How xtype Accelerates Delivery of All Native ServiceNow Objects

Introduction

In today's digital era, the key to gaining a competitive edge in the business landscape often lies in how rapidly and efficiently an organization can deliver its software products or services. To this end, ServiceNow is pushing citizen development to empower individuals within a business to develop solutions, increasing the speed and agility of problem-solving and productivity. This strategy fosters innovation by enabling non-technical employees to create applications that address their unique needs and challenges, bridging the gap between IT and business teams. Moreover, it helps to address the skills shortage in software development and reduces the workload of the IT department, enabling them to focus on more complex, strategic tasks.

Citizen development is a great strategy to further enterprises' speed-to-market approach. But citizen-created apps, like all other ServiceNow changes, also require regulatory adherence. Remember, apps built using App Engine Studio are just one of many ServiceNow entities that must go through formal release processes, quality checks, and approval gates. IT also needs a scalar to amplify its efforts to achieve a productivity output that exceeds traditional delivery methods to meet the additional payload.

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Understanding xtype

xtype is a native ServiceNow product that can package and propagate any combination of ServiceNow elements, such as scoped apps (like those built with AES), store apps, plugins, plugin activations, records, XML files, update sets, and more. xtype allows ServiceNow teams to standardize the path to production for all changes, including those submitted by citizen developers.

But xtype does more than package your release payloads and propagate them through your quality checks and approval gates. xtype addresses the most significant inhibitor to delivery velocity - environment inconsistencies.

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Environment Inconsistencies

Inconsistencies between your ServiceNow instances create a significant drag on your delivery velocity because these differences must be investigated, troubleshot, and addressed, which takes time. Cloning your way out of this problem also inserts a significant amount of lag into your delivery times. This lag is because rather than developing or delivering new features and apps, you prepare exports before cloning and import what you exported after cloning. Further, while the cloning process runs, you cannot deploy to that instance - you are down.

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Release Packaging

It's one thing to propagate one update set at a time through sub-prod environments all the way to production. However, ServiceNow pros are responsible and accountable for the stability of their production environment and need to propagate release payloads that are a combination of all kinds of native ServiceNow objects such as scripts, update sets, records, apps, plugins, plugin activations, XML files, records and more.

A great deal of manual effort is spent creating spreadsheets to list and order this collection of objects. Using xtype, this time can be spent developing and delivering new features and apps. Because xtype is eliminating environment inconsistencies, it knows what objects are where. Within an xtype Release Package, users can drag-n-drop any number of native ServiceNow objects into any order. The xtype Release Package can be deployed by click, schedule, or ServiceNow change management ticket.

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Change Management

ServiceNow's Change Management feature automates standard change processes, reducing approval times and enhancing the speed of deployment. xtype, being a native ServiceNow product, can trigger a deployment based on the approval of a change request and update the request after the deployment.

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Conclusion

xtype is redefining how ServiceNow pros deliver features and apps on the Now platform. By bringing multi-environment visibility, controlled instance synchronization, zero-touch deployment, and governance, ServiceNow teams can propagate their developed features and apps faster and more efficiently to production. Because xtype offers products native to ServiceNow and leverages many native ServiceNow capabilities, such as remote instance migration and change management, you can be confident that xtype will support your existing release processes and do so in a standardized and supported way.

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