Key Changes and Limitations

• All new assessments must use SAE questionnaire templates; classic templates cannot be used for new assessments after enabling SAE.
• Third-party risk assessors lose the ability to create issues directly from the View responses page; instead, issue generation rules must be used for automatic issue creation.
• Commenting on individual questions is disabled; comments can only be added at the questionnaire level.
• The signature feature is not supported in SAE.
• Automatic attachment of questionnaires to external assessments based on IRQ responses or risk tiers is currently unsupported.
• Unsupported question types in SAE include percentage, ranking, image scale, and custom metric; these must be converted to supported types or recreated after migration.
• Empty sections in migrated templates (due to unsupported questions) must be either populated with supported questions or deleted before publishing, as templates with empty sections cannot be published.
• TPRM scoring migration only proceeds if template migration has no errors.
• Event-driven management rules replace the older Repeating assessments method for scheduling assessments.

Plugin and Application Dependencies

Enabling SAE automatically installs several related applications and plugins, including:

• Vendor Risk Management Workspace application for accessing SAE features.
• Smart Assessment Engine core and supporting plugins such as Designer, Connected, Migration Tools, Dependencies, Post-assessment Actions, Response Automation, and Scoring plugins.

These components enable the full suite of SAE capabilities for assessment creation, management, automation, and scoring.

Migration Process and Workflow

• Templates can be migrated individually or in bulk; migrated templates default to Draft status.
• Each migrated template must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness before publishing.
• Publishing a SAE questionnaire template updates related assessment templates and automation rules to support SAE automatically.
• Issue generation rules require at least one question with the "Enable preferred response" option enabled to function correctly.
• After migration, in-flight assessments can continue using classic templates, but new assessments must use SAE templates.
• Assessment templates and automation rules must be reviewed to confirm they are marked as "Supports smart assessment" to ensure compatibility.

Feature Comparison with Classic Assessment Engine

The Smart Assessment Engine supports a comprehensive set of features equivalent to the Classic engine, including metric types, categories, sections, questions, scoring, response automation, and domain separation. However, some features like question dependency and signature support have changed or are limited in SAE. Automations now leverage tier-based, provider-based, and event-driven management rules, which work only with SAE-supported assessments.

Practical Guidance for ServiceNow Customers

• Plan migration carefully, starting with non-production environments and comprehensive testing.
• Review all existing questionnaires to identify unsupported question types and convert them before migration.
• Ensure all migrated templates are published and related assessment templates are updated to support SAE.
• Update automation rules and issue generation rules to align with SAE capabilities and requirements.
• Leverage the Vendor Risk Management Workspace for improved access and management of SAE assessments.

Additional Resources

For detailed procedures and further configuration, customers should refer to related tasks such as migrating templates, creating SAE questionnaires, and configuring scoring and normalization within assessments.