JaniceBot

Inspiration

IRIS (a.k.a. Service-Now) change requests are a part of our daily life here at Vantiv. Submitting change requests can be fairly routine, but once submitted there are often delays and challenges trying to get approvals. This often involves numerous emails to the individuals whose responsibility it is to approve or reject the request. In some cases a person has to physically track them down.

My idea was to proactively reach out to the Approvers and request their response via a more direct and interactive method to save time and effort.

What it does

Janice is a chat bot that monitors open change requests in a Service-Now instance. When a pending approval is found, it contacts the assigned user to request a response. Janice's conversation style makes it easy for the user to quickly update the change requests, and ensures the tickets can move forward in the IRIS process.

How I built it

I used Microsoft's Bot Framework to construct the bot, Azure storage tables to persist state, and Service Now APIs to get information and push updates.

Challenges I ran into

The Bot Framework is extremely flexible but has a high learning curve. I ran into challenges keeping state and triggering new conversations on a timer.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I learned a bunch of new technologies and was able to integrate them into a new and useful application. I am also proud that I was able to easily integrate into a development instance of Service Now - I thought interacting with the Service-Now API would be the most challenging aspect of the project.

What I learned

The Bot Framework has a number of exciting capabilities that can be immediately useful for this project, such as intelligence and ask-answer dialogs. The Framework allows a bot to be used across many different chat applications, including Skype and Slack. Additionally, the Service-Now API is very easy to use and very powerful - anything can be done via the API.

What's next for JaniceBot

After some refactoring and resolving or improving on open issues, the uses for JaniceBot as an IRIS-integrated application is open-ended! Ticket submission, ticket monitoring - anything is possible :)