View Recording: Top 10 Updates from ServiceNow Knowledge 2024

Well, thank you everybody for taking some time out of your day to come to this webinar for some of the best updates that are coming out of knowledge for 2024. So for anybody that doesn’t know, knowledge is a three day event. That happens is that happens yearly in Las Vegas and ServiceNow comes out and shares some of the top updates that are coming out for the platform and each individual module for service now. So we put this together with some of our insights and some of the things that we found most beneficial that we think we should pass on to clients and future customers. And we’re going to pass that on to long now. O let’s meet your speaker. So my name is Brian Trippy. I’m the lead technical architect for the entire ServiceNow practice at concurrency. I’ve got about 2 decades in the IT operations and automations arena, and I’ve worked with a bunch of ITSM tools and a lot of ITSM processes over the years and service now is just the most recent one that I’ve been operating in for the past seven years. And I’d like to tell you a little bit about concurrency. So concurrency has been in the IT services space for about 33 years, twelve of which I’ve been a part of, and we are both a Microsoft and ServiceNow shop in the Microsoft Arena, we’re top AI in front Azure partner uh. We have a data and Azure AI practice. We have a modern apps practice a DevOps practice, a modern applications practice and we are a mergers and acquisition specialists. So if anybody’s dealing with mergers and acquisitions come and talk to us on the ServiceNow side of things, which is my side of the house, we are a full implementation licensing and premier services partner. We operate in the following arenas, IT service management, operations management, customer service management, field services management, SEC OPS service, portfolio management, HR delivery and employee growth. We’d also do custom app development and full automation development with integrations and the third party systems. So we have a lot of deployment experience. We have a lot of implementation experience and a lot of that implementation experience is going to come through in some of our future discussions here. So Aknowledge Bill McDermott, the ServiceNow CEO, said something that was pretty poignant and that is ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation. It’s a single pane of glass. One experience layer and one automation layer for your entire company. So ServiceNow has gotten so expansive that they’re confidently saying that they can be the platform for your entire business for every business area to be the center front end for not only our customers, but also each of your departments. And the fact that they’re putting AI everywhere is just a testament to the fact that they’re really, really putting their money where their mouth is. So we’re going to learn about today. Well, there have been some really radical platform updates that are coming out of knowledge. Umm, we’re going to learn about some now assist expansion into other areas of service now as a tool set I Tom AI operate AI OPS and now assist for item is some brand new functionality that are coming out on Knowledge 2024. Awesome Field service management improvements, some improvements to employee growth and development along with HR, a big announcement about ServiceNow Studio, which is probably the single best thing for in administrator or back end developer uh. And some insights that are coming about with you know I OT operational efficiencies and some things in the manufacturing arena that are really, really coming to fruition within ServiceNow system and also some Co innovate industry solutions that are happening within NVIDIA and Microsoft that were interesting. And we’re announced during knowledge. So let’s talk about the platform. So the biggest announcement is that ServiceNow is migrating to Raptor DB. So Raptor DB is a fork of Postgres and it’s. Has advanced capabilities for performance, and we’re not just talking a small amount of performance, we’re talking almost a 2 1/2 X efficiency increase in back end transactional processing, which is going to completely transform not only the front end experience for analysts, because if any, if any analysts or administrator knows when they’re working in a workspace or trying to pull up a list of configuration items, there is some lag time there depending on how many configuration items that you have in your CMDB, along with workspaces, workspaces tend to have an extremely laggy load time and this movement. To this back end, database infrastructure is going to increase that. So what does that mean? So we’re talking almost a 25% faster load time on average across all workspaces and back end UX UI elements across all of ServiceNow. With regard to Xanadu, which is the next iteration of ServiceNow, which is extremely beneficial, right? Like if you were sitting there and we’re trying to pull up something and it’s taking a little bit of time, we don’t want that. We want it to come up fast when we need it, so this is gonna account for that. And it’s only gonna get incremental incrementally faster over time as they tweak and update this iteratively as we go through multiple iterations of ServiceNow. There’s also going to be upgrade uplifts, so not only are you going to get faster upgrades, you know from anywhere from 26 to 75% depending on the size of your environment, but that’s going to directly translate to faster installations of plugins. Uh, you’re deployments into, you know, new environments are gonna be rapidly upscaled, cloning down to other environments is going to be affected as well, incrementally as you guys are doing clones, you’re going to see faster optics in that process too. One thing that we’ve noticed over many of our deployments is that cloning on a cadence is something that is lacking in a lot of clients. So being able to facilitate that and having those things do and deploy a lot faster is something that we are really hoping that come to fruition as we start meeting with customers. So one one thing that is. Being touted across all of Knowledge was AI and AI’s going everywhere, and it’s not. It’s not going to be the. Augment or replacement for an agent or analyst. It’s more of a enhancement to their processes, right? Like how many analysts or agents are, or even people that are in different departments are doing things that are mundane or doing things that are inefficient. That where AI could augment those things like summarization or automating closure or resolution nodes, or helping out with searches inside of your business. Now assist is going to help with that. So if you haven’t had a chance to look into now assist, it’s gone through its second iteration now and that it’s now proliferating itself across a multitude of different modules, from ITSM. To ITOM to HR CSM, SPM all of these front end core technologies like summation, auto resolution feedback, uh Customer action, summarization, field, service management, action summarization. So all of these things are just enabling agents to do things fast or understand what they’re looking at faster, looking at issues and cases and movements from one group to another and understanding what’s been done up to that point, just enabling them to do things exponentially faster, which ultimately increases their efficiency rate. Meantime, to respond closure state criteria increases, so over the course of time you claw back time. And as everybody knows, time is money. So the more you can claw back that time and the faster you guys can get those efficiency increases, the better off you’ll see cost savings over the course of a year. But one thing I wanted to call out with specific regard to now assist is something called enterprise search. So what they’re enabling now is they are enabling connectors into repositories of information like SharePoint Workplace, GitLab from the context of your front end portal, you can now search all of those enterprise repositories in the back end and surface stuff that information and have it correlated such that if an employee is looking for something like what is my benefit for HR? Maybe that benefit information lives in a SharePoint repository somewhere, but they don’t necessarily have that connected to ServiceNow. But if you connect it with now assist, you can take that information and surface that up to the end user and only give them the information that they’re requesting. So if I’m looking for my benefits information now, it’s just can service that up for you right then and there. So that is something that is a huge benefit that’s coming now as an Edu. The next area I want to touch on is ITOM AI OPS, so if anybody has deployed ITOM visibility and are looking to deploy ITOM health or event management, I seriously look into AI OPS and start looking into now assist with AI OPS. What I Tom AI OPS is looking to do is leverage advanced data analytics. You know, it processes vast amounts of data from various sources. It also uses machine learning to forecast potential issues that are coming inside of your environment. So looking at all of your third party event management tools and pushing that data into ServiceNow and having ServiceNow is machine learning algos. Take a look and collate that data and understand that these events may be correlated and could signify a bigger issue with regard to a specific service. Umm. Having that event correlation also reduces noise, right? How many times have we looked at ITOM event management systems and understood that? Woo, there’s a lot of data that gets pushed out with event management tools, and if you’re not looking at those and really trimming down the noise, it affects your back end productivity. So pushing that information to ServiceNow, if you have it can reduce that noise by collating events and ensuring that you’re looking at things that are maybe of the same type or affecting the same service or CI. And it also takes a look at performance and monitors that and gives you access to real time dashboards to monitor that performance and understand if there is a performance impact that is coming, which is extremely helpful when you’re looking at uh event cases across your entire organization. But now they’re adding now assist 2I Tom and what is that gonna do? So I Tom with now assist is going to help your agents who are looking at alerts, understand not only what the alert could be, but also what it’s probable cause may be. It has the capability to take erroneous event information and populate that in a manner that is understood by the layperson, right? So a lot of times when you’re looking at an event, you may not understand exactly what all it’s trying to tell you, but having ServiceNow is back end, ALM understand across multitude of different implementations across an entire organization. Really, taking a look at events and how they’ve been understood by multitudes of different orgs, you can take that information and help Dr summations to help analysts and administrators understand what that alert might actually be trying to do. Like if you take a look at the picture here, you know it’s that alert up top is pretty erroneous, right? But if you look at the summation that now assist gives you, it’s basically telling you that snapshots have been running off an extended period of time, and that you know, we might want to investigate it and take a look. So from there you can, you know. Move that alert into a right, the right area, right group to take a look or, you know, throw it into items. Or mediation. Maybe you already have a package that’s been developed that can go and triage that alert automated in an automated fashion with AI OPS and now assist, you can have those playbooks trigger and automatically remediate those alerts ad hoc. So if you haven’t taken a look and aren’t really trying to understand how to auto remediate these event overtime, that’s something that you should take a look at. And with automation and workflow you know now these capabilities are realized. We just, we’ve worked with a couple of customers that are doing auto remediation on the SEC OPS side, they’re taking information from the security operations workspace and running that through ServiceNow and auto remediating security incidents on the fly. Same thing can be done with apps and ITOM. So some really cool automated anomaly detection, event management, correlation, machine learning, it’s it’s all being baked into the ITOM module and it’s the capabilities are really starting to favor the efficiency gains that we’re starting to see with administration and analytics. So one of the well as being a developer and my my colleagues being developers, we spend a lot of time in studio and IDP’s and different applications with inside of ServiceNow doing Development, doing back end development, doing front end UX UI development and we have to go to a bunch of different areas in order to get that done right. You have you have a bunch of different Ides that you may go to like studio or App Engine Studio. The UX UI builder? Different form builders different. Other tool sets in order to do development and ServiceNow has basically said we wanna stop doing that, right? We we wanna have our back end developers start going to 1 centralized area in order to do all of their development work. So they announced that starting in, I think quarter 4, they’re going to be deploying the beta of ServiceNow Studio. So what is ServiceNow studio? It is the amalgamation of all of the different areas where we’re currently doing Development into one centralized area with a full integrated IDE. It allows you to do development in multiple different application scopes. You can do custom app development. It’s got AI search for studio and also for all of your code within. You can take a look and understand upstream and downstream impacts of changes that you’re making to the system. A lot of times when you’re making changes, you don’t necessarily know up front what that change is going to affect over the entirety of your environment. So having access to understand those upstream and downstream impacts can greatly help you understand what you’re doing, what it’s going to affect, and drastically reduce issues when you’re promoting update sets and things like that. And the production? Uh. It also allows developers to collaborate on specific projects. Maybe you’re building in in house application. Maybe you’re developing something that is specific to your organization. Having collaborative efforts on a singular project and not having to, you know, say hey, can you take a look at this or can you take a look at this real time collaboration on application development is something that is promised with studio? All of your workflow, all of flow designer, all of that is being pulled into ServiceNow studio. And it’s going to allow drag and drop just like we do in flow designer now. But now we’re doing it in a centralized area. So now we have everything from front end, UX, UI development, mobile development automation, development, action building. So if we have to build custom actions, all of this can be done in one central area. In addition to being able to build custom apps, this single change is going to radically change how Development app dev, and automation development is going to happen in ServiceNow. So if you guys have a chance, there’s open beta that you can subscribe to and to help beta test this so that way you can give your insights. But this should drastically increase the efficiency that we can do for back end development. It’s going to be fantastic and eventually what they’re trying to do is they are trying to ultimately go and pull this into one single tool which is going to be awesome. So another thing that we saw were some enhancements to field service management. If anybody has deployed field service management, if you are running a utility company or if you’re doing any type of customer service where you’re actively having to go meet your customers where they are, ah, field service management is gonna allow you to do and serve your customers wherever they are and what they’re doing is they’re are allowing not only your technicians to operate from a mobile perspective, but there are adding now assist into field services management such that now you can get your summations, you can get your information on tasking and work order tracking and all. Of the activity that surrounds those work orders you have that capability now to look at what they’ve done over a period of time and understand, right, right to date, whether or not you need to send somebody to a particular location, send parts to a particular location. I understand that when somebody goes and actually visits that location, what they’ve done, what actions have been taken and easily add those actions to a resolution summary such that the whatever customer that’s looking to be serviced has real time updates to what’s being done and what has been done. So there’s a real focus on operational efficiency and doing more with less, because if we as we’ve seen over the past couple of months, especially this year, is that a lot of companies are really focused on trying to reduce the amount of tasking that and swivel chair that analysts are doing and by integrating some of these tool sets and allowing them to do more things faster, it’s really allowing uh customers, to serve their customers in a more efficient manner. So some of the things that now assist is really doing is you’re it’s leveraging back end API to really maximize dispatch and scheduling by matching up field service technicians to skill sets and those skill sets to availability and giving you the capability to auto assign tasking such that when you’re actually doing dispatch, you’re having a reduction in the time it takes to find a qualified field service agent. The amount of time it takes to find out what schedule they have, what skills they possess as a dispatch person, you know that it takes a lot of time to do that. And with ServiceNow having the capability to just have the tool do that research for you and then serve that up and an assignment capacity, again it’s efficiency gains. That’s the whole name of the game for a lot of the module updates for Knowledge this here. There have also been a lot of updates to HRSD and employee growth development specifically, and I know there have been some updates in for Knowledge 2024 with regard to HRSD, but the reason I wanted to focus on employee growth and development is again going back to the adage of. Doing more with the people that you have and driving skills development across that employee base such that they can develop their own skills in house and again do more with the tools that they have access to and also do more within the realm of their own career paths. So one thing that ServiceNow is trying to do is understand what? Employees are looking to do in their career paths and what skills they have across the organization, then understand where those gaps are and have ServiceNow automatically create skills plans for each individual employee such that you can Upskill where there are gaps and do more with those Employees. Combined with other efficiency gains throughout the tool to help not only move them along on their career path, but also help them do more in in their environment and allow them to do more within the company itself. They’re also doing skills assessments and learning plans automatically derived based on those skill gaps. Umm there is now assist with employee growth that is also gonna do dynamic feedback tracking and feedback check-ins for your employees. So you can develop a feedback plan and now assist will go out. Gather that feedback and then serve that up to your HR group or your employee growth team to help them understand what the what the you know. What the flavor is of the of the employee base? What the? How the morale is what? What that’s looking like and be able to understand if there are issues internally, what what things they can take action on and understand where they may be, things that need to be improved from the experience side of things. It also provides goal setting and progress tracking so employees can set their own goals, and then you can track those goals within inside of employee growth and development. If if you have, they also can explore other career path options. So maybe you have an employee that is in development, but they’re looking to go into more of administration. You know you can set those learning plans up and career path plans to help help them on that journey. You know, it’s not all the time where we wanna keep our employees in their in their areas, maybe they wanna branch out and go do other things. Also recognition and rewards. Uh, so as as people are having in celebrating different things or promotions or journeys in their environment now assist recognizes and celebrate those employees and it helps with motivation and engagement. And those are all things that are coming out with now assist with employee growth and development. So it’s a really cool things with helping Employees just start upskilling and really starting to do more with what they have access to inside the company and be able to foster the ability to being able to do more with less employees. And find some things that I wanted to discuss. If you have a manufacturing or services oriented environment. Maybe you’re doing a, you know creation of. Hars or you’re a bakery or you’re an automotive company. You’re utilities company. A lot of times they’ve got, you know, manufacturing lines and automation lines and bakery processes, logistics, supply chain, all of those things all have their own individual processes, their own individual machines, maybe robotics, maybe internal systems, downstream systems and a lot of people are trying to understand where you can do automation, where you can do proactive maintenance systems where you can do understanding the entire upstream and downstream processes. And ServiceNow’s operational technology module is really starting to drive some of those IoT processes as it relates to the manufacturing arena. And what it’s Foundation is is it’s going to allow multiple different third party systems to aggregate their information into a centralized management tool such that when if you have an IO T solution for, maybe you’re running a manufacturing line and you have seven or eight different processes on that manufacturing line with individualized pieces of equipment connecting those via IoT, get real time data in real time tracking of what’s going on on that line. Maybe there’s an issue that might be happening that you’re unaware of, but ServiceNow is back end AI can look at that and understand that, and maybe you have some maintenance that needs to happen on that machine and bringing that from. A possibility of maybe having some downtime to proactively doing maintenance on that machine and helping that machine not have that downtime. Uh. Thus saving you money from maybe a down line. Or maybe you’re a bakery that needs to understand how your ovens are operating or where you have supply chain logistics for your flower or bread, or where that where those trucks are going, where the movement is happening, where you need point of sale systems that are tracking your user or your customer base and what systems they’re accessing or what products they’re purchasing and understanding. Maybe you have a upshift in the amount of you know for Schantz you’re purchasing during the morning. Maybe you need to have more flour and more sugar over to this bakery. In this amount of time, being able to proactively take a look at all of that information real time and understand as you’re baking that you’re using XY and Z ingredient and being able to send that ad hoc by understanding that you know we’re down this amount or we’re down this amount and proactively being able to push that ingredient to that bakery in real time is is of of real benefit because that way you’re you’re not leveraging waste, you’re not wasting time. You’re not wasting resources. You’re really trying to strive for that flexibility in that that service to not only your customer, but also all your, all your other areas from automotive and utility. So I mean from, from an efficiency perspective, you can see here by the example that a manufacturing plant that integrated with their operational data with their IT systems, you know by leveraging some of those predictive maintenance algos they they reduced equipment downtime by 35%. So I mean, if you think about that over multiple lines, multiple different processes that that can add up from a cost savings perspective. So one of the last things I wanted to touch on is the fact that Microsoft is really starting to innovate with different industries and specific solutions. So recently at. Knowledge and Vidia announced that they were developing AI specific solutions specific to telecoms, and you can see that Microsoft is really trying to segment themselves away by really offering solutions specific to different areas like manufacturing, finance, retail, government. And they’re partnering partnering with different groups to help facilitate some of those interactions. And NVIDIA has stepped up not only in the realm of AI and helping them with their now assist efforts with their back end data center initiatives and develop helping develop their LLM’s, but they’re also Co innovating with developing some of these specific use cases for ServiceNow and really helping to understand. What other things they can do as a collaboration in order to drive some of those AI solutions forward? And of course, you know, we can’t forget ServiceNow’s integrations with Microsoft, right? So for a lot of people that don’t know Microsoft and service now are extremely tightly integrated. They have integrated into not only in 365, but Azure also copilot. If you guys are doing copilot issues and you’re environments, ServiceNow integrates into that and they’re also providing industry specific solutions for healthcare, finance, telecom and government. They are really developing a lot of capabilities within those arenas in order to help drive some of their partnerships and really stepping forward. The alignment to get Microsoft specific solutions tightly integrated into ServiceNow such that again it can become that one singular platform that one pane, single pane of glass for your entire enterprise. And with generative AI really starting to focus on some of those AI tools? Such that we can get some real efficiency gains there. No. What? What can we do now as a as a service provider? We can do a lot of different things, but with our clients, what we normally do is we like to do envisioning sessions, umm and what those primarily consist of is we can come in and understand what you’re doing from a business perspective. A lot of times when doing consulting with other consulting firms, usually they’re just point solutions. Concurrency takes a different approach and we really try to understand your business cases and understand the business itself, such that you’re really aligning your tools to your business and not the not the not the other way around. And we try to find what specific examples would benefit from specific technologies that you may be able to leverage, not only within service now, but also in the Microsoft realm. Umm, but we like to do something called a brainstorming pods and that’s where we try to get all of your departmental heads into a room and then start really leveraging what from a Microsoft and ServiceNow perspective. If you have ServiceNow, or even if you don’t have ServiceNow understanding what from an ITSM perspective and Microsoft perspective, you can start leveraging with inside of your own organizations in order to really understand what tool sets you can maybe pull into a centralized system like service now or what you’re doing from a Microsoft perspective to really start generating some benefit from a business perspective. Uh, and then come back and really start driving use case generation and start understanding what may be a road map might look like for your entire company and those helped generate, you know, maybe internal future projects for yourself, maybe future projects for us. It could be a a real driver session with discussions that we’ve have found to be extremely, extremely beneficial for the companies that we’ve done it for. So if you’re thinking about even migrating for something like a share well or another ITSM platform to service now, or maybe you have some questions about specific Microsoft use cases as it relates to ITSM. Umm, I feel free to head to head us up and we can do a free group envisioning session with you and we can definitely help on that front. Our second arena is evaluating scenarios and actually doing full on implementation. So as we told you in the beginning of our presentation, we do full implementations of all of these different products and have a deep understanding of how all those other products integrate with all the other products inside of ServiceNow as well as Microsoft. So we can do module proof of content concept. Umm, we can do enterprise workflow development and design. So if you have specific workflows or use cases or automations that you’re looking to develop, maybe from a automated remediation perspective or maybe you’re looking to do some business process automation, we can definitely help with that. We also do Rd maps, so real deep investigations into specific areas of your enterprise. So we can do, we can do Rd maps for every single module within service now or just business specific Rd maps. We also do health checks and licensing checkups. So as you’re looking to during your budgeting season, maybe you’re coming up to a renewal or you’re coming up to understanding what budgetary constraints you’re going to have for the next year. What? But uh projects, you’re looking to take care of are tackle in the next year. You know, we can help with understanding what your environment looks like, how healthy is it, what investments are you making, where are you making those investments? We could also help with renewal evaluations if you’re looking to do renewals, we can assist with that. Uh. Understanding maybe from a pricing perspective, what you’re paying versus what the, but it a renewal would cost with us also on the pilot side of things. If you’re looking to do anything net new or you’re looking to do a lot of complex development, and maybe you’re thinking about reverting that back to out of box, we do a lot of those things too. But Development from a full blown initiative of deploying ITSM, or if you’re not doing net new things for ITOM or FSM or project management, we can help you out with all of that. So if you’re looking for a partner, or if you’re looking to just have a discussion about ServiceNow, please feel free to reach out and we will be more than happy to. Discuss and we look forward to talking to you. But I’d like to open it up to anybody else. Does anybody have any questions? Any anything I can directly answer it could be about Knowledge updates, it could be extraneous to that if you have any questions. Otherwise, umm yeah, I’ll open up till floor. Amy Cousland 40:21 Any questions you can type that into the in the box. If you have any questions. Otherwise, on the survey, feel free. We have a place for comments and questions. We’re happy to get back to you with anything that we can help you with afterwards. Yes, we will have. We are going to go ahead and download this slide deck and we’ll be sharing that with everybody who attended today. OK. Brian, I think we’re set. Thank you so much and thank you everybody for attending