Last Wednesday at the University of Warwick in Coventry, we hosted the first ServiceNow User Group UK meeting of 2014, sponsored by TeamUltra. The presentation decks that can be shared are attached to this post. Also, the dates for two more 2014 SNUG meetings have been set.
To accommodate users from a wider range of UK locations, we moved this edition of SNUG to Coventry. Although that may have caused some of the regular London attendees to drop off, we did welcome many first time participants. With over 100 attendees, insightful presentations and lively debate, this edition of SNUG UK once again proved that the ServiceNow user community in the UK is in great shape.
We have created a quick online survey (5 questions, or 10 minutes of your time) to get your feedback on the day and recommendations on how we can improve our SNUG meetings moving forward. You would help us greatly by sharing your thoughts and expectations.
Incident Guitar Hero
The day provided a well-balanced mix of plenary presentations, roundtable discussions and customer breakout sessions. After having welcomed the audience, SNUG Chairman Shane Parsons of the University of Warwick handed the microphone to Faez Ahmed (director global education services, ServiceNow) for an update on the 2014 customer education program. For many attendees, this was the first time they had seen the full extent of the ServiceNow Training programme, for which feedback from an earlier SNUG had provided input and impetus to its development.
Faez was followed by Dan Turchin (senior director of product strategy, ServiceNow - read Dan's post here) who shared some of the highlights of the upcoming Eureka release, including a Guitar Hero approach to incident management and new visualisations of work and demand management and performance analytics. Dan's comments were welcomed with lots of smiles and nodding. Among others, Dan answered questions on client communications around the new pricing model and password reset and expiration management.
Replacing Salesforce.com
Between plenary sessions, breakout presentations by myself (Telephone Management Request System on ServiceNow - attached), James Hickey of Firescope ("Making Event/Incident Integration Achievable" - attached) and Pete Wiles, ServiceNow Guru at Service Birmingham ('Replacing SalesForce with ServiceNow' - attached) gave the audience plenty of food for thought on how to get more value out of their ServiceNow deployment.
Pete's presentation particularly gave a useful insight on how ServiceNow can be used to take the concepts of the Salesforce system and use the flexibility of the tool to improve central management of business critical processes.
Principles of Application Development
In the afternoon, Simon Morris (director of application development, ServiceNow) shared some ServiceNow best practices around custom application development (attached). How do you avoid being conceived as a bottleneck by the business demanding more and more applications, fixes and add-ons to the ServiceNow platform? How do you manage demand, prioritize, plan and develop, test and deploy in a way that is valuable to a business that is more and more depending on IT and service automation? Simon's recommendations were well-received by a full room of audience.
The final item of the day was the prize draw for the camera kindly donated by Firescope which was won by Jan from ResMed — congratulations Jan — bring it to the next event and take a few snaps!
As always, we concluded the day with a drink and plenty of networking.
A big thank you to everybody who attended today's event in Coventry, and to the SNUG committee supporting me in pulling it together: Lucia, Ericka, Lewis, Pippa, Jenn, Kees, Fleur — thank you!
2014 SNUG meetings planned
In 2014, we are planning to host two more SNUG UK meetings. Please put these preliminary dates in your agenda — to be confirmed pending locations:
- 16 July, London (location to be decided)
- 19 November (location to be decided)
I look forward to see you then — let's continue our discussions here in the online community!
Shane Parsons
Chairman SNUG UK
