Workflow has become one of the most important areas businesses are focusing on. This was made even more pronounced when the workflow of so many industries was profoundly changed by a global pandemic. For businesses to remain competitive, they had to do everything they could to tune and pivot their processes to adjust to the changing landscape. Not only were supply chains changing, but more and more employees and staff were working remotely.
What is workflow? To put it simply, workflow is the series of activities that are necessary to complete a given task. Workflow can be applied to nearly any segment of business, from development, production, distribution, marketing, and everything in-between. Each step through the workflow process should be carefully orchestrated, such that the entire process is as efficient and well-planned as possible. With a well-honed workflow, a business runs smoothly and can reach levels of profitability never-before-experienced. A poorly planned (or not planned) workflow has the opposite effect.
Let’s take a look at a very simple sample of a workflow. Take, for instance, the employee onboarding process. Such a workflow could consist of the following tasks:
- Prepare paperwork.
- Approve employee paperwork.
- Discuss role, goals, and projects with the immediate supervisor.
- Prepare employee workstation.
- Give employees access to the software and hardware they’ll need.
- Create accounts for employees.
- Prepare the employee benefits package.
- Provide a job description (including responsibilities) for the employee.
All of this happens before the employee even has their first day of work. Once they arrive on the first day, there’s another workflow to go through.
Now, imagine you’re an enterprise company that must go through this process hundreds of times a day or week. If you don’t have a perfectly devised workflow, it’s going to be a challenge to onboard all of those new employees.
Businesses, applications, and services to assist with corporate workflows have popped up everywhere, each of which promises to perfect your company’s processes. One such company is ServiceNow, which leverages a cloud-based platform to help businesses manage their digital workflows for enterprise operations.
By using ServiceNow, your company can better streamline your workflows to ensure every process is as efficient and reliable as possible. And because ServiceNow offers different types of products, you can be sure to find one that perfectly matches your company. You’ll find ServiceNow products for:
- Information Technology Service Management – enable services for your end-users.
- Information Technology Business Management – optimally deliver and manage business services with a focus on IT.
- Customer Service Management – built to help you oversee and track interactions with customers.
- Information Technology Asset Management – better lifecycle management of IT assets.
- Software Asset Management – manages the acquisition, usage, and lifecycle maintenance of software.
- Human Resources Service Delivery – automate and standardize your HR processes.
Why your company should use ServiceNow
There are several reasons your company should adopt ServiceNow, such as:
- Helps to reduce ITSM (IT Service Management) costs.
- All workflows are managed within the same platform.
- Employees will perform better.
- Service levels will increase.
- Makes it possible to replace unstructured and inefficient workflows.
- Enables much-improved help systems.
- Web services and email actions handle most events.
- You won’t have to worry about the maintenance of hardware or software for your workflow management tools.
- User-friendly customer service portal (complete with company branding)
But don’t think ServiceNow is limited to HR and management. Numerous teams can benefit from this cloud-based service, such as employees, IT support, admins, ops and implementers, and developers.
It’s that combination of ServiceNow and developers that should be especially intriguing to your company. When employing ServiceNow with a DevOps spin, your company can rapidly build, test, and deploy applications. And anyone can build on the Now Platform. The ServiceNow development process goes like this:
- Define business requirements.
- Define the data model.
- Build the application.
- Test the application.
- Share the application.
Hiring Guide
One thing to know about ServiceNow is that those you hire won’t be working on the platform. Instead, they’ll be working with it. In other words, you’re not hiring software engineers to develop applications to extend the feature set of the ServiceNow service. You will, however, be hiring developers who can function within the confines of a predefined workflow.
That’s key for your hiring process. You don’t want to hire a developer who prefers to work as a “lone wolf,” and who tends to work in an unstructured way.
Your business makes use of ServiceNow to ensure every single workflow is as efficient as it can be. If you employ developers who can’t abide by such restrictions, you would be doing your business a disservice.
To that end, you’ll need to hire developers who are team players and fully understand that collaboration is the heart of a successful workflow for your company to get the most out of ServiceNow. You could have paid for ServiceNow and have implemented it to perfection in your company, but if your developers can’t function within this cloud-based tool, all of your hard work on the system was for naught.
And it doesn’t matter what programming languages your new hires use, as ServiceNow is language-agnostic. So those developers could work with Java, JavaScript, .NET, Python, PHP, C, C++, or Ruby and still follow the workflows determined by ServiceNow.
Interview Questions
What is ServiceNow?
ServiceNow is a cloud-based IT service management tool that provides the tools to improve IT, business, and business management workflows.
What is a ServiceNow application?
A ServiceNow application is a packaged solution for the delivery and management of business processes.
What does CMDB stand for?
Configuration Management Database.
What is LDAP integration?
LDAP is the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and is employed for user data population and authentication. ServiceNow integrates with LDAP to streamline the user login process.
What do data lookup and record matching?
Data lookup and field matching make it possible to set a field value based on a specific condition, so you don’t have to bother writing scripts for the process.
How do you enable or disable an application in ServiceNow?
- Navigate to the Application Menus module.
- Open the application to be enabled or disabled.
- To enable the application, set the value for active to “true.”
- To disable the application, set the value for active to “false.”
What does ACL stand for?
Access Control List (which defines what data users can access).
What can UI policies be used for?
UI policies can be used to define what form fields are mandatory or visible or to even dynamically change the content on a form (based on the user).
What is a business rule?
A business rule is a server-side script that executes each time a record is inserted, updated, displayed, or queried.
Job Description
We are looking for a talented software engineer with a high-level mastery of their given languages/frameworks who can not only build efficient and effective applications and services but can do so within a ServiceNow workflow. The ideal candidate will also have experience with ServiceNow (or a similar cloud-based product) and can manage their processes from within the interface. You will be responsible for working with the necessary technologies and teams to build these applications and must be able to follow a well-defined workflow.
Responsibilities
- Design, build and maintain efficient and reusable software with various languages.
- Integrate data storage solutions.
- Implement performance and quality modes.
- Identify bottlenecks and bugs and resolve all discovered issues.
- Carefully monitor the performance of deployed software and constantly find ways to improve them.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and design new features.
- Stay up to date with new technology trends, applications, and protocols.
- Help maintain code quality, organization, and automatization
- Analyze user requirements to help inform application design.
- Define application objectives and functionality.
- Align application design with business goals and customer needs.
- Produce detailed documentation.
- Recommend changes to existing applications and the infrastructure used to build them.
- Ensure continuous professional self-development.
- Integrate user-facing elements developed by front-end developers with server-side logic.
- Write reusable, testable, and efficient code.
- Design and implement low-latency, high-availability, and performant applications.
- Implement security and data protection.
- Integrate data storage solutions.
- Work within the ServiceNow cloud-based platform and follow the defined workflows.
Skills And Qualifications
- Degree in Computer Science or related field.
- Experience with cloud-native computing and ServiceNow is a bonus.
- Excellent skills with the languages you were hired to develop with.
- Understanding of the principles behind scalable applications.
- Fundamental understanding of Version Control Systems (such as Git).
- Solid problem-solving skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication.
- Good organizational skills.
- Ability to work as part of a team.
- Attention to detail.
- Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
- A positive attitude.
Conclusion
If your company is serious about digital transformation, it would behoove you to look into ServiceNow and employ it to create ideal workflows for your business processes. Not only will your employees be empowered to work with more efficiency, but your bottom line will also improve.
