ServiceNow launches workflow, workspace tools for enterprises and government agencies

ServiceNow has rolled out a trio of solutions to improve productivity for employees, customers and partners. These promise to help digitize more aspects of workplace productivity, improving efficiency for enterprises and government agencies. The new tools available on the ServiceNow store are:

• Service Request Playbook for Public Sector: Helps set up communications workflows for government organizations
• Automated Service Suggestions: Helps streamline service inventory
• Workplace Scenario Planning: Helps reconfigure workspaces

Improved access to government services; ML-generated service maps

Service Request Playbook for Public Sector provides templates that help government agencies digitize and automate queries. This makes it easier for citizens to request services via their computers, mobile devices and third-party apps and track progress up through resolution. 

Automated Service Suggestions uses machine learning to automatically analyze an organization’s network traffic and suggest entry points for business-critical services. This new tool from ServiceNow helps IT operators create a high-fidelity map of all infrastructure and software with a few clicks. These maps can be constantly recalibrated to help teams make decisions and respond to IT events more quickly.

Yugal Joshi, partner with Everest Group, an advisory service, believes service maps are moving in the right direction but progress has been incredibly difficult. Enterprises have been using change management databases (CMDB) for ages, but these are rarely updated or strategically used. 

“Combined with AIOps, such service maps can become effective in predicting and proactively addressing service disruptions,” Joshi said.

ServiceNow wants to help you adapt to hybrid work

Workplace Scenario Planning from ServiceNow is designed to help businesses adapt to hybrid work models where employees are spending more time working from home. It helps enterprises reconfigure space and manage change for individual employees and departments in harmony with heat and electricity requirements. For example, space planners can design, compare and experiment with different space allocation scenarios using a drag-and-drop interface. This helps reveal tradeoffs in space utilization, cost and employee experience. 

Joshi said this is part of a larger trend of how the classic definitions of workplace and workspace are evolving. Enterprises are considering employee wellbeing, sustainability and automation as aspects of the workplace, in addition to devices, platforms and applications. 

This shift also represents an acceptance that despite some enterprises calling people back to the office, the hybrid model is here for the foreseeable future. It also indicates that workspace planning is receiving the importance it deserves. Previously, organizations “would buy spaces, build good-looking interiors, invest in advanced devices and software, but would forget to build a plan to manage it in a harmonized and cost-effective manner,” Joshi said. 

However, there is also an acceptance that the hybrid work model has made things worse from a technology-sprawl perspective.

“That is where a company like ServiceNow, which integrates many technologies to build workflows, can create significant value for clients,” Joshi said.