foreign servicenow what is normalization well it is the standardization of field values now there's often more than one way to record certain values for example like company names servers now for example correctly spelled is recorded with a capital S and a capital N no spaces but it may also be recorded as server space now or service Dash now or even just s n o w airports are a good example of where there's actually more than one correct way to write and identify an airport for example the long name of Brisbane airport as well just Brisbane airport but there's also an iata code which is bne and an icao code which is why BBN and it's important for us for our processes in service now that the data that is referenced is accurate that is uniform so that all our processes all our reporting is accurate because the data that is used for these processes is accurate and trustworthy it's important to note that normalization doesn't mean changing the display values of fields we're actually talking about standardizing the field values themselves for example our processors may all want to refer to Microsoft as Microsoft Inc but for dates for example we may have different display values for the same date and they can be changed in a user's display preferences a good example for normalization is for software licenses and software installations so you actually may purchase a software license for example for version 2023 but the software installation record actually records that software version as 2023.1.3.256 and we need a way to reconcile those two values as meaning the same thing so that we can reconcile our software licensors and support other processes that are using this data the now platform currently has different ways to normalize different field values and we're going to take a look at each of these features in this series so that hopefully by the end you're able to identify these different features know how to implement them and be able to select the right one for your particular use case we're going to start looking at normalization data services which is a way in which we can normalize the company name and then we'll move on to field normalization which is a method we can use to normalize essentially any field value but we can also transform values as well we can actually change the values According to some calculation and then we're going to move on to normalization features that are found in both the hardware asset management and the software Asset Management applications I'm just going to give you a brief overview of the features in those respective applications because we actually talk about normalization in the respective training courses for these apps so we'll take a look at the content service in hardware normalization and the content service in software normalization which is used to normalize Hardware models and software models the content service is actually a central repository maintained by a servicenow with various data that you can normalize records or field values against and then last we'll look at machine learning for software Asset Management as well so without any further Ado let's get started foreign