Exploring playbooks
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Playbooks
Workflow Studio playbooks allow process owners to create unified cross-enterprise workflows, enhancing collaboration and efficiency. With the Xanadu release, playbooks are now integrated into Workflow Studio, facilitating the authoring, configuration, and monitoring of workflows in one streamlined interface.
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Key Features
- Unified Processes: Connect multiple flows and actions to create comprehensive business workflows.
- Reuse Existing Content: Leverage existing flows, subflows, and actions to streamline automation.
- Visual Task Management: Organize activities using a digitized task board or diagram for better visibility.
- Guided Experience: Assist agents and fulfillers through complex processes to enhance customer experience.
- Cross-Platform Integration: Embed playbooks across various ServiceNow platforms including legacy workspace and Service Portal.
Key Outcomes
Implementing well-designed playbooks helps ensure that end users focus on relevant tasks, with clear stages and next steps visible throughout the record lifecycle. Playbook owners are responsible for creating and maintaining these workflows, which include triggers, stages, and activities to automate business processes effectively.
Getting Started
Before launching into playbooks, familiarize yourself with relevant ServiceNow features such as flows and subflows. Playbook owners can access resources on process automation and design to better digitize their business processes. ServiceNow Process Automation administrators should explore resources related to triggers and activity definitions to customize playbooks effectively.
Domain Separation
Playbooks support domain separation, allowing for data, processes, and administrative tasks to be organized into distinct domains, enhancing data security and management capabilities.
Workflow Studio playbooks enable process owners to author cross-enterprise workflows and create a single, unified process. Build the underlying processes for playbooks that Playbook Experience agents and fulfillers use.
Starting in the Xanadu release, the following updates have been made:
- Playbooks is now part of Workflow Studio. Workflow Studio gives you a streamlined way to author, configure, and monitor playbooks, flows, subflows, actions, and decision tables in one place.
- Processes are now called Playbooks, though Playbook Experience remains a separate application that is not accessible from within Workflow Studio yet.
- The core Playbooks builder in Workflow Studio is available with the ServiceNow AI Platform® by default, but the latest updates are available for download through the application in the ServiceNow® Store.
Playbooks benefits
- Connect multiple flows and actions into an end-to-end business workflow.
- Reuse existing Workflow Studio flows, subflows, or actions to automate playbook activities.
- Organize playbook activities in a digitized task board or diagram interface.
- Guide agents and fulfillers through complicated playbooks from start to finish, improving customer experience and task resolution. Build your playbooks in Workflow Studio, and then design and embed your Playbook Experience in legacy workspace, UI Builder, ServiceNow Mobile Platform, Service Portal, and more.
- Consolidate separate business processes across the organization.
- Define a consistent record life cycle from creation to completion.
- Pass data between the activities and stages of a business process.
- Specify the conditions and the order in which activities and stages run.
- Visualize and manage the activities and stages of your process.
Creating a well-designed playbook
The automated business processes that you design guide your end users and help them focus on the tasks and information that matter to them. A well-designed playbook can do these things:
- Start up, or trigger, automatically for the types of records that your end users care about
- Reuse activities from existing Workflow Studio content
- Has well-defined stages that end users can follow for a record
- Clearly show the next steps that end users must take to move through a record's life cycle
Playbooks content
Playbooks has these components:
- Playbooks
- A playbook is a ServiceNow AI Platform® representation of a cross-enterprise business process for your organization. A playbook owner is responsible for creating and maintaining a playbook.
- Triggers
- A trigger specifies when to start running your playbook.
- Stages
- A stage is a grouped sequence of activities in a playbook. A playbook owner creates a stage to specify a logical grouping of activities. A stage in your overall business process.
- Activities
- An activity defines the Workflow Studio content that powers the playbook's automation. An activity can also specify the user-facing experience that the playbook produces when it runs.
Getting started
Before you get started with Playbooks, familiarize yourself with any features that your business uses to automate operations on the ServiceNow AI Platform, such as flows, subflows, and actions.