ServiceNow EMEA: Shaping a cloud platform release

The Now Platform® Washington, D.C., release is here with exciting new features, including Platform Analytics and new AIOps experiences. These and other innovative capabilities are designed to help organizations boost productivity and accelerate time to value.

A project like the Washington, D.C., release requires contributions from multiple teams in multiple regions. ServiceNow employees in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) who helped shape the cloud platform release share how they collaborate on a global scale, how some of the features and enhancements came together, and how customers can benefit.

Unified analytics experience

Any platform release is "a collaborative effort on a huge scale," says Ramya R., senior manager of software quality engineering, who joined ServiceNow 11 years ago as one of the first quality engineers in Amsterdam. Today, she manages a team of 16 in the Netherlands and Israel.

"There were many individual contributions and moving parts, which all had to come together seamlessly," she adds. "That's where my team came in."

The team was tasked with ensuring Platform Analytics was completely integrated and worked as it should to create a unified analytics experience. "Now, there's a single page where users can navigate, share information across roles, and create visualizations seamlessly," Ramya says.

"We tested this rigorously, making sure that where there were inconsistencies or roadblocks, we were the ones to find them and pass them on to the relevant teams for resolution before they made it into the final release," she adds.

Improved incident management

The Washington, D.C., release includes numerous enhancements to our IT Operations Management (ITOM) product by our teams in Israel. Noa P.G., a software engineer on one of the most diverse teams in the Israel office, worked on the new alert automation feature. It provides context around events and alerts to help operators make informed decisions and accelerate resolution.

"It sounds highly technical, but at its core, it's about giving the customer a more targeted and efficient Event Management strategy to improve incident management," Noa says.

She and her team strive to consistently improve how the platform works. "Even if something is good, we ask, 'Could it be better?'" she explains, adding that her team is using customizations inside the user experience improvements frame.

"The higher level of customization in Washington, D.C., means the customer has more control over their incident management strategy-and ultimately more freedom."

Increased alert visibility

Shay C., manager of software engineering in Israel, oversees a team of six developers and two quality engineers. They started working on the Washington, D.C., release at the end of 2022 to develop and improve Service Operations Workspace in partnership with the IT Service Management team.

"Put simply, we were working to make the platform more intuitive," Shay explains. He and his team succeeded in developing an AIOps feature called Express List.

"In the past, customers had visibility over their alerts via a list page and alert records," Shay explains. "But for those dealing with multiple alerts, it was a lot of wasted time traversing back and forth to grasp required information."

Express List gives customers greater insights into the relationships among any given group of alerts.

"It essentially creates an all-in-one diagram for them, which wasn't the case in previous iterations of the platform," Shay says. "It fills in any gaps in knowledge so the customer doesn't have to. In this way, it's simpler, it's more intuitive, and it makes life easier for customers, which is always the goal.

Accelerated anomaly detection

The Metric Intelligence team spends most of its time improving anomaly detection within the platform. The team's work on the Washington, D.C., release helps make it easier for customers to identify and understand anomalies within their operations.

"ServiceNow caters to customers with highly complex operations, including multiple servers, services, devices, and processes," explains Matan G., another software engineer in Israel. "If something goes wrong, it can often be hard to identify whether it's a single anomaly or if there's a wider trend that needs to be addressed."

The enhancements in the latest release give organizations better insights into similar or consecutive anomalies, as well as the option to keep an alert open for as long as necessary. This new level of customization provides increased visibility, which can result in better resolution.

"Across Metric Intelligence, we work with software engineers and data scientists who play a vital role in building the algorithms we implement," Matan says. "It's great knowing we're all contributing to a global effort, improving the platform in a way that benefits customers all around the world, not just in EMEA."

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