Over-Automation in ServiceNow – A Lesson I Learned in a Personal Project

[srikanthmadabhu]

Hi Community,

While working on a personal ServiceNow project in my Personal Developer Instance, I realized something interesting — just because we can automate something doesn’t always mean we should.

In one scenario, I added multiple layers of automation to handle routing, updates, and notifications. It worked… but later I noticed:

• Troubleshooting became more complex
• Small logic changes required updates in multiple places
• Understanding execution order took extra effort
• It reduced visibility into decision checkpoints

It made me reflect on finding the balance between efficiency and clarity.

Automation is powerful — but thoughtful design and maintainability matter just as much.

This was a learning exercise, but it reinforced the importance of designing for long-term clarity rather than short-term convenience.

Question to the community:

Have you ever faced challenges due to over-automation in ServiceNow implementations?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences.

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

It depends on what the definition of 'over automating' is. It sounds more like a too complex solution and a design made on the go. If you add useful logging from the start (with extra logging that can be turned on/off for troubleshooting), clear steps of what it should do in what order, anything can be done.

The issue more often is that somebody creates a very complex flow, triggering on any update, running through countless decision policies and tables to update something, while a simple assignment rule could have done the same.

Start on the drawing board, implement later. Complexity is often only needed for exceptions. 

[SohamTipnis]

Hi @srikanthmadabhu,

Great observations, by the way!! 👍

Yes, I’ve experienced something similar in one of my ServiceNow learning projects.

For example, while designing an incident auto-assignment process, I initially tried to automate everything. I configured Assignment Rules to route incidents based on category, added Business Rules to update the assignment group using CI information, and also created a Flow Designer flow to send notifications and adjust priority.

At first it worked well, and incidents were getting routed automatically. But later, when an incident was assigned incorrectly, it became difficult to understand which automation actually made the change. Sometimes the Assignment Rule would assign the ticket first, and then a Business Rule or Flow would update the assignment group again. This meant the assignment changed multiple times in the background.

Troubleshooting required checking assignment rules, business rules, and flow executions, which made debugging slower than expected. Even a small change in the routing logic meant updating multiple configurations.

That experience made me realize that while automation is powerful, having too many layers of automation can reduce transparency. In many cases, keeping the logic centralized and easy to trace makes the system much easier to maintain in the long run.

Question to you: What kind of automations are good to make our PDI faster?

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as Helpful and Correct. ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer ||  Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10