[Music] hello hello and welcome to the workflow Academy in this comprehensive platform Academy video series we'll delve into the transformative world of workflow automation empowering you to build Monitor and optimize efficient workflows with e join us as we explore the core tools of s now's workflow automation Suite to build flow and subflows playbooks and decision tables on the now platform hello everyone my name is Lisa henin and I work as an outbound product manager for the now platform my area of expertise is workflow Automation and I create enablement content articles and blogs on the now Community I also conduct live webinars and create videos on this channel to help you understand how to solve common use cases establish guidance and answer your questions about flows subflows flow action decision tables and playbooks I have been with service now for nearly 5 years now and have been working on the now platform since 2016 before joining service now I was a platform owner admin and developer at a customer back in 2021 I launched the platform fundamentals Academy which with a brief detour into the Creator workflow space became the platform Academy you're hopefully familiar with starting in 2024 my wonderful colleague terara fisha will lead the platform Academy series allowing me to spin off this new Academy series about the workflow automation products on the now platform but before we dive too deep into new releases new content new product features new guidance and new best practices in 2024 I wanted to give us all a chance to review the amazing workflow focused webinars that we had on the platform Academy in 2023 in today's session I will walk you through some recent features and product highlights for the workf automation Suite that you may have missed in the Utah and Vancouver releases which are the foundation for the enhancements plan for the Washington DC and zanadu releases later this year first up what is work automation work automation is the heart of the now platform driving Automation and processes for your Enterprise flow designer allows you to create purposeful automation with reusable flows and subflows as well as atomic automation components in action designer process automation designer connects previously siloed steps and allows you to gain a holistic view of your business processes all process activities in pad are driven by flows subflows or flow actions Playbook experience is the process aware ux to improve end user productivity ensure response consistency and reduce errors and then lastly my favorite decision Builder this allows you to eliminate manual data entry and maintain consistency across your organization with powerful decision tables so what's in a year in review without some stats and numbers last year seven out of 18 platform Academy sessions covered workflow automation products with two of them being crossovers with other platform products virtual agent and subscription management this highlights how our products work even better together a grand total of 734 people attended these seven webinars live asking questions participating in chat and rating the content and speakers at 4.85 out of five on average even more folks watch the recordings on YouTube on demand the videos accumulated over 5,600 views on YouTube and over 832 total hours of watch time in 2023 I want to extend a hearty thank you thank you to everyone who joined us live in 2023 thank you to everyone who watched these sessions on YouTube and a giant thank you to all my guests and co-speaker in the past year so let's get a quick overview of what we're talking about today we started in 2023 with a great product release Road mapap planned only to quickly realize that generative AI took the World by Stone and upended many well-laid plans in more than just the Enterprise technology Realm however while gen was it is certainly very impactful it was far from the only Innovation that we released that last year consequently this session will cover plenty more sessions topics and enhancements for workflow automation some of my personal highlights are certainly the growing feature coverage for flow diagramming and the introduction of process diagramming as well as draft authoring for decision tables and with that we'll Dive Right into flow designer in April Andrew Barnes and I ran a session covering all things approvals and flows the ask for approval action in flow designer can do much more than most people realize allowing developers to build even complex approval rules asking for approvals from different stakeholders percentages of replies and veto rejections we covered the changes made to the action to allow for multi-stage sequential approvals and a work around to enable approvals in parallel flow paths one of the more important insights to note here is that you can have parallel approvals within the same ask for approval action without the need for the do the following and parallel flow Logic the latter is only being needed if the following actions will also be different we also highlighted the benefit of decision tables to determine the right approval path granting decision ownership to non-developers and the option to change uh approval groups or users without making changes to the flows themselves this session is accompanied with a center of excellence article on the now community so make sure to check that out while flows and playbooks are helping you to automate task workk they're even more valuable when you use them in tandem with other products in July and August I hosted two guest speakers Victor 10 who runs the Academy's covering conversational interfaces virtual agent and now new also now assist there's slide with all the academy series leaders so you can go and check out those as well in our Better Together Academy session we covered the highlights of how virtual agent can improve your internal and external customers experience and how you can natively run flows subflows and flow actions from VI topics you can even return subflow or flow action outputs to the person running the VA topic Adam Stout is a raring guest speaker helping our customers get set up and running with a subscription management application on the now platform we have made several significant enhancements to this product and recently released subscription management V2 through the service now store watch The Academy session to understand how to make use of flows to best manage your subscriptions your user groups and roles to keep track of your subscription consumption my last Better Together recommendation is a Coe article not a video maybe not just yet in which I uncover the magic of combining decision tables with the dynamic subflows feature in flow designer use decision Builder to determine which subflow should be run based on endless condition possibilities Next Up release time every year in q1 and Q3 we bring out new family releases with major improvements for all our products additionally more and more applications receive updates through the service now store which allows us to innovate faster and release and enhancements on a quarterly basis some of the features listed here are store apps so it's always a great idea to keep an eye on your application manager which was by the way also reworked in 2023 make sure to see if there are any recent upgrades to be install for your plugins and applications my Utah highlights for flow designer is easily the option to convert a selection of steps into a new soft flow when we start building flows we sometimes don't quite know where the requirements will take us and only too late we'll realize we should have started with a subflow this is where the convert to subflow feature comes in clutch allowing you to mark multiple steps and convert them into a reusable subflow small quality of live improvements include the option to see where a given subflow or flow action is being used so we can assess the impact of our changes immediately you can access this feature from the overflow menu in the top right but it will also automatically appear when you publish a subflow or flow action Additionally you can now easily duplicate an action to drag and drop to a different branch or a different place in the same flow where you previously had to delete and read data pills you can now simply click on them to choose a different field without needing to do walk the whole path again flow priorities I are very useful to make sure that your business critical flows are processed first so there 's no time lost when it comes to security incidents Etc subflows will now also support flow stages and then lastly we have launched our first now assist skills for flow designer and made huge improvements to our flow diagramming which I'll show in detail on the next slides diagramming has been one of the top requested features for flow designer since it's the initial release over 5 years ago many people work best with the linear natural language layout the flow designer is known for but about this the same number of developers admins and other flow creators prefer a more graphical way to understand the logic and the pathing of their flows in a multi-release effort we're now on the final stretch of full feature parody between both views the last couple of store releases added support for decision tables flow stages subflows du until try logic and annotations this will allow you to freely toggle back and forth between both views and use the one that that helps you do your best work as we're working to add generative AI functionality to our platform when and where it makes sense we're focusing on bringing the most value to our customers and since time is everyone's most precious resource the now the first now assist features brought to you brought to flow designer help us get started and work faster with models trained on good and best practices with now assist recommendations you can see a selection of steps for you to quickly choose to build out your flow with each added steps these recommendations become more and more accurate and precise flow generation sets developers up with a way to quickly generate a flow outline from a natural language requirement this skill will be enhanced in upcoming releases we're only just getting started and next step is decision Builder the first Academy with Julia is still an all-time favorite over 2 years later so we knew we needed to do a new session to catch everyone up on what's new for decision Builder this follow-up session happened in April and we included new features and ux improvements from the last three releases since the San Diego release we can create multiple result columns with data to use for each decision made input and result columns now support more field types than ever one H Edition that we made in the Tokyo release allows us to to export decision tables to Excel and share these with our probably possibly non-service now decision owners these experts include all of the choices or references and options for conditions and results so that editing is guided and intuitive the edited spreadsheet can then be uploaded and it will automatically update our decision table more improvements made in Utah and Vancouver include my favorite feature in decision Builder draft authoring more on this in a little bit we can also now pick a default result which will be returned if none of the decision rows equate to True allowing us to have a fallback value when using decision tables even outside of flow designer where we used to have an otherwise option so now we can also have a default result for example when using the decision table API additionally we're now also supporting currency type fields for pricing decisions and also use and reuse existing Choice lists and add filters on reference inputs and in result columns to improve the decision- making experience one example that we had is if you want to uh surface groups or users as a result column you might want to filter that down to only support groups or only active users and then another highlight testing we can now test the decision table and see the result for any given test inputs new in the Vancouver release we can now decide to use the draft authoring option for our decision tables when this feature is active a decision table is not automatically live when saved instead we can have a published and a draft version at the same time only the published version will be used when called from outside of the test function and decision Builder and when testing we can also choose whether to test the draft or the public version next up is process automation designer and Playbook experience these two products are two sides of the same coin so let's look at the designer side first and then check out the improvements made on the experience side just like Julia joining me to talk about decision Builder product owner Jason Le fever joined me to introduce our platform Academy audience to pad and playbooks over a year ago you can find the links to the initial sessions on these slides and on the community it had been a while since these first sessions and we have added such significant improvements to our products we just had to do a refresh for these so let's look at some of the details optional activities for our playbooks have been introduced in the San Diego release but their configuration was still hidden away in the list and forms view of a process definition you kind of had to know where to go to Define an activity as optional these optional activities can be made available for one stage only or globally to be used at any point in the playbook in the Utah release we made this configuration available from the design space so now you can freely drag and drop an activity to and from the optional activity swim Lane one more feature highlight for process automation designer and the biggest feature highlight must be process diagramming while both diagramming and board view are fully equal in functionality the diagramming view does a particularly amazing job visualizing the path our Playbook will take conditional branching and parallel stages or activities can be understood intuitively and the distinct visual language for different types of activities or logic just makes sense conditional stages or activities have been available more or less since the Inception of process animation designer but we have gone one step further by adding a dedicated deis logic where we can Define paths for our playbooks this decision activity currently uses simple condition logic but we're planning to incorporate decision tables natively in a future release next we'll check out what's new for Playbook experience which is the ux side of our process playbooks can be added to any next experience page for example on a record Tab in a configurable workspace but prior to the Utah release Le it was just one giant vam moth Playbook component with very limited layout options initiated by our peer service now product business units like customer service workflows we broke up that one component into multiple configurable components to allow for a more custom Playbook experience in the Vancouver release we added a mobile controller too to allow the embedding of playbooks in the now mobile app this effort is being spearheaded by the field service management product team our new playbook components can be arranged and configured in multiple ways you can decide to include or hide any of these and choose between horizontal or vertical stage Pickers as well as show and hide as much activity detail as required additionally with recent improvements in UI Builder you can now connect those components to the relevant data much more easily and more quickly than before data presets and controllers will wire up all the necessary inputs for each of these components without requiring any prior knowledge as mentioned previously the field service management product is taking the lead on mobile playbooks the controller introduced in the Vancouver release can also be used for your custom use cases note that offline support is currently not included but would love to add that in a future release beyond the presets and controllers to set up the Playbook components in UI Builder we we've made some smaller but similarly impactful quality of life changes we've refreshed The Playbook UI with new icons and progress indicators and added support for multiple record generators on the same trigger table this enables us to configure taad record creation experiences which will preview and launch different playbooks based on different input values if you're interested in more enhancements and improvements made to the now platform the Utah and Vancouver release Academy sessions are available on YouTube as well the last workflow Academy I want to highlight is one that spans all the products mentioned so far Andrew Barnes joined me for another awesome session where we Dove deep into the features and functions that allow us to control access to a work for products this session comes with not just one but three Center of Excellence articles for each dimension of control we're working through on the foundational level we're working with the delated development or app collaboration features to determine access to the design interfaces on the designer level we determine which features or capabilities within the designers our developers have access to this can for example limit which spokes or flow logic can be used based on user roles on the topmost level we'll look at options to restrict access when flows subflows decisions or playbooks are executing we can configure flows to run with rols to ensure that they run in the desired user context but can still perform the necessary database actions with all of the content and improvements in 2023 it's easy to keep track of what's most impactful for you and your organization our major Focus areas and this past year are first an improved design experience removing obstacles and enabling new use cases second diagramming for flows and playbooks and third of course is generative II we launched flow assist and flow generation in the past couple of months and are planning more additions to our gen skill set in 2024 and Beyond if you lik this session first of all please upload this video and whether you liked it or not this survey is your chance to provide feedback or comments about this Academy I'm looking forward to reading your feedback the same goes here you can find the link in the video description or use the QR code shown on the screen if you're interested in other topics Beyond workflows let me recommend my colleagues Academy series each of them covers a different part of the now platform we have content about conversational interfaces including virtual Agent mobile apps analytics next experience workflow this is here core platform and of course artificial intelligence while on the topic of more content if you prefer to read up on topics at your own pace check out the workflow automation Center of Excellence on the community I've collected resources and links and I'm regularly publishing new articles with best practices FAQ and guidance around flow designer process automation designer and decision Builder to close things out I want to repeat my heartfelt thanks from earlier thank you to everyone who joined us for the platform Academy in 2023 and thanks to everyone who joins us for the workflow Academy Series in 2024 and Beyond thank you for providing your feedback and questions to help us make these sessions better for you until next time bye