this is troy with now with troy with a workflow wednesday take two i tried an adventure of doing a behind the scenes and not surprising tech problems i don't know why my lavalier mic wasn't working but it wasn't and so i'm going to try to recreate the same thing we did last time live and do it again today on workflow wednesday one of the things we're talking about is what is a servicenow workflow and why does it make the world of work work better and so let me try to explain work is dynamic and one of the things that means is as we go through work it needs to go to different people needs to go to different teams and different things have to happen and those variations in work depend on what it is requesting what's happened in the system those things are conditions there's logical tests that we have to do to check to see if it's actually going to work for us and that's what a workflow is it's a combination of having servicenow watch the different things and provide either a logical test create a task ask for an approval or do some scripted activity and we'll talk more about that one too but think about work and sometimes it's good to walk through an example and so consider requesting a new laptop or a piece of equipment let's keep it generic and so as i request a piece of equipment the first test in that fulfillment workflow if you will is looking at a threshold let's say it's a thousand dollars if it's under a thousand dollars there's no approval it's just we know that there's some requests that's going to be done um and that will go and get fulfilled if it's above a thousand dollars maybe my manager has to approve it or a leader above it has to approve it and so in the workflow there would be a test is the requested equipment more expensive than that threshold or not if it is go one route if it is not go another and that decision of what comes next is if it is too much it would go up to create an approval request for someone to review it and determine if that fulfillment should be done or not the next step is actually go on off and doing it and for something like a piece of equipment let's say it's stocked in a store room servicenow would know about that right and it might be a task for someone to pull it from that stockroom or procure it or find it and provide it to it for configuration and so the workflow would create that task assign it to the group or individual to go and pull that equipment when that's completed the workflow again would trigger to show up say all right that task's done what's next the next task in this scenario could be you know assign it to a group in it to pre-configure to set it up so when that group is done doing that work it'd be assigned to their cue they'd see it they'd do the work make some notes and when that's done perhaps there's an alert come to me let me know hey it's been pulled it's configured it's ready for you and in our work from home days that likely means the next step is going to someone that can package it and ship it to send it to me and so as that's packaged and shipped it would be sent out and that step would be done and then there's another step where perhaps the system could be watching to recognize when a shipment was received notification or you know certain number of time has passed so follow up and say what either what happened to the shipment or was it actually acknowledged that it was received and so those actions could differ again we're watching different systems and responding with conditions the next step could be having assigned to a group that could reach out to me and say hey troy did you get your equipment do you know how to access it to log in and use it is that working as you expected and then when that task is done you know it could close off the fulfillment for that in that example we can see there's a whole number of different things talked about there's logical tests there's tasks to assign there's approval requests that could go out and then there's also times where i could go out and update a system sometimes that could be updating another record inside of servicenow for example the configuration management database could be updated along the way saying hey this asset tag this configuration item is now assigned to troy pisola you could update the location when it's shipped to know you know where it's at so each of those could be the workflow going off and updating that ci configuration item record in the system those types of scripted or automation responses uh are really called in oftentimes i'll differentiate between automation moving things from person to person an orchestration where a servicenow is going off without fingers on a keyboard and making updates to a technology often i'll determine that or call that orchestration instead of automation nuance doesn't really matter but just know that inside a workflow it could be both we're workflowing things where we're asking other groups other individuals to do some work whether it's an approval or an action and we're asking systems to do things we're either updating system we're waiting for a response from a system or you know going off and updating a system by actually changing some things or using calling api calls or other things that combination of things is really what makes a service now workflow if you haven't seen my video on what is servicenow check that out on the youtube version of this i'll put a link above and in the comments below and on linkedin i'll put it in the comments below um but again that's it what is a servicenow workflow it's a combination of those logical tests approvals tasks in scripted or technology orchestrations that can go off and make the world of work work if you have questions on how you can get more out of servicenow don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have comments or questions or other suggestions of things that i should cover on a future workflow wednesday don't hesitate to send me a link if we're not connected send me a message request or an invite in and include that in your connection request or send me a message i look forward to hearing from you and catch me on the next workflow wednesday thanks bye-bye