Improve Custom Apps at Your Enterprise: Create Your Own Hackathon!

[MichaelDortch]

In case you haven't already read about it, automotive finance leader and exemplary ServiceNow customer Santander Consumer USA held its first internal hackathon not too long ago. Loosely patterned after and, I infer, inspired by the Knowledge13 CreateNow Hackathon, the Santander folks came up with a list of programming tasks, formed teams, and basically had at it, each team picking a task and a programming environment, then going to work building a custom application to perform the chosen task.

Steven Bell of Santander describes the process his company used quite elegantly in his blog post on the subject. The key takeaways, for the purposes of this blog post, are as follows.

1. An internal hackathon is a great way to bring fresh thinking and enthusiasm to the challenges of identifying and creating useful custom applications at an enterprise. And a well-chosen list of candidate applications should easily and quickly engage a range of stakeholders and influencers, from both business and technology camps.
2. An internal hackathon is also a great way to have supporters of different application creation solutions and approaches compete head-to-head under admittedly staged and compressed but nonetheless "near-real-life" conditions. Which means that such a competition could be a useful crucible for testing and forging processes related to prioritization and execution of custom application development tasks.
3. An internal hackathon can also be a great way to introduce, promote, and evangelize the strengths and advantages of the ServiceNow App Creator and Service Automation Platform for custom application creation. Such a competition can familiarize the unfamiliar, and persuade or convince the skeptical, about those strengths and advantages.

Steven Bell's description of Santander Consumer USA's experience provides both encouragement and a strong beginning road map for anyone interested in conducting a hackathon at their enterprise. And since every enterprise can benefit from better ways to build and deploy custom applications, it shouldn't be difficult to generate both interest and candidate applications. Especially at enterprises seeking to extend the business value of their investments in ServiceNow. So if these characteristics sound like your enterprise if you're a ServiceNow user, or any of your customers or prospects if you're a ServiceNow field forces member or partner, why wait? Start organizing a hackathon now, and let me know what happens!