Flow Designer in ServiceNow Kingston Release

The intention behind this blog is to give an overview about Flow designer which is a new feature introduced in Kingston to configure the process flow without any code involved.

• Usage and benefits of Flow Designer:
  • Flow designer is introduced to configure the process flow without having any developer knowledge.
  • It is used to automate daily processes.
  • It is very useful and user friendly for all ServiceNow users, even for non-technical users and management people.
  • Reduces development cost in business.

• We can automate the following through it:
  • Employee onboarding and off boarding operations.
  • Password reset and expiration management.
  • Task management.
  • Simple business logic.

• Roles for flow designer configuration:
  • flow_designer- Full access to flow designer.
  • flow_operator- View access.
  • action_designer- Only to create and edit actions.

• Flow designer consists of the following:
  • Trigger:
    • Trigger point to initiate the flow.
  • Action:
    • Have pre-defined actions to be performed which are useable unit.
  • Flow Logic:
    • Its logic of process where condition and if/else is included.
  • Trigger:
    • We can trigger the flow on record creation/update or we can schedule it.
  • Actions:
    • ServiceNow Core:
  • It contains core actions of ServiceNow like create/update/delete/look up record, create task, approval,
    email, log and wait for condition.
    • Global:
  • Here one will find custom actions (created by them) if they have any in this scope.
    • Connect:
  • Action which can add group, user, and message to a task.
    • Customer service:
  • These are customer service management actions which can add comment/work note to a task or
    assign/create/update/escalate task.
    • ITSM
  • These are actions which operate on ITSM modules like incident/problem/change/request.
  • For example, create change, incident and problem in different scenarios or can add comments or can do
    assignments.
    • Visual Task board
  • These actions are to manage the boards, lanes, cards, board members, and assignees in VTB.
    • IntegartionHub
  • This is used to for integration with other system which required IntegrationHub plugin.
  • Flow designer and IntegrationHub are correlated to each other. One can say IntegrationHub is sub-part of
    flow designer which is used to integrate with other system using flow designer. Basically it is used to
    automate integration task.
  • Flow Logic:
  • This is to provide condition to the flow like apply action on each record it gets or apply if any
    condition gets true.
  • We have for each and if/else logic in flow designer.
• Best practice for Flow Designer:
  • If configuring/automating existing process in ServiceNow then deactivate the original one.
  • Run test only on Dev and QA and not on production. It might affect existing data.
• An example of configuring simple flow with processing incident is provided below with screenshots:
• Configure trigger point:
  • Flow gets triggered once incident is created with state new.
    
• Send email to caller that incident has been raised successfully.
  
• Send this incident for approval to manager of the caller.
  
• Configure approver rule:
  
• Send email to approver that you have record to approve:
  
• One can drag data from right side of panel to the left side as below:
  
• Set condition if approval is approved:
  
• Once incident is approved, add action ‘Assign Incident to CI Support Group’ or to ‘Assignment Update’.
  
• Select incident:
  
• Create task for this incident:
  
• Update Assignment group to task created above:
  
  
• Add else condition and send an email to caller of incident that incident has been rejected:
  
• In else condition, put one more action to update the record and make the state to close.
  
• We are pretty sure that this blog must have given an insight to Flow Designer in ServiceNow.
• Any comments/suggestions are most welcome. We have posted further blogs as well on other topics and will
  frequently come back with something innovative.