Proven Optics developer, Zach Burleson, shares his impressions of the ServiceNow Platform.
The ServiceNow platform is a remarkably flexible tool for automating business processes. Every business process first needs its set of inputs, and usually one or more forms are employed to capture this input data. While digitizing paper forms can be done in a variety of ways, many of the available technologies cannot validate the data before capture. That can be a big problem!
Without form-level data validation, the data will need to be standardized (or in some cases manually replaced) after it is collected and before it can be transformed into the desired output. That translates into more time someone spends chasing loose ends—which is not what a business seeks to achieve from “automation.”
ServiceNow has a robust form interface that can handle even advanced validations—for example, checking two other data tables for records fitting certain characteristics and then verifying the values in one or more of their fields related to the input data—all on-click and within milliseconds. Any other data in the platform can be used as the basis for validation logic, and there are no artificial limits to the complexity of the logical relationships you’re evaluating (so feel free to verify JavaScript’s Turing-completeness for yourself if you so fancy).
The form design tools are also extremely fast to use, relying on a set of configurable no-code and low-code elements. In fact, forms can be built out so quickly that I’ve put together several forms live in meetings with clients, which both greatly improved their engagement and reduced the number of development iterations.
The ServiceNow form interface is just one piece of the puzzle of delivering a business solution, but it’s the one that stands out to me the most in terms of sheer efficiency gain over the alternatives.
Visit www.provenoptics.com today to learn more about how we leverage the ServiceNow platform to enable financial management modernization and provide IT & Finance leaders with the necessary analytics and insights to make better business decisions.