ServiceNow’s Process Optimization solution

With the latest release San Diego ServiceNow introduced exciting new features of their Process Optimization solution, part of the Enterprise license model. Process Optimization is similar to other, external process mining solutions.

According to Wikipedia: “Process mining is a family of techniques relating the fields of data science and process management to support the analysis of operational processes based on event logs. The goal of process mining is to turn event data into insights and actions.

Translating this definition to ServiceNow’s Process Optimization solution: the tool automatically analyses the ServiceNow Audit table and visualizes the real process flow for, let’s say, the incident management process and compares the real flow with the happy flow, the perfect process flow for incident management as designed. The gap analysis between the real flow and happy flow gives you as Wikipedia describes it “event data for insights and actions”. It guides you to process steps that needs improvement projects. Extremely powerful!

Analyzing the audit data with Process Optimization will give you results like a huge percentage of reassignments, reopening’s or solution rejects. Based on this real customer data we know that for this organization the focus for improvement projects should be on these specific topics. Without Process Optimization it is kind of blind guessing what the most important improvement projects should be for an organization. You just assume/hope that the improvement projects that were good for organization A should also be good for organization B. Not true…

At The Cloud People, Process Optimization will become an important tool in the analysis phase. But there are other ways of course to analyze process data as the picture below clearly shows.

The picture above also shows how the ServiceNow Pro and Enterprise solutions like Predictive Intelligence, Virtual Agent or Performance Analytics should work together for any improvement project, continuously. The flow for any improvement project goes like this:

1. Pick the most important business goal for your organization. Let say Cost Reduction
2. Analyze the real data with the tools available (PO or Clustering), but also manual analysis, interviews. Result of the analysis could be: High percentage of manual password resets.
3. Design an agile improvement project around Password Reset automation. We use the ServiceNow solution Continuous Improvement Manager (CIM) for running improvement projects.
4. Implement Predictive Intelligence and Virtual Agent solutions to deflect these incidents from first or second level support and provide self service tools for the end user.
5. Monitor and analyze the individual trends for this specific improvement project and align these KPI’s with the overall process goals and business goals. So we really see a positive trend for the business goal “cost reduction”

Looking at this approach it is easy to see why we are so excited about Process Optimization, right? Having access to the real process data for analysis will guide any customer to the most important improvement cases. No more guessing or trial and error. Maybe not the holy grail, but definitely a huge step forward.