Here’s the good news! In my second article about powerful dictionary configurations, I will showcase a time-saving technique to reuse choice list values across your instance. This saves you time and ensures consistency in your data management. This approach is particularly beneficial for multilingual environements, as you only need to translate the main choice list.

Use case 1: Linking Catalog Variables to existing Choice Options

There is a Choice field on a table, and we need to replicate this field on a Catalog Item or Record Producer form with the same choices.

For example, adding the Incident Category drop-down to the “Create Incident” Record Producer. On the left of the screenshot below is the Incident Category field as displayed in the Service Operations Workspace, and on the right is the Create Incident Record Producer in the Employee Service Center Service Portal.

• To get these values onto the “Create Incident” Record Producer Form, create a new Select Box Variable to hold the values that need to be displayed.

• Next, instead of creating mirror Choice options in the Question Choices Related List, navigate to the “Type Specifications” section on the Variable form. Enter the following values and save the variable:
  • Choice table: Incident [incident]
  • Choice field: Category

• Now when we navigate back to the form in the Service Portal, we can see that there is a new Category field on the form, and it already has Choice values that exactly match the Incident Category selections. Now if you change the available Choices for the Incident Category field, the Variable drop-down values will automatically reflect those changes without have to repeat the configuration on the Variable record.

Use case 2: Reuse Choice List values in another field

Sometimes you need to replicate a choices options across several tables and fields to create consistency as data moves from one record to another, like Asset and CI attributes that exist on both records. –OR– You have several fields on the form with the same set of Choice options. For example, a design decision to use Yes/No Choice fields instead of Checkbox fields.

• First, choose which table and field will drive the other fields options. The example will use Incident Category.
• Navigate to the Dictionary record for the other field(s) that will be driven by the Incident Categories.
• Find the Choice List Specification tab. If you don’t see the Choice table field, you may have to switch to Advanced view.
• Enter the following values and save the Dictionary record:
  • Choice table: Incident [incident]
  • Choice field: Category

That’s it! Now, when you change the main field’s list, all of the other choice lists will reflect the change.

Summary

This article explored two simple ways to reuse choice list values in the ServiceNow platform. If you are a customer that supports multiple language, you’ve exponentially saved yourself some time, because you only have to translate the main field’s Choices and those changes will also be reflected everywhere as well.

By leveraging these techniques, you can streamline your ServiceNow configuration and save valuable time!

The post Be a Choice List “Thief” appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

It seems like every release brings with it a new Workspace, and with it either some new functionality or a shiny new coat of paint over some familiar capability. With the introduction of the Next Experience in the San Diego release, ServiceNow began the parade of “Configurable Workspaces,” or “Experiences,” that have now become the vehicle for enabling enhanced AI and other advanced capabilities on the platform.

Here we will look at the state of these Workspaces and how they impact the usage, architecture, and design of solutions for ServiceNow. For more detailed information, see the ServiceNow documentation: Next Experience UI (servicenow.com).

Workspace Overview

Prior to the Next Experience, ServiceNow dipped their toes in the enhanced UI waters by introducing the Agent Workspace (and the ability to create your own Workspaces using the framework). This would lay the groundwork for introducing what we now know as “Configurable Workspaces,” but as of the Washington DC release is no longer shipped, supported, or available for activation. Thus, for the remainder of this article the term “Workspace” is used to refer to the Next Experience configurable workspaces.

The Next Experience uses an implementation of “Web Components” (learn more about Web Components here) to encapsulate functionality within discrete units on a page to achieve the following benefits:

1. Allow complex functionality to be packaged into self-contained and reusable units
2. Avoid code sprawl encountered when reusing controls that require complex HTML, scripts, and styles
3. Prevent conflicts between different implementations of similar blocks of code where styles or events and functions may overlap

Each component functions in a similar way to an “Interface” (see this page for a good description of interfaces in object-oriented programming) in that it defines a set of inputs (if necessary) and returns a set of outputs (also if necessary) while leaving the details of how the functionality is implemented up to the internal code. It is, in other words, a promise of a specified or agreed upon result but not a promise of how that result is achieved. This means that any JavaScript library can be used to implement the code within the component. And this is precisely why the Next Experience was built using this methodology: the internal workings of the component can be changed in any future release to use more efficient, simpler, or just different libraries without the platform needing to be entirely re-architected. The component is effectively future proofed as long as the new implementation uses the same inputs and outputs and returns the same result.

That is a big deal.

However, it’s important to note that, as of this writing, Workspaces are not meant to replace every UI on the Now Platform. There are now three primary interfaces in ServiceNow: Service Portal for the end-user experience; Workspace for the fulfiller experience; and what is now known as “Core UI” (or the “backend” or the “admin UI” or the “frameset UI” or… well, it goes by many names) for System Administration as well as other Fulfiller processes that have not yet been gifted with their own workspace (emphasis on “yet”).

Workspaces do not yet support the “responsive” layout that Service Portals offer, and with continued development on several portals (Employee Center and the Customer and Consumer Service portals, for example) it does not appear that there is any rush to replace Service Portal with the Next Experience just yet.

Now that we understand a bit more about Workspaces, let’s look a little closer at some of the benefits and challenges they present.

The Promise of Workspaces

Going back to the Agent Workspace, the concept of a dedicated space that would ease access to information and supercharge productivity was the driving force behind introducing this new user experience paradigm. The idea was to encapsulate the various things a fulfiller would need to do work while remaining in a single browser tab. From a focused landing page and a targeted set of record lists to a structured work area that could use nested tabs to ease navigation without losing your place, the promise of Workspaces was to simplify the fulfiller experience under a single pane of glass (I promise that’s the last time I’ll use that term in this article) to make work as efficient as possible.

Often fulfillers need additional context when working on a task, such as information about a user, configuration item, Customer Account, or other related entity. Workspaces offer a consolidated view of this related information by either presenting it as a sidebar for the current record or allowing related records to open in a new tab within the same page so that users don’t have to navigate away from a record or open a new browser tab (which affects the browser’s history stack and can often cause frustration when the “back” button takes you somewhere you didn’t expect).

Additionally, most of the new capabilities (including the fast-expanding GenAI solutions) are exclusively released for and accessible from the new Workspaces. Now Assist, Playbooks (the portions for fulfillers), Recommended Actions, and other capabilities are not accessible in the Core UI, so adoption of these capabilities will also require adoption of Next Experience Workspaces.

If you have not already at least explored the various Workspaces, now is a good time to get started as they will only become more ingrained in the platform.

The Challenge of Workspaces

Every ray of sunshine casts a shadow, and it is no different with Workspaces. Along with all the promise, benefits, and new capabilities come real, and not insignificant, challenges to adoption, development, and maintenance.

Challenge 1: Silos and Sprawl

Considering users first, one of the main challenges of adopting Workspaces is the sheer number of them. Each workspace is designed for a specific Persona and Use Case, and the functionality is designed to support it. Unlike Service Portals, where any page can be used within any portal, each page (and with it, the functionality offered by the page) in a Workspace is defined only for that Workspace and cannot be used or accessed from elsewhere. This poses significant usability challenges when a user’s responsibilities cross multiple personas. In these cases, they may have to toggle between multiple Workspaces as they work through their processes.

A specific example relates to the intersection of Request Fulfillment and Asset Management. For many organizations, the Service Desk (the consummate IT Fulfiller) is responsible for fulfilling hardware and software requests for their end user base. Along with this responsibility, they may also manage stock for the equipment they provide. So, what happens when a user requests a new laptop?

Well, when Procurement is in use the first thing to happen (after approvals) is a “Sourcing” task for the entire Request. This task is meant to identify how the requested hardware will make its way to the fulfiller to supply to the requester. The request may be fulfilled from local stock, it may require transfer from another stockroom, or it may need to be purchased from a supplier.

As a result of such purpose-built workspaces, it can often be a challenge for a user to know where they need to be for a specific task or a specific step in a larger workflow. Clear and accessible documentation along with good training can help mitigate this risk, as well as some clever design to try to bridge across Workspace silos, such as providing navigation options when a task is best worked in another Workspace.

It may also be possible to mitigate some of this conflict by adding capabilities to other workspaces, however this would require a non-trivial level of effort to “copy” a page and its functionality from one Workspace to another. The copied pages and other artifacts would also need to be kept up to date with changes to the source page.

Challenge 2: Self-Configuration

Beginning with Homepages, one of the most powerful capabilities that ServiceNow offers is the ability to empower users to create what they need to be as productive as they can. Being able to build targeted reports, consolidate them onto a page, and share them with your team has been a mainstay of the platform since its inception, and is the main reason I fell in love with it so many years back. It was the root of my career transformation and the inspiration for my mission to spread that transformation as far and as wide as I can.

Now let’s talk Landing Pages. Each Workspace hosts a Home or Landing page, and it is possible to create “Variants” of the landing page that can be surfaced to a user depending on the roles they have (we will talk further about Variants a bit later). The Landing page is meant to provide key data for the user upon entering the Workspace to help answer the question “What do I need to work on next?” So, it would seem this is akin to Dashboards. But alas, this is not the case.

Landing pages, while they support Variants, are not adjustable or sharable by the user. Each Variant must be built by someone with what amounts to administrative access within the Workspace. Dashboards are still accessible though the Platform Analytics Workspace (see the documentation for more information), and it is possible to add Dashboards to a dedicated page within a Workspace (see the documentation for a specific implementation for the CSM Configurable Workspace), but given the newly siloed nature of Workspaces (see Challenge 1) it is no longer as intuitive or seamless.

Workspaces do still offer a level of personal configuration, specifically by allowing you to define your own “Lists” for quick and specific access beyond what is configured for the Workspace in general. The interface also still allows you (for the most part) to configure list layouts and to personalize forms, and certain pages offer personalization or configuration preference options depending on the page content. However, the loss of quickly and easily creating and sharing Dashboard content is a big one.

There are not a lot of options available to mitigate these challenges, other than providing good training and documentation to ensure users know where to find things like Dashboards and understand what they are able to configure themselves. You can also look to add a “Dashboard” page to each Experience, which will ensure that users remain in the experience when clicking through any report content to view the lists and records.

Challenge 3: Development and Maintenance Complexity

ServiceNow released UI Builder as a way to configure and develop within the Next Experience framework. They also allow building custom components (although they generally discourage this). However, building a custom component requires significant additional expertise and advanced tooling, as components must be built off-platform in a command line interface or other IDE, that most seasoned platform developers and architects do not have. And for many of us, the learning curve is a bit too steep.

The power and promise of ServiceNow is that it obscured the underlying complexity of building an Enterprise-grade application and allowed folks with moderate scripting abilities to build amazing experiences. Next Experience introduces an entirely new lexicon along with purpose-built architecture that looks similar to, but is distinctly different and separate from, familiar entities like Script Includes and UI Actions.

One need only attempt to explore an existing page in a Workspace to quickly grasp the complexity and multi-layered architecture upon which many pages are built. Often sub-pages are nested within a Viewport in an existing component, and that sub-page may contain additional viewports wherein additional pages are nested, and so on. It is often a struggle to locate the component you are looking to investigate.

Additionally, the nature of Page Variants can make testing a challenge. Each Variant is given an order within a page route, and the first variant for which a user matches an Audience (as well as a match on any page conditions) will display when accessing that route. As an administrator, it can be difficult to access a particular Variant when testing, as the “all roles” nature of the admin role means that you will likely match the Audience of the first Variant by order. That fact can make changes to a variant somewhat difficult to test, although you can impersonate a user with the intended Audience in another session to make testing a bit easier.

The ServiceNow developer community has been hard at work delivering content and enablement for UI Builder. At the moment, I can only recommend that you invest the time to explore the available content, leverage the collective community for advice and support (as this amazing community has done for decades now), and build up your capabilities and comfort level with UI Builder. Additionally, a light touch is the best solution and I recommend modifications in the Workspace only as a last resort, using Page Variants where possible, and with very comprehensive documentation. In the meantime, keep open communication with ServiceNow’s product managers, who are very active and open to dialog, with the intent of working collaboratively to ensure the platform continues to work for all of us.

Challenge 4: Capability Gaps

New Workspaces are introduced quickly in response to an ever-changing environment. As a result, sometimes the functionality they are meant to replace is not completely covered in the first release. ServiceNow has adopted an agile approach to this challenge, with frequent store releases occurring outside of the Major Family Release schedule aimed at providing evolving capabilities at a faster pace.

As an example, consider the evolution of the Project Workspace. When it was first released, it was limited to the new Planning Console and lacked the “Details” page to allow users to see the complete Project record; the other navigation options still linked out to the “classic” project workspace. Over the course of several Store releases, the “Classic” pages were added to the new Workspace, and as of Xanadu if you do a fresh install then the “Classic” navigation is now gone completely. There remain, as of this writing, several functions that elude the new Workspace, such as adding Test Phases to the Project from the Planning Console and preventing Child Tasks from being added to an Agile Phase.

The best way to mitigate this challenge is to carefully plan your adoption strategy. Establish a minimum capability threshold below which you cannot adopt a Workspace and then monitor the road map and releases to know when that threshold is reached. You can also identify which pieces of functionality it may still be possible to access outside of the Workspace (or is there is a way to embed it into a tab or modal, is that an option?) and explore a hybrid and phased approach to adoption. ServiceNow does a good job of regularly adding capabilities to the Workspaces, so it is likely only a matter of time until you reach critical mass and can begin adopting.

The Path Forward

Although I spent more time focusing on the challenges posed by Workspaces, my intent is not to cause despair. Having spent time working within these experiences, looking at the constant growth the steady stream of super impressive capabilities, and the simple fact that they are not going anywhere, I am hopeful that Workspaces and the tools underlying them will continue to evolve and fulfill the ServiceNow mission of making it as easy as possible to “enable regular people to create meaningful applications to route work through an enterprise.”

The power of the Now Platform lies within its community. That includes not only the users, administrators, and developers that use the platform to carry out their mission, but the folks at ServiceNow that enable those users, administrators, and developers by listening to their needs and producing a product that is unmatched in its ability to empower and inspire every day. My hope is that we continue to collaborate to make it as easy as possible to create and deliver value from this amazing platform.

The post We Need to Talk About Workspaces appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

Most instances have a limit on storage included per instance.  If you do not know your storage limits are work with your account team to ask how many TB per instance you have.  What many of us do not realize is that this also applies to our non-production instances.  This is where it really starts to add up!  If my pipeline goes DEV -> Test -> Pre-Prod -> Prod, then every 1TB over our limit in production is now 4X.  Imagine having an instance with a footprint of 100TB and then I clone that to all my non-production environments.  That would be 400TB of storage consumed!  Instead of using our IT budget for awesome features like AIOps, HRSD or GenAI we would be stuck footing a storage bill ☹.  This is where something as simple as using Advanced Clone Options and Clone Profiles can be a game changer.

Clone Home Page

At the time of writing this article we are using the Washington release which has a new feature of the Clone Homepage.  We will be doing using the Clone Homepage for the purposes of this article.  Navigate to “System Clone -> Home” and you should see the new home page like this:

Creating a clone profile:

Before we can get to the advanced settings, I like to use a clone profile.  This way I can tweak the advanced clone setting once and it applies to all future clones.  Lets go create our first clone profile!

To get here from our home page we are going to:

1. Click Configurations – that will take you to the overview page for configurations.
2. Click on “View all” under Clone profiles – This will show you all the clone profiles on your instance
3. Click on “New” – this will create our new Clone Profile

Advanced Clone Settings:

There are currently a few options to setup our clone profile.  In my opinion ServiceNow’s DOCS site does not do a good job of explaining each setting for us to make an informed decision on what will work best for our organization.  Let’s take a few seconds and over each one of them so you can make the best decisions for your instance.

Naming our Clone

Let’s Give our Clone Profile a name and set it as default.  This will ensure that this profile is used in all future clones by default and remind you how awesome the Guru’s are here at SNGuru!

General Settings

Now let’s go through the current options available on the “General” tab as this is where we will start to see some space savings in NPE!

• The amount of data copied from the Task Table:
  • This is a MAJOR setting to help save on storage.
  • Some instances have never archived and have 10 years of data in the task table, do we really need all that data in NPE?
• Apply On-Demand Backup
  • This is a personal preference and does a good job explaining what it does.

Exclusion Settings:

Next up is our Exclusions tab and it is an important one.  This is the second part that can move the needle BIG time for storage.  To give you an idea I have seen an instance with an audit log in excess of 40TB+ and this was a game changer in our clone times as well as storage footprint.  OOTB our clone profile had 182 tables in the “Exclusions list”.  You’re probably asking how do I know what tables to add here to save on storage?

I cannot provide screenshots for this portion so you will have to follow along via text.  If you have screenshots of this please add them into the comments below.

1. Login to the Support portal formerly known as HI.
2. Go to the “Automation Store” and find the item called “Database Footprint”.
3. Once the item is opened select your production instance
4. Second select Number of largest tables by size. It defaults to 10 so I select 40
5. Hit submit

After hitting submit you will be presented with the top tables on your production instance that are taking up space.  From here we need to evaluate each table and decide if we can add it to our exclusion list!  Here are a few tables I exclude from clones to save on storage:

• sys_flow_* //Any flow tables that have runtime data and logs
• pa_snapshots
• discovery_log
• cmdb_multisource_data
• sys_journal_field
• cmdb

Once you have all the tables added, here are the settings we use for our clones to ensure we exclude tables in our Exclusion list, Audit and Attachment data.

Preservers Settings:

These won’t save you on storage but we did not want to leave anything out as to cause confusion.  I prefer to have each Non-Production instance have its own theme, the uglier the better so I know it is not Production.  The settings below reflect my preferences.

Scheduling your Clone:

All the hard work is out of the way with our new clone profile, and it should be a breeze scheduling our next clone and all future clones.

Navigate to “System Clone -> Home” and select “Request clone”

On our clone request form, we should see our profile show up automagically because we set default above when we named it.  If not select your Clone profile and watch the settings apply.  As for locking your settings I prefer to lock them to ensure that this clone moves forward with the settings I have when requesting it.

Conclusion

By incorporating these clone options, you not only have an opportunity to save on storage costs but also enhance the performance and security of your sub-production instances.  Let us know in the comments how you plan to use these and let’s see who can save the most on their storage.  Happy Cloning!

The post How to Cut Your Storage Footprint (and Bill) by Using Clone Options in ServiceNow appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

Table of Contents:

What is the Now Value Framework?
How does the Now Value Framework benefit me?
The 4 Stages
Real World Example
Key Takeaways
Closing Remarks

What is the Now Value Framework?

This is the engagement methodology that was designed to help accelerate business outcomes. Over the course of thousands of successful digital transformations, ServiceNow developed the Now Value Framework. It includes 4 specific phases to help guide your ServiceNow journey down the path to measurable success.

NOTE: Please see the Customer Success Center for this information and more documentation that can help you maximize your realized value with ServiceNow.

How does the Now Value Framework benefit me?

Depending on your role within the digital transformation journey, you will draw different benefits from the Now Value Framework.

Leadership will be able to understand the value propositions and their measurable values to help them decide to move forward or not. Project Management will be able to tie specific project milestones to measurable value that has been realized. Implementation teams will also be able to see how much value their work is creating for the organization.

Now Value benefits the entire organization because it centers on accelerating value creation. This focus helps remove the uncertainty around your digital transformation because you have the tools, processes and capabilities that you need to be successful. The structures and the collective expertise of the ServiceNow ecosystem help you deliver a coordinated, positive experience.

The 4 Stages

Envision

This is where we explore the digital possibilities, determine our value potential using real-world measurements, and then develop our goals, strategy, and implementation plan.

At the end of the Envision phase, we’ll be able to see our total value and our expected payback from each ServiceNow investment and the ServiceNow program. This can help us gain more support for ServiceNow initiatives to deliver our expected outcomes.

By highlighting the benefits realized when current issues and roadblocks are resolved, we can showcase how strategic and organizational objectives will be met and when their value will exceed their cost.

We create our value story by describing our objectives (what we are trying to achieve), the challenges we’re facing in delivering those objectives (why it’s difficult to do today), how we solve the challenges and how ServiceNow can help, and defining the outcomes we’ll achieve and what will be different for the business, after we go live.

Create

In this phase, we seek to leverage ServiceNow leading practices to help us evaluate our adoption readiness and deliver a quality project execution.

This phase includes the implementation work, which can also leverage the Now Create Framework to accelerate your implementation efforts.

Your implementations can be modular and focused on specific efforts, while still using the Now Value Framework to constantly measure and re-measure value along the journey.

During this part of the journey, you can also catch things that may impact what you have captured in the Envision phase that require changes. You can also update your delivery timelines and costs, which will enable you to make more informed decisions throughout the entire delivery process.

Validate

During the validate phase, we measure our realized value, review our business outcomes, and, if possible, we benchmark against our peers. By reviewing the KPIs we established in the Envision phase and comparing their baseline data, we can then look at the current KPI data to understand how much success was achieved.

This phase also recognizes the timeline that was established during the Envision phase. For example, a desired outcome could be to reduce calls to the Service Desk by 10% within 6 months. You would take the baseline measurement of Service Desk calls in the first month (Envision), go through the implementation (Create), and then wait for a total of 6 months to elapse to measure and trend the Service Desk call numbers across that 6 month period (Validate).

Champion

The last phase of the Now Value Framework has us building our compelling transformation story and its purpose is to grow customer/employee engagement and get positive brand exposure.

With our supporting data from the Envision and Validate phases, we can showcase where we were, what challenges we were facing, what we were desiring to achieve, and then how successful we were, after we completed our implementation and validation timeline.

Real World Example

Governance

A larger customer that I once worked with leveraged this framework differently across their different Governance Boards.

During Strategic Governance meetings, Solution Architects would document challenges and desired outcomes, to align them to ServiceNow solutions and KPIs to measure success. A high-level estimate of the effort required was also included and this served as a key factor to answer the “do we explore this further” question. Medium and large initiatives were discussed in this forum and in some cases, the answer was “no budget is allocated for this year” and we were able to park the item for discussion again in the next fiscal year.

During Demand Governance meetings, different business units were able to allocate their budget towards smaller demands. The Now Value framework helped them not just determine to go forward or not with a specific demand, but also how to prioritize the order in which demands were implemented. This allowed the Demand Governance team to not only get the highest value demands into Production the fastest, but it also enabled them to support the overall strategy that was set by the Strategic Governance board.

The Technical Governance board leveraged the Now Value framework by setting implementation guidelines according to a value-based approach. This helped individual implementers use the same decision-making framework and increase the times that the same tools were used (or re-used). This also helped the implementation team decide to implement a custom piece of functionality or not. Key factors like reusability in other areas, multiple demands, or simply meeting compliance and audit requirements ensured that solutions were implemented in a sustainable fashion.

Finally, if an initiative was large enough or demonstrated enough value, then the value story process was expanded. Multiple value stories were created, with a focus on different audiences. This enabled the Champion phase to be showcased in more areas of the organization, with more relevant content and a more targeted communication style.

Value Stories

One value story would be created, with Leadership (the C-Suite) as the audience. This presentation covered things at a high level and also showed the connection between the initiative and the overall organization’s strategic direction that goes beyond the ServiceNow strategy itself. It also covered capability map updates, if they changed for the organization. Data presented in this story was focused on financial investments (without a detailed breakdown), cost savings, and/or impacted risk management.

A second value story would be created, with middle management (Directors and Managers) as the audience. This presentation covered detailed reviews of the implementation efforts and the results achieved, as they applied to the specific team members. For example, by implementing self-service updates via ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent, the organization’s Service Desk Agents were able to save an average of 1.5 hours of effort for each person every day. This time was re-allocated to clearing the entire backlog of incidents and requests and now has delivered the outcome of meeting 100% of target SLAs with the business.

A third value story would be created, with Project Management and Portfolio Management interested/involved parties as the audience. This presentation covers project milestones, their underlying supporting data, investments, and the value delivered by achieving the milestone(s). This also included a high-level project status update. There was a wider audience that was project-specific, so the audience spanned across the entire organizational hierarchy.

Outcomes

By implementing the Now Value Framework, this organization saw shorter Demand Governance execution timelines reduced, alignment between the ServiceNow investment and the organizational strategic direction, reduced technical debt and upgrade efforts through a standardized technical governance approach, and maximized value realization through the ServiceNow platform because there was a value-based prioritization method that put the highest-value deliverables at the top of the implementation list.

Key Takeaways

1. The Now Value Framework enables you to define your challenges, understand your desired outcomes, tie them to a KPI, and then build a success story to help showcase the value realized from each of your solutions.
2. This framework can be applied to any size of demand from adding a field on a form to a full-scale product implementation.
3. Now Value supports all forms of Governance: Strategic, Demand, and Technical.
4. The efforts spent training this out across your organization will be returned in reduced efforts over time.

Closing Remarks

The Now Value Framework provides you with prescriptive guidance to enable you to define your challenges, outline your desired outcomes, tie things to measurable KPIs, and then build a sharable story that showcases your success.

It can help with all parts of your governance (Strategic, Demand, and Technical) to help you quickly determine if you want to move forward or not and with prioritization.

This is a worthwhile investment for any size of organization because it accelerates your decision-making, prioritization, and helps you define and showcase your success story.

Now Value’s purpose is to ensure that you get the most value from your ServiceNow investment, as quickly as possible.

The post The Now Value Framework appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

There’s no doubt that ServiceNow has been (and continues to be) the proverbial “rising tide that lifts all boats” and I’ll forever consider it a blessing to have been introduced to this technology during its early days. There are so many people that helped me (both ServiceNow employees and clients) during those years as an administrator and consultant at ServiceNow. The contents of this site are really a giant collection of your great ideas over the years! Thank you to Michael Brown for giving me my first full-time job in the IT world, Matt Holetz for hiring me as a wide-eyed recent college graduate with a grand total of 8 weeks of ServiceNow experience and trusting me to handle full enterprise implementations on my own, and countless clients and consultants along the way. ServiceNow Guru ended up being the perfect launching pad for Crossfuze a few years later and has continued to help us be successful as a ServiceNow implementation partner. James Farrer (who is an absolute ServiceNow wizard) and Darwin Nielsen (who ran the whole business for over 3 years) were crazy enough to join us before we were even a viable company and have both been instrumental in helping Crossfuze to evolve into the leading consulting organization it is today.

There’s nobody I need to thank more than Jacob Andersen, who followed me to ServiceNow and co-founded Crossfuze with me just over 5 years ago. It’s not much of a secret to anybody who knows both of us, but he’s way more talented technically with ServiceNow than I am and I’m fortunate to have been able to lean on him for so long. Although there’s no doubt both of us wanted to be successful, more than anything we were completely addicted to the ServiceNow technology and loved making our clients happy. It’s a pretty simple formula, but it worked pretty well for us.

Looking back on this journey over the past several months and looking forward to some other priorities and goals in my life has led me to the realization that it’s time for me to step away from the ServiceNow world for a while. I’m anxious to spend more time with my wife and 5 kids at home and consider future opportunities.

Knowledge17 will mark my last week with Crossfuze and will also be a fresh start for ServiceNow Guru with a transfer of ownership and management to Crossfuze. With Chris Howard and the Crossfuze ServiceNow team at the helm, I can’t think of a better place to leave it. Alhough I’ll be stepping away, I’m confident that it will be in good hands and will continue to be a valuable source of quality ServiceNow technical content for years to come.

Thanks to all of you who have helped me in any way to make ServiceNow Guru a success. Every comment, backlink, like, thank you, and kind word helped to drive me forward each day. Knowing that my work was helping people to find success in their own lives and careers and finding innovative ways to solve common ServiceNow problems has fueled my desire to keep this site going for so many years. I wish all of you continued success in whatever ServiceNow adventures lie before you! Feel free to reach out to me through my LinkedIn profile if you’d like to keep in touch!

The post The Final ‘Work Note’ – Goodbye From ServiceNow Guru appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

Since 2009 when I originally launched SN Guru, I’ve used it as a place to share cool solutions on the ServiceNow platform, and (probably much less glamorously) to have a place to put all of my stuff so I didn’t forget how to build it the next time I needed it for a client engagement :). It’s hard to believe how much things have changed and grown in the 7+ years since then. Over the past couple of years the site hasn’t had my full attention as it had previously. Some of you may have even wondered if the site was going away completely! My primary focus has been on the massive task of running a successful company and consulting organization at Crossfuze. During this time, the SN Guru audience has actually grown considerably and it’s time to return a bit more of my focus to the site.

The beginning of those efforts will be the site redesign. It’s been over 6 years since I did the last one. One of the reasons for this is that it’s a TON of work and I simply didn’t have the time. Instead, I just tried to do my best to keep all of the existing content (over 250 different articles and solutions) relevant and help answer questions as they came in. The site redesign will provide a new, more modern look and will hopefully breathe a bit of new life into the content and concepts at the same time. Much of the content and organization will be the same as it was previously…I don’t want to make things harder for people that have been using the site for a while…but I’m making a few new, helpful changes.

• A new ‘SN | Guru’ brand, logo, and color scheme! This one is WAY overdue. No one has used ‘SNC’ for a while. This will be reflected on a new logo.
• Clean, new site redesign and theme. Seeing is believing! A brand new theme and cleaned up site will help everybody.
• Moving away (hopefully permanently) from the clunky built-in WordPress search to a full, Google custom search experience
• More flexible and modern Mailchimp-based email subscription service.
• Bringing in a few new expert authors to provide a fresh take on a larger variety of ServiceNow concepts on a more consistent basis

More changes will be coming over time as I continue to review older content and concepts and look for ways to do things even better but I’m extremely happy to have reached this goal of getting the redesign done and moving SN | Guru into a new, better place. Thanks so much to all of you for your support over the years and for your continued use of the site. It’s a ton of work but has been a very rewarding part of my career that I’m excited to continue.

Look for the redesigned site and brand to go live tomorrow!

The post ServiceNow Guru is Getting a Facelift! appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

Greetings from ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge conference! For myself, and all of the people at Crossfuze Solutions, we’re already in the thick of things assisting with pre-conference training. ServiceNow always puts on a great conference, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Crossfuze is a conference sponsor again this year so please stop by to see us at Booth 631! We would love the opportunity to say hello and show you we’re delivering world-class ServiceNow solutions with one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the ServiceNow partner ecosystem.

The post Welcome to Knowledge15! appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

We’re extremely excited for this opportunity to make a huge impact for our customers. If you’re looking for the absolute BEST ServiceNow experts to work on your ServiceNow project, contact us now. To learn more about how Crossfuze Solutions can help you to bring a world-class, innovative ServiceNow implementation to your organization, go to Crossfuze.com.

The post Announcing Crossfuze Solutions! appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

Overall Goals:

• Keep it simple!
• Leverage existing data
• Smart & intuitive design
• Get out of the code
• Automate and simplify repeated tasks

…all with the purpose of speeding time to resolution and improving customer satisfaction!

-Keep it simple!

-Advanced != Complex. Don’t overload your incident form with low-use garbage!
-Base incident form (screenshot above). All information is relevant and useful

-Leverage existing data

-CMDB
–Consolidate your ‘Configuration item’ field and ‘Affected CIs’ lists to get a better picture of what’s actually being impacted in your environment.
-Configuration item field macro icons
-BSM Map: relationships, map action icon showing only CI field tasks
Use of ‘Affected CIs’ list with BSM map action icons
-Change calendar (FSC): Don’t forget that change information can be a valuable input into incident resolution.
–On-call schedule popup
–Custom knowledge search

-Get out of the code

-Lookup tables are a great way to separate code from data and keep yourself out of the code where possible
–Priority lookup
–Assignment lookup

-Smart & intuitive design

–Priority 1 incident scroller
–Outlook-style module counts
-Color change on comments field (Field styles)
–Simultaneous task update alert
–Create user without leaving the form
–Knowledge search from homepage

-Automate & simplify repeated tasks & actions

-Templates (Advanced Templates)
–Suggestion fields
–QuickForm from list

The post Advanced Incident Management appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

I’m also looking forward to meeting a few of you and hearing how you use ServiceNow and how we can help customers to be more successful in implementing and extending their ServiceNow implementations. I’ll be around for the entire week and will be participating in 1-on-1 sessions and assisting with some others. On Wednesday I’ll be presenting a session on Advanced Incident Management where I’ll present some ideas on maximizing the usefulness of your incident management data.

Look for a few articles coming out from SNCGuru this week as well! If you see me at Knowledge11, please introduce yourself.

Keep an eye out for new content here and let me know what you think! All SNCGuru articles will be tweeted under both the #servicenow and #know11 twitter hashtags so you can follow me there if you like.

The post Welcome to Knowledge11! appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.