We made it! Two epic events in the space of 4 days, with so much innovation and creativity, its difficult to know where to start.
First up, a truly huge event with an incredible partner in Cognizant. With more than 1100 registrants we knew pretty quickly this was going to be massive. Coordinating over 40 resources to support 6 buildings in 5 cities was always going to be tough, but the team smashed it! The teams were underway on time and it quickly became apparent that the bar was pretty high, so high that there were apps being visioned that we thought not possible. Shame on us!
With over 250 newly upgraded and provisioned instances of ServiceNow's latest release 'Istanbul' the teams set off at a feverish pace. As we paced the halls and spoke with the teams we saw the start of IOT, Transportation, Healthcare, Philanthropy, AI, Cognitive and Bots appearing. All in all we had over 80 applications and solutions created. Each location had a Top 5, which were then put forward for judging to decide the final 3. Winners were judged based on 'EPIC' :
- Ease of Adoption
- Power of The Platform
- Impact
- Creativity
Additional bonus points were also awarded for going above and beyond in terms of thought process, usage of the time, teamwork and so on. At the end of a long day we got down to the final 5, each winner from each location was up for the Grand Prize. Myself and several of the senior execs from Cognizant were then wowed by a 5min presentation from each team. After a brief huddle and conflab, we had our winner. 'CareNow' blew the doors off, with social/geo/speech-to-text integrations and solved a real problem outside of IT. 2nd and 3rd place were incredibly good also, with 'Bumblebee' the Autonomous Bot a real crowd pleaser.
The real power of the event is that it has challenged the thinking of how long it takes to get things done, to deliver a MVP to a customer based on some high level requirements, then unleashing the teams creativity in how to solve it....
Huge shout out to the #HackNow Crew and The CTS Account team, truly phenomenal effort and energy to get us through the day.
Fast forward to Sydney, Australia. Instances reset and ready to rock, we moved into the next #HackNow event, hosted in our very own offices. With almost 60 attendees, this one was much easier logistically, but the creativity was no less. Teams from customers, partners and inquisitive minds joined us for the 2nd Sydney event we have held in 2016. Fast forward another 9hrs and we had our new winners, narrowly beating the previous winners into 2nd place. Not only was the solution impressive in terms of extending the platform into non-IT, but the idea was to potentially roll this out to the consumer, the real end customers of the company.
(Winners being interviewed and recorded as part of the final presentation).
It would be remiss to not mention the incredible support we had from our colleagues based in the Hyderabad office. All travelled to locations and supported the events with true professionalism, provided great insight guidance and support, and all in all contributed to the fun.
Massive thanks to the #HackNow Team for pulling this off, to run 3 events simultaneously with London being the finale in Dec 2016 was truly fantastic and I cannot thank you enough.
#GWP
