TechNow Ep 80 | Process Automation Designer/Playbook Part 1

[Chuck Tomasi]

Arriving in the Now Platform® Paris release, the new Process Automation Designer app empowers process owners to author cross-enterprise workflows and create a unified process. In addition, you can use Playbook to provide users with a simplified, task-oriented view of your process. Don't miss part 1 of this exclusive firsthand look!

Originally aired: October 20, 2020 8:00 AM PT

Featured Experts

Yaron Guez joined ServiceNow in 2017 as an engineer working on Agent Workspace after a decade of entrepreneurship. He’s been leading the Playbook Experience team for the past year, developing a new way to view and interact with business workflows in real time. Yaron is passionate about combining software architecture with product design to solve challenging business problems. When he’s not working, Yaron is playing with his infant son, Levi, gardening, hiking, playing piano, or traveling with his wife, Melissa.

Chuck Tomasi is a Sr. Developer Evangelist for ServiceNow. He is a computer science major with over 35 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, makes appearances on Live Coding Happy Hour, created dozens of fit for purpose custom applications, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

Kreg Steppe is a Training and Certification Program Manager within ServiceNow developing and supporting cloud training infrastructure. He specializes in developing integration solutions, automating repeatable processes and Cloud Management in ITOM. Kreg's prior experience includes operating his own ISP, developing web applications in PHP, network integration, managing network support, Application Development on cloud based networks, DNS and email server maintenance. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys Photography.

Jeremy Duncan is a Platform Architect on the Innovation team at ServiceNow. Jeremy is an Enterprise Architect with over 16 years of IT and Service Management experience. His experience and certifications span across retail and manufacturing with focuses on hardware, software, and information security specialties. He has done many implementations in both the Enterprise Federal and Commercial spaces since 2011 and brings a breadth of platform knowledge that aids him in sound architectural decisions. He achieved his B.B.A. at MTSU and majored in Information Systems. He spends his free time fighting crime as a volunteer certified police officer in North Nashville since 2012 and enjoys family time, camping, with his wife and kids!

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Questions and Answers

Can it consume workflows, or only flows from flow designer?

-- Murtuza Bookwala

It works on top of Flows built in Flow Designer. We are not investing any further development effort in Workflow at this point. However, you can create a flow that calls a workflow, so you could use Flow Designer as an intermediary.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Could you provide an example of what business use case this Process Automation Designer would be used for? When would we use this process automation designer vs. flow designer vs. Workflow Editor?

-- Kylie Jensen

Workflow Editor: Use it to maintain legacy workflows only at this point. Don't create net-new work with the legacy workflow. Flow Designer: Create small components of logic like business rules or schedule jobs would have (e.g. get an approval and send a notification when approved) and integrations. PAD: Best for cross enterprise workflows that need visualization in Workspace.

-- Chuck Tomasi

are you able to provide a customer portal version of the playbook so the customer can see the status of a particular playbook or certain steps within the playbook?

-- Catriona Scallon

PAD is agnostic, but Playbook is currently only available in Workspace. If you feel it should have a Service Portal counterpart, I encourage you to see if there is an open idea in the community idea portal. If not, open one up. Our product managers get a lot of input from there.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Does this require any additional licenses? can it be used with Delegated Development?

-- Bragg McRimmon

PAD and Playbook are standard platform features - no additional licensing for them. The tables you can access DOES depend on your license agreement so work with your account team to know more. I haven't had a chance to look in to the delegated development. I don't see a PAD switch on the Manage Developers panel, and not sure if it falls under the same entitlement as Flow Designer (yet). I'll have to get back to you on that.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Whats the roadmap look like?

-- Taylor Williams

Yaron is covering that toward the end of the presentation deck.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What was the error when Yaron saved the new activity definition?

-- Jon Serious

It had to do with the fact that he was using PAD on his local developer instance.

-- Chuck Tomasi

can we use this module in event management for creating alerts ?

-- Malatesh Kulkarni

I don't see why not

-- Chuck Tomasi

Totally off the subject, Can you recommend a starting point for training? We have the ServiceNow Platform and preparing to bring Nuvello CMS System online. Any help is appreciated. SStewart, St.Jude

-- Sandra Stewart

We have training plans outlined on nowlearning.servicenow.com. The typical starting place is ServiceNow Fundamentals. Depending on what your implementation looks like, you can tailor the learning path to your needs (e.g CMS focused, ITSM, ITBM, developer, etc.)

-- Chuck Tomasi

I would like to practice Process Automation Designer. Where is the lab exercise?

-- Akira Muranaka

It should be in the resources panel on your screen. If you don't see it or it doesn't work, try this: https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/creatorcon2020/CCW1001/lab_CCW1001_ccw1001__elevate_your_process_design_by_building_crossenterprise_workflows

-- Chuck Tomasi

I joined late, so this message may have already been answered. Is this a replacement for Flow Designer, or a similar but low-er code flow mapping tool?

-- Claire Ashdown

This layers on top of Flow Designer so no-code process designers don't have to know as much technical information about records, triggers, and menus full of actions.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What is the engine behind the scenes that PAD uses to process and determine when to run its Flows? Is entirely built off of Flow? Or does it use its own engine and tables behind the scenes and then simply calls Flow when conditions are met?

-- Joe Dukes

As Yaron explained in the very last question - PAD has it's own engine.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What if I would create a Process Automation on an incident but the agent opts to resolve the incident outside the prescribed process, will the 'Playbook' close the moment the Incident has been completed(resloved)?

-- teunis schouten

They are kept in sync.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Does adding activities affect in flight processes or is the process instantiated like Workflows and the change is only seen going forward?

-- Christopher Hagy

It's like workflow and Flow. Once a process is started, it is running it's own context of that original design. Further changes to the process in PAD do not affect running copies

-- Chuck Tomasi

Availability for Orlando or do you need to be on Paris?

-- Maggie Makuch

PAD and Playbook were introduced in Paris.

-- Chuck Tomasi

confused. did you say service portal is going away

-- Bragg McRimmon

No, Service Portal is not going away, just as (legacy) Workflow and CMS did not go away. We just won't be investing any more development cycles in to enhancements to SP.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Similar tools rely heavily on routing tasks and assignments to different users. How is or will that be handled in PAD

-- Taylor Williams

That would be handled through the activity definitions.

-- Chuck Tomasi

slides not changing

-- Kenneth Zabriskie

Hi Kenneth. Something odd with ON24 every once in a while. Try doing a refresh on your browser.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Do the BPA features demo'ed fall under ITSM pro with the Paris upgrade, or are there additional subscription fees?

-- Erin Coleman

Process Automation Designer and Playbook are part of the standard platform. No additional licenses are required. The tables you interact with MAY require additional licensing. Be sure to work with your account team when you have license questions.

-- Chuck Tomasi

To build off the PowerPoint comparison, PowerPoint is the most API limited in terms of developing and scripting custom Macros. Should we expect a similar level of limited support or can we hope for full API access?

-- Joe Dukes

Hi Joe. I'm not sure I understand how this question ties in to ServiceNow or today's topic of Process Automation Designer.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is this a replacement for FLow Designer?

-- Bragg McRimmon

No. It layers on top of Flow Designer to give no/low-coders an easier experience to building process workflows.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Confusing. Isn't Flow Designer simple enough

-- Bragg McRimmon

Flow Designer still requires a bit of platform knowledge to build a flow (think about picking a table from 2000 options.) PAD gives a simple interface to line up a series of activities. We're always trying to make things easier for less-experienced people and faster for developers.

-- Chuck Tomasi

does PAD only work with custom apps, or could we create a PAD for incidents, for instance?

-- John Mark Kennedy

It works for OOB and custom apps.

-- Chuck Tomasi

How to manage if condition like if info provided by user is a then trigger b

-- Dhruv Gupta

Activities can have conditions on them. Deeper looping logic should be built into the underlying Flow.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What about Requested Items? Can we run the Process Automation Designer on that table?

-- Emmanouil Mourtetzikoglou

Theoretically yes, but be cautious of conflicting with other Flows/Workflows that may be dealing with the catalog fulfillment process as well.

-- Chuck Tomasi

How does PAD work with Domain Sep?

-- Daniel Schreiber

The first sentence here says it all. Yes, it supports DS. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/administer/process-automation-designer/concept/process-automation-designer-domain-separation.html

-- Chuck Tomasi

Are the activities in Process Automation in any way related to the service catalog / RITMs? How does someone initiate one of these flows?

-- Susan Williams

They CAN be. OOB they are not related.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Are there any OOB reports/dashboards to help track the activities, in particular how much time is spent in each one? so we can see where the bottlenecks are

-- Susan Williams

Yes, there are reports/dashboards available. I don't know about the time spent part. That sounds sort of like an SLA thing.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can this be assigned to a group instead of hard coding a particular user

-- Goke Buraimoh

Yes, the assignment group field was just below the assigned to field.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can I use My PDI for the hands-on?

-- Akira Muranaka

Yes

-- Chuck Tomasi

We have a fairly large catalog of workflows built out in the traditional workflow editor. We have dipped our toes into using flow designer for a few things, mostly as a proof of concept. Between flow designer and process automation, this seems like a replacement for workflow editor. How would you recommend customers transition away from workflow editor? Should we be moving towards building new catalog requests and other processes using flow designer and process automation, or are there still use cases for workflow editor?

-- Matt Grover

The recommendation at this point is to use legacy workflow editor to maintain existing workflows, no net new material there. Instead create your new catalog item flows using Flow Designer. PAD can be used when cross department or visualization is required.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What were the features/tables that required a license, and what is the license required?

-- Jon Serious

Process Automation Designer and Playbook are part of the standard platform. No additional licenses are required. The tables you interact with MAY require additional licensing. Be sure to work with your account team when you have license questions.

-- Chuck Tomasi

But Flow Designer isn't good for processes that have to loop back...such as Change Management (Rejected Changes at various levels). What is the solution replacing Workflow Editor going forward for that?

-- Christopher DiOrio

Hi Christopher. Think about Flow Designer as more of a replacement for Business Rules, Scheduled Jobs, and inbound email actions than a replacement for workflow. Workflow often does things as one monolithic process flow, whereas BRs jump in and do what they need in smaller chunks. You can "run run" an approval in Flow Designer by running the same flow multiple times. For example, when your change goes back to "WIP' state and trigger the same flow multiple times when it reaches "Approval" state. Smaller flows are easier to build, debug, and maintain.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What are the security options for PAD? Does it depend on roles, ACL's? or is there something else?

-- Jose Reyes

Everything in PAD is driven by the Parent Record which triggers the process and the records associated with each Activity. There’s no additional APIs to permission. If a user can read a record, then he/she can view processes triggered by that record. If the user can create / edit a record, then he/she can effectively trigger the process via the create / update trigger. There are new ACLs surrounding the ability to Skip an activity that hasn’t started yet, but this functionality isn’t exposed anywhere.

-- Yaron Guez

Where is the Lab link?

-- Akira Muranaka

There is no lab interaction with this. This is presentation only.

-- Kreg Steppe

What level of API support does PAD have? Does it FULLY support ServiceNow's API? Or are there certain APIs that it doesn't support?

-- Joe Dukes

For scripting APIs, PAD doesn't afford scripting. It relies on Flow Designer to take action. For integration APIs, again, Flow (using IntegrationHub) is going to do the heavy lifting so if something is available in IH, PAD can call activities that leverage those. Very reusable components.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is this only available in Paris?

-- Gita Redfearn

Yes. Paris and later releases.

-- Chuck Tomasi

On the topic of Delegated Development can you recommend any webinars that go over that in detail discussing the roles, etc

-- Bragg McRimmon

This search turned up a few good hits in the first 4-5 results. Take a look.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can a PAD activity collect information from the customer or is it agent only data collection?

-- Christopher Hagy

If you are getting updates from a customer via portal, for example, PAD will stay up to date with those changes. Agents interact with the process flow from PAD via Playbook on the Workspace.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Are there tips/demos for how to convert existing workflows to flow designer and/or process automation? For example, custom change request workflows?

-- Jon Serious

Tip #1: Don't think of either of these as a direct replacement for Workflow. Think of Flow Designer as an upgrade to business rules and scheduled jobs. Small components that run as needed rather than a large monolithic workflow for Change. Smaller components are easier to build, debug, and maintain. PAD is an abstraction layer on top of Flow to make it easier for process owners to build workflows.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is this only available in workspace ?

-- Goke Buraimoh

Process Automation Designer is not tied to any experience, but Playbook is only available in Workspace. We'll be covering more about that on the TechNow Nov 17.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is this being recorded so I can rewatch

-- Tanekqua Harvey

Yes. I'll have the recording posted to the Community YouTube channel and community in a few days. http://bit.ly/servicenow-technow

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can I get a link to this video after this session? I was interrupted by a work phone call and missed some of this. My email is miriam@ksu.edu

-- Miriam Clark

Yes, I'll have it posted in a couple days at http://bit.ly/servicenow-technow

-- Chuck Tomasi

when you selected the location where did that data come from. an internal database or can it reach out to a seperate datebase platform

-- Dwayne Huston

While I'm not entirely sure what was being shown when you asked this question, I strongly suspect it was using the Location (cmn_location) table. How that gets populated (manually or from an external data source) is up to you.

-- Chuck Tomasi

For each PAD process, does it run the called Flows in their state at the time the PAD is started, or if a Flow is modified before it is reached, will the PAD then call the Flow in its updated state?

-- Joe Dukes

Did his demo answer your question?

-- Chuck Tomasi

Are there or could there be permissions in place to restrict specific activities to specific process designers?

-- Kaleb Long

There are new roles required for creating and editing processes and activity definitions. I’ll defer to @Russ Sarbora to outline those (and correct any errors from above). I think they’re described in the Paris TOI for PAD as well.

-- Yaron Guez

If you are a new customer to ServiceNow what is the best way to document our current work processess to better communicate to Service now for initial design. simple flow chart with some detail or soemthing more

-- Dwayne Huston

Great question. Sounds like a great question to discuss with your account team. It goes beyond the scope of this topic.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is recording of this webinar going be available for future reference?

-- Danny Singh

Yes. I will post this to the community youtube page and the community. http://bit.ly/servicenow-technow

-- Chuck Tomasi

Will Predictive Intelligence be able to fill in some of the fields, in your example "Fill in Issue Type"

-- Ryan Whitaker

Yes

-- Chuck Tomasi

What does that "Configure lane" link do under the When to start selection

-- Daniel Schreiber

It allows you to set properties about the lane (e.g. name of the lane)

-- Chuck Tomasi

A teammate sent me the information to join this session. It was mentioned there will be a part 2. How can I get information to join the part 2 session? Thank you - Colleen

-- Colleen Christoff

Part 2 will be November 17. We don't have a registration link set up yet (sorry, we tried to get it by today.) Watch for announcements on Social Media or keep an eye on the community TechNow page. http://bit.ly/servicenow-technow

-- Chuck Tomasi

Does this integrate with Service Portal (i.e. trigger from Catalog Item like Flow)?

-- Craig Gruwell

PAD is agnostic, but Playbook is currently only available in Workspace. If you feel it should have a Service Portal counterpart, I encourage you to see if there is an open idea in the community idea portal. If not, open one up. Our product managers get a lot of input from there.

-- Chuck Tomasi

What enhancements are on the roadmap for PAD?

-- Daniel Schreiber

We'll cover that toward the end of the presentation (hence the safe harbor statement.)

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can we make lanes depend on the user..

-- Dhruv Gupta

Conditional lanes are coming in a future release.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Great demo! Would be helpful to see some example use cases of this within ITSM, CSM, and/or ITBM. Some links to some of the store ITSM and CSM solutions would be helpful.

-- Steve Kelly

Great feedback. Thanks.

-- Chuck Tomasi

When is the portal getting replaced?

-- Jeffrey Kucaj

Portal will continue to live on, just not receiving any upgrades. Now Experience will be the new de facto UI in releases going forward.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is there any plan to give a tool to convert existing workflows to flow designer in future releases?

-- Sangita Swaminathan

Not that I'm aware. The technologies are totally different. There have been several attempts by ServiceNow and partners, but it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison. The best practice is to use legacy workflow to maintain previous work and do new work using Flow Designer (and PAD where needed.)

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can we get recording of this session?

-- Ryan Palamara

The session will be available on demand in a few days. I'll post it to YouTube and the ServiceNow community at http://bit.ly/servicenow-technow.

-- Chuck Tomasi

is there conditional starting of Lanes?

-- Taylor Williams

Not in Paris. It's on the roadmap

-- Chuck Tomasi

ls there a cost for Process Automation Designer or is it included with Paris release?

-- Lisa Wiegmann

Hopefully Yaron covered this on slide 23. 🙂 If you have additional licensing questions please work with your account team. Thanks.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Can or will we be able to expose this in self service portals?

-- Taylor Williams

Playbook is currently only available in Workspace.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Flow Data effectively replaces 'Variables".. can you 'collect' information from the customer or does it require the person to be a fulfiller?

-- Christopher Hagy

Short answer - yes, you can collect information from the customer.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is Process Automation Playbooks interaction only available on Workspace UI?

-- Irston Antao

Currently, yes. However, as Yaron showed, if you update a record with some other means, the UIs are all kept in sync.

-- Chuck Tomasi

I missed the majority of this broadcast with conflicting work meetings, will this be available soon to watch later? Thanks!

-- Alex Yaney

Yes, you can watch either on YouTube or from the community post http://bit.ly/tn80blog

-- Chuck Tomasi