It was one of those days, no time commitments, raining (for a change)… and I decided to catch up on the videos from Knowledge 16. It’s no secret that I’m not especially into all things tech, but the ServiceNow team provided an entertaining demo of this concept, that had a very strong message behind it. Well it got me interested, so I thought I’d share.

The Concept

Imagine unobtrusively monitoring one key metric on your wrist, using real time analytics that predict a potential future issue and raising an incident for your team to investigate and resolve before it actually becomes business critical. Welcome to SmartGlance.

The Story

An exec of a company is monitoring Customer Cases as his key metric. He’s on a date and knows it’s bad form to keep using his phone, but can get away with the odd glance at his watch. Quick caveat here, if it’s a first date, constantly looking at your watch, is not likely to lead to a long, happy relationship either!

Mr. Exec is alerted to an upwards trend in the number of customer cases being created that could become service impacting in the next 90 minutes. With a discreet tap of his finger, an incident is created for his Ops Team back at base.

Email? No thanks!

We’ve all got those email rules set up to channel emails to folders for future reading (that we never read) in a vain attempt to reduce the inbox clutter. Here’s an overview of the demo of the ways you can effectively and efficiently communicate using the power of the ServiceNow platform.

The Ops Director is on his laptop in the office. He invokes a Chat with his team to investigate the issue.

Back to the Exec who has excused himself and nipped off to check the Visual Task Board of Incidents by Urgency on his iPad. Aghast to see that his incident is Low he immediately moves it across to the High column. That should spur the team into action!

The Ops Team react to the virtual nudge and identifies the fix required (including a snazzy Orchestration demo to patch the affected devices). The Ops Director wisely decides to keep the boss informed, knowing that Connect will alert him on whatever device he’s using at the time.

The Exec pulls out his Android phone, accesses the ServiceNow app while his date is in the ladies and is now a happy bunny. Yes, there’s no excuse now for not keeping up to date with your business, the Android app is here.

A Quick Peek at Performance Analytics

Remember that alert the exec got?  This is using real time analytics, projecting trends from past data to predict a future event.

The Ops Director has a PA dashboard he uses and this includes a nifty new widget – the Geographical Heat Map. You can select from a range of maps, including the World, and from here you can drill down to more granular maps and finally to a list of cases for a specific town. Great visualisation to quickly focus on a geographical location and drill down to the underlying metadata.

Experience the Service Revolution

SmartGlance is a concept but the message is real. If you use a common platform to log issues, provide real time reports, analyse data, collaborate and communicate, the experience is far more efficient and service is greatly enhanced. Now, where can I get one of those watches?