What’s new in the ServiceNow Paris release

Rob Corradi - 18th November 2020

With the Now Platform Paris release, ServiceNow are providing powerful capabilities to help enterprises fuel growth and strengthen business resilience, while enhancing employee productivity and customer loyalty. These are all critical to surviving in the COVID economy.

These new features mean that you can better leverage one platform to optimize IT productivity, cost, and resilience, drive customer loyalty, deliver the right employee experience anywhere, and create new workflow apps fast.

 

Rob Corradi, Senior Technical Consultant, Engage ESM, takes a closer look at how Paris could help your organization, read his blog below:


IT Asset Management (ITAM) and specifically the Hardware Asset Management (HAM) area has, until now, appeared to be the poor sibling to the CMDB. But now, with the Paris release of ServiceNow, we have seen a number of significant improvements! Even though ServiceNow introduced their SAM Pro offering over a year ago, and subsequently moved into the market leader quadrant, the world of HAM did not have the same attention, until now.

Anyone who’s ever dipped a toe in the world of ITAM will have seen the life-cycle, it’s fundamentally unchanged – with no reason to completely rethink what isn't broken:


 

Key updates

New tools and capabilities that support this life cycle specifically, include the introduction of:

  • Hardware model normalization
  • Asset life cycle automation
  • Auditing of your asset inventory
  • Hardware Asset Dashboards

Honorable mention goes to the “Quick start tests for Hardware Asset Management” that will support upgrades on the platform. This is not to be underestimated as those platform releases come along twice a year and you’d want your ITAM solution to be functional on the back of an upgrade.

That said, the list is perhaps in the order that drew my attention the most. Hardware model normalization has been a challenge and pain point for customers, different data sources inevitably describing the same asset with differing terms (let alone some manufacturers doing things a little differently to the majority). Without normalizing this data, you can quickly end up with multiple entries for what is managed as a single asset product model (and that has its associated problems in the CMDB also). Akin to the similar offering in the SAM Pro space, now you can get your hardware models normalized as a service, where SN can provide a standardized value, giving you the consistency and control in this space to improve your data quality and so improve your business functions.

 

Life cycle automation

Another great improvement is in the life cycle automation. End-of-life for an asset should be managed via the disposal process, now this can be more efficiently be managed with ServiceNow, allowing you to cover more than one asset at a time, and critically this now goes through to disposal documentation.

That’s not the only improvement in this area – but it’s one that I take a keen interest in, having been on the cusp of creating a custom app to do something similar for customers in the past.

 

Who, What, Where?

In another time I heard one of the simplest (aka best) descriptions of ITAM, you want to know who’s got the device, what they’ve got, and where it is, so you may find me (and others) saying, “Who, What, Where.” Robust ITAM practices ensure that these three questions can easily be answered, but is that ever enough? ITAM is one of those areas where IT and Finance meet, and where there’s Finance there are controls that require audits. I’ve been through the “fun” of auditing, manually, walking around a stock room or data center floor to check what’s there. So, having the ability to scan (using a mobile device) and rapidly build a view of whether assets are as expected or not, identify what’s missing, and what is new, will help ensure that your ITAM data is maintained to the highest quality.

All of this could not be considered complete without reporting and that means a dashboard, which provides visibility and insight into the key areas of model management, procurement, inventory, and end-of-life.

All in all – this is great news for managing your IT Assets and will bring real-world value to you in your ServiceNow usage. To find out more about our offerings, including ITAM, HAM, and Paris upgrade support, contact us today.