ServiceNow Software Release — Kingston

Lisa Latour · ‎12-18-2017

A new ServiceNow release — Kingston - is now available, delivering exciting new capabilities that drive:

Check out the details for the Now Platform^TM and new capabilities by product.

Now Platform

Agent Intelligence: Delivers a supervised machine learning capability to accurately categorize, prioritize, and assign incidents and cases reducing resolution times, minimizing human error, and improving customer satisfaction. It uses an organization's own data to create predictive models. The accuracy of models increases over time, with more data to train with.
Flow Designer: Enables no code development by allowing any process analyst, IT generalist, or non-traditional developer to create and manage reusable codeless business process flows like approval automation, ServiceNow data manipulation, and schema-based data abstraction on the Now Platform.
IntegrationHub: Our next generation Orchestration capability facilitates connection of ServiceNow flows to external services by creating a link between Flow Designer and 3^rd party systems to allow anyone to author natural language based codeless flows. Includes packaged integrations for Slack, Microsoft Teams, and HipChat.
MetricBase Enhancements: Include twenty-five new functions - such as minimum, maximum, aggregate — to analyze time series data; ability to define static thresholds to trigger events; enhanced reporting, including new Performance Analytics reports.
Edge Encryption enhancements: New dashboard provides better proxy insight and support for journal fields when adding attachments.
Guided Tour Designer Enhancements: Include tour auto-start and tour usage reporting for better insights.

IT Service Management

Agent Intelligence for IT Service Management: Supervised machine learning capability speeds time to resolution by automating IT incident categorization and routing, resulting in faster response time, lower error rates and enhanced satisfaction for employees and agents. Administrators can automate incident categorization and routing in less than a day, using historical data.
Major Incident Management: Provides an end-to-end process workflow for rapid resolution of high-impact incidents via better integration of Incident, Incident Alert and Outage capabilities. Includes a new workbench that consolidates critical information to simplify communication and collaboration for business and technical stakeholders. This feature is a part of the Incident Management application.
Benchmarks - Recommendations: Improves service performance with personalized, actionable recommendations based on Benchmarks data. Recommendations can be implemented using Guided Setup for step-by-step assistance.
Service Catalog - End-user Experience Updates: Single-click access to wish lists and order status, multi-product packaging, easy mobile ordering, and a search-first capability simplify ordering.
Integration with IBM Watson Conversation Service: Provides those already using IBM Watson a text and natural language-based virtual agent capability for requesting IT services through ServiceNow Connect Chat. This proof of concept is available on ServiceNow Share.

IT Operations Management

Service Mapping - Traffic-based Discovery: Speeds service mapping adoption and accuracy by first automatically identifying service mapping candidates through traffic-based discovery and later generating and refining the initial service maps with network information and machine-learning algorithms.
Service Mapping - Guided User Experience: Delivers faster time to service visibility by guiding users through the process of simultaneously mapping multiple services and refining service maps in a simple, new user interface.
Event Management - Performance Analytics KPIs: New KPIs, such as average open alerts, average time for alerts, and percentage of new critical alerts, offer greater insight into alert activity and response effectiveness. Requires a Performance Analytics license.
Application Content Import: Allows adding application content from the ServiceNow Store, such as Service Mapping patterns and Cloud Management integrations, independent of ServiceNow releases and as the content becomes available.This feature is a part of the Service Mapping and Cloud Management applications.

IT Business Management

Project Portfolio Management - Project Workspace: Simplifies the process of understanding and managing the entire project workload using a single-pane home page that aggregates functions and is fully customizable.
Agile Development - Sprint and Backlog Management: Supports agile environments with easy sprint planning and drag-and-drop backlog management without need for 3^rd party tools. Includes story filters, epic filters, and drag-and-drop rankings.
Application Portfolio Management - Capability Based Planning: Provides new insights and improves communication and planning by mapping applications to the strategic business capabilities that they support.
Application Portfolio Management - Technology Portfolio Management: Calculates risks and ongoing technology cost implications for business applications to improve planning and optimize spend. Leverages Software Asset Management data to track the technology lifecycles from general availability through end-of-life.
Financial Planning - Budgeting and Forecasting enhancements: Enables analyzing budget and forecast data by multiple elements and time periods; simplifies ease of use with spreadsheet-like grid interface and drag-and-drop selection.

Software Asset Management

New Publisher Packs: IBM and VMware publisher packs add to existing Microsoft and Oracle publisher packs introduced in Jakarta to bring more software licenses under management and help reduce the risk and cost of managing software assets.
Office 365 Subscription Management: Provides the ability to manage license costs and consumption for Microsoft Office365 alongside Microsoft on-premise software licenses.
Blacklisted Software Discovery: Facilitates ability to enforce employee compliance by removing unwanted software that hinders employee productivity or introduces known security vulnerabilities.
Reconciliation Grouping Dimensions: Provides ability to organize software assets by business unit, cost center and geography for cost allocation and usage-based chargebacks.
Custom License Metrics: Offers flexibility to track unconventional consumption measures like index volume and number of facilities for any industry-unique or custom-built software.
Content Library Improvements: Includes 140,000 additional normalization rules, for higher visibility and control of the environment, and out-of-box content to identify software publisher licensing bundles.

Performance Analytics

Text Analytics: Provides insight into unstructured data in user-entered text fields via word cloud visualizations that surface frequently used words. Drill down on specific words to identify trends and associations and take action by clicking into related records.
Increased Access to 3rd-party Data Sources: Offers expanded insight by importing data from MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server databases to use in combination with ServiceNow indicators and breakdowns.
Analytics Administrator Console: Tiled interface streamlines the analytics admin user experience with easy access to create and manage content across the Now Platform.

Security Operations

Configuration Compliance: New application enables identification and remediation of vulnerable misconfigured software for improved security posture. Correlates assessment data from Qualys with the ServiceNow CMDB, prioritizes non-compliant items with risk score calculator, and allows for remediation using workflows, automation, and orchestration. Configuration assessment data can also be sent to ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance for continuous monitoring.
Security Incident Response - End-to-End Phishing Response: Remediate user-reported email attacks quickly by pulling security observables from an email file to perform enrichment activities such as threat intelligence correlation and internal sightings search. Allows corrective actions like search-and-delete of other message copies on the mail server from within ServiceNow.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance

Continuous Monitoring: This feature is part of the Compliance Management and Risk Management applications. Prevents "compliance drift" and maintains an optimal security posture by leveraging the capabilities of Configuration Compliance (the new Security Operations application). Enables continuous detection of technical control changes, and the ability to respond to, review, and monitor automatically generated issues in the Policy and Compliance dashboard and the associated risks in the Risk Management dashboard.
Out-of-box Content for Sarbanes Oxley (SOX): Streamlines SOX compliance, assessments, and audit with new templates, indicators, and SOX-specific reporting.
Enhancements for both Policy and Compliance Management and Risk Management: New heat map provides better visualization and prioritization of risks; improved risk acceptance capabilities and new policy exception workflows speed identification of critical risks.

Customer Service Management

Agent Intelligence for Customer Service Management: Speeds time to case resolution by automating case categorization, prioritization, and assignment with supervised machine learning resulting in faster response time, lower error rates, and enhanced agent and customer satisfaction.
Flow Designer for Customer Service Management and Field Service Management: Simplifies the automation of common tasks like timing-driven task creation, SLA-driven escalation, and technician arrival work note creation to increase efficiency by using a codeless, user-friendly approach suitable for both coders and non-coders.
Customer Service Management - Escalation Management: Puts focus on problematic cases and accounts to reduce customer frustration. Using a customizable workflow, enables the complete management of the entire lifecycle of critical issue — from escalation to de-escalation and closure.
Customer Service Management - Role-based Dashboards: Provides executives, managers, and agents out-of-box, job-specific KPIs to help them address service issues promptly. KPIs include: at-risk accounts, costs, average time-to-resolve, open case backlog, agent analysis, cases with problems, new cases, and more. Requires a Performance Analytics license.
Field Service Management - Appointment Booking: Saves time with self-scheduling of appointments by customers. Uses the existing dynamic scheduling feature that allows for tasks with appointments to be prioritized.
Communities Enhancements: Resolve issues faster with increased community engagement. Includes gamification with points and badges; forum self-registration; forum membership; support for documents and events as content types; harvesting solved problems for Knowledge Management articles; and creating cases from unanswered questions.
Knowledge Management Enhancements: Drives knowledge usage and improve article quality, organization, and discoverability. Includes article types for structuring and organizing knowledge content; searching external content sources simultaneously with internal knowledge bases, with results in a unified results list; in-context knowledge capture for creating knowledge during work processes; an Article Quality Index; and SEO support for knowledge articles to be indexed by popular search engines.

HR Service Delivery

Case and Knowledge Management - Response Templates: Enables HR admin to create personalized email templates for quick, accurate, and consistent responses to employees.
Mass Email Communication: Allows HR to more efficiently provide information to targeted sets of employees using easy-to-build rich-text emails and to manage all employee communications from a single place. This feature is included with the Case and Knowledge Management and Employee Service Center applications.
Embedded Connect: This capability is included with the Case and Knowledge Management and Employee Service Center applications. Enables real-time responses to in-task employee inquiries by instant collaboration with subject matter experts in HR or other departments. HR team maintains control over available chat hours, types of supported tasks, and users authorized to respond.

Going Live - The Kingston Release Webinar

Thursday, February 8, 2018
8:00am — 9:30am PST | 11:00am — 12:30pm EST

Unveiling the Latest Innovations from ServiceNow

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Carl Fransen1 · ‎01-18-2018

Thanks for releasing this article - a nice succinct way to show the new features with more than just a one-liner.

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