Introducing the Idea Portal on Now Community - why we did it and what's next?

[lawrence_eng]

We are proud to announce the brand new Idea Portal on Now Community. The Idea Portal is a new and improved method for you to submit product enhancement requests, view what others have submitted, vote on your favorite ones, and get feedback from ServiceNow product management.

Watch this video to get a quick overview:

There are additional ways you can learn about the new Idea Portal

• Read the documentation
• Listen to a podcast featuring myself and Chaya Kornreich, the product owners at ServiceNow who own the Idea Portal
• Just try it out!

You'll learn everything you need to know by doing those three things above. In this post, I'd like to take the opportunity here to give some context about why and how we built this on Community, and what we're planning to do to make it even better.

Why Community?

How to improve the process of collecting, analyzing, and responding to product enhancement requests has been a perennial question at ServiceNow. We knew we needed a good user experience and even better internal processes to make sure the best ideas were gathered, heard, and responded to.

A lot of requirements were debated, but all we knew that we wanted to harness the power of the Now Community. Thousands of ServiceNow experts and enthusiasts log in to Community every month. We believe Now Community is the ideal venue to get the best ideas in front of ServiceNow's product teams, and also a great way for those teams to communicate with all of you. Ideas submitted in isolation can be valuable, but ideas from the best minds in our community, vetted and improved by members collaborating with each other, are even more powerful.

When we migrated Now Community onto our CSM Communities application in 2018, that opened a lot of opportunities to enhance the site and integrate with other ServiceNow applications in our self-service ecosystem, such as Service Portal, Knowledge Management, and Case Management. Most recently, we partnered with the ITBM team who designed an Innovation Management application (available in the New York release), and we put it onto Now Community as the Idea Portal.

What's Next?

We hope you'll try out the Idea Portal and like what you see. Obviously, in the spirit of continual service improvement, we aren't done yet. We already have plans to use the Idea Portal for additional use cases on the Community, so be on the lookout for that in 2020. In the short term, we are evaluating some additional features, such as:

• Idea-related notifications in the Community inbox (in addition to email notifications)
• Subscriptions to the Idea Portal and specific Idea categories, so you'll be notified about newly published Ideas you're interested in
• Ability to see a list of your Ideas while you're logged into HI
• Ability for community members to quickly flag duplicate ideas
• At-mentions on Ideas and Idea Comments
• (your idea here!)

Your feedback is critical to making this initiative a success. In addition to commenting below, please feel free to leave your comments and questions about the Idea Portal on our feedback forum.

thanks!

-Lawrence Eng

Community Product Owner, ServiceNow