efficient collaboration 
• Contextual recommendations powered by AI for faster resolution 

What are the business outcomes you can expect from Incident management in SOW? 

Before you start to implement incident management in Service Operations Workspace it’s critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. Service Operations Workspace allows you to deliver several positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all 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. 

Service Operations Workspace benefits: 

• Reduce mean-time-to-resolve by quickly investigate and resolve incidents by leveraging contextual recommendations, enhanced collaboration, and investigation capabilities 
• Simplify incident investigation and remediation by leveraging integrations with monitoring tools 
• Improve visibility across teams by leveraging the landing page and the incident overview to assigned tasks across the team, as well as highlight key items to drive awareness and alignment  
• Support greater productivity by utilizing enhanced collaboration capabilities that provide easy access to relevant information and experts-on-call 

Before Getting Started

Since Service Operations Workspace is a configurable workspace developed with the Next Experience UI, it is important to keep the following in mind: 

Customer Type	Customers have access to Incident Management in SOW if they are ITSM Standard customers. For certain capabilities (e.g., incident investigation, remedial actions) ITSM Pro licensing is required. The app has a dependency on Service Operations Workspace for ITSM. This will get installed automatically if not installed previously.
Workspace Status	Identify whether you have teams working in the Agent workspace or not. Agent workspaces can be continued to be used in Utah but will not take advantage of the Incident Management experience in SOW (i.e., classic workspaces will open in their own browser tab), nor can they be configured with the new full-featured UI Builder. We encourage customers who are not using workspaces to begin exploring our configurable workspace solutions after upgrading to San Diego+.
Release Strategy	Consider how you will deploy Incident Management in SOW to your production instance. It is highly recommended to activate Incident Management in SOW 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 with any remediations as part of your organization's normal release process to make the configuration changes in your production instance.

Steps to quick success 

Step 0: Incident management in Service Operations Workspace 

Learn about Service Operations Workspace Incident Management via our product documentation. 

Step 1: Upgrade to the Washington DC release or newer 

Upgrade to Washington DC or newer on a sub-production instance if you haven't already.  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: Install Incident management for Service Operations Workspace 

To get started with incident Management in SOW, install Service Operations Workspace ITSM Applications from ServiceNow Store, which includes multiple user roles, plugins, and store applications that help in fully utilizing the potential of Service Operations Workspace. Store applications for incident management and related capabilities are:  

• Incident Management for Service Operations Workspace  
• On Call Scheduling for Service Operations Workspace 
• Recommendations for Incident Management  
• Agent Client Collector for Investigation 
• Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager for Investigation  

Step 3: Configure Incident Management in Service Operations Workspace 

Prior to or shortly after activating the apps, explore the kind of configurations that are available. Start with configuring the incident record page tab for your agents.  

Step 4a: Learn about the Workspace UI 

A workspace is a suite of tools that provides personas such as agents, case managers, service desk professionals, managers, and other process users with the tools to assist customers quickly and perform process-based tasks.  

Step 4b: Learn about UI Builder

Create and customize workspace pages with UI Builder or create custom web experienced using Next Experience Components and custom web components.

 

Step 4: Explore further 

Explore the community site to learn more about Service Operations Workspace and the Next Experience community site to learn how to customize your workspace. 

Other helpful resources 

• Incident Management in Service Operations Workspace product documentation. 
• If you are new to ServiceNow, we also strongly recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into using the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available.