ServiceNow Kingston Release Highlights

By Gregg Spivack

Director of Client Services, NPI

May 02, 2018

Interested in learning more about NPI’s services?

Contact Us

Since a large number of NPI clients have sizable ServiceNow investments, we wanted to share a few highlights on the ServiceNow Kingston release.

ServiceNow announced its latest release in January. As with all ServiceNow releases, there is plenty to be excited about. While Kingston has new features across the product set and platform, ServiceNow talks about the Kingston release as advancing functionality for customers in three broad themes: Machine Learning, No Code Development, and the User Experience. Below are the highlights of these release themes.

Machine Learning for Everyday Work (in the NOW Platform)

Last year, ServiceNow announced its investment into AI and machine learning, and this is a key focus of Kingston.  The release introduces Agent Intelligence, ServiceNow’s new “supervised machine learning” application that is built into the NOW platform. The goal of Agent Intelligence is to continue to drive up customer satisfaction and drive down incidents, resolution times, and error by accurately categorizing, prioritizing and assigning incidents. Initially, Agent Intelligence will be leveraged for ITSM, Customer Service Management and custom applications with a large amount of historical data.

No-Code Process Automation (in the NOW Platform)

ServiceNow has been a forerunner of no-code development, which is the concept of deploying business applications that require little to no programming expertise by “non-traditional developers.” Kingston introduces Flow Designer and IntegrationHub to carry this concept forward. Flow Designer works within and across ServiceNow products and applications, and enables business users to create process flows easily via a graphical interface.  In contrast, IntegrationHub is ServiceNow’s “next generation Orchestration solution” that enables users to design workflows between ServiceNow and 3rd party products by leveraging ServiceNow’s REST integration capability or Kingston’s out-of-the-box integrations for Microsoft Teams, Slack and Hipchat.

Note: Flow Designer comes free of charge with every ServiceNow release from Kingston forward, while Integration Hub will require an additional fee.

User Experience Innovations (multiple NOW products)

Customers have asked for an improved user experience over recent years in the form of a better interface, simplicity and performance, and Kingston continues to address this request. Several products are touched with improved user experience enhancements including ITSM (Major Incident Management, Text Analytics), Customer Service (Escalation Management), HR (Response Templates), and Security Ops (End-to-End Phishing Response).

More Information on ServiceNow Kingston Release

These are a few of the improvements made in Kingston.  Here is a useful “fact sheet” that provides a bit more information about the new features.  ServiceNow typically aims to deploy two major releases a year, so be on the lookout for the “L” (London) release in late 2018.

Want to know if you’re getting a fair deal on your ServiceNow purchase? Contact NPI.

RELATED CONTENT