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CJ & The Duke sit down with Sr. ServiceNow Solution Consultant Steven Jefferson to talk about all the big flashy features. We talk about
- what makes low-code / citizen developer programs successful.
- what is hyperautomation, and how do you get there.
Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:00:00] Duke: Okay. Today we have a very special guest with us, Mr. Steven Jefferson from service. Now he's a senior advisory solutions consultants. And if you check out his LinkedIn profile, which will be in the description below, you will see that he has got all the acronyms of all the new hotness features in service now.
And so we're really looking forward to dive in deep on this one. Welcome to the show, Steven. Good day.
[00:00:22] Steve: Well, thank you. I, really appreciate this, I said in LinkedIn, I'll say it again. It's an honor to be asked.
[00:00:27] Duke: We're happy to be here. so I guess why don't we start cause you've been in this space for six years, but you have some really interesting experience before that. So how did you get into the service now? Space?
[00:00:35] Steve: Oh. so at a, I had a really good boss, Dan Malone and, he and I worked together at Borland years ago. And then. When I left borderland and he left Borden, he ended up at a service now and, uh, he said, and I quote, you gotta check this shit out.
[00:00:51] Duke: nice.
[00:00:53] CJ: nice.
[00:00:54] Steve: So I said, all right, I'll take a look. And, , that was, uh, end of 20, well, actually about mid 2015. since then it's just been, put on your five-point harness and hold onto the rocket ship.
[00:01:05] CJ: You know, Steven, I feel like everyone has kind of like one of these stories, when it comes to service. Now I remember mine, we were at an ITFM conference and, King's cross in and, uh, Earl's crossing one and the one in across ends up there and, you know, one of us wandered into, the service now booth.
And the next thing you know, it was like the scene in, uh, in the first, matrix when Neil and Morpheus started the Kung Fu scene in the simulation and everyone's run into, oh my God, no Morpheus is fine, Neo, right? Like, What was that level of enthusiasm?
We're all like frantically texting each other. Get over to the service now booth you gotta see this shit.
[00:01:41] Steve: That's awesome.
[00:01:42] Duke: mine wasn't nearly as fun as that. every day that ends in Y it was a day where we were trying to figure out how to trick over DSD, into doing what we needed it to do. And it was in the middle of our team meeting. And our boss said, Hey, why don't we just Google what's better than HP O VSD. And it was really early days of service now. And their whole marketing campaign was basically gorilla marketing against HP. Just like, oh, like, oh, memes before anybody was calling anything memes and it was so fun. It was so fun. And it was like the same day, we got the demo.
And anyways, we set a purchasing record after that for,
[00:02:16] Steve: so
[00:02:17] Duke: how fast.
[00:02:18] Steve: that marketing side I had never heard of. until my boss mentioned it to me. And so, it has, it turns out when I joined the company, I was like, oh, I have used this before. I just didn't know. It was.
[00:02:31] Duke: Oh, nice. That's hilarious. so the reason why I invited you to the show is because in your service now, journey, you have worked with a lot of the, I don't want to call them edge cases cause that kind of takes away from what they are, but. Deeper more exotic stuff.
AI and machine learning and NLU and gosh, I didn't know what else NLQ is. What is that?
[00:02:54] Steve: Natural language query.
[00:02:56] Duke: Oh, okay. Got you. Yeah. Which is awesome. By the way, I did a video on that for the, when in Rome series, I think.
[00:03:02] Steve: Yeah, it's surprisingly. Surprisingly easy to do once you've done a little bit at the foundation. So, that's one of those little bits of wisdom I say, listen, it's kind of like an interactive dashboard, you know, on the list. It's, it's kinda like, just add it in, it won't take you long and it will save you a bunch of time later.
So I'm a big fan of it.
[00:03:22] CJ: So do you have like an order of operations in terms of how you should build upon some of these new technologies and service now? And that's, probably totally a sideways question, but he just kind of popped in my head.
[00:03:34] Steve: No, no, that's, that's where I live. the, the thing that's I consider is, is like, you've got multiple dimensions. You need to approach stuff. it's kind of like firing on all sides. but you can start with like, how do I digitize this first? Or how do I automate some of this? And those two things to me are, independent.
But when you put them together, it's, really handy. You know, you go from like, Hey, I'm, receiving this shipping thing and you know, the box is damaged. how does that affect our purchasing group and everything later, if it goes from like clipboards and phone calls to like, Hey, I just put it in, then that's your first digitization.
And, then you get to automation where it's like, Hey, when I received stuff that looks like. Who needs to know about it, where do we record this? And what do we do about it? So to me, if you start breaking down stuff into two, that you need to look at the experience. And so that's the human centered design and UX and all of that.
And I think that that's the best place to start because, otherwise you're just looking at a bag of tools and functionality. So I don't know if that's really what your question was. to kind of back up it's like, where do you start? Well, do you have a process, or do you just need like a bucket to hold a bunch of, tasks and information?
So there's maturity in that, that sort of process Or digitization side and then, there's maturity on, the automation side is, can I automate it? Can I connect to it? Can I integrate with it? You know, what can I do with that? Because you can't get to any of the cool advanced features.
Like, you know, we're just talking about NLQ, you can't get to that unless it has access to the data and, uh, a little bit of stuff to learn from some history. So I say start out simple and if you fail small and fail quickly. Great.
[00:05:21] CJ: I definitely love to fail small fail quickly. You know, a lot of what you just said, kind of reminds me of an episode we did previously around catalysts. What do you think about that?
[00:05:29] Duke: Yeah, I think when we talk about different maturity models as well, where the first thing you sell for is visibility, right? Then you can solve for automation, then you can solve for integration and governance and dah, dah, dah. But step one is, can we see these things? Do we know how many of them are out there?
[00:05:44] Steve: Yeah.
[00:05:44] CJ: Yeah.
[00:05:44] Duke: Right. I think that's always the best place to start. And then our catalyst episode, we'll link to below where we talk about, how things start. Cause we do have a definitive bias that somebody goes to the catalog or somebody calls a service desk or what have you. And there's just so many different new ways.
Now
[00:06:00] Steve: Yeah.
[00:06:01] Duke: you can start from an integration. It can start from a chat bot. It can start from natural language understanding. Hopefully.
[00:06:07] Steve: And, there's even a service now, maturity to the side of that. I ran across, a customer who came to me and was like, Hey, I wrote this security incident thing a long time ago, but we need to do a new one of it. And I was like, all right, why aren't you talking to sec ops?
And they're like, well, cause they said it's not theirs. And that's what I was like, what. What's a security incident to you. And he's like, well, when an employee gets kidnapped and I was like, what?
[00:06:33] CJ: Whoa.
[00:06:36] Steve: So, you know, they started out with a catalog item for that.
[00:06:39] CJ: Wow.
[00:06:41] Steve: And so now they're just.
[00:06:44] CJ: Look, man. Like I I've worked at a place, right. Like, I mean, but that one, like, Ooh. Wow.
[00:06:51] Duke: That's the most interesting one I've heard in a long time.
[00:06:55] Steve: Yeah, it caught my attention. So, when we think about that, maturity it's like, all right, well, she said I need to start and what can I do? Oh, I can make a catalog for that and worked fine for them for years. And then, they came along. He's like, how can we make this better?
And I was like, wow, thank you for asking that. And so, I happened to know that the company had the mobile app
[00:07:20] CJ: Oh, okay.
[00:07:20] Steve: Okay. So how does someone report this? And, they went through a few situations and, you know, they work with like third-party security forces and, uh, what do they call them?
Uh, like each country has like a, consulate and, papers and everything. It needs to be signed so that you can do exfiltration and all of that. And I was like, boy, is it getting pretty deep?
[00:07:39] CJ: Yeah.
[00:07:40] Steve: I was like, we can get their GPS location. And he was like, well, that would be awesome.
[00:07:44] Duke: So.
[00:07:48] CJ: Right. Like, I mean, Yeah. I mean, do go on. Right? Like, so this is one of those situations, I can't believe that, a solution to this problem actually exists. Right? Yeah. Wow. that's just incredible.
[00:08:02] Duke: what I find incredible is that there's enough of it to put workflow and visibility behind
[00:08:07] CJ: Yeah. Good point.
[00:08:09] Duke: the world. Just got a little bit darker for me, but that's okay.
[00:08:11] Steve: Well, this is a bright light though, because it was for them to, help their employee get back to their family. So, as a, this person who works in this security group, it was like, I need to do this and I need to do this and I need to do this. And then HR comes along as like, well, we need to offer the family, like, counseling and, maybe we need to get them a trip to meet the, family member or whatever.
And so then it just branched from there. But where did he start? He started at digitization,
[00:08:36] CJ: yeah, it's, it's about recognizing, the beginning of that, of that process. Like we have this process, you know, we'd like to digitize it, make it more efficient. And then the next thing you know, you've got service now, orchestrate and what happens if one of your employees get kid gets kidnapped?
like Robert is a bit dark, but great.
[00:08:55] Steve: Stuff's messy out there.
[00:08:56] CJ: it definitely is. one of the things listed on your LinkedIn profile, Is, your extensive experience with low code, no code. so tell me in order to. Successfully implement something like a successful low-code and no-code program internally.
Like, what do you need to do first? what do you get right first in order to make that happen? Because it always seems like from my direct experience, and also indirect experience is that, you know, there's something to companies are often looking to do, but often find it hard to actually get the traction to make it.
[00:09:27] Steve: And the concept is citizen development and, you know, it gets thrown around and, oh, you can do this and that and the other. And. Really technology's only part of the problem. you're going to mention culture, you're going to mention, security access. You're going to mention, this is not my job and why are you coming to me and asking me to maintain more applications and more platforms for more departments, you know?
So I'm going to take a page out of a, book for. one of where I used to work as is climb with care and confidence and what we did. mark Tognetti works with me. And what we've done is we've gone around to those customers that have had success.
And then we said, what worked, what didn't. So, there was organizational change management and that's, a big part because the culture is some places can be like, well, we don't work with them. Well,
[00:10:16] CJ: Yeah.
[00:10:17] Steve: you kind of have to at one point, where is that point and how does that work? You know?
So,
[00:10:22] CJ: I mean, one of the things that I seen, you know, as you point out, right? Like that culture of internal communications, right? Like we don't work with these guys. We don't talk to these guys. You need a ticket for that, you know, and all that and all that kind of stuff. Right. I've always found those internal silos to be the biggest barrier.
set in front of doing something like this, Where, because, when you have something, a citizen developer led, I mean, the citizen doesn't necessarily mean like, so on, out in the end user base though, it could, but it's sometimes just means like someone at the help desk, Who has a little bit of technical experience, but not necessarily like CIS admin service now, developer. And they might be closer to, the process on the ground, but they don't necessarily have the access or the respect internally to be given that responsibility to build something out like this.
That's one of the big roadblocks that.
[00:11:11] Steve: Yeah. a lot of people aren't willing to give up the keys to the castle and, we'll beat the drum of separation of data and duties and these are all well and good. And. But the issue is, and I'm gonna, I'm going to go back to is like, there's the definition of citizen development.
And I said, you know, like client with care and confidence and you bring up a good point is like someone on the help desk, if they have access to it, and they've got flow designer, maybe they can do something, I consider citizen development to be. part of a bigger umbrella and I got this from mark Tognetti.
So, you know, all credit due to him is a distributed development. And sometimes you've got pro resources that are assigned to different groups. And that's really your foothold. That's your fulcrum. That's where you say, how do we bridge these two people together is sometimes it is, oh, we don't have access, but Jane, Jane's our technology liaison.
And how can we connect Jane with James so that, we can start passing stuff back and forth.
[00:12:08] CJ: how have you tackled that issue, Because that one is always cost me. and I've, experienced it in different, ways right now, not necessarily , just in the citizen development part, but, from your experience, how have you tackled that in, the creation of like the citizen development programs internally, because I've.
found that when I'm on the outside looking in and trying to tackle internal communications is one of the things that I'm, I won't say least capable of doing, but one of the hardest things to do, because you don't have that understanding of internal culture until you've been on a project long enough.
And then by that point, you've probably killed a lot of cycles trying to get.
[00:12:44] Steve: Well from the culture side, I think we were actually talking about this. I don't know if it was in the green room or not, but the sort of limbic response is, how do you get an emotional response to someone to get them over a logical thing? So, okay, well, you don't want to work with this group, but you have to, how can we make that experience?
The best that it can be instead of them calling you or you managing a ticket or something else like that, how do we make that work better for you? sometimes it's something as simple as like a sub flow, now you don't even have to talk to them. You can just see what's going on and now you have it digitized and then you can automate from there.
And maybe you never even need to talk to them, who knows, but that's design. And so that's how you get that corporate marriage counseling. How can we get these two people to sit down and talk.
[00:13:29] Duke: could you tell us about a time where somebody succeeded at scale though? Like not knocking, like individual use cases. How do we talk to them? But have you seen many clients that actually have a no code, low code citizen developer program?
[00:13:43] Steve: A few. I work with some of our, defense contractors and our, GSI, most of them actually. some of the GSRs are, highly. Siloed. And some of them are not. And, the defense contractors kind of the same way by nature of how their job needs to be. You know, I was talking about separation of data and duties, especially if you're working on compartmentalized or secret or something else like that.
So, that is nuanced problem to solve because, they're immediately more reticent to share and work together in certain environments. And both of those are, a hundred thousand person organizations and they have thousands of these distributed and or citizen developers and they have different nomenclature for.
so some of them are like shared it resources. Some of them are like business process liaisons. Some of them are, I can't even remember some of it, but, that's, where it's successful is, is where you say all right, what is the culture? And we know people have to work together. Who are they?
How do they do it? Is that where you were asking?
[00:14:43] Duke: Yeah, I think so. It's just, while I have given people a citizen developer type access in the past, it was never something that I scaled up into Hey, fill out this form and you can start building catalog items or, you know what I mean? Or something like that.
And then, I would anticipate from the architect's perspective, we have to have some kind of review, . Cause we don't want these things push just Willy nilly. there's probably a lot of people who are trying to figure that out. they have an instinct that they know. They can't just turn this on.
so how do you get from, I don't have a citizen developer program to here's the steps I need to take.
[00:15:14] Steve: Well, whether they have one or not, they have one. The problem is, is that one of them is well-known discovered and managed and governed and audited and whatever. And if they don't think they have one, then they probably don't have a lot of rigor around those areas. So, what I normally do is, talk to the architects because they're going to be the ones that are going to say.
We have two or three low-code platforms. How do we choose what to build or what features and functionality to allow what people have and from a sort of, how do I start there? There is a, catalog item request or something like that to say like, Hey, I want to do. And then someone will say, okay, well, here's a knowledge article.
And uh, you need to go spin up a PDI and, do these labs, and then you need to, affirm in a test that you are not going to do X, Y, and Z. And when you want to do something or you want to level up, or you want to have new access, then we need to review. And, there's processes around all of that, but the scale comes from the automation thereof, I talked about earlier, are you just with this low code SIS and program, just giving it more work to do.
And it's, not necessarily that. And that's not the way to, to scale.
[00:16:29] Duke: this wasn't on the list, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Where do you draw the line between low code and everything above that?
[00:16:35] Steve: Um,
[00:16:35] Duke: Like, would you imagine a local or using integration hub and like plugging in an integration to another system? Or do you think that needs a little bit more pro code approach?
[00:16:43] Steve: So that's a good question. I consider no code, process automation, designer and flow designer. Yes. You can do a little scripting, one liners and whatever are, but that's the person's choice. I consider a low code. I can do some one-liners and some short scripts. and even maybe some, simple integrations, that'll be like your, pro amateurs that, happened to sit in a department.
But, yeah, I do consider pro coders. It's like, all right, well, I'm writing a bunch of business rules and script includes and all that stuff, as well as integration.
[00:17:15] CJ: what I always do wondering, and these situations too, is how do you scale the program itself up to a point where, so, Here's my perspective. Right? So typically, you might have, depending on the size of the organization where you're going to have incidents and you're going to have a, team, that team is typically going to be small because it cheap, right.
The business never wants to cut a check. Sometimes you're only going to have a service now, all the one person, sometimes you're going to get lucky and, the business will recognize the value of service now, uh, a lot more, and you might have like an architect, you might have a product owner and you might even get lucky and have a developer, or an admin, , from the perspective of citizen developers, like a lot of companies have a huge.
citizen development ecosystem already that they felt a recognized, everyone is building these apps , inside of Microsoft. Right. And so that's kind of like the untapped ecosystem for, in my opinion, building that service now, citizen development ecosystem, have you ever seen a company that likes successfully navigate that gap from creating. These applications and spreadsheets to natively change in a way. Folks think that we should create these applications and service now, and then also having the ability, those quote unquote power users in the end user ecosystem to do that.
[00:18:33] Steve: there's a few ways that I've seen that been done. I'll give you an example. so there's a consumer goods company and they were doing stuff and like SAP and sequel and, TIBCO Spotfire. These are the people that can, write queries and, do wizardry, quote unquote in Excel and access and all of, that.
And the problem was that they did not have access to do all of the programmability and SQL that they needed. They didn't have the flexibility to do calculations and automation and Excel they needed. And then, SAP was just, a PhD in a hundred thousand dollars away from being able to start.
So, when we came in, it was like, so here's your partner. Your partner is going to lay the groundwork for this. And then once you have that, then you are the shimmies. You've already got some technical capabilities. And so now you know how to parameterize your SQL query. Now, you know how to get an RPA to grab this thing out of TIBCO or have the partner build that API end point to generate the stuff from TIBCO and deliver it to you rather than you go and get it.
And then of course there was the Hey, how do we. And it wasn't invoices, it was marketing discounts and stuff like that. How do we enter that into SAP for the payback to the convenience stores? So it's not necessarily that you're going to replace everything with us. It's that we're the, the medium and there's capabilities that allow you to, instead of do it in 12 different systems, 12 different languages, 12 different way.
You just say, oh, well it just happens. All the stars align. And now I can do this with less of a heavy handed approach from my prose.
[00:20:14] CJ: Yeah, that makes sense. , I've always thought of service now it's the platform of platforms. Right. So I won't, steal any credit for the tagline, from what four or five years ago, but ever since it was announced, like it clicked, right?
Like, yeah, this makes sense. Because one of the main things I've been doing with service now is doing integrations with other platforms and utilize service now to be that front. of all of those other platforms, right then their religious Dorn data. Sometimes they'll do specific kind of business logic.
That's already built into it, but most of it is, pull data into service now and use the service now, wide variety of, of, of tricks to, do what you needed to do. whether that's workflow or calculations or reporting and what have you. so I want to
[00:20:52] Steve: I got, I got one more point on that for you,
[00:20:55] CJ: Um,
[00:20:57] Steve: you know, and this is to the previous question too, is what do I consider low code? I think the nuance is what can you do with less code?
[00:21:04] CJ: Oh,
[00:21:04] Steve: And so if you're working with your partners, then, they can say like, Hey, yeah, I can do this.
And, I can just slap it out in a, in a script. And I've seen that a bunch of places. And oftentimes that's some technical debt, but if you take a moment to refactor that, then you can say, Hey, here's the sub flow or here's how you can use this, or here's how I can reach out to these three other systems.
And then now you can change how that works. So there's,
[00:21:32] CJ: Yeah.
[00:21:32] Steve: there's differences there and that's all one sec.
[00:21:35] CJ: No, no, I think that's, I think that's something great to explore there too, because, in situations where I'm working with a client, they'll often remind me, Hey, don't forget that when you leave, we need to maintain this. so I think that runs parallel to what you were saying. Is that, sometimes just because I can knock this out in a script include that gets called from a business rule and with some kind of esoteric conditions on it. Right. And it'll work just fine. And doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the right way to do it for this particular project based on who's going to maintain it after I'm gone.
And I see the same situation, based on what you just said.
[00:22:09] Steve: Yup.
[00:22:10] Duke: There's one thing on your, LinkedIn feed. I definitely need to get to And your most recent experiments talks about dealing with hyper automation. which sounds awesome. but
[00:22:20] CJ: automation.
[00:22:21] Duke: hyper automation, not just automation. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't want to make the assumption. It's a buzzword, but it's very buzzy.
Um, and uh, what I want to do is hear, when you guys talk about hyper automation on service now, like what is that? And has anybody done it?
[00:22:38] Steve: in the same way that citizen development and distributed development, is. an organizational thing as well as a technological thing. I consider a hyper automation to be the sort of process analog of that. And there's a reason why, you know, I spoke before about human centered design and user experience, digitization and automation, because the ability for you to hyper automate.
And I'll get into what I consider that to be. And a moment is dependent on your ability to say, we can do this, but should we, and in what order, and what's easiest. And then how does that scale? So, one of the, biggest things that we do, when we talk about hyper automation is as we make sure that.
We let people know that hyper automation has a lot of components underneath it that allow you to get to that goal. So I consider hyper automation to be, the automation of automation or at least, Hey, you should automate here. Or this process or automation is a suburb.
[00:23:42] Duke: So that's where the new features on workflow optimization come in, where it's telling you how long it's spending at each of the phases.
[00:23:49] Steve: Right. And if you look at our acquisitions, uh, you're also looking at like gecko brains and, some others and our partnership with Solanas and that's process mining. So you've got process mining, you've got process automation, you've got, orchestration and bots. Those are in a, orbit around each other as part of the things that support hyper automation,
the thing about process mining is, is instead of saying, you know, this is what my process is. Process mining says, this is what your process actually is I looked at the logs and I saw what happened instead of. you drawing it out.
[00:24:24] CJ: It reminds me of, sometimes you'll build something and it'll work and then it'll work until it stops working and you need to troubleshoot, and then you realize, huh, this isn't working the way I built it or the way I thought I built it anyway.
Right. it's just kind of interesting to me
[00:24:38] Duke: I mean, for any skeptics out there who think that sounds a little bit too, like wave the magic wand and it discovers it for you. That is actually. What remember we had journalism as a sponsor forever, like with.loc.io, which just got, acquired by service now, by the way, that's what his application did was don't define your use cases in ATF because that's, the academic doctrinal view of how you intend this thing to work.
Why don't we just discover the way things actually.
[00:25:09] Steve: I was super happy about that acquisition.
[00:25:12] Duke: Yes, me too. Yup.
[00:25:14] Steve: there's another, avenue. Well, there's a few others, but people talk about prediction and ML and, AI and similarity frameworks and all that other fun stuff,
[00:25:24] CJ: oh
[00:25:24] Steve: like on their own. Actually, let me, let me put this in context of the story.
So, when we talk about what we're doing with our customers, , around hyper automation, you can go and look at our skews. We don't offer that. And that's important to know because hyper automation, isn't just a piece of technology. It's an approach, which means that you have to get a bunch of stuff lined up first and sort of minimize a bunch of stuff.
it's more deep than it is voluminous. if you think about how do we automate automation? we're not the only ones doing this. And in fact, there's a company I work with, they've got dozens of thousands of engineers, the creme de LA creme of, that industry.
And these engineers can go off and do everything they want. They've done data science, they know how to do AI and ML. they implement it in real life. And so when service now comes along and says, oh, we'll help you with this. And they're like, who are you? Why are you here? What's going on?
I start to talk to them and just be like, listen. not coming in and saying you should use our AI and ML. You can. But what I would like to do first is figure out what you're doing and why. And when you start to talk about them and what they're trying to do, it's the same journey that we have. how do you automate automation? When this company does it, they're like, oh, we build an AI model that talks to this, fluids, dynamics, simulation thing. And it does X, Y, and Z. Oh, okay. All right. Well, how does that tie over to your prediction model for forecasting parts to make sure that you have them in the right, country at the right time, seven years from now to make sure that this thing keeps working and they're like, well, Eventually we'll talk to that group.
oh, okay. how do you know when they changed their models and you change your models and, or the data sets that those models are built upon? because those are assets now. And ignoring audit because they, they are audited is, is, you know, what version of this did you use?
When well, we built ours in Sage and they built their, as in our, and they built theirs and, you know, just keep going down the list and it's like, okay, so this story is going to sound pretty familiar because it's the disconnected, disparate and different, it's the siloed approach to all these things.
And uh, just one statistic, I think it was Forester. And they said like 78% of AI models never make it out of the lab, even though they could provide value. when we talk to them, we say like, how are you managing your assets? How are you making this available? How are you, automating and deploying? How are you connecting these things? And they're like, oh, So that's what we're talking to them about. And that's really what made them buy into us on the hyper automation story. Is, is that not that we do all of it and everything, and right now it's that they've now figured out. there's a whole lot of stuff that we don't have to build.
If we go the service now, right.
[00:28:10] CJ: You know what? That has always been. My view of the platform since I first touched it even before, like we bought it when I was on the customer end, but when I first touched it and realized like everything, as, you know, I'm playing with it and everything, we ended up with a demo instance before we signed on his customers and blah, blah, blah. right. And how much of the heavy lift in the platform does for you so that you can focus on the things that you need to do.
[00:28:42] Steve: Hilarious. You said the contrapositive of what I told them. I was like, yeah, you can build all this stuff, but why. Valuable for your engineers, spend their time doing this mundane stuff in a discipline that they don't have a great grasp of. if you want the best in change management, you're talking to us.
[00:29:03] CJ: and that's what It's. about. why build a notification engine service now, already has that? Why build a workflow engine service already has that, why should I build a, platform full of API is one again, service now, already has that.
So it's all of those things that, you know, you put them all together. It's like, let me just focus on the stuff that we're doing. Well, I'll let you guys do the stuff that you're already doing. Well, we'll marry the two together and boom success, right?
[00:29:28] Steve: It's. I mean, to the point is we had a GSI and this goes back to sort of like the low code side of it, but it's also now how old at that previous company I was talking about is, doing this GSI was like, well, there's been some changes in how people need to access files in SharePoint.
we need to make sure it doesn't get external access and this and that and the right people see it. And you know, there's also rotations. So, consultants can't work on a company for so long or if there's conflicts of interest and.dot dot, right? Yeah. So they were like, How do we ensure that the right people have the right access to the right files that are user-generated across our whole globe.
[00:30:06] Duke: We talked about that a couple of times.
[00:30:09] CJ: Yeah.
[00:30:11] Steve: And there's a way to help your citizen. Developers never have to manage that again, because what they did was is they, they took our SharePoints. And they copied it and they edited it and they added extra logging and checks and audit. And so now anyone who uses that, integration hub spoke, it's automatically automating some of their audit and governance as well as, Ooh, this looks weird.
I want to have someone review this,
[00:30:36] CJ: that's beautiful.
[00:30:38] Steve: scale right there. Yeah. I'm a mathematician. So when I look at stuff, I'm like, what's the frequency, what's the severity, what's the complexity. when you talk to architects in that way, it's like, Hey, do you really enjoy managing all the various upgrades and connections and ETL and all of that, between all of these systems?
Or would you rather just focus on simplifying and getting work done? And, we have a great story around that, but I'm not going to pontificate.
[00:31:03] CJ: When you are in these situations, you're talking to folks, do you have a checklist or some kind of a Bible or something that you referenced to get through these things, or you just play them by ear with your wealth of experience.
[00:31:14] Steve: Yes I do.
[00:31:18] Duke: um,
[00:31:18] Steve: And this is how do I say this? I don't like to use, as a motivator, but. What I do like to do is say like, I know what you're going through. I know what you're thinking about. And so I, and my, sales guy, Kelly, , created set of six questions. That we ask people.
And all we're trying to do at this point is to make sure that we can speak to the right people so that we can be in the rubric. You know, it's like application lifecycle management, BCB D , how do we get in the conversation for someone to say, oh yeah, I know service now is available, but I don't want to use it.
And here's the reason. Because I want them to know when they should be using us. And I, I always try and do the fear and the negative, but I give them like six questions and actually, it's funny, you guys brought this up. How much can be done in nodal low-code can it integrate with my cots custom and collaboration platforms?
How do I manage to control this platform at scale? Is my data safe? Does it meet regulatory compliance and audit standard? Does it scale for enterprise wide use cases or consumption will my low coders be able to take advantage of omni-channel AI, mobile, natural language interfaces. And, we put that all in one and you don't really have to integrate together.
And architects really appreciate that. And auditors really appreciate that because then they don't have to sit down with a programmer and find out. So explain to me how this is audit compliant again. They can just get the log or they can use their own flow designer to do these things. So It's a wise approach to solving those scalability and complexity issues.
[00:32:52] Duke: All right. We are at time. So we'll give you the last word, Steven. , if there's one thing you want people to take away from this.
[00:32:58] Steve: Hmm. , the things I would say are the number one takeaways is, start with design. the technology is probably there, or it can quickly be accessible, but if you're not addressing how someone needs to work or work better, or how your customers need to get X, Y, or Z, then you're just doing the same thing a different way and expecting the same result.
[00:33:24] Duke: Sounds like our outcomes episode inquiry. Just insert that right here.
[00:33:29] CJ: Definitely does.
[00:33:30] Steve: Yeah. let me try and say that again. I would say, start with design because otherwise you're just throwing a bunch of technologies together. If you're not addressing, outcomes or the experience, then, Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I say that citizen development is one of my most common conversations and I think it's because. People don't know all the things that we can do and how, simple and cohesive we make it and how safe and uniform it is. So once they can approach service now from a design perspective, Then they're going to get more out of this.
and I know that I'm not speaking alone in this because the former CIO, Andrew, something of Accenture said, we quit asking if service now could do it. We started asking what experience do we want to provide? And I think he's at Microsoft. He's like their CTO now. that would be my, number one thing to take away from this.
[00:34:24] CJ: Wise words from Steven here, closing us out.