Knowledge 2020 hackathon celebrates health and automation use cases

We know that software developers love to create. It's part of their core DNA and it's what drives them to be what we often like to call ‘creators’. The term has been popularised to denote individuals that live to make, create and sometimes deliberately break.

To champion this ingenuity, every year we celebrate our ‘creators’ with our ServiceNow CreatorCon Hackathon.

As we all know, 2020 is kind of different. Just as ServiceNow's Knowledge 2020 conference was transformed into a digital event, Knowledge 2020 CreatorCon Hackathon of course followed suit and staged its proceedings as a virtual codefest.

The central idea behind any ServiceNow CreatorCon Hackathon is to provide an environment that openly showcases ideas, fast-tracks development, rapidly prototypes new ideas and accelerates the innovation curve of the team and individuals behind each app, with additional support and resources from ServiceNow.

The categories inside which we encouraged app development for 2020 were Telecoms, Healthcare, Social good, Banking and Manufacturing.

All the teams built their solutions on the Now Platform over a two-day period. The teams were given free reign as to how much of the ServiceNow platform they used, but were encouraged to leverage as many of its functionalities as possible. This year's five finalists and their creative innovations were:

JetVet by team Sopra Steria

Sopra Steria developed an integrity, due diligence and background check solution. JetVet addresses the fact that financial institutions typically spend thousands of hours performing due diligence on potential clients and partners when a lot of this background work could be automated. Using a wide range of data sources, JetVet decreases supplier and client onboarding time as well as reduces the risk of corruption and unethical practices throughout an organisation's supply chain.

KICK: Key Items Crisis Kit by team World Class Wrackin' Cru

KICK is an application designed to streamline the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical services, developed in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Key workers and volunteers can register and log requests for PPE, track their request and use a knowledge base. The app helps drive specific workflows to the right place at the right time, ensuring that supply meets emergency demand.

Clinical Care Management (EMR) by team Volteoans

This is a complete hospital management application that aims to address many of the issues faced by healthcare professionals on a daily basis. Clinical Care Management bridges the gap between IT and healthcare using electronic patient records and allows healthcare to become a digital experience, automating the most commonly executed medical tasks and aspects of clinical care management.

Zoom: Extra Crispy by team Extra Crispy Stimulus Package

With so many different teams from different work silos connecting on Zoom, the Zoom Extra Crispy team reminds us that it's easy to forget the bigger business picture during a surge in conference calling. This application provides an integration with Zoom that takes a call transcript and builds actionable object ‘word clouds’ that in turn drive workflows and create actionable tasks. It also uses machine learning to look at sentiment to uncover even deeper intentions that people had perhaps discussed but not formally mandated for action.

Reach by team NewRocket

Reach helps people reach information and one another, just when they need it most. Developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Reach enables people from all backgrounds to find reliable information and local resources during times of crisis. Leveraging the power of the ServiceNow platform, Reach is a dynamic personalised hub for information resources that takes global information networks and delivers them at a local level. Users might use the application to look for COVID-19 testing facilities, or to simply find local practical information, such as food outlets that are currently open.

Real world values

What's really amazing and inspiring about ServiceNow CreatorCon Hackathons is the diversity of participants and their organisations. Once again, this hackathon series saw us welcome qualified software engineers alongside project managers and other less technical business people.

Once again, we saw entries from participants who work at multinational organisations alongside apps developed by startups or smaller companies employing less than 50 people. The fact that there are no barriers to entry in this way really highlights the breadth and accessibility of the ServiceNow platform.

There had to be a winner though. First place was won by Team Volteoans for its Clinical Care Management app. Created as a brand new solution on the Now platform, the app has amazing depth as well as numerous features and functionalities.

Overall, I think all our Hackathon participants brought everything to the virtual table that they possibly could in terms of enthusiasm, dedication and commitment. All that was really missing was the soda and pizza at the end…

There are three more global hackathons scheduled in June of 2020 which will be staged in association with our partners.

This article first appeared on diginomica on 19th May 2020.