Exploring playbooks

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring playbooks

    Workflow Studio playbooks empower ServiceNow customers to author and manage cross-enterprise workflows that unify multiple business processes into a streamlined, digitized experience. Playbooks enable process owners to build end-to-end workflows by connecting flows, subflows, actions, and decision tables within Workflow Studio, simplifying automation and improving task resolution for agents and fulfillers. Starting with the Xanadu release, Playbooks are fully integrated into Workflow Studio, providing a centralized environment for authoring and monitoring these workflows.

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    Key Features

    • Unified Process Automation: Connect multiple workflow components into comprehensive playbooks that represent entire business processes across the enterprise.
    • Reusability: Leverage existing Workflow Studio flows, subflows, and actions to automate playbook activities efficiently.
    • Guided User Experience: Organize activities into logical stages and digitized task boards that guide users clearly through complex processes.
    • Integration Flexibility: Design playbooks in Workflow Studio and embed the Playbook Experience in various environments such as legacy workspace, UI Builder, ServiceNow Mobile, and Service Portal.
    • Process Visualization and Control: Visualize stages and activities, define conditions and execution order, and manage the lifecycle from record creation to completion.
    • AI-Powered Playbook Generation: Use Now Assist to generate playbooks automatically from text or images, accelerating playbook creation.
    • Domain Separation Support: Maintain data and process segregation across domains, controlling user access and visibility per domain context.

    Practical Guidance for Customers

    • Playbook Components: Understand and utilize key elements such as triggers (to start playbooks), stages (for grouping activities), and activities (which execute workflow automation and user interactions).
    • Designing Effective Playbooks: Ensure playbooks start automatically based on relevant record types, reuse existing workflow components, define clear stages, and provide explicit next steps for users.
    • Getting Started Resources: Familiarize yourself with flows, subflows, actions, and the fundamentals of Process Automation to build and customize playbooks effectively.
    • Choosing Between Flows and Playbooks: Use general guidelines to decide when to employ flows versus playbooks, depending on the complexity and scope of your automation needs.

    Key Outcomes

    • Streamlined creation and management of complex, cross-enterprise automated workflows within a single authoring environment.
    • Improved agent and fulfiller guidance through well-structured, digitized playbooks that enhance customer experience and task completion.
    • Consolidation and standardization of business processes, enabling consistent lifecycle management and better data flow across activities.
    • Enhanced agility with AI-assisted playbook generation and flexible deployment across multiple ServiceNow platforms.

    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.

    Note:

    Starting in the Xanadu release, the following updates were 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

    Workflow Studio Playbooks enables you, as a business playbook owner, to organize Workflow Studio content into unified and digitized cross-enterprise processes. With Playbooks, you gain these 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.
    For more information about how to use and navigate the Playbooks user interface, see Playbooks.

    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.

    If you're a playbook owner who wants to learn the basics of digitizing your business process, check out the following resources:
    If you're a ServiceNow Process Automation administrator who wants to set up and customize Playbooks, check out the following resources: