The Challenge of Sparking Imagination in Application Development

[bradley_owen]

The challenge of unleashing a powerful platform on the minds of innovative spirits is managing the volume of creativity produced.

Last week, I had the privilege of both attending my first Knowledge event as a part of ServiceNow as well as facilitating the Fruition Programming day for Kids at ServiceNow. As a Product Manager for Services, I attended Knowledge 13 to discover how our customers were using the ServiceNow platform. My goal was to identify opportunities to improve existing services or create new services to facilitate those innovative efforts. The climax of the conference was the CreateNow Hackathon where teams of ServiceNow customers and partners spent 11 hours developing new applications from scratch (read about the finalist applications here).



Upon returning to San Diego, my boys and I presented a 4 hour session on game development to kids aged 8 and up (plenty of grown up kids attended). Of the roughly 100 participants, very few had ever used the Scratch IDE (from MIT Media Lab). Once the students grasped the potential to program graphical, interactive applications, it was hard to keep them in sync with the lesson plan. We had 15 students participate in a one hour Hackathon at the end of which each presented their creation (see all the projects here). We did not expect so many new programmers to rise to the challenge and did not have enough prizes to give to all the participants!

I heard many stories during the Knowledge conference, both formally during customer-led presentations as well as informally over food and/or drinks, that the challenge is NOT coming up with new ideas. The challenge is managing the resulting stream of requests generated by both the "process users" (everyday users) and the businesses that IT supports who end up touching ServiceNow as end users using the automated services incarnated on the platform. As great of a problem as this may be, it is nonetheless a problem. Again, several of our customers have addressed this challenge by creating applications using ServiceNow PPM, SDLC and custom applications to manage this workflow. One of my colleagues, Dale Brown, created an application called StartNow using the same building blocks that is used by all of our consultants on implementation engagements.

The lesson learned in both Hackathons is that most if not all of us are capable of innovation when given the right tools and inspiration. I would love to hear your stories of innovation and resulting challenges to managing the workflow as well as solutions you have developed, seen or heard about. Thanks for taking the time to read. Now get back out there and create!


Bradley Owen
Services Product Manager, ServiceNow
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleyowen