ServiceNow’s latest platform upgrade release, Utah, provides major enhancements and new capabilities. AC3’s ServiceNow Architect, Angus Palmer speaks about the latest changes, and how it will benefit teams and workflow.
There are three main themes that organisations will uncover when upgrading to Utah. These are: boosting productivity, low-code/no-code development, and platform security.
Boosting Productivity
ServiceNow has been pushing Workspaces with the new Next UI since San Diego. These are optimised for specific roles and personas in your organisation. Most new capabilities will only work in Workspaces and they will largely replace the legacy UI by the time Washington is released at the end of this year. ServiceNow Utah continues this with the release of more Workspaces in each Application Suite. I see teams leveraging these Workspaces and dramatically improve their efficiency, as they are able to deftly context switch between tasks and leverage machine learning capabilities to relieve them from repetitive tasks and intelligently push information where and when it is needed. Given the benefits and future roadmap, all ServiceNow customers should be migrating now or imminently to the new Workspaces.
Machine learning features unlocked with Platform Intelligence helps boost productivity by flagging relevancy and urgency. The newly upgraded AI can indicate if something is a major incident, helping to inform the team when to engage major incident management.
When looking at the boost in productivity holistically, this upgrade removes some of the tedious manual effort that has weighed down work in the past. It’s looking at those who manage infrastructure and the environment. It streamlines processes from frontline to designers.
Citizen Development
ServiceNow is about empowering people to do their best work. More often than not, the people doing the work have the best insights into how to work better. This is where Citizen Developers should be encouraged. By allowing no-code/low-code development, your users can build apps on the platform, further advancing the platform so that enhancements are not bottlenecked by the Admin team. If you can build a dashboard in Excel, you can now use ServiceNow to build applications. These advances reduce teams’ reliance on a developer to create dashboards and apps.
ServiceNow Admins don’t need to fear a return to the Wild West. They can manage, review and approve Citizen Development work by using App Engine Management Centre. At the crux of this new centre, it allows admins to control what citizen developers create and then what gets pushed to production.
Security
As data and security breaches have affected major Australian businesses, more and more companies are needing to be compliant with regulatory controls. ServiceNow has multiple security features that customers can adopt to fit their unique requirements but sometimes poor choices lead to non-compliance. ServiceNow Vault is a bundled offering that includes the security features that organisations need to be compliant.
ServiceNow Vault includes Platform Encryption which enables encryption at rest for the entire instance and policy based encryption at the column level. Neither of these have an adverse impact to the user experience. ServiceNow Vault also includes the ability to recognise sensitive data such as personal identifiable data that once recognised can be redacted or anonymised. This can be used to prevent sensitive data from appearing in development instances, a scenario that is unfortunately a common way that data breaches have occurred.
To upgrade to Utah, customers should review the Release notes available on docs.service-now.com. You can tailor these to match your particular instance and deployed applications. Then to perform and upgrade, follow the prescriptive advice found on the ServiceNow’s NowCreate site.
Upgrading is about more than just the technical side. Organisational change is often overlooked but critical to success. Understanding your users’ needs and effective communication is important. Upgrading to Utah will require planning, testing, and validation. This is where organisations can benefit from leveraging a trusted managed service provider like AC3, to upgrade their ServiceNow environment.