ServiceNow Paris Release: 10 New Features

Written by Mohsin Farooq

Senior Software Engineer at Royal Cyber

ServiceNow Paris release date was July 2020. In the ServiceNow Paris release, new features were added along with fixes for existing products.

It is a well-known fact that 20th century architectures are slow and siloed and need a lot of speed and agility to keep pace with the ever-changing business environment. Keeping this in mind, ServiceNow Paris release provides new features that offer smart experiences powered by Embedded Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and resilient operations. In this blog, we will look at the top 10 most promising features added in the Paris release.

ServiceNow Paris Release New Features

1. Customer Service Management (CSM)
  1. The Paris release will enable ServiceNow users to automate and digitize customer service processes. The playbook added in the Paris release will provide the customer service agents steps to efficiently resolve complex product issues and create tasks for other teams. It also empowers agents to monitor the progress of middle office teams.
  2. The CSM product will provide a centralized view of customer activities and history, which will help in supporting customer interactions. It will also empower agents to show empathy towards customers and focus only on customer issues. The agents can engage customers on cases, topics, and requests, carry out on-going conversations, and service customers with online check-ins.
2. DevOps
  1. Accelerating team delivery lifecycles is now possible by integrating the ServiceNow platform with GitLab Code Repository and GitLab Continuous Integration. You can normalize information and add integration to Jenkins and Azure DevOps release pipelines. The Paris release will also show insights on resiliency, operations, stability, outage, and incident metrics and improve service availability and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) metrics. It will be easy to take advantage of the data from the new integrations from this release onwards.
3. Field Service Management (FSM)
  1. With the Paris release, FSM can onboard, manage, and track the work done by third party workforce. The contract manager can view and reassign tasks in the contractor portal and update work order progress.
  2. Customers will get status update notifications via SMS. They will also find the field service agent's location on the map, which will reduce the number of customer calls. The ServiceNow® Agent mobile application in the FSM product will help agents search for work order, inventory, and parts. With the mobile app's help, agents can pause and resume a work order and log expenses, mileages, and incidents.
4. Mobile App Security
  1. The mobile apps such as NOW Mobile and Mobile Agent will now comply with federal and internal security requirements. The app is authorized for use within the GovCommunityCloud (FedRAMP High/DoD impact level 4) environment. With this accreditation, the platform will not encrypt the locally stored app data such as user preferences and offline data. It will encrypt only the sensitive data before sending it over the internet. The mobile app will support edge encryption in which users can both view and edit the encryption.
  2. The mobile dashboard will also have bar and donut charts embedded in addition to the time series reports. With these charts, you can quickly drill down, find information, and take action. The ServiceNow mobile apps users will be able to decide which push notifications to receive directly from their lock screen or Apple Watch. The users can customize up to three actions for each notification.
5. Performance Analytics
  1. The ServiceNow has introduced an analytics center on the agent's Workspace. It is a one-stop-shop where you can access analytics content at your fingertips. You can answer questions about analytics in natural language using Analytics Q&A. For example, if you want to ask a question—how many open incidents by priority—the platform will be able to understand and answer the question.
  2. You can also drill down into KPI details—trends, predictions, breakdowns, and associated records. The user can proactively monitor unexpected behavior of a process that could impact service delivery with KPI signals' help.
6. Predictive Intelligence Workbench
  1. The ServiceNow Paris release has a new application, Predictive Intelligence Workbench. The application provides pre-built templates, guided and non-guided models, and a step-by-step visual walkthrough to implement and tune machine learning (ML) solutions without any pre-requisite knowledge of the language. You can use the application dashboard to visualize and monitor predictive models and statistics' health and performance. The user will be able to correlate business goals with the machine learning metrics and deliver value to stakeholders.
  2. Predictive Intelligence Workbench monitors the most granular data and creates reports, demonstrating the strategic, operational, and automation value of predictive intelligence.
7. Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
  1. In PPM, you can simulate multiple investment scenarios by selecting different projects and demands in your portfolio for execution. You can also compare scenarios by cost, strategic alignment, team capacity, and benefit. The ServiceNow user can select the best scenarios and approve demand and resources that add financial value to the organization.
  2. The ServiceNow introduced a strategic spend tracking dashboard in PPM to evaluate the strategic value of projects and demand. You can also view whether the actual costs, planned costs, and benefits the project has achieved align with the business goals. PPM will help understand the financial performance of the organization.
8. CMDB
  1. In the Paris update, ServiceNow introduced the Multisource CMDB feature. This feature improves CMDB quality and reduces MTTR by avoiding duplicate CIs and providing more significant CI attributes details. Service Graph connectors will increase CMDB quality and retain reliability by ingesting data from SCCM, JAMF, Extrahop, Solarwinds, Intune, Bigfix, Istio, and DataDog via a robust transform engine.
9. Software Asset Management (SAM)
  1. The SAM application can host Software Asset Management services to the managed services provider. It is possible to have multiple clients’ software data and services together on a single, multi-tenant instance. SAM will also allow you to switch between specific customer domains and perform actions, delivering a single source-of-truth.
10. Process Automation Designer
  1. Business Process Owners can create, manage, and view cross-enterprise workflows in a single end-to-end process with no-code playbooks. With new enhancements, you will be able to smoothly pass information between different process stages and visualize and manage the processes' activities.
  2. You will also be able to customize flows and get enhanced catalog support. More and more automation of processes in a single design environment will be possible as users will run flows with persona-based access. To automate tasks, notifications, and record operations, process owners can use natural language.

ServiceNow has made significant improvements with the Paris release. They have introduced new products and services and fixed and enhanced the already existing ones. The ServiceNow Paris releases new features are one more step in the organization's mission to bring the future of work in the business.

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