Twice a year, ServiceNow announces a new release of the platform. ServiceNow’s release, Rome, was announced in the late Summer of 2021. Each release is named after a city in alphabetical order (previous releases to Rome being Quebec, Paris, Orlando, etc.). For more information on previous releases all the way to Aspen (released 2011), read here.
With ServiceNow’s Rome come many new and enhanced features that we’ll break down for you below:
ServiceNow Employee Experience (HR Service Delivery, HRSD): New & Enhanced Features
Learning Posts
- Integrate with third party Learning Management Systems, such as Cornerstone, Udemy, and PluralSight allowing you to build a learning content library.
Employee Center
- The Employee Service Center (ESC) has been renamed to Employee Center.
Employee Relations Enhancements
- Evidence Management – new module that will allow you to capture and organize evidence related to ER cases
- Interview Question Templates – reusable interview questions to create consistency during the ER case investigation
Mobile App for Onboarding
- HR Onboarding workflows have been moved from the Onboarding app to the Now Mobile app to simplify the onboarding process for new hires.
Granular Delegation
- Assign HR tasks to another eligible agent using Granular Delegation when the agent is unavailable or it was assigned in error.
New Integrations
- Integrations with Workday, Oracle Cloud HCM, and Ultimate Kronos Group
Universal Request
- Allows agents to resolve cases seamlessly across the enterprise to provide a better employee experience.
ServiceNow Workplace Service Delivery:
My Reservations
- The Reservations Module is built as a widget.
- Bookings are made via the Workplace Services Portal or can be included in another ServiceNow Portal you’re using
Reservation Forms & Configurations
- Easy to configure reservable spaces—Offices, Meeting Rooms, Cubicles, Work Areas—and to provide users with a map and floor plan
- Ability to easily set up room Amenities and Services, which shows users what is available to them in the room and Services they can request be brought in before they book the room
- Out-of-the-box Approval workflows are available
- Configurable User Criteria make it easy to limit room selection to certain groups, individuals or departments
- Out-of-the-box Reporting on Office and Meeting Room Utilization as well as a Manager Dashboard is available
ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM)
Universal Request & Innovation Management
Streamline your end user’s experience through Universal Requests.
- You’ll be able to create ideas for new products, enhancements, features, and changes by leveraging Innovation Management. Also, you’ll have the ability to easily turn an Idea into another task.
Project & Portfolio Management
- Non-monetary benefit plans can now be created and associated to demands and projects.
- This can help showcase the benefits of initiatives that may not provide a monetary benefit/cost but can help with other objectives like employee retention or customer satisfaction where a monetary value can be challenging to quantify
Enhanced Business Stakeholder Role
Allow business stakeholders more visibility into the lifecycle of work within your organization.
- Visibility into the development process tracked in Agile 2.0, Essential SAFe, and Portfolio SAFe.
- Gain full visibility to all tests, suites, and execution plans in Test Management 1.0 and 2.0.
- Business stakeholder roles will get even more information about upcoming Demands, Projects, and Programs.
ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) Visibility: What’s New
Agent Client Collector (V)
- Use Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V) to run push-based Discovery on a host. You can discover data from various file systems and storage devices, TCP connections, running processes, and other information about target hosts.
Global Excludes List for IP addresses and ranges
- Define global IP exclusion lists across discovery schedules to discover configuration items, IP addresses, or networks. Use this list to help to prevent access to sensitive IPs as it blocks discovery. This feature is applicable only for Horizontal Discovery starting in Rome.
Add CIs to application services using connection rules
- Create rules for automatically adding traffic-based connections and the CIs they lead to in discovered application services. Using these rules, you can add connections to single or multiple services. Connection rules enhance the connection suggestions generated using Predictive Intelligence.
View Dependent Application Services
- Check which application services depend on an application service and open maps for dependent application services. The service that contains a reference to another application service, becomes a dependent service. The service that you include as a reference is a contained service.
Quick Start Tests for Service Mapping
- After upgrades and deployments of new applications or integrations, run quick start tests to verify that Service Mapping still works. If you customized Service Mapping, copy the quick start tests and configure them for your customizations.
Add Kubernetes and cloud components to service maps during tag-based discovery based on CI relationships
- Enable new traversal rules that contain information about CI relationships to enhance tag-based discovery.
Containerized MID Server
- Build MID Server images and launch containerized MID Server. Docker recipes for Windows and Linux are available to download from MID Server download page.
Support FIPS (FedRamp)
- The ServiceNow® platform is introducing a new environment, National Security Cloud (NSC) IL-5, which requires all utilized cryptography to be FIPS validated.
ITOM Visibility- Changes
Deduplicate IPs in Discovery schedules
- Detect whether an IP address is included in multiple ranges of the same Discovery schedule and remove the duplicate IP address from all but one range by setting the glide.discovery.shazzam_simplify_ranges property to true.
Ability to generate and download the JSON payload without rerunning patterns
- Click the new Generate Payload button to generate a JSON payload of the CIs, relationships, and references at any step within the Pattern Designer. This payload can be used to test pre-sensors and simulate IRE processing while in the Pattern Designer.
Discovering devices and applications using the latest patterns
- Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns, version 1.0.82 (August 2021) and later
ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM)
Dynamic Related Records
Enable agents to quickly view related records without switching tabs.
- Dynamically display contextual info such as related contracts and interactions based on current state
- Eliminate need to switch tabs to access related records
- Surface related records without requiring a reference/parent-child relationship
Configuring Next Best Action
- Recommend prioritized next best actions to agents
- Recommend both guidance and guided decision trees as next best actions to agents
- Dynamically rank next best actions based on frequency and priority of recommendations
- Quickly develop and deploy new guidance via configuration
Workspace Visual Refresh
Provide agents a richer look and feel and more space to work on the case form and activity stream.
- Optimizes the real estate and removes unnecessary white space.
- Centrally focused and brighter icons for Activity Stream
- Bordered form fields
- Configurable display options for ribbon and secondary values
Mobile Messaging
Engage customers in their preferred messaging channels.
- Enable system and agent-initiated conversations on WhatsApp
- Enable system and agent-initiated conversations on LINE.
- Enable system-initiated notifications on Facebook Messenger.
ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery
Empowers legal teams to efficiently structure legal intake, prioritize workload, and provide turnaround with greater speed and efficiency
- Through self-service, employees can request legal services that help drive operational efficiency, allowing the legal team to focus their efforts on higher priority work
- With structured legal intake, legal teams can educate and capture essential legal information upfront, minimizing the back & forth between employees and the legal team
Legal Service Delivery Key Features
- Legal Counsel Center –Provides a single workspace for legal teams that allows them to view requests and prioritize work, and provides practice specific tools to help them manage complex affairs
- Request Management -the gateway to legal workflow
- Matter Management – provides support for more complicated or cross-departmental matters
- Virtual Agent – enables conversational interaction for employees to access legal knowledge base articles, submit legal requests, and check the status of requests
- Mobile App
ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) – New in Rome
Digital Portfolio Management
Holistically manage services, apps, products through their full lifecycle
- Manage Services apps and/ or products through one unified workspace
- Manage roadmaps, prioritize backlogs and promote new ideas within the greater context
- Optimize portfolio performance and make more informed budgetary decisions
Employee Center
Deliver unified enterprise service experiences to employees.
- Increase self-service with a standard out-of-the-box portal for service delivery
- Easily scale to support service delivery and engagement across multiple departments
- Create a curated experience with dynamically generated topic pages based on a unified taxonomy
IT Service Management: Key Enhancements in Rome
Workforce Optimization
Expand functionality facilitates greater team performance.
- Optimize demand forecasting by modeling forecast scenarios for greater accuracy
- Manage all on-call schedules in one place in WFO calendar
- Integrate with 3rd party Learning Management Systems (OOB integrations to Udemy, Pluralsight & Cornerstone)
Process Optimization
Provides actionable insight to increased process efficiencies.
- Give business users actionable insight to process improvements
- Identify and remediate issues faster with machine learning cluster analysis
- Run Process Optimization analysis directly from a list of records (as opposed to just from the audit trail data)
Vendor Manager Workspace
Vendor Managers get faster access to vendor information
- Surface the KPIs of vendors on landing pages for immediate overview
- “Service Credits” help tally refunds from vendors due to performance failures
- Leverage KPI groups for greater flexibility with reporting and tracking