Meet Community MVP...
Michael Ritchie
Hello Michael! So tell us a little on how you got started in your career and when was ServiceNow introduced to you?
I have been an ITSM and ITAM practitioner my entire working career. My first professional job was an intern at an insurance company providing level 1 and level 2 support on their helpdesk in the afternoons. I ended up joining that company full time and was tasked with replacing their aging helpdesk software as part of a Y2K project. I participated in vendor demonstrations from Peregrine, Remedy, and IBM at the time. Peregrine ServiceCenter was chosen which started my journey in this career as I left the insurance company and joined Peregrine as a Sales Engineer. That is where I met many of the founding employees of ServiceNow as I spent a ton of time in San Diego. I worked for Peregrine for 3 years and unfortunately they folded as a company and I joined a large financial institution that had just purchased the Peregrine suite of products. I helped implement ServiceCenter and AssetCenter and lead several development teams supporting the ITSM and ITAM solutions. In 2008, I started getting calls from my former Peregrine friends who were at ServiceNow asking if I wanted to join. With my second child being born the previous year and ServiceNow being such a small company, I passed up that opportunity because I needed stable job – though wish I had made the move now! In the following years I would get additional calls but again passed them up until one day in 2011 where I was super frustrated with my current employer and decided to consider. I started playing with the ServiceNow platform and was amazed things just worked compared to what I was used to and joined ServiceNow as an employee in July 2011. At the time, there were around 450 employees and by year end over a 1000. It has been amazing to see the company grow so much and the platform expand. Fun ride.
How did you get involved with the ServiceNow Community? You're very generous with your time. What inspired you to start answering in addition to asking?
When I joined ServiceNow in 2011, there were many resources to learn the product. The ServiceNow Community was one of the few great resources where you could find answers. Having learned so much from the Community I decided to pay my knowledge forward and contribute back. I love solving problems and many of the questions become small challenges where I can help others in need. While working for ServiceNow, I often come across various challenges to win a sales opportunity and will put extra effort in to document those situations in the Community so others may benefit. Some of these solutions may end up on ServiceNow Share too!
Creating solutions that others can quickly benefit from is very motivating to me. As I am developing demonstrations and solving interesting challenges, I will ask myself if others may benefit from this and if yes then I will put in extra effort to document and create a Share solution. Years ago, I had the pleasure to work with Ben Hollifield when he was an employee at ServiceNow. He tackled the challenge of making an easy to use utility to push records to update sets that included necessary dependency records. A few years back, I started supporting the HR Service Delivery application and helping to create update sets for internal instances. HR is comprised of many Application Scopes which makes update sets quite challenging. I leveraged what Ben had built and added functionality to handle multi-scoped applications. Knowing that customers and partners were also experiencing these same challenges, I worked with Ben to include this functionality in the version in Share. The Add to Update Set Utility is the #2 most downloaded item in Share!
Any other advice to share with those just starting on their journey with ServiceNow?
I realize that everyone learns differently but what has worked best for me is to learn by example. If you are faced with a use case that you aren’t clear on how to solve, think about features in the platform that may be built like your use case, learn from it and build your own version. There are so many features that may be built for one applications that work across the platform. But the main thing is to try to figure out things first versus just asking community members to do your work for you. I am much more willing to help those that have tried and have hit walls.
Thank you, Michael!
