[Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] hello and welcome to Creator toolbox this is the show that puts Tools in your toolbox for servicenow developers admins and all kinds of people who are working with the system we've got a very special show today we're going to be covering a new topic on explored territory a new product in Tokyo that I'm very excited about but first let's get to some introductions my name is Chuck tomasi I've been with servicenow since 2010 but a customer for a couple years before that and Computing history back into the Stone Age oh happy to be here passing it over to Earl hi everyone I am a developer advocate here with servicenow I've been with servicenow for a year but for about four or five years before that I was with customers mostly in higher education and then before that I was in student affairs and business administration for uh the universities and stuff like that and I'll pass it to Lauren hey good morning or afternoon or evening everybody my name is Laura McManaman I've been at servicenow the company for about five years uh but have switched from developer to sales to now also a developer advocate so super excited to be here and I'll kick it over to Benny thanks Lauren hi everyone I'm Benny bhatnager I'm a product manager in the nautics team which is a future products incubation team and I've always only been a product manager not like the others which roles and I'm here to talk about a new product we launched in Tokyo today so excited to be here all right so we are here it's October 11th we are working through in fact we're mostly through our Tokyo season so the icon in the upper right represents it's Tokyo season you saw something similar earlier this year with our San Diego content so that you know what context this fits into if you're watching this in the year 2035 you'll know oh yeah that was 2022 wasn't that cute well this is part of our Tokyo content and Earl just flashed up the link devlin.sn Tokyo and if we continue to pay our domain registration fees to the year 2035 that link will still work and get you to the page that has all of the Tokyo content depending on category or calendar or you'll find what we're looking for so you can go back and re-watch maybe you missed something or maybe you're watching this live in the year 2022 and you're planning on something that's coming up Podcast a live stream blog articles it's all there so if you're looking for Tokyo stuff we've got the breakdown starting at August 3rd of this year with our Tech now and working our way through the details of many of those topics and many more to come so without further delay I think we need to who are we turning it over to Earl or Benny Vinnie Benny Benny you're on stage thank you for joining us yeah yeah sounds good I can get it started oh it looks like you unshave your screen well the topic we're talking about today is automation Center New in Tokyo and there we go here it comes all right sounds good so the product I'm going to talk about is automation Center which like I said we launched in Tokyo and I want to start with we all know every customer is automating but what we realized is that automation at scale is not really easy and why is why is that so automations typically touch a lot of and complex Enterprise systems and they span across multiple Silo disconnected automation Technologies along with these automation Technologies it leads to a lot of disparate Center of excellences that are trying to maintain these distant different systems technologies automations which really adds on to the complexity because there are common problems everyone's trying to solve but they don't talk to each other they're all trying to do it in very siled environments and also some of these automations still require human Intervention which is prone to errors with minimum guardrails there's no no way to manage and monitor all these Technologies to uh in one central place so what is service now done uh on their automation Journey where is servicenow on that Journey yeah and we've been adding a lot of capabilities we've started with our basic workflows that's how service now started then we added app engine where citizen developers can build apps flow designer got upgraded uh sorry workflow got up created a flow designer then integration came with all the apis uh for these modern applications we introduced virtual agent where end users can solve problems I use that all the time in our platform and we added process optimization to our portfolio that's where you can discover new opportunities new candidates and some could be for automation and then we added RPA robotic process of automation where it helps uh customers make human Mouse clicks any mundane civil chair processes can be automated using RPA and then we added dock Intel that's the intelligent document parsing of unstructured data and you know again if it's repetitive manual so all these capabilities we kept adding on to our platform and from a tool standpoint we are a hyper automation platform right today customers can execute on business processes automate them by leveraging not only the digital workflows that we have but all these multiple tools along with AIML that complement all these tools and this is all on one single platform right which is really cool but what we've been learning is that only tools are not really enough to truly be a hyper automation platform so we spoke to a lot of customers and what we've been learning is that um that these customers are not really reaping the benefits of all these automations if it stays at a very tactical level there are common challenges because you know when we were taught when we were having these conversations interviewing customers we kept hearing like similar some some of the challenges were kind of uh similar and common so this is kind of for a summarized list of that so what what we heard is that discovering what to automate and prioritizing because you could have 100 things you could automate but there's only limited resources there's limited skills limited time so what should you automate it's really manual today it's done in spreadsheets there's meetings multiple teams are involved there's Email exchange so it's it's not an easy process so once you discover what to automate how do you automate it like I was mentioning there are so many Technologies today uh like I'll take an example for example uh there's invoice processing in sap should you use an a bot a RPA bot or should should you use an API integration because there are multiple ways you can do this but which is the best way to automate this there's no easy way to know that can you leverage um best practices because maybe someone else within the organization has done it can you reuse an existing automation a template a code snippet none of that happens which leads to duplicate efforts so that's another challenge we've heard then okay once you've automated um the life cycle of an automation doesn't really end there right it goes into production but there's maintaining the health of those automations organizations are really struggling in that space how do you maintain those automations after they go live in production for example when automations are built uh taking the RPA Bots you have to monitor the performance the failures the enhancements this changes fixing the water retiring them re-testing Etc so there's a lot that needs to be done the and the analytics and Reporting metrics around the return on investment because you've done all this work but what are you getting out of it and like I said there are siled tools so there's no easy way to know how much money you're saving what benefits you're getting out of it how many of these automations are really successful accuracy of these automations there's no one central place you can manage that every tool has bits and pieces of this but it's again all different dashboards it's really hard to at a high level Consolidated level see the benefit of these automations um and overall the governance of the automation life cycle the end to end like I said from Discovery to knowing if you're getting benefit out of it that's all missing and it's a big gap so I'm going to talk about how automation Center is help is helping with this let's do a quick product overview of what automation Center is so I'm sure you've heard about automation engine that is a bundle that we offer automation engine has RPA Hub which is your robots this computer vision rules engine there's template Solutions then there's integration Hub where you have all these connectors the apis you can do a custom integration Builder transformations and then we have document intelligence that's like semi-structured extraction and making sense out of that um there is it's all AI powered intelligent document parsing so all those Technologies are there in automation engine what we've done is uh We've added automation Center which brings it all together and what does automation center allow you to do it allows you allows uh you to take get intake of these automation candidates in one central place helps you prioritize helps you manage the health of these automations and then you can ultimately manage goals and your kpi tracking there's cost benefit analysis Etc foreign this is a quick visual overview of how the flow comes to be how the flow comes together in automation Center uh so we have data coming in so in Tokyo we went live with more of the RPA Technologies so there's data coming in from RPA uh via flow and in next few iterations we're going to bring in data from integration Hub and Dock and tells all the technologies that we have in automation engine so they uh we bring in the executions data into automation Center and then we are also continually discovering opportunities because it's an ongoing process from process optimization a service catalog any end user can submit a request right I'm an HR analyst I process um employee onboarding every day spend so much time it's repetitive I want to submit a request or ideation so there's different ways where you can discover automations they get submitted to automation Center then all these Technologies get applied on it and uh it all comes together in this one central place all these executions then get they get plugged into itsm which is a huge differentiator for us and out of the gate we have an advantage of a platform of existing capabilities where we are leveraging our cmdb our change management capabilities and I'm going to talk about a little bit more detail in this but this is like a high level flow and then once you know the new requests come in they get automated the execution start coming in then what automation Center allows you to do is you can report you can run analytics you can get insights and this is all in a workspace experience which allows not only the technical users to take advantage but also the business folks because they're all part of this whole automation um automation ecosystem and it brings so automation sort of brings all these stakeholders together uh which are like which is really important right so the kind of questions that can help answer for an automation development manager is how can they start their day what are the issues that they need to resolve today what system changes could impact the automations uh taking an example of sap generally the sap um application is owned by a different team the automation team is different and the automation team could have built automations on the sap system but if the Sap's team has an upgrade coming up the automation team generally doesn't have the idea and their automations break the Bots break so they can proactively be informed and then what automations do they need to implement right this is maintaining the health but like I said it's an ongoing activity what's next in the pipeline what does the team need to build more so that's that's some of the questions that automation Center can help them for a Coe lead a center of excellence lead they generally want to know are the goals being met because they've been assigned these goals and are those on track or not if they're not on track that is something they can look into are these automations adding value to the business because ultimately anything the team is doing it should add value and which automations to prioritize right like I said there could be so many automation requests that come in but which are the ones that they should really automate and then for executive leadership like a CIO CTO they want to know if the organization goals are being reached or not because that's ultimately their goal they want to know if those are being met or not I think this is um it's it's to like sum it up on this Slide the the main thing about automation Center is what I'm getting is two main things about the so one the central governance of it all being able to manage and monitor everything that's happening with automation but then also with the personas that you're showing on the right that return on investment demonstration to any stakeholders that you might have it really shows business value I know for all of us that are developers one of the main things that we always need to remember to be doing is as we automate and as we uh workflow and flow everybody's processes one of the main things we need to always be constantly doing is demonstrating to our stakeholders that this was worth it and automation spending is going to be very good about providing that kind of demonstrated Roi uh as we go without having having to actually set it up ourselves so it's really awesome yeah no that's right that's right and also what we realized right the reality today is that customers can pick and choose what automation Technologies they want to use and it doesn't have to be just service now it could be any third-party vendor also so the problem that we had like this is great what we were building but one of the challenge or problems that we wanted to look at was how can we Elevate and really coexist with these other automation vendors so the way we've built automation Center is that it is agnostic to third-party vendors um where so like I said for Tokyo it's only RPA vendors so um we have our servicenow RPA tool that is part of automation Center but it can be any third-party RPA vendor it could even be a homegrown RPA tool that using these generic apis that we've exposed using that you can push data into the automation Center and we will start getting data like your automation executions your RPA boards the robots that are running that so all that information comes in and then you can leverage all of these platform capabilities that I've been talking about it's centralizing all of the centralizing awesome yes yes because I mean we AK problem but but they could be using one of the third-party RPA tools they could be using us for immigration Hub Dock and tell but then their different dashboards there's different places to manage that so how do we bring all of that together was one of the challenges we wanted to solve so so moving on um just like the stakeholders that I was mentioning before it brings a lot of different uh different folks together you have the influences which is the automation Coe team because they are the key people who fit who are in charge of making sure the right automations are happening the right codes are being met you have the executive leadership like the sponsors they are the ones who are actually giving the budget and you want to make sure you can show value to them and then the buyer is the automation managers so they are the ones who are actually doing the work so automation Center brings all of them together this visibility it helps a collaboration uh so yeah so just wanted to mention that so next uh wanted to talk about the use cases that automation Center is trying to solve and which uh kind of helps with our whole high pro automation platform story that I was mentioning so the challenge that for the first challenge that we wanted to solve was that the biggest pain point is that building these automations sometimes is not the biggest like most challenging it's it's it's maintaining them because these automations work right they're brutal failures are really hard to find troubleshooting triaging is very time consuming I've spoken to customers where they have dedicated teams who are helping fix these problems it's it's really reactive again no one central place to manage that and this impacts the whole scalability right because you're just spending time at the Tactical level keeping the lights on so using R and how we solve this is using our capability of cmdb itsm change management because what we've done is that like I said it's just RPA for Tokyo so and it's going to be any anything you know any automation like your spokes and all that in future but for Tokyo all these RPA processes and robots are CIS as part of the cmdv with that what happens is that you can now plug in the itsm this cmdb change management now you can proactively manage your automations right because all these are CIS for example um I have a I have a automation built on like going back to the sap any impact on sap you'll know exactly where the failure is going to happen um so this is I think this is where we really differentiate and a lot of customers get excited this came from the customers organically that we should leverage the existing capabilities we've spoken to Gartner analyst and they said this is this is where we can actually differentiate and make a difference so that's one of the use case that we're trying to solve foreign which I touched upon a little bit is um you know I was talking about all these siled systems applications siled Center of excellences that are trying to manage all these uh different complex Enterprise systems and automations there is no Central visibility to view your benefits the impact the business impact right we were talking about that so without that the teams cannot even justify or ask for additional budget right because if you don't have if you can't show what benefit you've gotten out of it how much money you've saved how you get that extra budget so with automation center it's your one single pane of glass for not only service not any RPA vendor your integration Hub in future will be integration Hub your dock Intel anything you consider an automation because it's built in such an agnostic way you can monitor it here any third part argue vendor any even homegrown tone tool that you have so it provides like the whole monitoring the 360 degree I would say visibility of your whole automation landscape and this is the operating model so that was high level but how is it being implemented and what have we really provided from a functionality standpoint so we have Integrations with servicenow RPA and we have process optimization integration also built in where you can discover automation candidates and then um like I said any third-party tool I just mentioned UI path because we've extensively tested with that so the way this works is uh there's really two flows to it one is um there are new requests that customers want to capture so it could be a manual submission which is an end user like I mentioned before submitting a request uh via service catalog or process optimization is where process optimization finds these inefficiencies based on the like you could run it on incident table and it tells you where where there's opportunity for improvement and you can those can be submitted to automation Center so once the automations are submitted then there's life cycle management what that means is these automations come with the status new these could be deferred rejected they could move uh they could move to a planned State this this could be like a solution architect Enterprise architect trying to figure out prioritize you can create uh tasks on these uh automation requests that have been prioritized if you want a development task or just a design task so that this flexibility around that and you can do the whole task management where if it gets assigned to a developer to build an RPA bot another task is to a different developer to build a third-party RPA board because you could Stitch sub automations together and manage all that here and then once you do the whole life cycle you can um sorry and you can attach the resources the tasks you can attach it to because there are different teams that own these Technologies so you can kind of manage all of that in one place and once the automation happens you publish those automations as CIS then we have these dashboards one is an executions dashboard where and I'll show you a bit visual on that you can see insights and alerts of how should you start your day what's failing what's coming up um you know that and you can put uh you can you can configure insights on you know like for example we start a server every 15 days it's not on a particular automation it could impact multiple automation so there's a lot you can do in this executions dashboard but the idea is to manage the health of the automations to make sure everything is up and running and if there are any critical issues those are triage to the right teams and right people and the second dashboard that we have it helps you with more of the reporting and analytics it helps you manage the performance of these automation usage uh and there's few other metrics around return on investment how much time did these save how much money are these saving are the goals being met so things like that so one is like I said new automation comes in they get automated and then you can manage and monitor them here but the reality is customers are already automating so if you have existing automations it could be in service now RPA or a third party tool so vishna RPA out of the box we provide a flow where as soon as you Implement automation Center the you download the plugin you will start receiving data if you have automations created within using servicenow RPA a flow is going to start populating your executions your uh the processes your robots in these dashboards and for third party for V1 the first version that we went live with like I said we have the generic apis so using that it's a one-time setup once you do that the same information you're getting for service now RPA the executions the robots the processes will start populating in these dashboards so you could do a mix of both because it's a non-ring activity as new things come in you can create requests and bring in all that information or you could just do the existing data and you do not have to create a request for that that's awesome I actually didn't realize that I I was just thinking this was execution management and watching after the Bots were built but it really is life cycle management of bot creation because if you're assigning a bot to be created then it even shows from the beginning of when you even start attempting to think about automating a process and it actually tracks all that for I didn't realize that I was really literally from beginning to end yeah it is the end to end and we've uh you know something we've been really mindful is of is the usability and we want to keep the experience simple because this can get really complex and it is a complex process but it's very lightweight based on what we heard from customers that's that's uh that is one of the goals um so with that I think the last thing that I wanted to share is uh there's a demo a recording which will show you a glimpse of the product and it is a very nice overview that we have so uh it's a form of unlocking the true benefits of us I'm sorry it's a four minute video and uh it's really nicely put together so I'll say it automation requires more than just a few points unlocking the true benefits of automation requires more than just a few Point Solutions without a unified automation platform it's easy to end up with disconnected islands of automation that are not only difficult to manage but nearly impossible to assess in terms of efficacy and return on investment automation Center provides a solution to this complex challenge by offering a central repository to intelligently manage the full life cycle of automations from multiple vendors across your business let's follow the Journey of a cross-enterprise automation initiative that involves the automation center of excellence and the now platform owner both can now gain visibility into their organization's entire automation landscape in one place whether starting from data driven analysis or a flash of inspiration automation Center helps you make sense of New Opportunities using Discovery and submission mechanisms users from all parts of your company can submit their ideas using a service catalog entry lending their unique insight into potentially pivotal areas of automation alternatively you can use our best-in-class process mining tools like process optimization to harness the power of data-driven insights and automatically create automation opportunities pertaining to high potential areas of improvement uncovered by your analysis these automation requests flow into the automation Center workspace enabling effective evaluation and prioritization these records allow us to maintain full traceability throughout the life cycle of automation efforts and provide a way to easily create Associated tasks and manage relevant resources one great aspect of this approach to automation record keeping is that you can align your activities to business goals and tangible key performance indicators helping you automatically ascertain the value your automation initiatives are bringing to the table critical metrics like time and cost savings are just some of the useful components outlined on the automation Center overview dashboard this view lets you quickly understand what you've achieved with automation information about automation efforts that are going well and detail into areas of opportunity additionally you'll find a wealth of info regarding active automations along with a handy summary of future automations in a similar fashion the executions dashboard displays everything we need to discern the current state of our automation operations this includes helpful insight into job States executions over time and importantly detail about current incidents and upcoming changes to both automation packages and dependent applications because automation Center runs on the same platform as it service Ops every bot process and execution is configured as a cmdb configuration item surfacing plan changes to applications that could potentially break in automation this empowers service Ops teams to proactively prevent failures via change management while also relaying these key considerations within automation Center and of course all of these components are interactive so you can quickly get to the time frame or category you're seeking then drill directly down into pre-filtered details right from the visualization we've also Incorporated intelligent insights that keep your team ahead of potential issues these insights include good to know info that can help you proactively address possible future blockers and take action insights that will help you keep track of urgent problems impeding your automations the real power of the solution comes from the fact that these capabilities are designed to work cohesively with your environment integrating seamlessly with both servicenow Solutions and third-party systems consider the potential you identify an opportunity using servicenow's process optimization then develop an automation using either servicenows robotic process automation offering or your own RPA platform of choice your automation then interacts autonomously with external systems like your Erp platform and completes an end-to-end automated process using contextually relevant information provided by servicenow's low code Integrations to close the loop automation Center helps you keep track of the benefits this automation is providing relative to the business goals you're hoping to realize this potential is made possible by automation Center the latest addition to servicenow's hyper automation portfolio I think this solution you can manage and monitor across Enterprise automation across any vendor in a single workspace gotta love Tom yeah I recognize that voice Tom Freeman did that video and I just have this final one slide just to recap [Music] I think um welcome to Tech now the webinar series for servicenow developers admins and Builders of all skill levels he's got a video running somewhere so glad to be here before we get started want to make a couple of notes I think Binny's uh uh audio is YouTube went to the next video automatically which coincides with our Early Access and items shown in this webinar I've muted Benny just for a moment so that uh I was getting ready to do lip syncing yeah I know he's such a good plug for if you missed the tech now episode go ahead and jump over to devlin.technow if you want to listen to that audio going over all of the Tokyo uh information that we've been going through so that's a good plug thank you I brought you back today was that my laptop yeah I think you're YouTube after you got done with Tom's Video it went to the Next One automatically no worries I had a question for you you mentioned that uh we've got manual and automated ways to identify automation opportunities manual being a catalog item record producer and the automated ways through process optimization have we considered I'm going back about eight years to when I first learned about performance analytics and how it could spot optimization opportunities as well you're supposed to put your indicators where you had um you know key opportunities to identify performance have we thought about integrating triggers or something from performance analytics into automation Center yeah that's a great question Chuck um you know to your client just uh service catalog or process optimization are not the only ways to discover opportunities you know PA is one one we um so it's again the intake is agnostic this generic apis for that too if you have another Source where you want to push opportunities because you have customers who manage it in jira but jira is more technical there's more we have Dev tools right this there's demand management there's so many different places where these could be managed but automation Center is almost prescriptive to just automations so if you have a different Source you could push it in but to answer your question we don't have it out of the box yet it's not on the roadmap but if a lot of customers want that or you know if it becomes a priority we will definitely consider it all right thank you we had another question from the chat someone was asking uh if you could go a little bit more on how the automation Discovery Works um the idea of how do we know what things we should be implementing with regarding to automation how can you drill down a little bit into how that works if I understand correctly uh once you discover opportunities I mentioned like the whole prioritization right how do we manage that is that correct uh like how does the tool how does automation Center identify um automation opportunities so automation Center doesn't really identify them it manages it right it's a whole kind of management tool process optimization identifies opportunities and it submits it uh say like 30 opportunities were discovered and process optimization submitted 20 opportunities were crowdsourced from service catalog some could be manually created also right so automation Center collects those like 50 opportunities and it's a central repository of all of that right so that's what it does but it's not really creating any opportunities if that answers the question yeah it looks like we need to do an episode on process optimization to answer that question completely we did a live coding happy hour a long long time ago two three years ago when it first came out we hooked it up to our artifact manager and went well look how many of these don't follow the path we intended because we're manually changing states so it's it's out there but it's probably a bit dated at this point it might be worth looking at it yet ashitosh also asks are we able to in automation center drill down per product Suite so secops itsm Hrs the answer is no because you you could but you would have to build that integration but out of the box it's not there right now but like we've used elements of itsm like I mentioned right and we've used cmdb so the the capabilities that are integrated yes but not everything is seamlessly integrated with automation Center and um just to clarify we need to get access to automation Center this is in the servicenow store so uh yeah that's a good question we did go live with Tokyo so uh stories um it is part of automation engine bundle I believe it's part of the Enterprise bundle and it's it's free in that Enterprise bundle like there's no additional cost to it but you have to have that and if you do have that bundle to get get automation Center is it um already in your instance if it like with with Tokyo being installed or do you have to go to somewhere to get it or a plug-in yeah it's in the stores you have to download the plugin and yeah cool because we always get that question like where do we go to play Get It How do we try it out cool um what other credit do you all see any other questions the main thing that people are saying in here is uh this is amazing yeah I love it you know right awesome that's the the automation's amazing uh that's the general consensus it seems to be going through through the chat right now so um awesome to hear yeah I was like I'll save that for the end I bet Vinnie will be really happy to hear all those comments yeah because we just went live so I want to hear all the feedback good or bad right we're always looking to improve so I'd love to hear more feedback cool well thank you very much for joining us if there aren't any other questions I think we just have a couple of announcements and we'll get out of here uh first announcement we have is called for content for Creator con 23 is coming up I know it seems like May is a million light years away but it is not it is not the planning has begun and we need your input October 18th through November 15th is when you can submit if you have an idea if you don't have an idea now's a good time to think about it because you have one week if you're watching this live October 18th November 15th you go to the link that's on the bottom of the screen devlin.sn cc23 CFC you can submit your ideas and we will review them and hopefully everything works out you get picked we will also be doing some office hours during that period so if you don't have an idea we got a lot of people that picked one up off The Cutting Room floor yeah people were saying what about this what about this and how about we do this and we turn those into sessions so ideas pop up at those office hours meetings you could just walk in with a an empty offering basket and get something put in and walk out and go I've got the start of an idea I know where I'm going to go with this or if you've got an idea very encouraging to walk in there and help refine it so we are there to help you some of the best presentations I saw at knowledge22 were the people who actually attended these office hours meetings to get their messaging and ordering and how should I approach this it was it was a wonderful experience I had a great time in every single one of them the other thing is those office hours start tomorrow by the way so oh they start tomorrow evening yeah yeah okay morning and evening yes so check out the link if you want to attend those office hours it has the links to the actual time to the actual sessions themselves we've also got a number of hacktoberfest I'm sorry before I get to the other one the hectoberfest devlin.s Oktoberfest it is October we do this every year for is this year four or five or I lost count I think this is our fifth year doing it here okay so the idea is to help people understand Source control GitHub Repose working collaboratively this is a fun way to do it it's even easier Earl made it easy last year it's even easier and more popular and thank you very much for everybody who participates and if you do participate and meet the minimum qualifications is it still foreign I already ordered mine uh Earl already sported his in a recent video short that was a lot of fun so devlink.ss Oktoberfest and we have a number of developer Meetup chapters that are going back to in person so watch your calendar that is devlink.s meetups and you can find that you know what if you're not writing all these down devlink.sn slash links that's where you'll find all of these important ones so we'll make sure we keep that page up to date but the meetups uh people in Chicago Madison Atlanta Boston we see in New York check your calendars keep an eye on those Meetup chapters for your Q4 meetups you may find a holiday surprise we'll just say looking forward to uh seeing many of you I think Phoenix has an in-person Meetup coming in December virtual Meetup in October so lots of lots of Vibes happening again we're coming out of the dark ages of the last two years and people are very excited to get together in person again share ideas these things are way better in person not yeah put anything down about the virtual meetups they allow people from other areas to attend where they normally wouldn't but um looking forward to seeing a number of you at meetups again real soon so that's all the announcements I had anything else we're good they will play the music smile and wave how's that sound [Music]