To automate all business services would be the dream of nearly any IT Director. With ServiceNow, an astonishing degree of automation is possible, but some things must still be left to human hands. One example of a primarily human-driven process, is approval. Sure, we can set up automated approvals for a number of different circumstances. For example, orders of new hardware with a cost under a certain amount, by a manager can potentially be auto-approved. However, if an individual contributor is submitting a change request to alter a firewall rule for example, that would likely need some review.

Approvals can be requested of individual users, or of entire groups. Approvals requested of individual users, are stored within the Approvals [sysapproval_approver] table, whereas group approvals are stored in the Group Approvals [sysapproval_group] table. Approvals can be generated via approval engines, or workflows; the more common of the two being workflows. We went over these approval options in some detail in the Workflows section of this chapter.