ServiceNow launches platform expansion with the Utah release

ServiceNow has introduced a major platform expansion with the Now Platform Utah release. Utah is built to help organizations future-proof their businesses and drive outcomes faster in the face of continued economic uncertainty. The latest version of the intelligent, end-to-end platform for digital transformation includes AI-powered process mining with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities, additional search enhancements, expanded Workforce Optimization, and Health and Safety Incident Management, all designed to help increase automation, simplify experiences, and offer greater organizational agility. 

According to IDC, spending on digital technology will grow eight times faster than the economy in 20231, and by 2026, 40% of total revenue for G2000 organizations will be generated by digital products, services, and experiences.1 Even as technology budgets increase, leaders are going through a “great reprioritization” of tech investments based on the need for near-term organizational impact and time to value.  

“Organizations no longer need to choose between speed and innovation, or great experiences and business growth,” said CJ Desai, president and chief operating officer at ServiceNow. “ServiceNow’s intelligent platform offers fast time to value, continuous net new innovation, and a simplified and seemingly invisible upgrade experience so customers can do more with less and transform their business models. Our latest release is designed for this moment – empowering organizations to maximize efficiency, accelerate ROI on digital spend, and create simplified, connected experiences across their entire value chain.”  

Accelerating impact with purposeful automation  

According to the 2023 Gartner® CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 46% of the organizations polled expect to increase spend on application modernization, and 50% will increase their spend on cloud platforms.2 As organizations increasingly digitize, ServiceNow helps deliver more value by orchestrating work across silos to multiply productivity and accelerate automation, now with new AI-powered features including:  

•       AI Search, now built into ServiceNow’s Next Experience, uses AI and natural language processing to help service delivery workers find the information they need to do their jobs more effectively and resolve customer issues faster. AI Search also includes advanced features like auto-complete suggestions, exact match, and typo handling – allowing users to go directly to a record, to more quickly identify relevant materials that can help them resolve an issue. 

•       Process Optimization has been expanded to support workflows beyond IT Service Management (ITSM) to other workflows within the Now Platform, such as Field Service Management (FSM) and more. With improved AI-powered visibility into hidden inefficiencies, organizations can apply those recommendations with ServiceNow’s RPA solution to optimize process efficiencies and performance to help cut costs and improve customer satisfaction.  

•       Workforce Optimization capabilities have been enhanced and expanded to support workflows beyond ITSM and Customer Service Management, into areas like HR Service Delivery and more. For example, Workforce Optimization now also gives HR managers a central place to understand and optimize their employee bases (or teams). Leaders and managers can maximize the quality of work performed by employees, teams, and departments so businesses can perform at the highest level without significantly increasing costs.  

•       Document Intelligence allows customers to accelerate and automate AI-enabled text extraction from documents, saving time and eliminating human errors. The Utah release includes a more streamlined user experience so process owners can easily build, personalize, and monitor document processing. Document Intelligence also can automatically pull massive amounts of data from long tables in documents like invoices and purchase orders to expedite things like payroll, finance, and procurement processes.  

•       ServiceNow Impact is the industry’s first solution designed to help customers accelerate the return on their digital transformation investments. Enhancements to performance tools, as well as new Impact accelerators, are available in the Utah release. These additions help platform owners better manage system health and reduce the time it takes to bring critical dashboards online, for better visibility into the status of digital transformation initiatives. 

Minimizing operational and security risk with solutions to boost agility 

“Globally, the constant barrage of risk events, incidents, and disruptions have become so frequent that the increased level of risk is the ’new normal,’” according to Forrester3. To help organizations navigate an increasingly complex threat environment in the hybrid world of work, the Utah release empowers customers to innovate faster, operate with more agility, and manage increasing operational and cyber risk. New capabilities include:  

•       Health and Safety Incident Management helps leaders foster a culture of wellness and productivity with tools that make it easier to report and resolve safety incidents and assign corrective and preventative actions for those incidents, while connecting siloes and reducing costs. 

•       Security Incident Response Workspace, part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, allows security analysts to examine incidents within a central workspace, so they can be more efficient in urgent moments and analyze the growing volume of data associated with security incidents. Customers can build assessments and analyze reports within one workspace, and leverage Process Automation Designer to manage multiple workflows with no-code playbooks. 

•       Operational Resilience Workspace, also part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, provides an enterprise-wide view of critical risk information, such as issues, vulnerabilities, outages, and failed controls, for greater visibility, fast decision-making, and improved organizational performance. The new product experience increases productivity and simplifies navigation while a 360-degree view of dependencies and resilience metrics provides contextual understanding of upstream and downstream impacts across the organization. 

•       Log Export Service simplifies security and performance monitoring for Now Platform implementations. Building on ServiceNow Vault – which protects business-critical applications – this solution seamlessly incorporates ServiceNow system and application logs into enterprise security analytics tools. 

Simplifying experiences for smarter ways of working 

To succeed in today’s highly competitive environment, organizations must find new ways to realize the full potential of their workforces and maximize engagement and productivity. The Now Platform Utah release introduces more simplified, unified admin and agent experiences across Next Experience, so employees work smarter and get more done, while delivering excellent experiences for customers. It also introduces a better way to create a connected workplace with insights to inform planning and make the most of office space. New capabilities include: 

•       Theme Builder allows customers to easily create and manage branded themes via an intuitive interface that helps users create and preview a branded, personalized look and feel. These capabilities help organizations deliver consumer-grade experiences that work for everyone.  

•       Enterprise Architect Workspace allows users to gain control of app redundancy and limit unnecessary spending as organizations look to do more with less. This workspace provides a consolidated user experience for enterprise architects to make smarter decisions across their app portfolios while reducing risk and cost. 

•       Workplace Lease Administration arms facility managers with powerful data and insights so they can more effectively track contracts and make informed decisions about office space while controlling costs. As the role of the physical office continues to evolve with the reality of hybrid work, additional enhancements to Workplace Space Management unlock insights for workplace leaders to re-design workspaces that respond to employee needs. 

“Enterprises are increasingly looking to accelerate time to value and drive more growth from digital investments amid growing macroeconomic pressure,” said Stephen Elliot, group vice president, I&O, cloud operations, and DevOps at IDC. “As a result, IT and business leadership teams are evaluating shifts from legacy point solutions to modern cloud platforms in an accelerated manner, and across industries. This migration offers customers an ability to achieve faster outcomes and accelerated time to value with improved automation, increased agility, and more streamlined experiences. Armed with the ability to do more with less on one platform, enterprises have an opportunity to simplify and achieve competitive differentiation across processes and teams.”