Why Develop on ServiceNow?
Maybe you know and maybe you don’t know (yet) of why ServiceNow is such a great platform to develop on, but either way - you found yourself here.
To take a moment to brag – we're a great platform to build apps that manage and report on data and automate workflow processes inside of and between teams. All those processes that you are developing apps to solve for like checking out loaner equipment, travel authorization, or time off requests – being the platform that allows you to build that out in the easiest way is our bread and butter.
But we’d love to tell you so much more! Why should you develop on ServiceNow?
It's agile. It's efficient. It's all right there.
You wouldn't believe how quickly you can build an application when you don't have to do all the 100’s of lines of boiler-plate code. ServiceNow makes the process more efficient. You can get down to those 10-20 lines of code that are really meaningful and interesting and skip the boring code that isn’t fun to write.
With traditional tools, building an app can be a six-month process. Using ServiceNow, it could take 37 minutes. Literally. Here's a story from a pro-dev about how efficient and easy it was to develop an app using ServiceNow:
"One day, I had a customer who booked an hour-long meeting with me to talk about a public permit inquiry process he was running out of a shared Outlook inbox. He wanted to piggyback it on top of our IT service management installation. Within a couple of minutes, it was blazingly obvious that this was a terrible idea, but what he needed was a slam-dunk fit for a ServiceNow app.
I pulled up the development environment right there in the meeting room and started building the app as we were talking. We ended the meeting at the 37-minute mark because I was building the application faster than he could think about what he wanted for a future state. He left with a minimum viable product (MVP) he could show his team, and I left with the same endorphin rush that usually comes from writing a clever chunk of code to solve a tricky problem." - Jason McKee
What it all boils down to (pun intended) - ServiceNow lets you solve a problem easily and move on to the next one.
Low code doesn't mean No Code
What does low-code mean exactly? Here's the answer: You can 100% still express everything that you would need to. You can use code almost anywhere in the ServiceNow platform while at the same time skipping all things that could be annoying to express in code.
For example - using Flow Designer in ServiceNow - building your process flow declaratively is just way easier. But all those complicated and nuanced rules in your organization can absolutely still be expressed in code and customized how you'd like. It's like combining the best of 2 worlds!
It's all connected. People - System - Process.
Have a process that’s not just system to system? Maybe a process that has people steps in-between? Approvals, notifications, human exception handling – all those lovely things that can be such a problem – are all something that become exceptionally easier with ServiceNow.
If all you have is logic and integrations, you can pretty much do that in a single, linear block of code. Easy, right? Maybe not. As you know, as soon as you insert people into the process, things become complicated.
For example, here's a totally hypothetical but probably entirely relatable scenario:
Someone tells you, “Alice needs to approve this before it gets sent to the upstream system.” Suddenly, now you have to have a way to notify Alice that she needs to take action on something, build a UI of some variety for her to take said action, and then pick up the process of sending it all upstream in another chunk of code. And the more people steps involved in said process, the more annoying it is to code. Complicated and annoying right?
We are all about letting you model your process flow between systems and people seamlessly. That’s why we’re here to make your life easier!
The Now Platform provides you a rich set of APIs and tools so you can be set up for success by allowing you to quickly integrate with virtually any external system or third-party app making our little hypothetical situation much easier to manage.
We also provide tools for connecting with people, who have terrible APIs, notifying them that they have decisions to make and tasks to complete and collecting the human inputs required to keep your process humming along.
The Now Platform is exceptionally good with integrating with other systems - letting you quickly connect all your system and apps and people into one workflow. We’re here to make even the trickiest of situations much easier for you to handle.
That brings us to where ServiceNow helps you solve your problems: it can reduce costs, complexity, and risk - which at the bottom line helps you get your work done in the easiest way possible
Tempted to give ServiceNow a try?
We’re already one step ahead of you! We’ve designed a learning plan for professional developers to get started on ServiceNow. Or if you’re ready to jump right in, you can take advantage of a free Personal Developer Instance (PDI) where you can experiment with ServiceNow and begin to build your first app in minutes.
Happy Developing!
