What Is Workflow Data Fabric?
Ethan Davies- May 1
- 3 min read
You may have heard the term Workflow Data Fabric already, but if like me your initial thought was "what the..." – then hopefully this article can provide you with a better understanding of what ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric is and why it is important. At a glance, this term, "Workflow Data Fabric" may sound like a new marketing term; maybe a term to describe a consolidated series of workflow tools or capabilities. However, it is far more than that.
Workflow Data Fabric is a new enhanced, integrated foundational data layer that helps unify data you have across the enterprise. We all love an analogy, so we can think of the term ‘Workflow Data Fabric’ as a newly built Company HQ. Gone is our old brutalist tower block and satellite offices, instead we now have a state-of-the-art facility that allows our data to work together like never before in the platform. The old brutalist tower block and satellite offices represent a series of disconnected silos in the enterprise, disconnected process and data. The new Company HQ isn't simply a cosmetic upgrade, but it has unified our departments and functions of our business. The HQ building was designed with new open spaces, new collaboration areas and tools, new ways to streamline our processes and data flow, and room to scale and grow. From our new Company HQ, with our silos now broken down, we can now connect, leverage or take action on our newly connected data throughout the organisation.
Whilst that analogy maybe doesn't entirely stick the landing, hopefully it can give you a sense of how Workflow Data Fabric is positioned on the Now Platform and how conversations around this are going to be approached articulating the value of Workflow Data Fabric. It is worth noting that Workflow Data Fabric is in essence a new SKU, so you will want to check with your ServiceNow Account team or your customers account team to better understand the entitlements for the offerings.
By breaking down the etymology of the term we can gain a better understanding of what this term really means in the context of ServiceNow. The “Data Fabric” aspect of the term refers to a unified, real-time data integration layer that makes available data from across the enterprise, in a single framework. The "Data Fabric" term itself is not one that is unique to ServiceNow. It is industry terminology, and Data Fabric capabilities and tools are available in many other enterprise tools and platforms. Where ServiceNow starts to differentiate itself from the pack is with its zero-copy connectors (similar in concept to Remote Tables) to allow bi-directional data sharing between enterprise platforms like Databricks and Snowflake without actually having to store the data in either platform. The icing on the cake is that you can then leverage all of this unified, real-time data to trigger and drive your AI Agents and automations, adding the ‘Workflow’ magic to ‘Data Fabric’.
You may have wondered with all the AI Agent hype coming out of the ServiceNow space: “how” AI Agents are going to not only have access to the data, but also the context to make decisions from sources outside of your existing ServiceNow data model. Workflow Data Fabric is in essence, the foundation and the answer to that very question. By leveraging Workflow Data Fabric to connect the data across your enterprise to ServiceNow, your AI Agents can now not only access that real-time data but also make decisions and drive workflows from it, making them truly valuable, and enterprise aware.
If you're interested in learning more about Workflow Data Fabric and its concepts –you can check out the following courses and paths that are available on NowLearning (and Now Create, if you have access)!
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