Category: Automate

Part Three: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Process Mining

Automate, Blog, ServiceNow, Tech TipsKelly Cooke

ServiceNow, a leading platform for process mining and automation, recently launched its Utah release with several new features and enhancements, including multidimensional mining.

Part Three of this blog series will explore how you can analyse and improve your IT service management (ITSM) workflows using process mining and automation.

What is Process Mining?

Process mining is a technique that applies data science to discover, validate and improve workflows based on event logs from information systems. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically extract process models from your ServiceNow data and visualise them in an interactive dashboard. You can then use the dashboard to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, deviations and best practices in your ITSM processes, and take action to optimise them with automation solutions.

How can ServiceNow Process Mining help you to enhance your organisation’s incident management process?

ServiceNow Process Mining can help your organisation enhance your incident management process by providing you with valuable insights into how your process is actually performed, how it deviates from the expected or desired behavior, and how it can be improved.

Process overview shows you the key metrics and statistics of your process, such as the number of cases, the average duration, the throughput time or the compliance rate. You can also filter and segment your data by various criteria, such as category, urgency, assignment group or resolution code.

Process Map provides your organisation with a graphical representation of your process model, which is automatically generated using your data. You can see the flow of cases from start to end, the frequency and duration of each activity, and the variants and deviations of your process. You can also drill down into specific cases or activities to see more details.

Process Analysis presents you the results of various analyses that are performed on your organisation’s process model, such as bottleneck analysis, root cause analysis, conformance analysis and best practice analysis. You can use these to identify and understand the causes and effects of problems and opportunities in your process.

Using these three capabilities, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your organisation’s incident management process and discover ways to optimise it through elimination of unnecessary steps or automation of repetitive tasks.

Final Thought

As an Elite ServiceNow Partner, JDS can help you navigate the complex and fast-changing world of hyper-automation. We have the expertise, experience and passion to support your organisation’s digital transformation journey. Whether you need to automate your business processes, optimise your IT operations, or leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can guide you every step of the way.

Part Two: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Proactive Automation Resilience

Automate, Blog, ServiceNowKelly Cooke

What is Automation Resilience?

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, automation is becoming increasingly vital for businesses. However, as with any technology, it’s important to be prepared for unexpected disruptions and failures. This is where automation resilience comes in.

Automation resilience is the ability of an organisation’s automation solutions to withstand unexpected interruptions and recover quickly from failures. Without automation resilience, any downtime or disruptions can lead to significant financial losses and negatively impact the customer experience.

ServiceNow understands the importance of automation resilience, which is why capabilities to enable proactive monitoring and management of automation solutions have been developed. Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a crucial tool that allows your organisation to track automation solutions and dependencies in the same way you track other facets of your tech stack.

With ServiceNow’s automation resilience capabilities and CMDB, businesses can operate their automation solutions with confidence, knowing that they are prepared for any unexpected disruptions. There is no need for downtime or interruptions to negatively impact your business.

Establishing Proactive Automation Resilience with ServiceNow

Disruptions are inevitable in the fast-paced digitalised business environment, that’s why it’s crucial to have the right tools in place to anticipate, prevent, respond, and adapt to them. ServiceNow’s hyperautomation technologies and capabilities enable organisations to do just that, by leveraging multitudes of technologies.

Intelligence (AI) and data insights are examples of such technology, enabling ServiceNow’s hyperautomation to assist your business with predicting issues, reducing user impact, and streamlining resolutions. It also involves automating the right processes in ServiceNow to improve efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. With ServiceNow, your organisation can serve customers more efficiently, deliver products faster, and protect its workforce more effectively.

ServiceNow’s automation center allows your organisation to assess every aspect of relevant change management details, not just the execution details of your RPA bots. By viewing a graphic depiction of their bot’s process infrastructure dependencies, organisations can identify potential disruptions such as maintenance windows or unexpected configuration errors.

Moreover, ServiceNow’s AI-powered root cause analysis and automated remediation actions enable your business to effectively reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). This means that your data can be analysed from various sources, such as logs, metrics, traces, and events, and identify the source of problems in your IT operations. It can also trigger automated workflows and actions to fix issues faster and prevent them from recurring. By doing so, ServiceNow helps your organisation to improve service quality and performance, while shortening the time it takes to resolve incidents.

ServiceNow’s innovative solution empowers your business to gain a competitive advantage by providing exceptional customer experiences and satisfaction. By using insights gained from service quality data, your organisation can proactively communicate with your customers, addressing pain points before they become a problem. With the ability to map out the entire customer journey, your business can tailor your customer service strategy to meet their needs. With ServiceNow’s hyperautomation, you don’t have to wait for disruptions to occur.

Watch: Establish Proactive Automation Resilience | ServiceNow

Part One: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Process Optimisation

Automate, Blog, ServiceNowKelly Cooke

Improvement Initiatives

As businesses grow, IT processes become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. This is where Process Optimisation comes in, providing a way to evaluate and enhance the performance of your IT processes using data from your systems. In other words, it’s a method of making sure that your IT processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

One of the key components of Process Optimisation is ‘Improvement Initiatives’, also known as ‘Continuous Improvement’. This approach involves using data-driven insights and best practices to identify opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of your IT service management processes. By continually refining and improving these processes, you can ensure that your organisation is operating at peak performance, and delivering the best possible outcomes for your customers.

Whether you’re looking to get started quickly with API-driven processes or planning for the future with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the ServiceNow platform can help you achieve your goals. If you’re already using ServiceNow, the leading platform for digital workflows, Process Optimisation and Improvement Initiatives are built right in.
Read on to learn more about ‘Improvement Initiatives’ and explore RPA and API in more detail.

Understanding APIs

In the world of software development, an Application Programming Interface (API) is an essential building block that enables different applications to communicate with each other. APIs are like the ‘bridges’ that connect different software components, allowing them to share data and functionality seamlessly. Without APIs, software applications would have to be built from scratch every time, making the development process much more time-consuming and resource-intensive.

An API typically consists of a set of rules and protocols that govern how software applications should interact with each other. These rules and protocols define the methods that can be used to retrieve, update, or delete data, as well as the format of the data that is exchanged. APIs enable developers to create complex systems that can be easily integrated with other applications.

APIs are used in a variety of settings, from web and mobile applications to enterprise software systems. Many popular web services, such as Google Maps, Twitter, and Facebook, provide APIs that developers can use to access their data and functionality. In addition, many enterprise software systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, offer APIs that enable developers to integrate their applications with these systems.

APIs are critical components of modern software development, enabling applications to communicate and share data with one another. By providing a standardised way to interact with software systems, APIs simplify the development process and make it easier to create powerful, integrated software solutions.

Understanding RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a revolutionary technology that promises to transform the way we work. Essentially, RPA involves using software robots (or bots) to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks that are typically performed by humans. This means that employees can be freed up to focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

RPA tools are designed to mimic the actions of a human worker. For example, they can log into applications, copy and paste data between systems, and enter information into forms. By automating these tasks, RPA can help organisations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase accuracy.

One of the key benefits of RPA is that it can be used to automate a wide range of processes across different departments and industries. For example, RPA can be used to automate invoice processing in finance, customer service inquiries in retail, and claims processing in insurance.

RPA is an exciting technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we work. As businesses look to stay competitive in an increasingly digital world, RPA is set to play a key role in driving productivity, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction.

API vs RPA: Understanding the Difference

In today’s world of increasing digitalisation, businesses are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Two technologies that are often mentioned in this context are RPA and API. Both technologies can help businesses automate processes, but they have different approaches and capabilities. It is a common misconception in the IT industry that RPA is only used when API is not available. In fact, RPA and API have their own strengths and limitations.

The key difference between RPA and API is their approach to automation. RPA is focused on automating specific tasks or processes, while API is focused on enabling different systems to work together. RPA is typically used to automate repetitive and manual tasks that are prone to errors, while API is used to integrate systems and data sources and enable real-time communication and data exchange.

RPA and API are two very different technologies that can help businesses automate processes and improve efficiency. Depending on the needs of your business, one or both of these technologies may be useful in achieving your automation goals.

Unify your Hyperautomation Landscape with ServiceNow (Automation Center)

ServiceNow Automation Center is a cutting-edge platform that offers a centralised solution for managing and executing Hyperautomation strategies. By utilising powerful features such as workplace, dashboard, executive dashboard and RPA vendor integration, businesses can streamline their automation landscape, making it easier than ever before to implement a comprehensive automation strategy that can improve efficiency and reduce costs.

One of the key benefits of ServiceNow Automation Center is the ability to integrate disparate automation solutions across different third-party vendors. This can help to maximise the business impact of automation initiatives, as well as consolidate automation opportunities across the entire enterprise. With ServiceNow Automation Center, businesses can manage the entire automation lifecycle from intake through to execution, providing a holistic view of automation activity across the organisation.

In addition, ServiceNow Automation Center provides a powerful visualisation tool, allowing businesses to view benchmarks for automation business goals and activity in one centralised location. This feature makes it easier to track the progress of automation initiatives and make data-driven decisions to optimise their impact.

ServiceNow Automation Center also provides a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing robotic process automation (RPA) jobs in CMDB. This means that businesses can keep automation activities active, with full visibility of their status and performance.

ServiceNow Automation Center is a powerful platform that enables businesses to achieve their automation goals through centralised management, seamless integration, and comprehensive automation monitoring and reporting.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Proactive Automation Resilience…

Watch: Unify Your Hyperautomation Landscape | ServiceNow

Introduction to ServiceNow Hyperautomation

Automate, Blog, ServiceNowKelly Cooke

Imagine this…

You’re at work, and suddenly an application you’re using stops working. You’re in a rush and can’t afford to spend hours on the phone with technical support. But what if there was a way to get your problem solved quickly and efficiently, without ever having to speak to a human being?

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent is an AI-driven conversational chatbot that is equipped to efficiently tackle your IT issues. With just a few clicks, you can explain your problem and get instant assistance. Using a combination of ServiceNow Automation Center and Flow Designer, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent will quickly identify the submitted query and proactively initiate a conversation for resolution, without the need for human intervention.

In our initial scenario, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent would have promptly diagnosed the problem and triggered the ServiceNow Automation Center bots to restart the application service through the use of Robot Process Automation. Simultaneously, a ServiceNow incident ticket is created through the ServiceNow Flow Designer, allowing your IT department to track the issue and ensure it doesn’t happen again. All of this happens in a matter of minutes, ensuring that you can get back to work without any further interruptions, and with minimal human interference.

This is a practical example of Hyperautomation in action.

Automation vs Hyperautomation

Automation has become a buzzword in the world of technology and business, but what exactly does it mean? Simply put, automation refers to the use of technology to perform tasks or processes that would typically be performed manually by humans. This can include everything from using software bots to handle repetitive tasks, to using machine learning algorithms to make decisions based on data.

However, automation is no longer limited to simple, repetitive tasks. With the emergence of advanced technologies such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), AI (Artificial Intelligence), and ML (Machine Learning), we have entered a new era of automation known as Hyperautomation. Hyperautomation involves using these advanced technologies to automate more complex and sophisticated tasks, such as decision-making, data analysis, and even creative work.

The goal of Hyperautomation is to create a fully automated end-to-end workflow that can deliver business value by improving efficiency, reducing errors, and increasing productivity. By leveraging the power of automation, organizations can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and free up their employees to focus on more strategic tasks.

ServiceNow Hyperautomation

ServiceNow offers a platform that combines several automation technologies, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Hub, Process Automation Designer (PAD), Automation Center (AC) and Integration Hub (IH), enabling organisations to automate complex, end-to-end processes.

With ServiceNow Hyperautomation, organisations can improve their overall processes, efficiency and productivity. This is achieved through the use of workflows, bots, and other automation tools that can automate everything from simple, repetitive tasks to more complex decision-making and data analysis processes. ServiceNow Hyperautomation has become an increasingly popular solution for businesses looking to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced, digital world.

Up Next…ServiceNow Hyperautomation: Part One will look at Process Optimisation, API vs RPA

Read Next…Part One: Process Optimisation

Watch: Hyperautomation and Low-Code | Knowledge 2022