Business Continuity Management release notes

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Business Continuity Management release notes

    The ServiceNow Business Continuity Management (BCM) application enables organizations to maintain delivery of products and services at acceptable levels during disruptive incidents. The Yokohama release introduces significant enhancements to assessment templates, event planning, and crisis mapping to improve performance, usability, and configuration flexibility.

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    Key Features

    • Updated Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Assessment Template: The latest template supports diverse question types (drop-down, references, text, attachments, checkboxes, date/time, number inputs) and automates response calculations for recovery tier, recovery point objective, recovery time objective, and maximum tolerable downtime.
    • Nested Plans with Hierarchical View: You can create nested plans within events, cross-referencing multiple plans and organizing nested event tasks by dependencies using a work-breakdown structure (WBS). Progress bars help track related plan, asset, and task creation.
    • Enhanced Crisis Map with UIB Components: The crisis map now uses the latest UI Builder (UIB) components for improved performance and configuration. Features include filtering alerts by state, severity, location, or source; detailed alert queries and editing; secondary attribute settings; and sorting and toggling active alerts.

    User Interface Improvements

    • The BIA form and Assessments tab have been streamlined to reduce repetitive actions and optimize space.
    • The BIA PDF output now reflects all questions and answers from the updated assessment template.
    • The Crisis map displays alerts in a side panel with options to open or dismiss alerts, refresh alerts, and sort them by severity and timestamps.
    • The nested plans UI shows a hierarchical task view and progress tracking progress bar.

    Activation and Requirements

    Business Continuity Management is available for installation via the ServiceNow Store by request. Browser support includes Google Chrome, Firefox (including ESR), Microsoft Edge Chromium, and Safari version 12.0 or later. Accessibility improvements include replacing the older FAM Map component with the Geomap component in the Crisis map application.

    The ServiceNow® Business Continuity Management application gives your organization the capability to continue to deliver products and services at an acceptable level when a disruptive incident occurs. Business Continuity Management was enhanced and updated in the Yokohama release.

    Business Continuity Management highlights for the Yokohama release

    • Use the latest assessment template to perform a Business Impact Analysis.
    • Create nested plans in an event so that you can activate cross-references to multiple plans.
    • Use the hierarchical view in the plans to organize nested event tasks according to their dependencies.
    • Use the Crisis map functionality that includes the latest UIB components.

    See Business Continuity Management for more information.

    Important:
    Business Continuity Management is available in ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

    New in the Yokohama release

    Using latest assessment template for conducting BIAs
    Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) by using the latest assessment template. The assessment template enables you to create questions of different types and automate the responses from existing data sources. You can configure the logic for calculating the recovery tier, recovery point objective, recovery time objective, or maximum tolerable downtime.
    Adopting UIB page for improved performance

    Leverage the Crisis map functionality that includes the latest UIB components. By adopting the UIB components, you can help to minimize development efforts and get more configuration options within the Crisis map application.

    You can filter alerts by their state (active or inactive), severity level, location (regions), or source. You can refine your search, perform detailed queries, or edit actions on the alerts, so that it's easier to find both the alerts and assets on the map. Additionally, you can set the secondary values such as urgency, severity, category for the alerts in the Details card.

    Using nested plans

    Create nested plans in an event so that you can activate cross-references to multiple plans. You can use the hierarchical view to organize nested event tasks according to their dependencies with the work-breakdown structure (WBS) functionality. You can also monitor the progress bar to track the creation of related plans, event assets, or event tasks.

    UI changes

    Using latest assessment template for conducting BIAs
    • The BIA form displays the assessment questionnaire that is based on the latest assessment template. The Assessments tab in the BIA record page has been enhanced to eliminate repetitive UI actions and reduce large empty spaces. The latest assessment template includes additional question types such as drop-down, references, text, attachments, check boxes, date, time, and number value inputs.
    • The PDF template for the BIA has been updated to include the questions and answers that are based on the latest assessment template.
    Adopting UIB page for improved performance
    The enhancements to the Crisis map user interface are:
    • Alerts are displayed in the side panel of the Crisis map application.
    • The alert details page includes the Open alert and Dismiss alert UI actions, which enable you to either open or dismiss alerts.
    • The active alerts can be sorted by using the Severity, Created, Updated fields, and can also be toggled from top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top by using the Toggle option.
    • The alerts display can be updated with the Refresh icon Refresh icon..
    • The active and dismissed alerts are now displayed on the Alerts page.
    Using nested plans
    The enhancements to the nested plans user interface are:
    • The hierarchical view shows the nested event tasks.
    • The progress bar displays the progress of the creation of related plans, event assets, or event tasks.

    Changed in this release

    Using latest assessment template for conducting BIAs
    You can use the latest assessment template to conduct the Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

    Activation information

    Install Business Continuity Management by requesting it from ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

    Browser requirements

    Business Continuity Management requires the following browsers:
    • Google Chrome
    • Firefox and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR)
    • Microsoft Edge Chromium
    • Safari 12.0 and later versions

    Accessibility information

    Various accessibility issues in the Crisis map application have been resolved with the implementation of the Geomap [sn_geo_map] component, which has replaced the FAM Map [sn-fam-map] component.