Almost anyone who is reading this has had to work with customer support at some point in their lives. Whether it be returning a product, issues with a service, or trying to find a lost package, all of us have been on a customer ticket at some point in our lives.
Another example, as pertains to Identity Management especially, is when you’re at work, and you need access to an application. Typically, you put in a service request through your company’s Service Management tool, and that ticket is routed through the correct channels to either automatically assign access based on established rules, or to the right person to deal with it. That ITSM tool, increasingly so in recent times, is ServiceNow.
To be exact, ServiceNow provides ITSM as a service. Activities that occur on ServiceNow are part of a managed digital workflow system overseen entirely in the cloud, which allows for greater collaboration and productivity with both team members and customers alike. What else does SNOW do?
SNOW is a Platform that Allows you to Track your Investments in IT
Aside from being an investment in and of itself, you can use the SNOW platform to bring together your application portfolio, project management tools, operations tools, and more into one central repository of oversight. ServiceNow can provide insights into the performance of your investments, allowing you to track business processes both from a workflow and tool effectiveness-based perspective. This allows for centralized management and assessment of productivity, both from a technology and workforce perspective.
A key example of this can be seen in Identity Management, with provisioning and de-provisioning processes. What tools and personnel are involved at each step? Where are the bottlenecks? What processes take the most time, and what parts of these processes, if not the whole process itself, can be automated? ServiceNow allows for better tracking and reporting of the Identity Lifecycle, which allows for businesses to move faster and more efficiently.
SNOW Allows you to Automate the Resolution of Common Issues and Provides a Path for Escalation Among Multiple Teams for Quick Resolution
With ServiceNow, we can provide both employees and customers with quicker case resolution, by automating responses to common problems that are easily resolved. This way, your help desk is resolving tickets that don’t have an easy fix, and not wasting time being inundated with the same issue repeatedly.
ServiceNow also allows collaboration on tickets by automatically routing problem tickets that may need cross-functional expertise to the appropriate team members. Based on the type of issue, if the proper groundwork has been laid, SNOW can recognize an issue that won’t be resolved by a common fix and can route that ticket to the appropriate party.
Bring any App into SNOW Workflows, Developer or Not, and Build Workflow Apps
ServiceNow’s IntegrationHub allows for everyone to function as a developer would. Adding new process flows using code your developers already created makes extending ServiceNow flows to external applications something anyone who is familiar with the business process needs can do.
Developers will typically build out these reusable processes so they can be used in the future to integrate with workflows that empower business and application owners to better automate and digitize their workflows. You can also build your own custom workflow apps, whether you have experience as a coder or not using the Now platform’s drag and drop functionality to easily create an application that fits your process needs.
Operations/Identity Management Automated through SNOW Orchestration
Identity Management experts know this, but most enterprises use a multitude of tools to achieve a complete Identity Lifecycle for employees and customers alike. Even outside IAM, there are sometimes tools that exist in different areas of your IT environment, as well as manual processes and largely disorganized flows that do not allow cross-functional coordination between teams, which slows down your process and affects the value your team brings to customers and employees alike.
SNOW’s Orchestration automates these processes for more streamlined operations. Using a reduced code, mostly UI-based framework, you can automate without using REST and SOAP messages, instead of using the UI to map processes and communicate between applications. Using orchestration, in terms of Identity Management, a user can put in a request for access to an application, and a manager/ application owner does not have to work through the Identity management UI, but can use ServiceNow’s orchestration framework and automation to approve access from the same UI, and automate approvals and review processes to take a process that may take 5 minutes and do it in less than a minute.
ServiceNow is Constantly Pushing for a Mobile Experience
ServiceNow, in recent times, has been pushing for the platform to work the same on mobile as it does on desktop. With each release, SNOW reworks, eliminates, and adds methods to that effect. This has worked to make ServiceNow a tool that empowers both admins and customers/ employees with the ability to work from anywhere and respond quickly to customer needs.
One caveat to this is if you are the one tasked with normalizing each SNOW release. Release notes will let you know what methods are being retired, but it is up to you and your team to inform all affected parties in your organization of the changes and to come up with a way to retain the functionality you want with the new methods they add to each release. This requires careful planning well in advance of your upgrade, as your whole organization will feel the impact whether positive or negative.
Does your organization have a plan to implement ServiceNow or another ITSM tool? RAAH Technologies has developed project plans that help maximize the benefit of your purchase, transforming the parts of your business that need it over the long term. Our expertise in service automation, development, and workflow-based service management makes us a premier choice to bolster your ITSM initiatives. Reach out to find out how we can help you today!