Introducing First Connections

[JenniferG]

First Fridays has always been about three things: learning from each other, building a network of healthcare peers who actually get what you're dealing with, and getting better at the platform together. The best sessions we've run aren't the ones with the slickest slides, they're the ones where someone walks through what they actually built, what broke along the way, and what they'd do differently. That kind of honesty is hard to fake, and it's why this community keeps showing up. We also know that not everyone wants to grab the mic on the main stage, and that's completely fair. Some stories feel too niche, too in-the-weeds, or just too "is anyone else even dealing with this?" to feel worth presenting. We promise: someone out there absolutely wants to hear it.

That's why we're kicking off a new segment in June called First Connections. The idea is simple. If you're looking for advice, guidance, or just want to hear how a peer navigated a specific platform topic, you can put a request out to the community. Nothing is too big or too small. It could be how you stood up the full HAM suite, how you manage groups in your instance, how you approached your first Now Assist use case, or any of the thousand other things we wrestle with day to day.

Here's how to participate:  During any First Fridays session (at anytime in chat), drop your request and start it with "First Connections Request" so we can spot it. We'll capture those and post them to a dedicated forum we're spinning up just for this. If you see a request and you've lived through something similar, reply with "First Connections Share" and we'll work on matching you with the person who asked. From there, the conversation belongs to the two of you: a coffee chat, a Teams call, an email thread, whatever works for you both.

For now, we'll help jumpstart the matching. As the forum grows and folks get to know each other through the meeting chats, our hope is these connections start happening on their own. That's the real point of it: a healthcare ServiceNow community that knows each other well enough to just reach out.

We will be creating the forum here on our Community page for the connections soon.