Many of our customers start their ServiceNow journey looking for standards, SLA's and consolidated systems and processes to manage day-to-day IT. They want to leave the chaos and the firefighting behind and regain control over their workloads and daily tasks. ServiceNow as a single system of record and engagement appeals to them because it delivers just that: control, transparency, predictability, insight into the work and costs of IT.
But once the workflows have been designed, the CMDB is populated, the service portal published, the first reports shared with management and the dust settles - sooner or later, someone starts asking around about the broader capabilities of the ServiceNow platform. They want to be creating new apps, to structure and automate processes specific to their business. That's when Creators raise their hand.
To me, ServiceNow Creators ultimately are the people Fred Luddy had in mind when he founded his company in 2004. "When I started ServiceNow," he said, "my vision was to build a cloudbased platform that would enable regular people to create meaningful applications to route work through an enterprise."
Ser•vi•ce•Now Cre•a•tor
(ˈsɜ�vɪs) (naʊ) (kriˈeɪ tər)
n.
1. a regular person who creates meaningful applications to route work through an enterprise.
If you are one of them, you don't want to miss the Knowledge15 Hackathon.
That's where all creators of the world unitet
o show off their ServiceNow custom app development skills. Tuesday 21 April, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. It starts just before 4pm and takes until midnight.
So what defines a ServiceNow creator? Let's have a look at previous Knowledge Hackathons and find out, shall we? For the full version, have a look at last year's live blog.
What about Rich Acosta, a young student who joined the 2014 Hackathon with less than a day of ServiceNow experience under his belt. Nevertheless, and on his own, he produced an app to measure audience sentiment in Twitter and manage the response through a workflow.
At Knowledge13, a seven-person "pick-up" team from multiple ServiceNow clients and partners, including some conference speakers, produced KickITnow, a kind-of "corporate Kickstarter" for incubating projects within an enterprise. KickITnow, which leverages ServiceNow's CMS, Project Management, and Social IT features, won the hearts and minds of Hackathon voters, and the overall competition.
Take Jason Norred, Director of Service Management at PCM, a Managed Service Provider. Jason and his PCM team wanted to put the full day of development to good use. They created a Password Vault in ServiceNow that was implemented into their production environment some time later.
> Team Aspédiens creating TravelNow at Knowledge14
Team Aspédiens, who requested a just released Eureka instance and got creative with all the new features to build TravelNow, a rich application using geo location, visual task boards, api's with travel web sites and multiple web services to check on availability and pricing of hotel rooms and plane tickets.
Carlos Gama and Justin Drysdale, both Application Developers at Pacific Life, who joined the competition in 2012 (the year Carlos happened to win the Innovation of the Year Award), made it to the finals in 2013 and again competed at Knowledge14. Last year, they created a wheel of fortune with sound effects and all. They compared building the app with teaching a kid how to behave… because most of the functionality was never done before.
> Fred Luddy presents SchoolHub from Knowledge14 main stage.
The winners in 2014, Team SchoolHub, put the classroom in the cloud. Team SchoolHub consisted of Ryan Lemay, Sean Caron, Cherylyn Dawson and Tim Provin of Linium, and Josh Andres of Xerox Business Services created an app to structure the interaction between teachers (give assigments and grades), faculty (biographies, tracking attendance), parents (check the grades, fill out all kinds of forms — absence, dietary, holiday requests) and students (survey teachers, get assignments). On top of that, a GPS tracker for the schoolbus, crisis management with ServiceNow Notify to quickly inform all parties in case of emergencies our mass communications, a service catalogue tied to Knowledge Management for all kinds of information, teachers and parents blogging, and last but not least: "Virtual Classroom", pulling in a live webcam feed, allowing absent students to attend anyway. Watch the SchoolHub video here - or go straight to the demo here (you're asked to register in order to get in).
Where creators unite
The list goes on and on. And I am sure we'll see most of these guys back in this year's edition of CreateNow Hackathon. If you are a ServiceNow Creator, make sure you join them in Las Vegas. It's where creators unite on 21 April 2015.
