What is ServiceNow?

I LOVE this question. I used to think to myself "how do I explain something so broad, so powerful, and so impactful before I bore people to tears with techie talk?"

Then an opportunity arose when working with one of my ServiceNow mentees, which gave me a great story to explain how we help the world work better. This mentee is one of several who have come to me from their non-IT careers and said, I want to know more about this platform you always speak of!

I promise, I get to the part where I explain "What is ServiceNow", but let me first introduce you to Stacy (name altered for anonymity). She owns a small cleaning service called "Stacy's Cleaning Service" that services a few small hotels around town. She's now learning ServiceNow because she has been hearing about this amazing platform from her friend Jeremy (name not altered). In the process of taking her ServiceNow Fundamentals course and prepping for her exam, I set aside a few hours to walk her through some basic learnings of my own from 11 years in this business :).

My question to her was, "if you could do anything with ServiceNow, what would you do?" It was a loaded question because I wanted to see how deep her understanding of the platform was after taking her Fundamentals course.

She said, "I would love for my customers to come to a branded website of mine and fill out a quote request form so I can review it and give them a quote." I said "GREAT! let's go get you a $6/month drag-n-drop website builder to do it." I explained that a service like Squarespace, GoDaddy, Wix, etc. are great options for sole proprietors to create a presence online and even get some simple things done. But we needed to think BIGGER!

I took her on a journey and asked her to imagine her sole proprietorship just got bought by a hotel chain like Hilton because she has the fastest service in the nation. They have challenged her to expand from the one city she's in to 20 cities in 6 months. Before purchasing her business, she was asked (hypothetical) how she had the fastest service in the nation...and she said she divided her staff by the speed in which they clean and divided based on the room types that she cleaned. Slower and more meticulous cleaners got the more expensive and less rented rooms, and the faster less meticulous cleaners got the cheaper and faster turned rooms. They asked her how she kept up with all that, she said "in my head". In that moment, she knew her way of doing business couldn't expand because she was dealing with only a couple handfuls of cleaners.

I explained to Stacy that it's now time to think BIGGER! Here is where ServiceNow comes in! Now Stacy needs to onboard new employees, track employee skillsets, employee performance, track expenses, manage quotes, manage SLAs, and MORE! She also needs to provide a catalog of services for her customers to request from her business on a daily basis. Once the requests comes in, she needs automation via workflow to ensure that requests are responded to in time.

It's time to trade in that overnight website builder for ServiceNow, the cloud-based platform that enables enterprise business owners like Stacy realize the true potential of their business model. It enables them to grow exponentially where human interaction is not necessary. Why hire a team of people to answer questions when our Virtual Agent can answer questions automatically? Why hire an entire team of IT staff to manage servers so you can hire front, middle, and backend developers to build your apps when you can use our No/Low Code platform and App Engine Studio to build an app in minutes? Why not spend time showing your new HR team how to configure and use ServiceNow to automate their processes rather than doing things manually?

I explained that Stacy could pull some of our Off The Shelf applications to get her up and running quickly

• HR Service Management - for onboarding employees, and all human resources needs
• Customer Service Management - to manage the interactions with her customers
• Field Service Management - to manage the deployment of cleaning agents based on skill, availability, and location

I also explained that when she came up with a crazy application that only her business could think of, she could Kevin Costner it using:

• App Engine Studio (the guided low/no code app builder)

At the end of our 4 hour session, we took a sole proprietor mindset and turned it into an Enterprise mindset all powered by the ServiceNow platform. We actually used App Engine to build a quote intake system with a fun portal, simple service catalog with a couple of requests, and a workflow to automate the quotes in this time we spent together! I even showed her how we could take an Amazon Dash button, and have her cleaning agents push it on their way in and out of the room to track when service started and stopped and have that data stored in ServiceNow using a simple integration. I'll admit that got a little mind blowing after 4 hours of my rambling on....but the understanding that we could do it was amazing to her!

I hope this helps understand how ServiceNow fits in the big picture. After 11 years of making SO MANY things possible, I see where we are behind the scenes of many enterprises driving process, innovation, and workflow. We enable so many businesses to grow their digital footprint without the expense of hardware or high-end development teams. We bring silo'd business together with one robust, but simple at its core, platform.

I LOVE what I do. I LOVE this platform. And 11 years later, I still believe it's a game-changer! Hit me up sometimes and let's talk shop!

Jeremy Duncan - Certified Master Architect - ServiceNow