Latest Now Platform release unveils AI-powered process mining with RPA capabilities, search, workforce optimisation for HR, and incident management enhancements to address security and operational risk
ServiceNow, the digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, announced a major platform expansion with the Now Platform Utah release. Utah is built to help organisations future-proof their businesses and drive outcomes faster in the face of continued economic uncertainty. The latest version of the intelligent, end-to-end platform for digital transformation includes AI-powered process mining with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities, additional search enhancements, expanded Workforce Optimisation, and Security Incident Response Workspace, all designed to help increase automation, simplify experiences, and offer greater organisational agility.
According to IDC, spending on digital technology will grow eight times faster than the economy in 2023, and by 2026, 40% of total revenue for G2000 organisations will be generated by digital products, services, and experiences. Even as technology budgets increase, leaders are going through a “great reprioritisation” of tech investments based on the need for near-term organisational impact and time to value.
“Organisations no longer need to choose between speed and innovation or great experiences and business growth,” said CJ Desai, President and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow. “ServiceNow’s intelligent platform offers fast time to value, continuous net new innovation, and a simplified and seemingly invisible upgrade experience so customers can do more with less and transform their business models. Our latest release is designed for this moment – empowering organisations to maximise efficiency, accelerate ROI on digital spend, and create simplified, connected experiences across their entire value chain.”
Accelerating impact with purposeful automation
According to the 2023 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 46% of the organisations polled expect to increase spend on application modernisation, and 50% will increase their spend on cloud platforms. As organisations increasingly digitise, ServiceNow helps deliver more value by orchestrating work across silos to multiply productivity and accelerate automation, now with new AI-powered features including:
- AI Search, now built into ServiceNow’s Next Experience, uses AI and natural language processing to help service delivery workers find the information they need to do their jobs more effectively and resolve customer issues faster. AI Search also includes advanced features like auto-complete suggestions, exact match, and typo handling – allowing users to go directly to a record, to more quickly identify relevant materials that can help them resolve an issue.
- Process Optimisation has been expanded to support workflows beyond IT Service Management (ITSM) to other workflows within the Now Platform, such as Field Service Management (FSM) and more. With improved AI-powered visibility into hidden inefficiencies, organisations can apply those recommendations with ServiceNow’s RPA solution to optimise process efficiencies and performance to help cut costs and improve customer satisfaction.
- Workforce Optimisation capabilities have been enhanced and expanded to support workflows beyond ITSM and Customer Service Management, into areas like HR Service Delivery and more. For example, Workforce Optimisation now also gives HR managers a central place to understand and optimise their employee bases (or teams). Leaders and managers can maximise the quality of work performed by employees, teams, and departments so businesses can perform at the highest level without significantly increasing costs.
- Document Intelligence allows customers to accelerate and automate AI-enabled text extraction from documents, saving time and eliminating human errors. The Utah release includes a more streamlined user experience so process owners can easily build, personalise, and monitor document processing. Document Intelligence also can automatically pull massive amounts of data from long tables in documents like invoices and purchase orders to expedite things like payroll, finance, and procurement processes.
- ServiceNow Impact is the industry’s first solution designed to help customers accelerate the return on their digital transformation investments. Enhancements to performance tools, as well as new Impact accelerators, are available in the Utah release. These additions help platform owners better manage system health and reduce the time it takes to bring critical dashboards online, for better visibility into the status of digital transformation initiatives.
Minimising operational and security risk with solutions to boost agility
“Globally, the constant barrage of risk events, incidents, and disruptions have become so frequent that the increased level of risk is the ’new normal,’” according to Forrester. To help organisations navigate an increasingly complex threat environment in the hybrid world of work, the Utah release empowers customers to innovate faster, operate with more agility, and manage increasing operational and cyber risk. New capabilities include:
- Security Incident Response Workspace, part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, allows security analysts to examine incidents within a central workspace, so they can be more efficient in urgent moments and analyse the growing volume of data associated with security incidents. Customers can build assessments and analyse reports within one workspace, and leverage Process Automation Designer to manage multiple workflows with no-code playbooks.
- Operational Resilience Workspace, also part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, provides an enterprise-wide view of critical risk information, such as issues, vulnerabilities, outages, and failed controls, for greater visibility, fast decision-making, and improved organisational performance. The new product experience increases productivity and simplifies navigation while a 360-degree view of dependencies and resilience metrics provides contextual understanding of upstream and downstream impacts across the organisation.
- Log Export Service simplifies security and performance monitoring for Now Platform implementations. Building on ServiceNow Vault – which protects business-critical applications – this solution seamlessly incorporates ServiceNow system and application logs into enterprise security analytics tools.
Simplifying experiences for smarter ways of working
To succeed in today’s highly competitive environment, organisations must find new ways to realise the full potential of their workforces and maximize engagement and productivity. The Now Platform Utah release introduces more simplified, unified admin and agent experiences across Next Experience, so employees work smarter and get more done, while delivering excellent experiences for customers. It also introduces a better way to create a connected workplace with insights to inform planning and make the most of office space. New capabilities include:
- Enterprise Architect Workspace allows users to gain control of app redundancy and limit unnecessary spending as organisations look to do more with less. This workspace provides a consolidated user experience for enterprise architects to make smarter decisions across their app portfolios while reducing risk and cost.
- Theme Builder allows customers to easily create and manage branded themes via an intuitive interface that helps users create and preview a branded, personalized look and feel. These capabilities help organisations deliver consumer-grade experiences that work for everyone.
“Digital business is here to stay, and the Now Platform is the end-to-end platform for digital businesses,” commented Mark Ackerman, Area VP for Middle East & Africa at ServiceNow. “With the Utah release of the Now platform, we are providing our customers in the Middle East and Africa region with powerful tools to unleash automation in the service of organisational performance and business impact; simplify and connect experiences across the organisation so employees can do their best work; and accelerate innovation so the enterprise can operate with efficiency and agility.”
“Enterprises are increasingly looking to accelerate time to value and drive more growth from digital investments amid growing macroeconomic pressure,” said Stephen Elliot, group vice president, I&O, cloud operations, and DevOps at IDC. “As a result, IT and business leadership teams are evaluating shifts from legacy point solutions to modern cloud platforms in an accelerated manner, and across industries. This migration offers customers an ability to achieve faster outcomes and accelerated time to value with improved automation, increased agility, and more streamlined experiences. Armed with the ability to do more with less on one platform, enterprises have an opportunity to simplify and achieve competitive differentiation across processes and teams.”
