This week started in a flurry of activity at the annual PartnerNow Summit in Barcelona, Spain, as I joined 100 people from ServiceNow partner organisations as they competed in a their very own Hackathon.
I took on the role of roving reporter throughout the day and met with some of the teams taking part to find out more about how they were taking on the challenge.
‘Team Undefined’
“We have been to lots of hackathons and even won a previous ServiceNow one, so we love the challenge of doing new things with the platform as it grows,” said Neale.
Neale and Attenborough built an application designed to test performance across all ServiceNow instances. The app works to provide a layer of Continuous Integration (CI) and make sure that all test instances run in line with production instances, so it is especially well-suited to dev-test environments.
The pair used ServiceNow Flow Designer, a Now Platform feature that enables rich process automation capabilities in a consolidated design environment. They combined this with their own pre-built testing tool.
“We’ve really enjoyed our exposure to the technology here this week and we think that the new security function in the ServiceNow Kingston release appears to be much more ‘locked down’ now,” said Attenborough.
‘Team Now 101’
Kamal Jayyusi and Mohammed Shaheen, both employees of Devoteam in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia formed ‘Team 101’.
“We attended to get more acquainted with the ServiceNow platform and to also spend time getting to know other partners to see how their approach to the technology works,” said Jayyusi.
The pair built an application that functions as a services portal, not only for information technology services, but for all other related corporate services administration tasks such as cleaning and laundry, site maintenance, electrical services and so on. Team 101 used Service Request and integrations with Google Maps to build their app.
“The ServiceNow solution is easy to use and has lots of functionality built in,” said Jayyusi. “We deliberately pushed ServiceNow to use it for functions outside of pure IT and ensure that our services portal could also be applied to other aspects of life.”
‘Team SPOC’
Michal Logwiniuk acted as front of house spokesperson for ‘Team SPOC’ from Polish technology consultancy SPOC.
“We wanted to use this event to really put some of our development skills to the test and see how quickly we could build an application from the ground up based upon what we had pre-conceived in preparation for the Hackathon’s theme options,” said Logwiniuk.
With a comparatively large team of around seven members, Logwiniuk stressed the need for collaboration and delegation – two aspects of operational performance that were made easier by ServiceNow Now platform technology and Service Portal.
“Lots of our customers around the world work with geographically dispersed teams and so we wanted to create an application that would act as a bonding bridge for various people to get involved with events happening around the globe. Based on defined tags, we have created an events forum that brings people together based upon mutual areas of interest,” said Logwiniuk.
‘Team Back to BASIC’
Rome-based Andrea De Stefano was spokesperson for the group of hackers that made up ‘Team Back to BASIC’ from NTT Data.
Frustrated with red tape surrounding access to corporate office premises, the team built an application using ServiceNow that would provide an individual with a QR code via email.
Using this secure time-limited QR code, a person would be able to scan themselves in at a company reception as an alert message is sent to the meeting host to signal arrival. At the end of the allotted meeting time, the QR code is invalidated.
