ServiceNow has announced machine learning capabilities to tackle some of the biggest problems in IT.
With ServiceNow Intelligent Automation Engine, companies can now prevent outages before they happen, automatically categorise and route incidents, predict future performance and benchmark performance against IT peers.
Capability will also bring machine learning to ServiceNow cloud services for Customer Service, Security and Human Resources (HR).
Most companies want to innovate and drive transformation, but find that inside they are bogged down by tools, processes and work patterns of the past.
The volume of back and forth work across every department for common tasks like resetting of passwords or onboarding new employees is straining the system.
By 2020, 86% of companies say they will need greater automation to get their work done. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning provide a way out, but until today, those have been buzzword techniques or technologies looking for a use case.
The ServiceNow Intelligent Automation Engine is machine learning intelligence applied to four of the biggest use cases that IT has today. ServiceNow has taken the combination of massive amounts of contextual operational data, huge R&D investment and a team of leading data scientists, to address four big challenges for today’s IT organisations – preventing outages, automatically categorising and routing work, predicting future performance and benchmarking performance against their peers.
“Intelligent automation heralds a new era in workplace productivity,” said Dave Wright, chief strategy officer, ServiceNow. “With this game changing innovation, we have embedded intelligence across our Platform, trained with each customer’s own data, ServiceNow is enabling customers to achieve a quantum leap in the speed and economics of their business.”
Key innovations include:
- Anomaly Detection to Prevent Outages —ServiceNow has bolstered its ability to help customers predict and prevent service outages with anomaly detection. The algorithm identifies patterns and outlying occurrences that are likely to lead to an outage. Combined with new dynamic threshold measures, the system learns what is the normal range of behaviour and flags outliers that can indicate future errors or malfunctions. Initially delivered in Operational Intelligence for IT, the anomaly detection capabilities can correlate past events that led to outages and initiate workflows to pre-empt future problems when the same preceding events are observed again.
- Intelligence to Categorise and Route Work – ServiceNow will make available machine-learning algorithms to each customer’s unique data set based on the DxContinuum acquisition. By learning from past patterns, the Intelligent Automation Engine can predict future outcomes, including determining risks, assigning owners, and categorising work. Initially, this predictive intelligence capability will be used in the IT Service Management offering to categorise and route IT requests with a high level of accuracy. Learned models set the category of the IT request and assign the task to the right team, as well as calculate the associated risk of action or inaction. This capability brings new levels of speed and efficiency to IT delivery, and provides a foundation for the future, where connected devices create orders of magnitude increases in service requests.
- Performance Predictions to Drive Improvements—The Intelligent Automation Engine powers new algorithms in its real-time Performance Analytics application to help customers better determine when they will achieve performance goals. Customers set a performance objective and based on the data profile, Performance Analytics uses the optimal algorithm to predict when they will reach the objective.
- Benchmarks to Evaluate Performance Against Peers –ServiceNow Benchmarks enables customers to compare their service efficiency to peers – such as similarly sized organisations or companies in the same industry. In the past, comparing performance to peers was difficult if not impossible, now, companies can not only know how they are performing against their own goals, but how their performance compares to like organisations.
The Intelligent Automation Engine is part of the Now Platform™, which powers cloud services to speed and automate work for IT, Security, HR, Customer Service and custom applications for any department. As the platform evolves, all departments and applications will benefit from intelligent automation. By automating both routine and complex processes and predicting outcomes, every organisation can dramatically reduce costs, speed time to resolution and deliver consumer-like experiences for employees, partners and customers.
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