ServiceNow Tokyo Release - Features and Enhancements

The Tokyo release is here and it’s time to find out what ServiceNow developers believe to be their favorite features in this release. We have covered some features that impact App Engine Automation & customer service management.

Overview of the Tokyo Early Availability (EA) release

Customer Service Management

• Case resolution through AI : Resolve customer cases faster with automation and AI.
• Auto-populate fields, detect customer sentiment and extract attachment data for more complete case files.
• Industry data models : Unify business operations across internal and external business locations. Define and register franchises, dealerships, and staff.

Field Service Management

• Territory planning : Optimize service territories. Minimize coverage overlaps, improve scheduling, and visualize people, tasks, and assets with an interactive territory map.
• Schedule optimization : Maximize scheduling efficiencies by prioritizing business objectives and scenario KPIs. Enhance real-time, in-day schedules and automatically balance multiple priorities.
• Capacity and reservations management enhancements : Schedule resources efficiently by managing employee workload capacities. Optimize capacity usage by leveraging internal and external resources to meet appointment booking needs.
• Inventory management enhancements : Optimize part sourcing and maintain inventories. Field resources can search for, transfer with peers, select, and request multiple parts.

Document Intelligence

Document Intelligence is a new application in the Tokyo release. Document Intelligence application is a machine learning (ML) solution that provides assistance to quickly and accurately extract information from documents to the Now Platform

Environmental, Social, and Governance Management

The new application helps you manage all your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments and enables you to report on the progress that you make on your ESG initiatives.

Enterprise Asset Management

The Enterprise Asset Management application manages the entire life cycle of your enterprise’s connected and non-connected assets. This end-to-end solution enables you to maintain and maximize the life of your assets and at the same time, minimize any costly downtimes. Enterprise Asset Management is a new application in the Tokyo release.

IT Service Management

Admin Center: Simplify licensed product configurations and set up. Increase transparency and time-to-value by monitoring, managing, and adapting applications and capabilities.

ITOM

Accelerated root cause analysis: Review how DevOps configuration item (CI) changes modify configuration data values and assess them against policies to resolve, reverse, and modify non-compliant changes to related incidents.

CMDB

CMDB attestation with smart detection: Confirm critical CIs are present with the attestation widget and attest discovery items automatically with the smart detection feature.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (Integrated Risk Management)

Scenario Analysis for Operational Resilience: Resolve service disruptions before they become a business risk by monitoring and predicting impacts and disruption scenarios.
Strategic Portfolio Management
Financial metrics: Enable process managers to confidently re-forecast project costs when changes occur​.

App Engine

• Flow Designer enhancements : Enhance workflow reviews and eliminate change risks with read-only views for users and stakeholders.
• Process Automation Designer enhancements : Create complex process variants efficiently by building new processes from an existing process definition and duplicating tested methods.
• Pro development enhancements : Convert ServiceNow Store apps to in-development apps and submit deployments in parallel without causing collision using continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Now Platform

Next Experience UI

• Admin Center : Follow a guided experience to install and configure ServiceNow solutions including personalized application recommendations based on instance maturity and desired business outcomes.
• Platform Analytics Workspace : Leverage cross-platform user experience and log analytics data in a dedicated workspace. Design, build, and configure complex dashboard visualizations with in-line editing and advanced UI builder components.

Now Intelligence

• Task Intelligence : Deliver fast resolutions with AI-powered task creation and triage. Understand sentiment to prioritize efforts, categorize cases to route them correctly, and auto-populate fields with Document Intelligence.
• Process Optimization enhancements : Discover and analyze processes to maximize performance with multi-dimensional process mining.
• AI Search enhancements : Leverage search-based autocomplete suggestions to get users to the correct destination. Expand language support to traditional and simplified Chinese-character tokenization.
• Virtual Agent enhancements : Enhance customer conversation experiences by detecting and translating to the end-user’s language, routing conversations with topics in Slack and Microsoft Teams, and sending interactive voice responses (IVRs).

ServiceNow mobile

Mobile Agent enhancements: Drive agent productivity with offline record creation, updating, and viewing. Allow agents to upload multiple media files simultaneously, and toggle between map and list views for all points of interest.

Platform Security

• ServiceNow platform encryption : Increase privacy policy compliance with cost-effective encryption that works for both a ServiceNow and customer-managed key (BYOK).
• Adaptive Authentication for mobile devices : Improve secure authentication for ServiceNow instances on registered and trusted mobile devices regardless of physical location. Increase mobile user productivity and authenticate them with context-based authentication to remove vulnerabilities.

Platform foundation

• Automated Testing Framework (ATF) enhancements : Improve the quality of apps and accelerate testing speeds with AI-powered automated testing and verification.
• Upgrade plans : Accelerate and simplify upgrades by packaging applications across multiple instances in an upgrade plan. Upgrades can be configured in a subproduction environment to ensure the desired outcome before upgrades are live.

More products and features will be released with the Tokyo General Availability (GA) release at the end of Q3 2022.