Heard of the ServiceNow platform but don’t know exactly what it has to offer you? Get to know all about the platform, what it is used for, which modules there are and how flexible the platform is.
ServiceNow is a cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform that automates organizational processes and delivers a consistent, consumer-like experience. It is a comprehensive development environment in which you can build, test and implement applications that provide automated workflows for challenges such as case management, operations management and services management.
What makes this platform unique? As a cloud-based platform, ServiceNow enables smooth integration of legacy software. The platform offers connected digital workflows that make work, work better for people and business operations. On top of that, ServiceNow has been built as native mobile experience, offering insightful, easy and consumer-like experiences. Its service apps deliver the insights employees need to be their best and boost productivity.
ServiceNow’s networked, easy-to-use IT and enterprise support system extends to every corner of an organization. Its services help connect every department—from human resources and security to customer service, marketing, legal, finance and facilities—to one shared online database where an organization can analyze and act on information.
With ServiceNow, old and manual ways of working are transformed into digital workflows. It makes it fast and easy to request services, automate routine tasks or interact with other departments. In other words, ServiceNow provides a platform for all service departments to easily access the services they offer to employees.
For example, employees can use ServiceNow to:
The ultimate goal is to enhance the quality of the lives of people at work, whether you’re an IT help-desk professional or an end user. It is not technology in service of technology, but the always-on engine behind an employee’s work life, from the moment he or she is hired. It’s the intuitive, enjoyable employee experience that allow people to do what they need to do in just one click.
Just some of the platform’s capabilities:
In many large organizations, finding the best communication channel to get in touch with other internal departments is a difficult task. Yet people need to interact with departments like HR, Facility, Procurement, Legal, IT and more, to ensure they can successfully do the work they are hired to do. The ServiceNow platform is built to create a more consumer-like experience for customers and employees by helping them easily and quickly find the information they need.
The Now platform is used to digitize and automate departmental and cross-departmental workflows. Replacing unstructured work patterns with intelligent workflow automation, ServiceNow enables nearly everyone—from professional coders to those with no coding experience—to digitize and automate workflows as mobile-first applications.
Creating such out-of-the-box, secure workflow applications for IT, customer service or human resources—based on AI-powered knowledge—streamline work and simultaneously measure and optimize your business processes.
You can only improve what you measure. Delivering great experiences is an iterative process, which is rocket-fueled when you have the right data at your disposal. Apply various experience measurement techniques to collect data related to each aspect of your digital experience. For service portals, track behaviors like mouse and eyeball movements, clicks, and drop-offs. Or measure actual usage of features like the Virtual Agent and Knowledge Articles. Through Machine Learning, you can make sure service requests end up at the right agent or department.
Take any day at the office or in your production facilities. How much time do your people loose filling in and waiting for answers or decisions that involve tickets, approvals, requests or events? Things that can be streamlined and automated into workflows, thereby eliminating tedious, repetitive work while achieving better outcomes. Automate routine actions to raise IT satisfaction and productivity. Speed up incident resolution with machine learning and building on transparency and visibility to help you improve your service offering.
A few examples on how easy it is to create end-to-end digital workflows with ServiceNow:
To fully benefit from digitized workflows, it is essential that organizations drive continual improvement in their automated processes. Customers who do so are managing to significantly lower operational costs, reduce process lead times and increase customer satisfaction. With ServiceNow, you get the building blocks to smoothly automate any service management use case.
IT Service Management (ITSM) helps you to provide high-quality IT services to ensure consumers of these services—the business—are satisfied. Business users need to focus on doing their work, not spend time solving IT issues. At the same time, providing high-quality IT services should be cost-effective. In reaching these objectives, ServiceNow’s ITSM implementation focuses on 5 key themes:
The Common Service Data Model is a best practice framework for CMDB data modeling and data management. It gives you guidance on service modeling and comes with a standard set of terms and definitions. It’s the backbone for the service configuration and connects your CMDB from both a business and technical perspective with recommended mappings and relationships.
Done well, it provides visibility into service and application related data from different domains, consolidated in one single view, enabling you to align your IT strategy with company strategy and capabilities. But that’s not all. A high-quality CMDB brings along many benefits, like faster incident resolution, an improved security vulnerability profile and better judgment of change impact.
ServiceNow Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) provides a real-time view of compliance and risk. Improve decision making and increase performance across your organization and with vendors when you use ServiceNow to transform inefficient processes into an integrated risk program.
If you use different security tools, like firewalls, end-point security products or Security Information and Event Managers (SIEMs) to collect and prioritize security incidents and are looking to integrate these tools, these together will generate far more alerts than you can handle. Unless you automate. And that’s exactly what ServiceNow does. It is a solution that allows you to track the progress of security incidents from discovery and initial analysis to containment, eradication and recovery, all the way to post-incident review, knowledge base article creation and closure.
With ServiceNow, you can respond faster and more efficiently to vulnerabilities, connect security and IT teams, and provide real-time visibility. You can view your vulnerability status in real-time via customizable dashboards and reports backed by quantitative data.
Connect your existing Cyber Security Management tools with ServiceNow Security Operations to prioritize and respond to incidents and vulnerabilities according to their potential impact on your business. Resolve security incidents and vulnerabilities fast with prioritization, automation and orchestration.
How do you measure whether your IT investments are bringing you what you are looking for? How do you allocate your IT resources across projects? Let alone, how do you maximize the business value of your IT? ServiceNow ITBM gives you the transparency required to manage the processes, people and projects related to maximizing the business value of your IT.
Mismatches in IT investments and your business goals can lead to cost overruns and project delays. Often, in such cases, they also lead to a lack of trust in IT.
Aligning IT investments and work to the organization’s goals can help IT support better outcomes and respond more rapidly to change. And it provides a solid foundation for adopting modern project management strategies and ensuring that every IT project supports an organizational objective.
With just one place to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand—rather than having to deal with many silos across your business units—ITBM brings integrated visibility across IT teams. It enables you to deliver value on time and within the approved budgets. ServiceNow handles the full program lifecycle: from initial ideation to final delivery for better decisions and efficient execution.
Showing the business value of IT, investment decisions are transparent with everyone knowing what IT is working on. When a strategic technology investment decision is made, people understand the business drivers behind the decisions and the potential impacts.
It has been proven that speed, productivity and innovation are boosted by agile practices and DevOps. The challenge is now on to shift from pockets of innovation to being the basis of enterprise-wide digital transformation. But, as with the scaling of any technology, scaling DevOps has its challenges.
One of the biggest challenges being that while applications are being created fast and even faster, that majority of companies that use DevOps have not seen an increase in the release frequency. The biggest obstacle seems to be governance, risk and compliance and audit issues. To circumvent delays, developers start to side-step risk and control processes. Doing so, puts an organization at risk of unplanned downtime caused by small, unmanaged changes, security breaches and even non-compliance issues.
With ServiceNow DevOps teams and developers can achieve their Agile goals while maintaining quality code, in compliance with regulations and without experiencing system downtime. ServiceNow DevOps provides a platform with a correctly architected environment, designed to automatically combine the intelligence scattered across a disjoined chain of planning, coding, pipeline and execution tools. The platform becomes the sole source of truth for IT, thereby streamlining and maximizing innovation and productivity, with a faster speed to market.
Besides cost savings, ServiceNow DevOps simplifies developers’ work jobs and allows them to focus on the meaningful stuff, instead of chasing and solving GRC and audit-related issues.
Effective IT Operations Management (ITOM) requires an integrated, service-centric approach: one that maximizes business service quality, drives efficient processes, enables innovation, and ensures robust governance. However, many IT teams still wrestle with multiple, unintegrated ITOM tools. As a result, they suffer from service outages and cloud complexity.
IT teams continue to manually stitch together disconnected data from multiple monitoring tools rather than have a clear, real-time view of business service and IT infrastructure health. They struggle to detect, diagnose, and resolve service issues, and the result is yet more frequent and more severe service outages.
Moreover, as the demand for cloud resources grows, so does the complexity to manage them. Cloud challenges include having different systems to manage each cloud environment, inconsistent service catalogs, limited cost and usage visibility of cloud resources, and high expectations from users and businesses that want immediate results. Nevertheless, multi-cloud is quickly becoming the de-facto deployment standard as organizations of all types leverage an ever-increasing variety of cloud computing services.
ServiceNow ITOM delivers a comprehensive and integrated set of ITOM capabilities that build seamlessly on ServiceNow ITSM. Create a single system of record for IT infrastructure across data centers and clouds. A single dashboard proactively identifies IT service issues and possible causes for service downtime before they occur. In a nutshell: with ServiceNow ITOM, IT can proactively eliminate service outages and manage hybrid clouds, including multi-cloud IaaS/PaaS/FaaS services.
ServiceNow IT Asset Management gives insight into asset use and costs. Key applications enable you to manage software licenses, hardware assets and cloud resources. The powerful platform capabilities simplify the tracking of your assets across your organization.
Hardware Asset Management
Software Asset Management
Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Discovery
Risk management is not a one-off action. Rather, it is a never-ending process involving regulations and policy changes. Not only internal changes, but also those involving third parties and beyond. The ServiceNow Integrated Risk Management solution combines technology, processes and data that enable the simplification, automation and integration of your strategic, operational and IT risk management across your organization. Where GRC technology provides compliance-driven solutions, IRM goes one step further and offers actionable insights based on your business strategies. It provides a one-stop-shop with an integrated view covering risk, security, IT, as well as the business itself.
With the right workflows in place, ServiceNow IRM continually monitors changes for non-compliance and risk. The mobile-first, intuitive dashboard gives authorized persons or teams real-time access to the central platform in order to manage or mitigate any risks.
The ability to adapt and change as the world in and around your organization changes is key to your business success. Yet, facilitating beneficial changes usually, for many companies, is synonymous with major interruptions to IT services.
ServiceNow Change Management offers full control of the life cycle of all changes—from creation, risk-assessment, conflict detection, through to approval—with minimum disruption to your IT services.
Besides the standard workflow, the Change Management platform includes analytical tools that allow you to visualize your business processes and identify possible issues or risks using automated risk assessment.
Mirroring the ITSM Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, Change Management is focused on continuous, integrated, incremental changes across IT that bring with them shorter process lead times, lower costs and empowered developers who benefit from automatic approval for low-risk changes.
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