ServiceNow consistently releases upgrades every 6 months, featuring captivating city-themed names and an impressive array of new features. The most recent release, ServiceNow Utah, introduces a host of fresh products and applications, along with innovative features and important bug fixes for existing offerings. This blog will provide valuable insights on staying informed about the release, effectively preparing for the upgrade, and successfully implementing it within your ServiceNow instance.

Need a refresher on the last ServiceNow release? Read our blog about ServiceNow Tokyo Release.

Introducing the highly anticipated ServiceNow Utah Release brings a wealth of thrilling features and enhancements aimed at empowering organizations to streamline their processes, enhance user experiences, and achieve more. ServiceNow officially launched the Now Platform Utah, released in March 2023, making it widely accessible. This latest platform release includes an array of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes across various applications, providing organizations with a significant range of considerations when planning their upgrade.

ServiceNow stands out for its exceptional ability to adapt and cater to the evolving requirements of diverse industries, consistently delivering optimal experiences for end users and customers. With every platform release, ServiceNow introduces enhanced capabilities that empower users to optimize their workflows and ensure seamless operations. Each update brings a wealth of features and improvements, enabling users to achieve smoother and more efficient work processes.

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• Install Base Foundation: The Utah Release introduces the Install Base Foundation feature, which enables the installation of complex product bases and facilitates the linking of these bases to the database. This functionality is particularly useful for organizations offering add-on products and services to customers. With Install Base Foundation, it becomes easier to manage and track the specifications of individual items purchased by customers and their provisioning status within an account or at a customer location.
• ServiceNow Definitions: With the ServiceNow Definitions feature, administrators gain the ability to present customers with a wide range of relevant services based on the products they own. This empowers organizations to personalize the customer experience by providing tailored service offerings specific to each customer’s product portfolio. By leveraging ServiceNow Definitions, administrators can enhance customer satisfaction and ensure customers can access services that meet their unique needs.

• Task Bundling: The Utah Release introduces Task Bundling, a feature that enhances dispatcher efficiency, workload management, and backlog handling. By consolidating similar tasks from different work orders into a single trip, Task Bundling minimizes travel costs, reduces time wastage, and lowers carbon footprints. This leads to increased service margins while optimizing resource allocation.
• Intra-day Schedule Automation: ServiceNow Utah includes Intra-day Schedule Automation, which automates the real-time rescheduling of work based on field updates. This eliminates the need for guesswork by dispatchers and ensures that schedule gaps are promptly filled, meeting contractual obligations. Technicians and customers are kept informed of changes, improving the experience for all stakeholders involved.
• Equipment Scheduling: The Utah Release offers enhanced capabilities for Equipment Scheduling, catering to more detailed scheduling requirements that involve specialized equipment. This feature accelerates job completion times by reducing delays caused by equipment unavailability. Efficient equipment scheduling enables smoother operations and enhances overall service delivery.

• Digital Portfolio Management Enhancements: In the ServiceNow Utah release, powerful enhancements have been introduced to revolutionize Digital Portfolio Management. With a keen focus on enhancing asset reliability, these features delve deep into historical performance and trends of work orders. Organizations can harness advanced analytics to make well-informed decisions regarding future asset allocation and procurement strategies. This level of insight optimizes resource utilization and ensures that assets are strategically aligned with business objectives, driving efficiency and maximizing returns on investment.

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• Enterprise Asset Work Management: The ServiceNow Utah release introduces a groundbreaking set of capabilities to transform Enterprise Asset Work Management. Through comprehensive analysis of historical performance and work order trends, organizations can now make data-driven decisions that profoundly impact asset reliability. By leveraging these insights, companies gain unparalleled visibility into their asset portfolio, enabling them to optimize allocation strategies and plan for future procurement needs with precision. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and enhances operational efficiency, ultimately driving business success.
• Streamlined Enterprise Asset Maintenance: The Utah release of ServiceNow includes automation capabilities for regular maintenance plans of physical equipment across all locations. This automation helps extend the lifespan of enterprise assets and covers maintenance paperwork required for audits and inspections.
• Automated Enterprise Asset Reclamation: With the ServiceNow Utah release, businesses can automate of recovering and retiring corporate assets when an employee leaves the company. This automation enables organizations to identify assets that can be redeployed, repaired, retired, disposed of, or returned to inventory.

• Enhanced Value Builder for Software Asset Management (SAM): The ServiceNow Utah release introduces Software Asset Management Success Value Builder functionality. It provides businesses with insights into unused capabilities within ServiceNow’s SAM module. With the software asset workspace, organizations can create, assign, and track the progress of tasks to build value in their SAM implementation.
• Streamlined Management of Containerized Software Licensing: The Utah release of ServiceNow includes features to handle license compliance for software deployed on containers, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or using Docker and Kubernetes. It enables organizations to assess the licensing compliance status of Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Windows Server products running on containers and actively monitor usage. In cases of non-compliance, it generates remedial options.
• Software Contracts Renewal Calendar: ServiceNow’s Utah release offers a centralized Software Contracts Renewal Calendar. This feature allows companies to gain visibility into all their software contracts and entitlements approaching renewal or expiration. By leveraging this capability, businesses can delve deep into contract and entitlement data, enabling better planning for software renewals, both for SaaS and on-premises software. Additionally, contract and renewal management automation streamline the entire renewal process across all purchasing stages.

• Hardware Asset Procurement Workspace: The Hardware Asset Procurement Workspace enables businesses to monitor and manage the acquisition of assets centrally, ensuring efficient processes and quick service provision.
• Pallets for Inventory: By associating assets with pallets, the Pallets for Inventory feature allows companies to manage their inventory effectively. It provides precise location information within a warehouse using aisle and space characteristics, improving asset accountability, and supporting supply chain and logistical requirements.
• Asset Donation Workflow: Simplify donating assets to charitable organizations within the hardware asset workspace through the Asset Donation Workflow. This feature allows users to add tasks to donation orders, facilitating requests, approval, planning, scheduling, and preparation of assets. It also maintains accurate documentation records for charitable donations of assets.

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• Operational Resilience Workspace Enhancements: Enhance operational resilience across the entire enterprise by adding context to data and assets, enabling better visualization of their relationships. This feature incorporates a contemporary design and a customizable workspace, promoting increased productivity and improved navigation capabilities.

• Restrict App Creation: Enhance governance measures by implementing app creation restrictions, preventing member users from creating new apps from scratch or utilizing templates. Instead, users will be limited to editing applications within App Engine Studio to which they have authorized access. This restriction helps maintain better control and oversight over app development processes.

• Stream Connect for Apache Kafka: Stream Connect for Apache Kafka enables the consumption and processing of messages from Kafka using a trigger, allowing for data transformation and insertion into ServiceNow tables. Users can also utilize drag-and-drop data tablets and the low-code flow action Kafka producer step to push messages and create their own workflows.
• Usage Dashboard Enhancements: Experience improved visibility and compliance with the enhanced Usage Dashboard. Gain comprehensive insights into spoke utilization and licensing compliance while recognizing adoption as an indicator of business value. Easily track transactions related to leading spokes, custom spokes, and licensed/unlicensed components for compliance.

• Theme Builder: Introducing the Theme Builder, the latest release makes it effortless to create and manage branded themes, captivating users’ interest. The feature generates themes automatically and provides step-by-step guidance throughout the customization process. Preview, adjust, and fine-tune themes to align with specific branding requirements before deploying them to production.
• Unified Theming in Mobile Apps: Achieve a consistent visual experience across web portals and mobile apps with Unified Theming. This feature ensures a cohesive and branded motif across all user interactions, establishing a unified and recognizable interface across platforms.
• AI Search: Simplify the process of locating crucial information for service delivery teams with AI Search. Advanced search capabilities such as auto-complete suggestions, typo correction, and exact match functionality enhance the relevance and provide a unified search experience, enabling swift issue resolution.

• Process Optimization Expansion: Expand your process optimization capabilities with a wider range of in-platform process mining options. Conduct detailed and actionable analyses of your business processes to drive improved business outcomes. Utilize AI-powered root cause analysis and delve into bottleneck and variation analyses through direct process map drill-down to understand process performance comprehensively.
• Workforce Optimization Expansion: Enhance your workforce optimization efforts with expanded functionalities. Gain real-time visibility into performance metrics, benefit from an intuitive interface for scheduling and managing time-off requests, and leverage demand scenario modelling to accurately predict scheduling requirements. These enhancements enable efficient workforce management and better alignment with business needs.

• Unified Theming: Unified Theming simplifies creating and maintaining a visually cohesive experience across mobile applications and websites. Implementing a consistent, branded theme throughout the user experience ensures a seamless and recognizable interface.

• ServiceNow Platform Encryption: ServiceNow Platform Encryption enables enhanced adherence to privacy policies by implementing cost-efficient encryption that supports both ServiceNow and client-provided keys (BYOK).
• Adaptive Authentication for Mobile Devices:Accelerate the implementation of secure authentication for ServiceNow instances on authorized and trusted mobile devices, regardless of location, using Adaptive Authentication. This feature utilizes context-based authentication to verify the identities of mobile users and address security vulnerabilities.

Royal Cyber is a trusted provider of IT solutions and services, including expertise in ServiceNow. They offer various services related to ServiceNow upgrades, ensuring a smooth and successful transition to the latest version of the platform.

We have expertise in ServiceNow, and their dedicated team of consultants can guide you through every step of the upgrade process, from assessment and planning to implementation and post-upgrade support. We aim to deliver a seamless upgrade experience that maximizes the benefits of the latest ServiceNow version for your organization.

Overall, Royal Cyber offers expertise in leveraging the ServiceNow platform to optimize IT service management, automate business processes, and enhance customer and employee experiences. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or visit Royal Cyber.