I am a big fan and advocate of Live Feed - in fact my first contribution to most email threads that I can see turning into "yet another behemoth of an information silo locked into someones INBOX" is:
Could we take this onto Live Feed and discuss it there?
Live Feed in ServiceNow is great for a number of reasons...
- The consumer controls the firehose: Email is controlled by the sender, I have no control over how messages are sent to me and my only defence is to set up filters to divert mails into folders. Live Feed lets me choose how and when to consume information. I might to choose to follow some groups for a while, drop out of the conversation and review it later.
- Collaboration is so much easier: Group email conversations split and converge in a maddening sequence of exchanges. Bringing additional people into an existing email discussions often means the newcomer has to decipher the conversation, reading from bottom to top in a mess of old TO and CC lists and noise.
Live Feed gives you a clean threaded messaging interface available to anyone - joining the conversation is much less painful - Decisions are made faster: Having information at your fingertips means that decision making accelerates and based on the right information. This is critical for IT organisations, especially during outages or when things are going wrong.
Think back to your last IT emergency - how did you communicate with everyone you needed to? Email? How did that work out for you?
It's also applicable across your business - tracking the Sales team activity in our Live Feed is really interesting. The convergence on the right answer happens across the entire organisation and often in minutes. People that have never talked before strike up conversations to help find the answer for prospective customers. It's inspiring to watch.
I could go on, but you see why I'm a big fan of stream based collaboration.
But there's one drawback...
However, one thing thing has niggled me about our implementation of Live Feed - a niggle that is now fixed as an enhancement in our Berlin release.
Live Feed supports Groups in order to aggregate message streams together that share a common theme. For example you might create Live Feed groups to reflect your organisational structure (Sales, Marketing, Network Engineering), your geographical structure (London, San Diego, Amsterdam) or in any other way that makes sense to you.
Users can create their own Live Feed groups too.
Groups can be configured as either Private or Public
So far, so good. Groups that are Public can be viewed on their own or if you join the group you can see it in My Feed.
Here comes the niggle... By default Public groups are also visible in the Company Feed.
This does make sense in a way - by pushing all of the messages from Public groups into the Company Feed you are promoting Discoverability. People reading the Company Feed will see content from groups they aren't a member of giving that message a bigger audience.
So - this default configuration isn't necessarily a bad thing but it starts to niggle in a couple of circumstances
Scaling Live Feed
If Live Feed is a runaway success - removing information silos from email and moving conversations into a more capable platform - your Company Feed starts to get verbose. The more groups you create to cater for specialised conversations, the more messages you create - the busier Company Feed gets.
At some point its so busy that a message that is posted directly to Company Feed (and not to a group) gets lost in the noise.
As well as Public and Private groups - a third type is needed
Private groups are a great feature. Some discussions might relate to confidential matters and shouldn't be available to the Company as a whole. Users can request to join these groups and administrators can approve to grant access.
Public groups are great to aggregate streams of messages that don't need to be kept secure. By default they are pushed to the Company Feed.
But what about messages that are not confidential... anyone can see them... but I don't want to pollute the Company Feed. In versions of ServiceNow prior to Berlin your only option was to create a Private group and live with the overhead of approving membership.
People just want to share
There are plenty of use cases for Public Live Feed groups that shouldn't appear on the Company Feed. No-one said Live Feed had to be all about work...
- The Friday night beer club: Messages organising which bar to disappear to after a long week and to publish pictures the morning after a good team building session
- The company soccer team: Discussing the upcoming match and who would be better in goal
- Pictures of cats and babies: Everyone loves pictures of kittens, right?
Giving Live Feed to users is giving them a frictionless method to share information and collaborate. Any user can create a new Live Feed group and start to aggregate messages around a common theme. This is great stuff - but we are going to start devaluing the Company Live Feed which should be reserved for company-wide messages and updates.
Live Feed with default settings
Beth, a ServiceNow end user, has a fascination with pictures of cats. In her organisations she's aware of an underground, clandestine ring of people that share pictures of cats over email. It's time to come out of the closet and start using Live Feed.
She creates a new group called LOLCATS (Thanks to www.lolcats.com for the photos in my example) and sets it to be public. She posts a few photos and suddenly people start commenting and adding their own.
All of a sudden LOLCATS has swamped the Company Feed. I'm using pictures of cats as an irreverent example, a more work-orientated example would be a new group that should be a public, is relevant to a subset of users and has a high volume of messages.
The Live Feed administrators might not be happy with this - but what choice do they have? Should LOLCATS now be a private group that Beth has to administer? That doesn't really promote the idea of frictionless sharing of information
Applying the Live Feed LOLCATS setting
The Berlin release introduced a new system property to change the behaviour of the Company Feed.
By setting glide.live_feed.company_feed_exclude_groups to true you can configure the Company Feed to not show Public groups. Fans of LOLCATS can now either visit the group directly or join and follow the fun in My Feed.
Company Feed is restored to a state where it contains messages relevant to the company as a whole.
In Summary
Live Feed brings a lot of benefits for communication and collaboration but the value of Company Feed gets degraded as usage increases. Consider excluding groups from the Company Feed if you see this happening in your instance.
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