Events
CreatorCon inspires developers to solve pressing social problems
Every year, CreatorCon brings together builders and developers to connect, get educated and inspired about new innovations in the ServiceNow Now Platform and learn how to build new workflows fast when businesses need them most. Already in its sixth year, CreatorCon 2020 is drawing more people than ever before as an all-digital multi-day experience within ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2020 event.
In the CreatorCon Keynote, ServiceNow CTO and SVP of DevOps Pat Casey, observed that CreatorCon’s goals this year are even more meaningful because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He believes that creators and engineers have the right skills to help solve some of today’s most pressing problems.
Once you're registered or signed in to the Knowledge website, you can watch the CreatorCon Keynote.
New COVID-19 management applications help organizations and communities
Marcus Torres, VP of product platform management at ServiceNow, highlighted key new features of the Now Platform. “The pandemic didn’t just change where we work,” Torres said. “It has changed the future of how we work, and we want all of you amazing admins, developers, or fulfillers to leverage the Now Platform to help the new world of work, work for you.”
Torres recounted how the team at ServiceNow came together in just a matter of days in March 2020 to publish four emergency response apps designed to help organizations and communities navigate the pandemic. They include ServiceNow's Emergency Response Operations, Emergency Outreach, Emergency Self Report and Emergency Exposure Management.
Taken together, these apps create a unified workflow that connects people in various functions, increasing their collective ability to save lives.
“We’re digitizing every person’s activities using the platform. But automating the entire workflow towards a single common outcome, the safety of all of you, is what’s truly important,” he said.
New features enable fast workflow development
The Now Platform will include a new feature in the Paris release, Process Automation Designer, which helps build and manage cross-enterprise workflows in a single screen, and the new, drag-and-drop UI Builder, which enables users to create amazing user interface experiences. In addition, the Now Platform CI/CD, helps developers scale development and management deployments seamlessly.
Torres demonstrated the new features by presenting a COVID-19 use case. He used Process Automation Designer to define a workflow that was visible in a single screen. “You can see the various stages or lanes of this entire workflow from identify and outreach, to treat and assist,” he said. “Within each one of these lanes you can see various activities that pan personas, people, and applications.”
Chris Haas, senior manager of product management at ServiceNow, joined the demonstration to illustrate how to extend the benefits of a COVID-19 outreach application. He demonstrated building a new UI component with the VS.Code extension, and then used the Now Experience UI Builder to add an enterprise social map that identifies people affected by the pandemic, allowing the user to visualize the impact in a whole new way. Haas then demonstrated the use of ServiceNow CI/CD to selectively commit which code he wanted to push into production.
Fireside chat: Proud ServiceNow moment
Senior developer evangelist Chuck Tomasi focused his fireside chat with Pat Casey on ServiceNow’s past, present, and future. Casey was employee #9 at ServiceNow. He emphasized that ServiceNow was not founded as an application company, even though today the company is well known for its apps. The initial vision was a platform that would let regular people build business applications.
Casey observed that it was relatively easy to transition the ServiceNow workforce to work remotely because of ServiceNow’s modern cloud environment and the fact that there was no need to change tool sets.
“We did find that it was a lot harder to work without the day-to-day human contact,” he said. “I’m really proud of the team and how they’ve been able to keep delivering the services for you even though it’s hard.”
Casey also expressed pride in how ServiceNow is helping communities cope with the pandemic. In Los Angeles, people who want a COVID-19 test can use a custom application built on the Now Platform, to get a test for free.
“That was the product that Fred Luddy thought of all those years ago,“ Casey said. “It wasn’t just solving a business problem. It was solving a social problem and doing a social good. I was proud of the team that built it and proud of the company.”
Looking to the future, Casey advised developers and engineers to concentrate on building things. “The way we can get out of this current situation is to find a problem out there that no one else has solved and build an app that solves it,” he said. “Let’s build some stuff that’s going to help.”
To learn more about CreatorCon and other Knowledge 2020 events, go here.
