Hidden Now Intelligence Gems in the Paris Release

dangrady510 · ‎09-18-2020

When planning a trip, we often pick our destinations based on some key highlights or landmarks that a location has to offer. For example, my wife and I went to Italy for our honeymoon and spent time in both Rome and the Amalfi Coast. Of course, our site seeing plan included the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Spanish Steps. And we saw all of those things. But the stories we tell our friends, the moments we relive over and over again and cherish the most have nothing to do with those well-known spots. We talk about the night we wandered into this little father and son-run wine bar(and the exploits that followed) or the perfectly peaceful view we had from our balcony at the the Buca di Bacco hotel in Positano.

The same thing often happens with software releases. There are some key features that get all the hype and attention, but there are always a handful of enhancements that go under-the-radar but may end up making the most impact on your organization and becoming the stories you share with your ServiceNow peers.

In this article I'd like to call your attention to a few of those enhancements to Now Intelligence in the Paris release.

For Performance Analytics, the major new feature that is getting all the attention is Analytics Q&A, which makes analytics more accessible by allowing your to explore data using natural language. Imagine a world where you no longer have to use a reporting tool, you simply use a Google-like search box to ask your question and get your data-driven answer. Understandably, this is a must see attraction in the Paris release.

A capability that is getting less attention but has significant value is KPI Signals. With Performance Analytics we spend a lot of time talking about trends related to a given process and the metrics that are measuring it's performance. There are always going to be small variations from a performance perspective. What KPI Signals does is calls our attention to situations where those variations statistically move beyond "small" and could have a significant impact. Have you ever asked yourself - "Why can't the analytics just tell me what I should be focusing on?" - KPI Signals does just that.

The change that is getting almost no attention, but will probably have the largest impact is related to a capability that has been round for years - Interactive Filters. As of the Paris release, Interactive Filters is a core reporting functionality and no longer requires a Performance Analytics license. If for some reason you aren't familiar with Interactive Filters this blog post will get you thinking about the possibilities.

For our artificial intelligence capabilities, the ITSM Predictive Intelligence Workbench and the additions of French and German language support to ServiceNow's in-platform natural language understanding(NLU) engine will be the headlines. But customers who are using the Clustering Framework to help identify automation opportunities will have a greater appreciation for the change that has been made to the Cluster Visualization. The Scatter Plot visualization that was available prior to Paris has proved to be a challenge for some to interpret and use to identify opportunities in the data(in fact sometimes it is fun to play "What do you see in the data?" "I see a butterfly." or "It looks like someone spilt the rainbow sprinkles."). The new Treemap Cluster Visualization in Paris is not only more readable so it's easier to identify where the largest opportunities lie, but it also gives you the ability to interact, isolate, and drill into those opportunities.

There are also a couple of enhancements that have been made to the NLU engine that will have a significant impact on the Virtual Agent experiences customers are able to provide. Those enhancements are the ability to add synonyms to the vocabulary based on ServiceNow tables and the ability to create an open-ended entity. Combined, these capabilities will really improve the accuracy of the NLU predictions or from an end user's perspective the ability for the Virtual Agent to understand what you're trying to accomplish. Just one real life scenario the combination of these two capabilities addresses is the need to create utterances with entity values for every item in the Service Catalog to support an "Order an Item/Submit a Request" Virtual Agent conversation. This can now be easily accomplished with just a handful of well-designed utterances.

Now Intelligence is a suite of solutions designed to help organizations optimize their service delivery experiences. When we can blend multiple components of the suite into a single solution we can create unique experiences that make a difference. The intelligent "Open IT Ticket" Virtual Agent conversation uses the Similarity Framework to predict similar open tickets and prevents users from opening duplicate tickets. This small machine learning-driven change will have a big impact on human agent productivity by helping to reduce their workloads. There is also a new "Personalized Greeting" topic that not only greets the user by name but also presents them with any existing work they have open or system outages that impact them to create a more personalized experience.

We've already touched on a few Virtual Agent enhancements based on improvements to the NLU engine but there are three other enhancements that might get overshadowed by the bigger news of a Virtual Agent API which allows the customers and partners to build integrations with other 3rd party conversational interfaces.

The first of these three enhancements is the ability to send notifications via the Virtual Agent to our native service portal client. We had the ability to send notifications to MS Teams and Slack prior to Paris, now we can do that natively as well. This allows us to create more proactive Virtual Agent experiences.

The second enhancement is the ability to customize the chat menu. This has been a very common ask from customer to be able to remove or add contact types from that menu.

The final Virtual Agent enhancement I want to touch on is the combined authoring environment. No longer do you need to bounce back and forth between the Topic Designer and the Studio when authoring a Virtual Agent conversation that involves an NLUU component. This has a dramatic impact on the productivity of those who are authoring conversations.

The last enhancement I want to mention is a change to an overlooked Now Intelligence solution in the Orlando release. Employee Workflows has added an HR-specific Knowledge Demand Insight solution. Are you now asking yourself "What is Knowledge Demand Insights"? You aren't alone. Knowledge Demand Insights is an out of the box machine learning solution that identifies gaps in your knowledge base. You can learn more about this value add solution in this blog post.

Paris, like every other ServiceNow release, has hundreds of enhancements that can positively impact the value customers get from the Now Platform. This article is meant to highlight some of the hidden gems, the cups of coffee at that tucked away cafe in the shadows of the Eiffel Tower.

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Hidden Now Intelligence Gems in the Paris Release

April 17th, 2024 - Proactive Analytics