Orchestration in ServiceNow is a powerful system for managing IT and business processes quickly and reliably by automating simple and complex tasks on remote services, servers, applications, and hardware. Let’s explore how ServiceNow Orchestration solves IT pain points and improves business agility by automating 50% of routine IT tasks.

Pain Points of IT

These issues necessitate the need for ServiceNow Orchestration:

• Multiple password resets
• Routine software installations
• New employee account creations
• Disabling existing accounts
• Server, Application and Network known issues with temporary fixes for known errors
• Disk space management

IT departments often struggle with 3 key questions:

1. What processes should be automated?
2. What much of the process should be automated?
3. How to make automation drive value. 

The answer to above questions lies in connecting Man Hours to Routine Tasks. To solve above challenges, as a part of ServiceNow ITOM module ServiceNow Orchestration is introduced.

Orchestration automates IT and business processes for operations management. It includes Password Reset, Client Software Distribution, and activity packs. Reduce tasks, improve productivity, and automate and accelerate processes."

-ServiceNow

Key Features of ServiceNow Orchestration

• Calling feature out of ServiceNow
• Ready to use Activity Packs
• Activity Packs can be created for Scoped Applications
• A Data Tab to monitor the flow of data across all activities

How Does ServiceNow Orchestration Do?

IT departments must operate like a business- focus on strategy, customer service, business objectives and value-based outcomes. Even though there are enough best practices (ITIL, Cobit, ISO 20K) on strategy, development, administration, and maintenance, in practice there are a lot of gaps in the successful implementation of these practices.

The time spent on the pain points is huge and is directly proportional to the Man Hours being spent on these routine activities. The pain points are more of a generalized collection based on experience. A drill-down must be made specific to the organisation's transactions to ensure accurate Man Hour Reduction. The aim should be to use the resources in a more efficient way, allowing the saved time be spent on value-added activities.

Based on my experience in service-based industries for more than a decade, here is a table listing the most common routine IT tasks and the percentage of effort those tasks take on an IT department.

ServiceNow Orchestration escalates enterprise agility by facilitating IT manual tasks to be automated; including the systems and applications that are external to the ServiceNow platform. ServiceNow Orchestration enables IT teams to build reusable libraries of various IT activities without having to code every workflow. This way, Orchestration can directly scale up IT operational efficiencies by reducing the problem resolution time and increasing the speed of service. 

ServiceNow Orchestration can automate:

• Active Directory Creations and Deletions/Disabling
• Mailbox Creations and Deletions/Disabling
• Share-point Account Creations and Deletions/Disabling
• Software Installations on Desktops and Laptops
• Server, Application and Network Device Reboots

About Author

Lokesh Kumar Narayana works as a ITSM process expert at V-Soft Consulting. He holds 10+ years of experience which spans across both infrastructure management and software development services.  He is a ITIL® 2011 expert, Prince2® practitioner, ISO/IEC 20000® practitioner, certified Scrum® Master and a COBIT® Certified Professional. He has some notable contributions to the overall organizational improvements with his existing knowledge as a Principal Consultant in the ITSM Space.