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"ServiceNow can do anything". Sure, but what is it REALLY used for? CJ & The Duke propose a quick way to understand ServiceNow value propositions, and what applications it is best for.
Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:00:00] Duke: This episode is brought to you by magic mind. Magic mind is the official productivity drink of CJ and the duke. And believe me four o'clock on a Friday. , definitely thinking about productivity. ,
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All right. Our second sponsor is clear. Sky clear sky is the better way to IGA on the service. Now platform, IGA stands for identity governance and administration, and you take one, look at this app. And my first question is why the heck doesn't this on service now? right, so. Clear sky is a team that has taken all the industry best practices over all those years.
And they've built them in a new, fresh product on top of service. Now,
Where all your other, , workflow applications are. It just, it makes so much sense. So it's a better way to IGA on the service now platform. , the links are going to be description to below. Please check them out. All right, Corey, what are we talking about today?
[00:01:46] CJ: All right, duke today, we aren't talking about.
Oh, man, this was going to be a
[00:01:54] Duke: this is a PG 13 warning, right? This episode. Yeah. You don't want your kids listening to this episode?
[00:02:01] CJ: This is the episode where, we might lose RPG 13 label, but we're, we're going to go for it anyway. Right. So today, duke, we're talking about how work is.
[00:02:11] Duke: Work is bullshit.
[00:02:13] CJ: Yeah, it is when you come down to think of it, right.
[00:02:16] Duke: I love the work I do, but there's all kinds of work. I do a man. I just had a coaching session That I love the work I do seriously. , but there's
[00:02:27] CJ: he's he said it like three times now use you, I don't know who he's trying to convince you guys or him.
[00:02:31] Duke: Hey. So listen,
is that work around the work that I'm trying to do? That's the bullshit part, right? Like, have you ever been like a new hire and you couldn't start working for like days because there's just stuff that wasn't done.
[00:02:47] CJ: , you know, duke, it is bullshit, honestly, when you're going to onboarding onto a project, right? Like there's so much work that's involved and getting you onboard and integrate into their systems. Right. And most of the time. work that needs to be done is undocumented very well.
Isn't laid out very well. The, the sequencing of it is off, and there's a lot of back and forth. There's a, did this happen? Did that happen? Did they send you the thing? Oh, they're sending me a laptop. We're sending you a laptop. I don't want you a lot to down. Great. Cause we didn't send it.
You know, those, all of that kind of, stuff that goes on around just getting onboarded onto a project or, or, a job. Really underscores how much bullshit is in the work before we even do the work.
[00:03:27] Duke: That's right. And it's not just onboarding, it's just getting the stuff done that needs to get done so that I can do what I have to do. And, you know, I was on a contract once and for the first half of the year, I'm not one of their employees, so I can't. go onto their SharePoints or do whatever. And so they're like, well, you gotta be on our VPN. So we're going to send you a laptop and blahbity blah, blah, blah. And it's just, it never arrived. and so what That did was it just multiplied my efforts.
[00:03:57] CJ: Right.
[00:03:58] Duke: Like it just added that much more friction to my efforts because it's like, oh, Robert, didn't you use document?
No, I can't go to your SharePoint site. Remember. And so days later they're sending me a hard copy over email and that's bullshit.
[00:04:14] CJ: is bullshit, dude.
[00:04:16] Duke: And this is all just to help us understand service now better, right? what is service now? What is it? What does it do? What does it for this bullshit? I just got hired. I can't work because I don't have the right things are, I'm a consultant and I need to access this resource. I don't have it. Or think about all the types of work we can deal with now. And it's just like you think about just, just initiating the work is bullshit.
[00:04:41] CJ: Yeah. You know, I'm just thinking about that as you're talking. Right. And you know, I know this isn't only I'm in the onboarding process, but I have never had the experience of getting to a place sitting down, logging in with account credentials and having like service now automatically pop up in a browser with the status of every single onboarding task in.
Right. Like how cool would that be?
[00:05:10] Duke: it's the first problem I solved and we didn't get everything, but we got a whole lot of it. And 14 years later, it's still a big, huge thing to build,
[00:05:18] CJ: Yeah,
[00:05:19] Duke: but that's because getting onboard is bullshit. There's lots of stuff to do anyways. That's just, that's just one That's just, yeah.
If you took a look at that bullshit Patty, right? That's just one facet. Of the bullshit diamond.
[00:05:35] CJ: Absolutely. at the end of the day, once you get onboarded, there's a whole nother level of bullshit that you got to navigate your way around or through. Right. And nobody comes out smelling like roses after that. Right. Everyone's frustrated and pissed off.
There's so much loss lost productivity And you just end up in this situation where, when you look back on it, you can see all of those inflection points where something should have been done differently. And it wasn't. And you think to yourself, if you have any experience with service now, why aren't we having service now do that,
[00:06:05] Duke: Which leads us to seem too. When you get onboarded, it is to do something you're good at, right?
You're you're you're to meet some objectives about the organization, but you know what, what's bullshit organizing your work is bullshit, man. Like, I know what I'm good at. And I need a list of things, you know, put in front of me of, of all the ways you need me to do that stuff.
But without platforms like service now, Like how else would I figure out what Because it's basically, oh yeah, man. Let's just use emails, my, to do list and then you graduate to calendar and your calendar looks like, like a million
[00:06:44] CJ: could go wrong?
[00:06:45] Duke: rainbows, right? Million of them.
[00:06:49] CJ: What could go wrong. If you store all of your, to do's and email and you have to search for them every time you want to look for them, right? Like what could go, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, you know what, why don't we store all of our really important stuff in deleted items? That sounds great. I mean,
[00:07:05] Duke: Especially with the volume of email you get, right? Like all that important stuff you're supposed to get done yesterday is now pushed down a page lower, which you never get to.
[00:07:12] CJ: exactly.
[00:07:13] Duke: that's BS. And then it's, maybe I got a good memory, but nobody's got that good. A memory.
[00:07:19] CJ: No, no. I mean, you know, we're not a, not a bunch of, uh, doctor reads around here, right? W w total and complete recall, right? Like, I mean, you're going to drop something eventually. And if you drop it in email, man, is it hard to find if you drop it in service now on the other hand, right? A lot of. Native search tools, organization filter this show matching, man, let me tell you about filter this and show matching.
Oh my God. Like those are my favorite features on the platform are I swear to God so simple, but such a productivity boost. I find myself in every list, any in any app or user interface with a list instinctively looking for, uh, right click show matching, right. Click, filter out. You know, and if, oh man, I, it just annoys me how this has not become a thing across applications.
I mean, that's BS.
[00:08:10] Duke: Yeah. Even if you graduate, you know, you go up and the maturity level and it's like, it's not email, it's not my memory. It's not my calendar. Like what else? Excel. but then who owns it? Where is it? Is it centralized care? Would you see it? No, you can't. It's bullshit. It's bullshit,
[00:08:27] CJ: This is bullshit. Nobody can see it. Nobody owns it. . Oh. And somebody is going to change it and somebody's going to delete, oh, we've got a conflict pick. which version of this spreadsheet users you should save, right? Oh, there go all of the last five to do's you put in that, in that spreadsheet, right?
it's all bullshit. You can't run an organization like this. there is so much lost productivity here. And E it really pisses me off when I started to think about it and start to talk about it. Because, you know, when you bring in folks, employees, or consultants, what have you doesn't really matter, right?
When you bring these folks in and you say, okay, you need to do this job and you need to have this done by that time. And you've got all this loss productivity in the middle. You're effectively condensing those deadlines.
[00:09:13] Duke: Yup.
[00:09:13] CJ: And that's, bullshit. Like if I, if you, if you want to done in a week, give me a flat out week.
Don't give me a flat out week where I got three days waiting on people to do things, right. That's not a week. That's a two day deadline.
[00:09:24] Duke: which brings us to chapter three, sequencing work is bullshit, man. we all work in teams and I think most of us can see that everything we do is part of some other higher level initiative.
[00:09:41] CJ: Yeah.
[00:09:41] Duke: and, especially onboarding is always like great example. Cause there's like 40 things to do.
And I might just be task three of 40, but how do I know that
[00:09:52] CJ: You don't.
[00:09:53] Duke: like, if somebody's going, gonna email me every time I have to do something, I'm next in line. What if that falls off my page?
[00:09:58] CJ: Yeah. Well, if you've got something else to do, what if they now you've got, uh, uh, And this onboarding thing is another thing in your queue. And I mean, I don't know, man. It's like, this is all like insight, insight, right? Like lack of insight is bullshit. You people need to know at what stage and at what queue and what part of the process, their piece of work.
before and after they get it. And if you, the person that the work is being done for you, you have that have that information at a glance so that you can then report up status as well. Right. This is all about status, all about tracking work without necessarily creating more.
Right. Like, so duke, if you have a thing that depends on me doing the thing and I'm backed up and I'm trying to get to your thing, and then you email to get a status on where your thing, when I'm going to be done with the thing to pass it to you, do you think now that it's going to take less time for you to get the thing or more,
[00:10:55] Duke: Yeah, well, I've just added work to the system. Haven't I, by asking you where you're at on this thing, which is going to take time for you to like, you're gonna have to duck out and figure out oh, Rob needs an answer.
[00:11:04] CJ: Exactly. So now I got, I got a task shift, right? Like I got a complete mental shift of what I'm doing to think about when I can deliver this for you. And then I got it.
[00:11:14] Duke: that's the worst kind of busy, isn't it
[00:11:16] CJ: It is.
[00:11:16] Duke: I'm busy, but it's just like, I know three times today, I'm going to be asked about some other initiative that I'm just not on top of and not even, because I'm not, because I'm a bad resource, but just because there's so much of it.
[00:11:30] CJ: Absolutely. Right. because there are two different types of people who do work in offices. There are people who do work and then there are people who manage work. The people who manage work don't quite understand that, that 30 seconds or that five minutes or 15 minutes, however long it takes for me to actually answer your query.
They think that's negative. However, if you, one of the people who's actually doing work, that context shifting takes much longer than it looks like on the label, right? Like I might get you to an answer in 30 seconds, but it costs me a half hour of getting back into that flow state.
[00:12:06] Duke: Yeah. Do you know what? That's bullshit.
[00:12:11] CJ: Oh, man, that is total bullshit. And I I've been there. It fun and, you know, working from home as most of us do now. I've got family and wife and kids and stuff and, you know, have had one of the kids come, you know, and, and tap me on the shoulder to ask me something after. And I, Hey dad, can I get a glass of water?
Like, um, Thanks. But now I have no idea where I was in this complicated workflow. I was designing. So let me test it a few more times to figure out where it breaks. I can get back to where I was, right. and it's not their fault. I'm their dad. Of course, they go to come and ask me. What ages illustrates, how something as simple as taking your eye off the ball for 30 seconds for men, it for five minutes can completely, throw a, bullshit monkey ranch and where you were.
And if there's insight into these things, right? If person who's asking you, for the task to get done can actually ascertain an information themselves. Then they don't have to bug you and your task for them gets done that much quicker.
[00:13:04] Duke: just reminds me of project status functionality in the SPM suite. you know, I've had people on the ITFM side say, well, why would I write out a project as well, so that they don't ask you all the questions that you're putting into your status report? Like leave me alone.
I've got $8 million of cap X to get across the finish line here. Thank you very much.
[00:13:24] CJ: I do. So this, this reminds me right. Likes always helped us. I was talking to someone online and they were having an issue and they said, you know, my manager is a microwave. And I don't have the option of leaving the team or the job help me. What do I do? I said, well, you got a micromanager micromanaging manager, right?
That's what it comes down. So what you do is you bombard them with project status, you know, meeting minutes, agendas, homework, the whole nine yards. Right. You just, completely super saturate them with information. Right. So they know exactly where things are at every, at every given moment. Right.
And that typically satisfies their Underlying control mechanisms right there that are, that's forcing them to be over your shoulder all the time. Right? Because micromanaging is bullshit. So what you want to do to prevent micromanaging is to build a system that produces statuses, Then those statuses automatically go to the people who are interested to save yourself, bullshit, like this. Oh, man. I, you know, um, I'm a little wild up on this duke because.
[00:14:27] Duke: Well, I just want to like maybe take this moment because. Some might say we're preaching to the choir and this is what we know, but I want people to realize it's a feeling place, Like we can explain to her blue in the face, optimizing your, resource allocation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, people can understand that Sure. But people feel. bullshit people go after work, out for happy hour or at least used to do happy hour. But, you go for happy hour and you talk about the stuff at work that was bullshit. The stuff that's stopping you from from exceeding, from excelling.
and that to me is what service now is about. So if you're, if you're one of the new people coming into the service now, this is a great episode for you because I think sometimes you're told, oh, service now is an application for building applications. Any application? Well kind of, but what is its sweet spot?
Its sweet spot is dealing with these bullshit paradigms of work.
[00:15:23] CJ: Yeah, I like that
[00:15:25] Duke: I want this, I want this done because it's bullshit. I don't know all the stuff I need to do because it's bullshit. I don't, um, don't know if I'm supposed to do my part in this sequence or not, because this is bullshit and there's all kinds of other facets of bullshit or not, but just, this can blend in with our episode on, just build something, right. Because what do you build? We'll just think about your own life, your hobbies, your family, your, the other jobs you've done, and just think of what the real bullshit parts of those jobs.
[00:15:57] CJ: Anything that requires me to manage it as a, is a candidate for an application for me.
[00:16:01] Duke: Just write anything. That's invisible is a candidate for me,
[00:16:05] CJ: okay.
[00:16:06] Duke: there's not a thing that says I had to do this.
[00:16:09] CJ: Okay. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, my thing is always trying to abstract and automate, right. I want to abstract and automate as much stuff as I can. So I don't have to think about it so up that I do need to think about, I think for those mental processes to think about it, right.
Those cycles, I can utilize them in a better way it's the same way, whether or not it's my personal life or my work life. Right. And my work life, I'm thinking about tasks. I'm thinking about how can I automate project statuses to my clients? How can I automate documentation? Things like that.
Am I at home? I'm thinking about how can I make sure all my bills get paid without me having to actually think about it. Right.
[00:16:45] Duke: Well, but don't you see like that, that's how it all comes together. Like,
you can't automate it until you can see it
[00:16:51] CJ: right,
[00:16:52] Duke: and put it in a database that where it is seen. So it's like, the problem we all had years ago is that I get this paper in the mail.
[00:17:00] CJ: right,
[00:17:01] Duke: And then now I gotta like, okay, I put it on the stack of bills.
And then at some point in this month, we're going to go through the stack of bills and pay them. right.
[00:17:09] CJ: that sounds horrible. That sells. Absolutely do. Let me.
[00:17:12] Duke: it right? I mean, and we live in a world where we can easily just scan these things, have the scanner, tell a database. Here's a thing that I scanned use all the optical character recognition is this company is this amount of money, send an approval notification to my phone. Do you want to pay this now?
Yes. You know, or, or a lot of these places have websites now or apps where you can pay via the app or whatever, but.
[00:17:35] CJ: building that.
[00:17:36] Duke: Exactly. But, but the thing is, the first thing is make it visible so that.
I know I have to do it. And then you can talk about how can we make it easier to do this? Like you might build a workflow legit, your first workflows and service now could be, Hey, listen, take this file, copy it to the SharePoint site, do something insultingly manual, but that's better than not having it visual at all.
[00:18:04] CJ: Exactly.
[00:18:05] Duke: chop down the automation tree.
[00:18:07] CJ: Absolutely. Right. And, and with some of the, with some of the things that we're building out now on the platform with like RPA and, uh, and OCR, there's that ability now to do some of the stuff that you literally just talked about. Right. And as you're talking about it, I'm thinking about the knowledge keynote where this, uh, where the OCR was showcasing, um, Wow.
Okay. That's a great use case. And I don't know, sorry, I don't know if I'm a weird, you kind of unique use case for service now, but I always think about what service now can do to help me in my personal life. Right. And this is largely because like I said, I want to have, less, uh, of my mental cycles devoted to managing these mundane tasks and more devoted to my family.
Right. And doing things that I actually enjoy. Right. So that means less paying bills, more having fun and being immersed in a service now ecosystem, I can see all of the bullshit on the consumer side that has failed to find a solution. And so when we get back, you know, on the, on the work end of it though, right?
Like it's the same thing. Like you said, duke, you can't fix it unless you actually make it visible. Right. And, and fixed means, you know, automated or fix my meat right. In the workflow around it. Fixed might mean don't communication with it, whatever the case may be.
If it's invisible, it's going to slide through and that's going to be a, that inflection point that doesn't get caught. that's going to cause folks to say, if this point in the process, this is Bush.
[00:19:29] Duke: Yeah, man. I hear that. , and if you're a service now, builder, maybe you're an se, like if you work in service now, I would just encourage you to look. In every aspect of service. Now just take a step back and say this exists because something is bullshit. let's take like something you said made me think about event management, Corey,
[00:19:51] CJ: Okay.
[00:19:52] Duke: like we've spent gazillions of dollars on making our infrastructure such that it tells us what's. And we have all kinds of applications and infrastructure and all this stuff that is capable of throwing a flag up and saying, Hey, something bad happened. and there's still customers that don't have that connected up to their service now system.
[00:20:13] CJ: Yeah.
[00:20:14] Duke: like, think about a football game where there's a referee throwing flags up everywhere, but nobody can see that.
[00:20:21] CJ: Yeah, yeah. Right.
[00:20:22] Duke: is going wrong all over the place. And
[00:20:26] CJ: like a comedy era's.
[00:20:28] Duke: it's like, I'm not saying that this stuff doesn't get done. there's some true heroes on the infrastructure side, just reacting to this stuff and doing stuff, but it's not like a fully integrated experience in disservice. Now, a red flag was thrown on this critical piece of infrastructure.
That critical piece of infrastructure is on the payroll system and a payroll is tomorrow.
[00:20:47] CJ: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:48] Duke: I mean? Like.
[00:20:50] CJ: And I, I have been chasing this for the better part of a decade, right? Like, so I've got it background that it background encompasses things like this infrastructure. I ran a network monitoring solution way back when, right. So event management and trying to get that in the end smart system built has been like my unicorn solution, right.
That I've been chasing for you. Because I want that event ingestion. Right. I want that to flag in service now, and I want whatever that flag to being, to be automatically prioritized and kicked off to somebody to either handle or be notified about. Well, what have you, right? I go on all of that to happen without somebody having to do something.
as it stood, the best I've ever gotten to when building these solutions out for, for a number of different reasons is you get the events in the service. Now you get a button to click and turn it, that event into an incident, right? You might have some rudimentary ability to tie that to, uh, ultimately to a change or a problem or an outage, right.
But never the full automated. that I've always envisioned get the event that the printer's down, something somewhere in the instance, spot ingest that kicks off a flow that restarts the spool or using the PowerShell. Right? Like that's what I want anyway.
[00:22:08] Duke: Yeah, I have been doing this for a long time, but as soon as I came up with that, like work is bullshit. narrative. It's made so much this stuff so much easier to explain
[00:22:20] CJ: Yeah.
[00:22:21] Duke: so much easier to explain. Well, you can do the whole start with why thing and like tell them your what's your objectives.
And, but I think if you just take it from a place of feeling. A place where your senses are insulted, but you know what I mean? Uh,
[00:22:36] CJ: That's that statement is very like Matt, uh, Matt Berman asked, right? Like baronesses. Yeah. and you know, because that sounds a lot, it's something a lot, like something he say in terms of like, how does that make you feel? Right. Like if that makes you feel bad, when you're doing it, you're doing it wrong.
Right. The process design wrong. Right.
[00:22:55] Duke: No kidding. we're humans and our emotions are incredibly powerful and I'll bet people make emotional decisions far more than sitting back and assessing the variable inputs and multi-variate analysis. And you know what I mean, people are wanting, they want to go with.
[00:23:12] CJ: Yeah. Yeah. And the gut typically doesn't steer you wrong. typically.
[00:23:16] Duke: seriously, get a good gut instinct, but all the young crew coming up and they want to know how to, like, how do I get a seat at the table? How do I grow? How do I grow? How do I grow? Comes down to producing better outcomes. But if you want them to realize. The path, you can take them to value. You have to associate it with some kind of sense of fencing, bullshit part of their life.
[00:23:39] CJ: Yeah.
[00:23:40] Duke: why don't you want this? Do you want to be that kind of I dunno, pick your poison. Why don't you want to install? ITBM do you want to work on some bullshit 30 year old implementation of Microsoft project? Where you like nobody in the organization has visibility into what things are up for project selection, how those projects are being sized And shape how those projects are going to be executed.
And where are they going to get the resources from? you don't want that visibility everybody that you want to work on, the projects are already in service now. Fine, fine. Do it the bullshit way, right?
[00:24:14] CJ: Yeah. Right.
[00:24:16] Duke: Yeah.
[00:24:16] CJ: Where's that project server,
[00:24:19] Duke: Yeah.
[00:24:20] CJ: let me log into that thing, oh God, no, no dude. You're you're but you said something duke about it, like all the folks, you know, coming into the ecosystem now. and trying to make their mark. And how did they do.
And, you know, one of the things that, I think ties in a lot to the fact that this is all bullshit, is talking to your customer to figure out precisely where the bullshit. I think in technology there's often talk about, talking to your customer, if you want to make your product better. And you know, a lot of tech guys don't want to talk to people, you know, I'm sorry, tech, folks, don't like to talk to people. Right. And so you end up in these situations. Where you're building something that's, scratching the itch that you think people have.
And it turns out to not be aligned, right? The same thing happens in the enterprise, it or in any organization, right? Like this, this is all of what we're talking about here. Right now. Talk to people, figuring out what a bullshit is and then fix the bullshit.
[00:25:12] Duke: all right. Should we, did we just about cover it?
[00:25:16] CJ: Man, I think we covered it. And then some.
[00:25:20] Duke: So if you're one of those people who wants to know, what's so good about servicing. Think about what's what kind of bullshit you deal with anyway, without it, if you're new to service now and you want to start, forming good stories, crafting good narratives, just think about all the bullshit stuff that people deal with every day, when it comes to, initiating work, organizing their work, sequencing the work, automating the work, governing the work, integrating in the work, all the things we preach on all in all about.
And get to that deep, emotional reaction, that sense offending reaction, that the word bullshit it's the only way to describe it.
[00:25:57] CJ: Yeah. if the users of your system don't have a bullshit moment, then I can guarantee you they're not using it.
[00:26:04] Duke: All right, folks, this has been CJ in the duke. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you on the next one.
[00:26:08] CJ: Goodbye.