Meet Community MVP...
Chuck Tomasi
Hello Chuck! So tell us a little on how you got started in your career and when was ServiceNow introduced to you?
What do you do now? What is your favorite part of using the ServiceNow?
I’m currently a Sr. Developer Evangelist for ServiceNow. My favorite part is learning new things about the platform, finding ways customers can use them in their solutions, and sharing that information.
How did your career evolve?
How far back do you want to go? Before ServiceNow, I was a full-stack developer, Unix admin, system architect, project manager, and a few other IT related roles. As noted above, I started as a ServiceNow admin/developer. In 2010, I attended Knowledge 10. At that time there were only 500 people at the conference! I was honored to win the first Innovation of the Year Award for building an app to track loaner assets. That’s when I discovered the power of the platform to build apps quickly. Shortly after K10, we had an org restructure and I was let go. Within a few weeks I was working as a Technical Consultant for ServiceNow. Since that time I’ve had various roles in Customer Outcomes (formerly Professional Services), pre-sales, and Marketing. All of these roles involved feeding my need to create applications and integrations.
How did you get involved with the ServiceNow Community?
It started as a customer. I had questions and the ServiceNow employees did a great job answering questions. I don’t recall too much non-employee answers back in 2008/2009, but eventually the ecosystem grew. When I became an employee, I started sharing what I learned from implementations in the form of blog posts – all of which are still available today.
You're very generous with your time. What inspired you to start answering in addition to asking?
Status. I recognized that the knowledge I had to share wasn’t represented by my position on the leaderboard. I started a friendly competition with Pradeep Sharma to become #1 (at least for a little while.) In doing so, I discovered how much there is to learn and how awesome the community is. Along the way I’ve made some terrific relationships.
How do you work the community into your day?
I don’t spend as much time answering questions as I used to a few years ago. Today I’m focused more on making videos and virtually attending developer meetups. Each day I’m either ideating, scripting, recording, or editing content for the community.
Where do you spend your time in the community?
Most of the time I’m in the Developer Community, but I also frequent the Now Platform, Idea Portal, Instance Help, Member Feedback, and Architects areas.
How else do you participate?
The main way is creating videos for admins, developers, and builders (citizen devs) to enable them to do more with the platform.
What would you say to encourage your peers to participate more?
Just do it! Start reading some of the postings and respond where you can. As you create and configure on the platform, share those experiences. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first table you’ve ever created or large scale enterprise application.
What advice would you give to someone who wanted a nudge to start contributing?
Find your niche. There’s a lot of unexplored territory on the platform. Discover your interest, find your specialty, master it, and share it.
Any other advice to share with those just starting on their journey with ServiceNow?
Participate in the community. That’s the best way to learn and grow. No question is too basic. We all started out where you were. Many of us were too intimidated by the “smart ones” to post anything at first - in retrospect, I wish I had done it sooner.
Do you have any stand-out / memorable experiences with ServiceNow?
At Knowledge 10 closing ceremony, I sat down with my co-workers and noticed the woman, Gail, in the row in front of us, had the same laptop bag as me with the exception here’s said “Service-now.com” and mine had another vendor name. We struck up a conversation and I jokingly asked if she wanted to trade. She declined. A few days later Gail called me to get a demo of the app that earned me the Innovation of the Year Award. I agreed. Unfortunately, I was dismissed the day before our demo. I reached out to her to cancel our appointment and she immediately offered me a job. Mind you, this was less than an hour after I was let go! A similar experience happened with a partner from the same event. We were scheduled to talk in two days. After thanking the Gail, I called the partner to cancel our appointment and he said with great emphasis “Call ServiceNow, immediately!” He gave me four names and numbers and was a driving force to getting me my job. ServiceNow can change lives!
Is there a specific product and/or feature that you just can't believe you ever lived without?
Studio. Managing application artifacts prior to Studio used to be a tedious exercise in running around menus, creating bookmarks in the browser, or an unruly collection of shortcuts. When I saw Studio and how you could quickly access tables, business rules, ACLs, and more from one tabbed screen, I never looked back. Now I have trouble remembering some of the old menu names or locations in the standard UI because I just don’t use them that often.
Do you have a favorite piece of content on the community?
I may be biased, but I like the TechNow page. I reference it all the time. When someone asks for an answer that I’ve already got a video (sometimes multiples) that can help them, BOOM – here’s a link to a video. Done.
What motivates you to participate? Why do you do it?
I’ve always had a strong desire to learn and share. I recall being 10 years old and learning Cartesian coordinates (you know, X-Y graphs). For some reason, I and a few friends picked it up fairly quickly, but there were several others that were struggling to understand. The teacher just couldn’t get her point across (no pun intended) and asked for a volunteer to come up with the chalkboard and try to explain. I volunteered and succeeded. Oh, if I could only go back and tell my younger self what adventures lay ahead!
Any other interesting tidbits, stories, hobbies you'd like to share?
Never ask an old guy for stories… J My latest hobby is karaoke. I’ve had so much fun singing in person that I created a ServiceNow Karaoke app. It not only feeds my need to practice singing, but also keeps my development skills sharp. Tables to store songs, artists, parties, queue requests – REST APIs to keep the data fresh – Service Portal widgets to present a great experience – it’s all there. The lessons learned there become direct input for future videos. What’s more, I’ve made the instance public at http://bit.ly/sn-sing for anyone who wants to practice or have a party. Check it out, I welcome the feedback.
Thank you, Chuck!
