ServiceNow Brings Workplace Scenario Planning to ITOps

With employees working both remotely and in the office, many organizations are trying to figure out how to optimize workplace operations and IT service management.

ServiceNow announced on Nov. 3 a new set of capabilities to help solve those challenges. The new automated service suggestions feature in the ServiceNow IT service management platform is an AIOps capability that uses machine learning (ML) to help organizations better manage the health and operations of IT services. In addition, a new service request playbook capability has been specifically designed to help governments manage and respond to requests.

With the new workplace scenario planning capability, ServiceNow is enabling its users to proactively manage the utilization and capacity of workplace environments.

The new services build on top of ServiceNow's Tokyo release of the Now Platform, which the company released at the end of September.

The updates are all about helping organizations revolutionize their processes, Brian Emerson, vice president and general manager of the IT Operation Management (ITOM) business unit at ServiceNow, told ITPro Today.

"Think about digital transformation — what can we do to not only enable automation and better flows behind the scenes, but also how do we engage in the user experience in new ways?" Emerson said.

Related:IT Leaders Expand Automation Efforts to Optimize Business Processes

Automated Service Suggestions Boost IT Operations Efficiency

ServiceNow provides a foundation for IT operations to manage the health of services that they have in their environment, according to Emerson. One of the key things to enabling that is understanding how technology relates to business impact.

The new automated service suggestions capability enables ServiceNow users to use machine learning to very quickly understand how technology assets relate to each other to support a business service or an application. The new service suggestions build on top of an existing ServiceNow service mapping capability that helps organizations better understand how services are running, Emerson explained.

"What we're actually doing is putting machine learning on top of network traffic," he said. "We're just looking at network traffic and understanding what's important in that traffic and what's less important, and basically those traffic patterns then allow us to understand how different parts of the infrastructure relate to one another."

How Workplace Scenario Planning Addresses the Reality of Hybrid Work

Managing modern operations is also about dealing with the actual places where people work.

Related:ServiceNow Looking to Improve DevOps and ITOps with New Services

ServiceNow planned its new workplace scenario planning service to help with the evolving needs of employees as they pertain to the workplace, Melanie Lougee, head of the Employee Workflows strategy at ServiceNow, told ITPro Today. Scenario planning builds on ServiceNow's existing workplace service delivery capabilities that include room reservation management, the ability to make service requests for configuring a room, and ordering supplies, she said.

ServiceNow-Workplace-Scenario-Planning

Scenario planning includes such things as ensuring there is enough space for staff, as well as identifying if there is too much space that is not being properly utilized.

"It could be space planning around having more spaces for collaboration — being able to take knowledge about which buildings are being used or floors within a building are not being used very much and be able to think about consolidating people to be able to foster collaboration and also be able to save money," Lougee said.