ServiceNow - Managing Your Environment

Venetia Rook - 13th January 2016

Those of us who have ever worked in large offices have no doubt all been guilty of thinking our office moves, cleaning and availability of paper for the printer happens by magic. In fact, the smooth running of our environment is controlled by Facilities Management (FM) which, along with Property Management, continues to evolve as businesses realise the need to understand the space they have and how it is being utilised. With the Geneva release, ServiceNow offer some major features/enhancements to support this area of Service Management, significantly increasing the platform’s potential.

 

Space Management

A key new concept is Space Management. Buildings are now included as Assets, so the CFO will easily be able to have a view of costings (e.g leases). Spaces extend from the Location table because this is referenced throughout ServiceNow and is not restricted to rooms; it can be anything from a gym, to a table or even a parking space.

The main benefit is the ability to flag the space as occupiable (after all, you wouldn’t want to seat your new starter in the Ladies Toilet, now would you?), define the maximum users for the space, allocate people to them (primary space and any other place they may have at their disposal) and then roll up the occupancy percentage by level/floor (oh yes, we don’t just have floors now, remember the outside parking spaces!), building and overall company. The FM team (and the ever so grateful CFO) can now understand the space they have and how efficiently it is being utilised.

Zoning In On Groups

If that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, we also now have logical groupings of spaces called Zones. These can be departments (it’s not always possible to seat everyone in one area), cover multiple buildings, or most usefully (with my IT Service Management hat on) show spaces that get their network access from a specific WiFi access point. I know you’re way ahead of me here, but this is a really good example of Enterprise Service Management in practice, not just the sales speak! IT know there is an incident affecting that WiFi point and FM know where, and crucially who, is affected. Simple, but oh so effective.

And Last But Not Least

In true showcase fashion, I’ve left the best ‘til last – the new and ever so snazzy interactive Floor Plan Viewer. (N.B. Legacy floor plans can be migrated to this new feature).

People can easily locate rooms and colleagues using the self service capability, and this really helps the FM team manage spaces, requests and tasks and supports the other new feature, the workflow-driven employee Move application.

The maps use GPS co-ordinates and ServiceNow have partnered with Micello, experts increating GeoJSON maps (that’s the techie bit). There are icons so you can easily spot the Fire Extinguishers and the ever so useful bathroom facilities, information can be updated from the map and if you are a member of the FM team, you can identify the tasks assigned to you and see where they are located.

The Geneva release is the start for building out this area of Service Management, so Watch This Space!


For more information on how Engage ESM can help you implement ServiceNow in Facilities Management, please contact us.