ServiceNow Rome Highlights Managers Need to Know About

Ready to jump into ServiceNow Rome? Rome marks a continuing shift towards “[making] enterprise processes easier for employees to navigate,” with enhancements and new features across the platform. 

Whether you’re feeling eager or unsure about the release, it’s important to be aware of the implications of this new platform update. Read on for a high-level overview of the top Rome features managers should be aware of under CSM, ITBM, and IT Workflows.

Before reading on, check out our Friday Fast Fifteen video on what's new in ServiceNow Rome!

New ServiceNow Rome CSM Features

The Rome release updated and enhanced customer service management (CSM) to make it more user-friendly and effective for both consumers and contact admins. For example, the B2B2C customer data model now allows service providers to create cases on behalf of end users, whether they’re inside or outside of the organization. This adds flexibility and visibility into what’s going on. 

CSM also has a few features that do so much to make end users’ jobs easier. Conversation Autopilot, for one, allows for a balance between attentive customer service and quick and thorough investigations into issues that chatters bring up. As the person responds to you, the virtual agent captures their input so you can do the deep dive on the backend.

“This [feature] helps you walk through those different topics that they may be covering while you’re chatting with them,” said Allison Holt, managing consultant and certified master architect at Crossfuze, in a recent webinar. “So you can multitask without feeling like you’re ignoring them.”

Another feature allows you to configure decision trees that recommend Next Best Action to agents. These can be ranked based on the frequency of issues agents encounter so that your IT team can resolve issues faster and provide the best customer service.

Finally, Field Service Crew Operations enables teams to better manage shift turnover. With planned crews, managers can “create a fixed crew that work together for many tasks over a duration,” allowing teams to manage tasks in a streamlined fashion.

New ServiceNow Rome ITBM Features

IT business management (ITBM) has a few new and a few updated features in ServiceNow Rome. Alignment Planner Workspace now allows you to connect multiple roadmaps, allowing you to track progress at different levels of the organization. 

“There can be a hierarchy between them, and you can add more than one type of record,” said Justin Meadows, solution consultant at Crossfuze. “So if you wanted to include projects and demands, or maybe some Agile ethics, you could have all of those on one roadmap now. You’re not restricted to just one particular record. If you want something that’s not out of box, you could put that on a roadmap as well.”

Sometimes, there are nonmonetary benefits that can qualify a project or demand. In Rome, you can track nonmonetary benefits like increased employee or customer satisfaction within ServiceNow.

Additionally, business stakeholders can access Agile to view project status, reports, and even demand when they are doing an assessment.

New ServiceNow Rome IT Workflows Features

Here are some of the most helpful updates and enhancements in IT Workflows, including in IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and IT Asset Management:

IT Service Management

• Digital Portfolio Management provides “a successful plan for you to design and build your service portfolios out to your end users. It allows you to add automation,” Holt said. “When you go to create services and offerings . . . , they are all automated instead of you having to build piece by piece.”
• Process Optimization enhancements enable better prediction and recommendation of items to allocate to different agents based on their group, skill sets, and assignments. Managers can also manually adjust forecasts, giving more accurate visibility into what agents are doing and the ability to streamline their work.

IT Operations Management

• Agent Client Collector is a ServiceNow agent installed on your Windows and Linux servers to collect host data. This is not to replace any of your agents; it’s a supplement to what Discovery is today. It includes inventories, serial numbers, storage devices, and more.
• Health Log Analytics helps better predict IT issues, collecting log data through a third-party monitoring system. When it discovers an anomaly, it sends it to event management to get the issue resolved before IT is alerted.

Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

• “The CMDB Data Workspace is really just a better, single location for important metrics, activities, your tools, your CMDB admins,” Holt said. “It’s kind of that ‘one pane of glass’ for all that information. Right now, they have health dashboards [and] they have some other information. But this is really to improve your productivity with one location.”

IT Asset Management

“ServiceNow outdid themselves this time with the release on Software Asset,” Meadows said. “They’ve completely revamped the user interface for your asset management. So there’s now a workspace where they can get in and have better visibility into dashboard and metrics. It’s not the traditional dashboard we’re used to seeing. It’s now a workspace with actionable things they can do.”

In addition to software asset management improvements, Rome offers enhancements on cloud insights for budgeting and tagging. This is a store app, so it’s available without having to do the full upgrade to ServiceNow Rome.

Meadows mentioned several features he was excited about for Hardware Asset Management, including the following:

• Asset health dashboard 
• RMA (Return Materials Authorization)
• CSDM alignment (“Aligning some of the attributes and class structure to comply with the common service data model,” Meadows said)
• A new health tab on the dashboard, which allows you to see and manage defective, missing, or aged assets
• A class for mobile devices (Now mobile won’t have to be a custom or extended class—it’s available out of the box.)

Tips for Upgrading Your Existing Instance

ServiceNow Rome brings some excellent new and enhanced features with it, but how do you know if it’s time for your company to make the upgrade? 

First, take a look at the Rome release notes. There are release notes specific to Quebec, Paris, and Orlando, which gives you an idea of the specific features to watch out for if you decide to do the upgrade. 

Once you have an idea of what the release entails, ask yourself, 

• What’s our bandwidth? Would it be better to skip this upgrade and then do the next one? Do we have the budget to have a partner help? 
• What’s going on with our teams, primary users, and the helpdesk? 
• Would it be worth it to switch to features that are now out of box and supported as opposed to staying with something that we’ve built from scratch?

Keep in mind that there are new features, but ServiceNow allows you to turn them on whenever you are ready. And if there is a new feature that would replace something your team has built from scratch, “You’re usually not losing anything; they’re just replacing it with a better feature,” Meadows said. Holt added, “They have a nice transition plan.” 

With new features and enhancements under CSM, ITBM, and IT Workflows, ServiceNow Rome is designed to make enterprise processes easier for employees to navigate. If you’re ready to go ahead with the release but would like some extra support, consider reaching out to a partner like Crossfuze for everything from strategic advice to hands-on technical expertise.