Are there plans to remove Workflow from Service Now?

Tom Brown · ‎05-11-2020

We keep hearing asides about Flow Designer replacing Workflow, and the extension of that is that Workflow will no longer be needed at all. While I understand that it's great that SN is steering toward the no-code/low-code that they are advertising, I don't see Flow Designer being capable of replacing workflow when we need something particularly nasty. I could see perhaps evaluating a new catalog item to see if it fit flow designer first, then workflow if it was likely to grow overly complicated. What's the general feel for this? Anyone have a roadmap of where they're likely to take it?

Pradeep Sharma · ‎05-11-2020

Hello Tom,

As of this writing, there are no plans to remove workflows. You can still use workflows. With respect to Flow Designer, the strategic position is to make the next workflow engine for the masses. The current graphical workflow has been in place since 2008 and isn't "citizen developer friendly". Flow Designer, and accompanying IntegrationHub are intended to be available to the "drag-n-drop" users in your organizations. Right now Flow Designer can replace many business rules scheduled jobs, and workflows. To me, it's on a different level than the graphical workflow engine. In my experience, admins have tended to build out fairly monolithic workflows using the legacy engine. These were challenging to build, debug, and maintain. Flow Designer breaks this down, much like business rules to be more discrete and thus easier to build and manage.

Reference : https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=e93e47eddb9cdbc01dcaf3231f96...

- Pradeep Sharma

View solution in original post

Allen Andreas · ‎05-07-2021

Hi,

Absolutely. Yeah, I only mention Flow Designer vs. Workflow because the context of their question was...when to use which?

You wouldn't ask that same question if it was for an inbound action or a business rule as Workflow Editor wouldn't be used for that.

With that said, definitely agree with reviewing what is presented and seeing what option you'd like to go with. I also am more "old school" and don't just run to Flow Designer, but for the sake of the forums and the "general consensus", I say review Flow Designer first. But for inbound emails, I'm using inbound actions, etc. Especially since flows actually get triggered before inbound actions, that just complicates things even more, but we should be aware of that behavior.

Great points all around though. Thanks everyone!

Please mark reply as Helpful, if applicable. Thanks!

Please consider marking my reply as Helpful and/or Accept Solution, if applicable. Thanks!