With employees working remotely and in the office, many organizations are trying to figure out how to optimize workplace operations and IT service management.
Service Today 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 a 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 is specifically designed to help governments manage and respond to requests.
With the new workplace scenario planning capability, ServiceNow enables its users to proactively manage the utilization and capacity of workplace environments.
The new services are built on top of ServiceNow’s Tokyo release of the Now Platform, which the company released at the end of September.
The updates are about helping organizations transform their processes, said Brian Emerson, vice president and general manager of the IT Operation Management (ITOM) business unit at ServiceNow. ITPro Now.
“Think about digital transformation — what can we do to not only enable automation and better flows behind the scenes, but also how we engage with the user experience in new way?” said Emerson.
Automated Service Suggestions Boost the Efficiency of IT Operations
ServiceNow provides a foundation for IT operations to manage the health of the services they have in their environment, according to Emerson. One of the key things in 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 will build on top of an existing ServiceNow service mapping capability that helps organizations better understand how services are running, Emerson explained.
“What we’re really doing is layering 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 not, and basically those traffic patterns allow us to understand how different parts of the infrastructure to each other.”
How Workplace Scenario Planning Addresses the Reality of the Hybrid Workplace
Modern operations management is also about dealing with the actual places where people work.
ServiceNow plans its new workplace scenario planning service to help with the evolving workplace-related needs of employees, said Melanie Lougee, head of Employee Workflows strategy at ServiceNow. ITPro Now. 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 order supplies, he said.
ServiceNow’s new workplace scenario planning capability helps organizations visualize and optimize working environments.
Scenario planning includes things like making sure there’s enough space for staff, as well as determining if there’s too much space that’s not being used properly.
“It could be planning space around having more spaces for collaboration — getting knowledge about which buildings are being used or which floors within a building are not being used as much and being able to think about bringing people together to provide collaboration and savings as well,” Lougee said.
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Sean Michael Kerner is an IT consultant, technology enthusiast and tinkerer. He consults with industry and media organizations on technology issues.