Bazinga! Kingston is here! And ITSM is Ahhmazing!

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I'm very excited to preview what's new in Kingston. With Kingston, ServiceNow rings in a new era of innovation and creativity in IT Service Management. Digital transformation is breaking from board room conversations into the enterprise to enable organizations to accelerate transformation at scale and deliver greater efficiencies through superior user experiences. IT Service Management leads the way in shifting the thinking of organizations from rigid, on-premise technologies to rich, always-on, personalized and scalable digital technologies for all transactions and workflows.   When it comes to digital transformation, ServiceNow helps you walk the talk.

Here are some of the highlights in Kingston.   We will have more details on these capabilities in future blogs.   Meanwhile, feel free to post your questions in the comments section below.

In Kingston:

• Machine learning moves past scholarly articles and blogs and makes its way into your hands with Agent Intelligence.
• A superior user experience makes using the Service Catalog a pure delight.   A search-first experience combined with single-click access to orders and wish lists brings you the familiarity of your favorite consumer sites.
• Major incident management will change the way you manage critical incidents. From rapid resolution, to instant notification to stakeholders and resolution groups, to a dashboard that keeps you on top of all major incidents and their statuses, Major Incident Management greatly minimizes business downtime.
• Get practical and personalized guidance for service improvement with Recommendations in ServiceNow Benchmarks.   Not only do you see how your organization is performing with respect to your industry peers, but you get personalized recommendations and guidance on where and how to jump-start your service transformation.

Here are some additional details on the highlights mentioned above:

Speed time to resolution with Machine Learning

The value of machine learning lies in learning from past and current data and executing future tasks with speed and precision.   ServiceNow Agent Intelligence puts the ability of machine learning in your hands with surprising ease.   Agent Intelligence automatically categorizes and routes incidents to create simpler end user and fulfiller experiences. By applying advanced machine-learning and data models, Agent Intelligence reduces costs dramatically and speeds time-to-resolution, enabling customers to realize game changing economics.

The best part is that you do not need data scientists to implement this capability.   It's almost as easy as configuring a report in ServiceNow.   Give the training models at least 30k incident records from your operational data and within a few hours, you'll have your data models ready to automate incident categorization and routing.

Wonder what the business impact of something like this could be?

Did you know that agents spend 12% of their time on an average in categorizing and routing incidents? Agents at large enterprises often have to choose from over 100 categories before they can route the incident. That is a lot of time, money and effort spent in routine tasks that could instead be used for higher value tasks. With ServiceNow Agent Intelligence, organizations free up agents' time so they can focus on more strategic priorities while driving higher SLA attainment. Additional details on the business benefits of Agent Intelligence are contained in this Accenture Report.

Benefits:

• Personalized adaptive intelligence tailored to each customers instance
• Eliminates the bottleneck created by manually triaging tasks
• Incidents get the right attention to drive SLA attainment
• Improves productivity for IT teams and end users by freeing up time to focus on more strategic priorities.

Superior user experience with Service Catalog:

The Service Catalog is one of the most widely deployed ServiceNow applications.   Most of you have the ServiceNow Service Catalog in your environment.   With Kingston, a superior user experience combined with greatly improved administrative capabilities brings even more mojo to this critical application.   Here are some of the updates in Kingston:

• A search-first experience (just as we'd rather search Amazon.com than browse its catalogs) as well as the ability to browse by categories.
• A better performing search capability that returns more relevant search results
• Single click access to several items including wish-lists, ordering items, browsing most popular products or revisiting recently viewed items
• An improved mobile experience
• All of this delivered on a slick UI

On the fulfiller side, Kingston brings easier Catalog administration.   With greater ease of administration and troubleshooting, automated testing framework and macro debuggers, it is easier than ever to create and maintain the service catalog and enable organizations to reduce costs, increase user satisfaction and maximize business benefits.

Rapid resolution of major incidents

Major Incident Management is an extension to incident management and provides a process flow for handling high-impact incidents faster than ever. Service desk practitioners understand how important this capability is. Managing major incidents and service outages can overwhelm IT departments that lack well defined major incident management process and systems. Inefficient handling of major incidents can not only impact service delivery and employee satisfaction, but can also result in loss of revenue and reputation of the organization.

ServiceNow's Major Incident Management streamlines the end-to-end process of identification, tracking and resolution of high impact incidents. As soon as a major incident is identified, the workflow enables automatic notification and real-time collaboration between resolution groups resulting in swift resolution of the critical incident. The included Major Incident Management Workbench gives organizations a single-pane-view to streamline the response process.

Major Incident Management is important to help you:

• Avoid governance and compliance risks resulting in fines or fees due to non-delivery of required services
• Avoid loss of revenue and increase in costs due to impairment in key business functions
• Prevent employee satisfaction and productivity from being negatively impacted with unstable or unavailable services.

Personalized guidance for continuous improvement of service delivery:

Customers Benchmarks will include recommendations in the Kingston release. Based on proven practices, the recommendations will vary with the values of the Key Performance Indicators. Customers that accept a recommendation can use Guided Setup for a step-by-step implementation process.   For example, if the KPI "Average time to resolve a high priority incident" is weak and the organization does not have Service Level Management implemented, ServiceNow Benchmarks will recommend that Service Level Management be implemented. Good Service Level Management will accelerate the time to resolve high priority incidents.

ServiceNow also continues to add more KPIs to its set of Benchmarks.   With a total of 23 KPIs including 7 new KPIs in Kingston, ServiceNow Benchmarks gives you a new level of visibility into your organization's service performance in comparison with its peers.

Using ServiceNow Benchmarks:

To start incorporating ServiceNow Benchmarks in your performance analysis, all you need to do is simply opt-in to ServiceNow Benchmarks.   You will immediately have access to all of this insightful data, plus see the percentile ranking of your service organization for all the KPIs. No one else but the designated roles in your organization will have access to your Benchmarks data.

In Conclusion

There is a lot of activity at ServiceNow, not just to enable you — our customers — to drive innovation in your organizations, but to make it really easy and cost effective for you to do so.   ServiceNow Agent Intelligence does not just bring you the power of machine learning. It makes it easy for you to harness the power of machine learning and quickly experience tangible benefits. With the new and improved Service Catalog, employees may soon forget that the enterprise service catalog of the past used to be slower and less intuitive than their favorite consumer sites. The capabilities mentioned in this blog highlight some of what's new in Kingston.   To take advantage of the full set of capabilities in Kingston, upgrade soon. Talk to your account executive if you have questions.   And if you have any product specific questions or comments, we are here to answer. Just post them below.

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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