How ServiceNow Applications can accelerate the Growth of your Business
Simply put, ServiceNow is a web-based platform where you can build your own customised platform for your business, using little to no-code. This platform, known as the Now Platform, provides APASS — an Application Platform as a Service. It lets you use an intuitive development environment to create your business workflows using drag-and-drop components, and easily automate business processes. ServiceNow was recently declared as a Leader in Enterprise Low Code applications by Gartner, and is currently used by large scale businesses around the world.
ServiceNow allows you to create a custom-made application for any process or task you need to integrate into your business, be it employee management, issues and incidents or customer request management. In this post, I share my views on what makes ServiceNow an ideal platform to build your business application.
- Integrate every aspect of your company within a single application
Using ServiceNow, you can create applications to model any and every workflow in your company — IT services, Employee management or Customer Management.
2. Build cross-platform applications using built-in components
Now Platform provides you with Application Studio, an intuitive environment where you can build applications, simply by creating database tables and using drag-and-drop UI components. It further lets you to expand your application reach by building web and mobile applications, which can later be published to be installed in users’ devices.
3. Use Flow Designer to manage end-to-end processes
Imagine you have a process where customer can create an order for a product they are going to purchase. As soon as a new order is created, the employee who handles orders should be notified by a notification or email. The Flow Designer in Now platform lets you map this process using a few drag-and-drop components, automate the workflow without any coding, and test out how it executes in real time.
4. Ready-to-use Service Portal and Service Catalog
The Service Portal in ServiceNow lets you create a separate access point for employees to access your application. It is powered by simple components that can be used to build a portal for the user, encapsulating the implementation details such as database tables and workflows.
Service Catalog enables easy building of these portals, by allowing separation of services to different employee or customer groups in the company. For example, the catalog for customers will allow them only to create support tickets, while the catalog for the Support Engineers will allow them to manage and resolve the tickets.
5. Easy Analytics with Dashboards
ServiceNow lets you create dashboards for all or different groups of users, to give a high-level overview to the business processes. These dashboards enables you to add a variety of information, ranging from simple counts and averages to complex performance analytics. These analytics are built-in to the ServiceNow platform, and are one-click away for the platform user.
6. Scripting for fine-grained customisation
The Now platform enables you to build a fully functional application without using any code at all. It further lets you extend the basic functionalities as you wish, by using JavaScript to write Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and classes, and executing them either on client or server side. For instance, server-side scripts can be used to perform database operations and automations, while client scripts can be used to modify the appearance of user interface forms based on user input.
7. In-built Version Control
Most companies use a form of version control to manage their software applications. ServiceNow supports out-of-the-box version control support, allowing you to easily integrate your Git repository and perform commits within the platform itself.
8. Ready-to-connect Application Integrations
ServiceNow Integration Hub offers third-party app integrations, which are known as Spokes. These applications include Jira, Jenkins, HipChat, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure, which are widely used among enterprises around the world. In addition to these available integrations, you can create your own custom Spoke, and use it as an integration across several applications.
9. No-code Predictive Intelligence
Imagine your application needs using insights from your own application data, and needs to integrate a machine learning component to perform operations based on these insights. ServiceNow offers an out-of-box workbench which can be used to categorise, detect and predict trends and incidents that can occur, and carry out automated operations and provide recommendations.
10. Build ChatBots with Virtual Agents
ServiceNow further lets you build your own chatbot for your application, using the built-in virtual agents. These virtual agents support a set of pre-built conversational topics for easy deployment, and allow you to deliver a personalised experience to the customer.
This brings us to the end of this post. Hope it was informative and helpful to you.
Thank you for reading!
