Have you held on to your organization’s catalog management because you were not confident about the `other people` working on it? Has your team been stretched too thin maintaining the catalog – and still not be able to keep up? Have you wondered why your requirement gathering process takes weeks instead of hours - and still falls short of expectations during UAT? Well, if you answered yes to any of these questions – you are one of the many catalog/platform owners who take pride in ensuring that their catalog is useful and a massive driver of self-service adoption. But it’s now time to let your bird fly the nest and free up your time for more strategic work without having to worry too much about the quality of your organization’s catalog.
We’re happy to announce the arrival of the ServiceNow Catalog Builder (Generally Available in Quebec) which takes its first steps towards enabling federated catalog development with its visual, guided, WISYWIG and completely guard railed experience. Here’s how it can help in its debut release:
Developers: Faster development for simple requirements using the visual question designer and multi-channel preview capabilities
Catalog admins: Increased throughput of your team by federating the catalog development and maintenance to the service owners
• Using catalog templates, catalog admins pre-specify values, variable sets, and provide controls on what attributes can or cannot be edited by the service owners.
• Service owners can use these templates in Catalog Builder to create or maintain offerings on their own with minimal help from the development team(s).
• Even for complex items, the requirements phase and churn is reduced as service owners visualize and design items (or at least its basic structure) on their own. The development team can then work on enhancing it with advance capabilities.
Service Owners: Faster time to value by reducing dependency on a centralized development team and improve turnaround time for simple items and enhancements
Watch this video series (~17 minutes) to get a high level understanding of how Catalog Builder can be used in your organization.
“… Simple can be harder than complex ..” – Steve Jobs
After watching the videos, if you’re left wondering that your items are really complex and that you didn’t see any of the advanced capabilities, then you are absolutely right - catalog builder is fine tuned for service owners and we’ve intentionally left out all the complex (and sometimes lesser used) capabilities. So you don’t get to add catalog client scripts, advanced reference qualifiers and even tiny yet advanced controls like Catalog UI policy’s `Reverse if false` attribute (only 1 in 10 UI policies have Reverse if false unchecked). Side note: `catalog UI policies` is called `dynamic behavior settings` in catalog builder and is one of the many synonyms we are using in catalog builder more to make it more business user friendly.
It’s all about customer experience
Large multi-purposed items (e.g. “Application access”) vs smaller, single-purpose items (e.g. “Sharepoint access”) has been a long-standing debate and frankly there are two schools of thought prevalent in the set of customers, partners and colleagues I have spoken to. Interestingly, the latter has started becoming popular now and guess what’s driving it – it is the customer (requestor) experience. It’s probably no co-incidence that the catalog size grew ~30% on an average in 2020.
Here are the main reasons:
Omni-channel experiences: In the current times, we’ve all been reminded the value of having consumer grade experiences and meeting the users where they are - in the channel of their choice. Mobile and conversational interfaces are no longer a hype (this Gartner blog mentions “By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis”). If you have not already, do check out the `Submit a request` conversation in ITSM Virtual Agent to see how your catalog items magically become useful conversations without you having to do any extra work while configuring them.
The catch here is that these channels are best suited for micro-moment experiences (even better when powered conversational AI) and simplicity is what makes them so attractive. Imagine having to select from amongst a list of hundred applications in a conversational or mobile interface! That’s why catalog builder shows you the preview of the item not just for portal, but also Now Mobile (safe harbor applied teaser - I just accepted the story to preview the item in Virtual Agent and targeted it for the next release).
Discoverability: Granular and single-purpose items make them more discoverable as the customers use search phrases that describe what they need and not what the organization offers. In the above example, it is more likely that a requestor searches for “I need access to sharepoint” rather than “I need access to an application”. If you’re thinking that increase in catalog items would require an even better search for the discoverability to improve, AI Search (also in Quebec) comes to the rescue by providing an intelligent consumer-grade search engine which can even find the proverbial needle in the content haystack.
More content: I’ve observed that customers who have seen good success with their self-service adoption are usually the ones that have more content in their portal.
Here's my hypothesis:
Comprehensive content on the portal = higher probability of solving the user’s problem = love the portal = repeat users and references = higher footfalls = increased self-service = value realization
One of the easy ways to have more content on the portal is to have decentralized content authoring by service owners themselves who can easily author simple and smaller items.
But size S does not fit all
While we see advantages and also a trend (sometimes even a reverse trend) towards smaller, granular items - there will always be use cases to have complex and overloaded offerings to accommodate all use cases. Even then, catalog builder can help in the requirement phase to make it less painful. Here’s how - let the service owners do the basic stuff in catalog builder (at least visualize it), and then have the developers add the complex capabilities to it in platform (yes, `Maintain items` remains the king of advance catalog development) and can be used alongside catalog builder.
So we have (and will continue to add) advance capabilities to maximize the value you can get out of the product. One such example is the support for list collectors in the Multi-row Variable Set (MRVS) also being released in Quebec (are you smiling ?). MRVS is super powerful and we continue to see increased adoption and usage (we are aware of the love and hate relationship it’s developers have with it). While there are some architectural limitations, we have and will continue to improve it. Ever wanted to hide a variable in the MRVS modal form? Wanted to control a variable based on the value of one outside of the MRVS? Have only unique values in the rows? Well, it’s all possible in Quebec!! (hope this helps in pushing the needle a little more towards love now).
It’s been the plan all along
Some of the work we’ve done in the previous releases of Service Catalog have been leading up towards a decentralized model and will continue to do so in the next few releases. e.g. we’ve tried to reduce the need for scripting and customization by providing new variable types and settings (yes, you now get to mark variables as hidden or read only with a single click (in Quebec)).
Thank you dear community for always inspiring and partnering with us to ensure we build the right products for the right problems. Would love to hear your comments and feedback about the Quebec features, especially catalog builder. Please continue to use the Idea Portal to submit ideas around your most common use cases, especially ones that require scripting or customization.
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