Modernizing Your ServiceNow Experience: Why Now Is the Time

ServiceNow has made significant upgrades in both the Yokohama and Zurich releases, introducing workspace improvements, modernized reporting, and many smaller changes designed to prepare the platform for a more AI-focused future.

As a result of these changes, ServiceNow is sunsetting many legacy components that will require adjustments by both administrators and end-users alike.  That means now may be an ideal moment to take stock of your current implementation and focus on modernizing your entire employee experience.  Don’t waste the opportunity to have these platform upgrades act as a catalyst for transformation and innovation across your organization.

Our Checklist: How to Stay Current and Modernize Your ServiceNow Platform

1. Employee Center Migration

If you’re still using legacy portals or older service portal experiences, it’s time to move to the Employee Center. This unified interface is the future of user engagement on ServiceNow offering a consistent and more modern experience. If you haven’t already migrated, you’re already behind.

2. Reporting Modernization

Transition from Classic Reporting to Platform Analytics and Next-Gen Data Visualizations. The Yokohama and Zurich releases introduce key improvements to customization, performance, and usability. This update can unlock new capabilities and empower your data driven end users; however, it is nothing without adoption.   It will require evangelizing the change, highlighting the benefits and training your end users to drive adoption.

3. Workspace Transformation

ServiceNow is phasing out the legacy Agent Workspace in favor of the Service Operations Workspace and other configurable workspaces as part of the Next Experience.  Now is the time to align these new workspaces with how your business actually operates and how your fulfillers work, day to day.

4. Workflow Conversion

ServiceNow has completed the transition of all out-of-the-box workflows to Flow Designer. Starting with the Zurich release, new instances no longer include the legacy Workflow engine. Continuing to use it increases technical debt, security risk, and limits automation potential.  Migrate your legacy workflows into Flow Designer.  This step is critical for preparing your platform for AI-driven automation, ensuring resilience, and simplifying future upgrades.

Another important enhancement is moving to Playbook Experiences. These are the next evolution of cross-functional workflows and allow for standard “playbooks” for common and even complex operations where a single playbook can be run with multiple decision gates, variables and paths as required.

5. Embrace Now Assist

Now Assist offers many skills including: incident summarization, change summarization, and incident auto-resolution that will streamline operations across the enterprise.  This ecosystem of Now Assist skills is expected to expand and grow overtime.

Additionally, the natural language chat capabilities of Now Assist offer an easy, conversational experience that is a welcome change from legacy Virtual Agent’s scripted interactions.  With voice agent support expected to be released soon, organizations will be able to standardize their experience across all channels of engagement; truly transforming the way their end users get support.  The bottom line, not adopting Now Assist and continuing to use Virtual Agent will likely result in rework and missed opportunities for automation.

Don’t Wait, Act Now!

Many legacy components are already being deprecated or will be in upcoming releases. Delaying modernization could block your access to exciting new capabilities.   Do not wait until you are forced to make a change.   Use these upcoming changes as a catalyst and get ahead of the changes so you can focus on unlocking their full potential.

At RL Canning we help organizations assess, migrate, and future-proof their ServiceNow environments. If you’re ready to take advantage of these new capabilities, reach out to our team.  We are here to help you modernize, enable, and optimize your ServiceNow experience.