The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the adoption of AI driven automation technologies by companies worldwide. Accenture’s study on “Future-Ready” organizations found that companies that doubled down on digital transformation, retooled operating models, and pivoted to wholesale reinvention achieved nearly twice the efficiency and three times the profitability of their peers (see footnote1). These business leaders transformed their operating models using and automation strategy called Hyperautomation.
In this article I’ve outlined three things to get you ramped up on what Hyperautomation can do for your organization and how ServiceNow can uniquely help you use Hyperautomation in your automation strategy.
1. What is Hyperautomation?
ServiceNow defines Hyperautomation as a business strategy to automate the enterprise as much as reasonably possible. Hyperautomation uses an end-to-end approach combining different technologies and a people first mentality to create automation that makes work easier for us and our customers.
After reading this definition you might ask yourself: “How is Hyperautomation different than the automation we create using Flow Designer and Integration Hub?” ServiceNow has always been great at automating a process when the target system APIs are available, but we had a gap when APIs for an external application did not exist. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) fills that gap. With the Intellibot acquisition ServiceNow acquired class leading RPA technology. RPA is ideal at tackling automation scenarios where the APIs for the target system are not available or if the process spans multiple applications in a complex way making coding difficult; for example, data entry into multiple different applications such as Excel, copying fields from PDFs, and entering the data into different SAP web applications.
Hyperautomation can “automate anything” even if an API does not exist or if the automation is extremely complex by using RPA software robots. RPA robots are deployed in the following two ways: (1) bots can assist a user by doing data entry or repetitive work that requires interfacing with multiple applications; this is known as an attended RDA robot. Or (2) bots can operate independently using an instruction set and machine learning to free the human from low value manual tasks; known as an unattended RPA Robot.
I want to emphasize that Hyperautomation is not just about RPA or workflow automation. Although, automation and integration are the typical starting points for our customers. Hyperautomation is an iterative journey that also leverages AI, analytics, and process mining to identify the best areas to automate. It uses ServiceNow’s incredible automation and integration solutions to implement that automation and then keeps track of automation effectiveness through analytics and continuous improvement management.
2. How does ServiceNow help deliver on the promise of Hyperautomation?
ServiceNow’s San Diego release provides complete Hyperautomation on a single platform to help customers on their Hyperautomation journey. The Hyperautomation wheel graphic (fig1) below represents four capabilities : (1) Build & Digitize, (2) Automate, (3) Apply AI & Analytics, and (4) Discover. Each capability uses different ServiceNow applications to achieve an automation outcome. Your entry point may be different based on how much automation you’ve done in your enterprise.
(fig1) ServiceNow Hyperautomation
| Entry Point | Automation Outcome |
| Build & digitize | Use ITSM, HRSD, CSM, custom workflows to digitize manual process. |
| Automate | Automate repetitive human work where it makes sense. |
| Apply AI & Analytics | Use analytics to understand business performance and predict dangerous trends that may impact the business. AI can be used to automate the human decision making where it makes sense. |
| Discover | Use AI and processing mining to identify ways to improve/automate existing process |
So how do we navigate this wheel to help us on our Hyperautomation journey?
Let’s imagine you’ve been a ServiceNow customer for several years. Your company invested in ServiceNow to digitize your ITSM/HR/CSM process using the packaged workflows found in the Build & Digitize entry point. You’ve automated many processes in the enterprise and now turn your attention to improving those processes. Looking at the circle graphic the Discover, Automate , and Apply AI & Analytics capabilities can help mine your existing processes and find new automation opportunities that can be automated using workflow or an RPA bot.
Just in case you're wondering, the applications used at the Hyperautomation capabilities have been in the platform for several years. Automation Discovery, Process Optimization, Predictive Intelligence (AI), Flow Designer/Integration Hub, and Performance Analytics have been deployed in production by many of our customers.
We introduced ServiceNow’s RPA Hub and Document Intelligence in March of 2022 to complete our Hyperautomation capabilities. With RPA Hub, ServiceNow customers can create robots to automate human tasks and digitize data in documents using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Document Intelligence.
The differentiator for ServiceNow’s Hyperautomation is our platform and no-code/low code implementation. All the Hyperautomation technologies use the same data model – there is no need to do messy data replication or integration to multiple point solutions. ServiceNow’s Hyperautomation uniquely enhances existing Employee, Customer, and IT workflows allowing for dynamic cross process optimization, integration, and automation while leveraging the security and governance of the platform.
If your organization is using RPA vendors such as UiPath or Blue Prism we have good news. You can leverage your existing RPA investment in ServiceNow by orchestrating your third-party RPA bots with ServiceNow’s native RPA bots to automate complex processes using Flow Designer and Process Automation Designer.
In a multi-bot RPA ecosystem our recommendation would be to look at new RPA automation projects that can benefit from the native integration that comes from running on the ServiceNow platform. The combination of RPA Hub + Integration Hub + Process Optimization + Predictive Intelligence + Performance Analytics + VA to drive Hyperautomation becomes an automation force multiplier because of the single integrated platform with a shared data model.
What does Hyperautomation look like in action? As we covered earlier where you start your Hyperautomation journey will be unique to you. The capability you start with will depend on the outcome you wish to achieve. In the below scenario we start with the Discover capability.
Scenario - Address issues from recent SAP upgrade
Background: Your team has recently completed a global roll out of an updated version of SAP for Sales, HR, and Manufacturing. This version of SAP has been in production for three months and you would like to understand the top SAP issues that can be automated using ServiceNow. You would also like to report back to the VP of business applications the measurable improvement that can be made by utilizing software automation.
We’ve already used ServiceNow’s packaged workflows in the Build & Digitize capability to digitize the incident and request processes and we would like to improve the newly implemented SAP process by looking at the incident and request data flowing through the platform and identify new automation/optimization opportunities. The Discover capability is a good place to start.
Discover Capability: Uses Automation Discovery and Process Optimization to identify potential automation and process improvement opportunities in your data.
Automation Discovery identifies top automation opportunities in your data. We can see we have 1,603 ITSM-Issue-Software-SAP issues many revolving around SAP application access (fig2).
(fig2) Use AI to find automation opportunities with Automation Discovery
In fig3, Process Mining is used to visualize the process used to solve SAP access issues. We can see that we have 972 SAP Access Issue incidents and resolving those issues takes an average of 3months. On the right we can see the automatically generated process map reflecting a highly manual resolution processes.
(fig3) Mine existing processes with Processing Optimization.
Automate Capability:
From the process map we can drill into the incidents and see that the resolution used by the agent is to initiate a “remote session” for SAP access issues and follow a set of steps defined in the resolution notes in fig4.
(fig4) Incident Resolution Notes
We can use Flow Designer & the SAP Integration hub spoke to automate the resolution steps by integrating to SAP and building the workflow to re-establish access; all without writing a single line of code (fig5).
(fig5) Automate the process w/o writing a line of code with FlowDesigner & the SAP iHub Spoke
We can take our resolution automation further by building an RPA software bot (fig6) in RPA Desktop Design Studio to validate that the SAP application access was restored by mimicking the login keystrokes of the human.
(fig6) RPA Desktop Design Studio for building RPA bots
If the workflow or the RPA bot are not able to resolve the issue through automation, we need to open an incident. We can leverage the Apply AI & Analytics to use machine learning to route the ticket to the right assignment group reducing re-assignments (fig7). Using AI we can reduce the number of re-assignments by sending incidents to the best group for resolution.
(fig7) Using AI in Agent Workspace to predict assignment group for routing.
We can use Virtual Agent to allow the user to check the ticket status of their SAP Access issue 24x7 (fig8).
(fig8) Use Virtual Agent for self-service
Optimize Capability: Finally, we can monitor the effectiveness and activity of the RPA bots using pre-built analytics (fig9) and use the trending capabilities of Performance Analytics to see if SAP Access issues are on the decline with our automation efforts. If we are don't see the expected improvement trend we can create an improvement initiative using Continuous Improvement Management.
(fig9) RPA Hub Dashboard
This concludes our simple walk through of the Hyperautomation capabilities.
3. How can I start my Hyperautomation Journey?
The good news is Hyperautomation does not require a “boil the ocean approach”. You can approach Hyperautomation in incremental steps; entering into the journey where it makes the most sense for your organization. Below I’ve included links that provide an overview of ServiceNow’s Hyperautomation capabilities to get you started.
Videos on Hyperautomation:
• Hyperautomation Overview & Demo
• Automation Engine Overview
• RPA Hub Demo
• Process Optimization
NowLearning Courses:
• RPA Hub
• Flow Designer Essentials
• Integration Hub Essentials
• Accelerate Incident Resolution for Agents using AI/ML and Flow Designer
Finally, we’re here to help you with your automation strategy. Please reach out to your local ServiceNow sales team to better understand how Hyperautomation can help you achieve outcomes that can transform your business. Happy automating!
Footnotes:
1 Accenture study, “Future-Ready” Organizations Leveraging Digital to Operate Faster and Smarter Could Help Unlock $5 Trillion in Economic Growth, Says Accenture Study
