nullEDGE - Beating the complexity of approval flows with Jan Procházka

If you’ve worked in a big corporation, you’ve dealt with approval processes that cost way more than whatever you’re requesting.

Originally, the process was simple, but Joe Employee did something stupid 10 years ago, and now everybody suffers the consequences.

Rinse and repeat, and now you need your manager’s manager’s approval just to get a pen.

The technical side of Approval Flows in ServiceNow is fairly simple, as Jan Procházka shows in the demo: Decision Tables + Flow Designer.

Key takeaways

Cultural problems

The main problems are cultural, not technical:

Legacy mindsets.
Lack of trust.
Unclear delegation.
Risk blindness.
Customisation addiction.

Tips

Jan shares a lot of good tips in this nullEDGE session, focusing on simplifying decision-making, instead of automating bureaucracy.

Sometimes, you can just notify, there’s no need to wait.
You can set thresholds.
Categorise decisions based on risk. Not every action deserves the same attention.

Simplify!

And talking about approvals… I can’t help but remember that day I opened a security hole when trying to improve the approval widget… But that’s a story for another day!