I attended the UK ServiceNow User Group (uksnug) meeting today. In a break from meeting in London the group converged on the Science Museum in Birmingham
Although meeting in Harrods and in London Bridge was pretty cool, todays venue took us to a new level. Who doesn't want to see talking robots at a User Group meeting?
As well as being the first meeting outside of the capital we also had a record attendance. I believe around 70 people registered, with a few dropouts on the day.
Special thanks should be made to Partners in IT for sponsoring the event. I'm sure the cost for booking the space, food and logistics required are considerable - they did a great job on behalf of our community.
Welcome and introductions
Nikki Baker from Harrods lead the group through a session of introductions, inviting representatives from different industries to tell us how long they'd been customers, their progression and aims for the meeting.
Not surprising to see that all customers with Incident, Problem and Change on their list of achievements. Customers roadmaps consisted of CMDB, Discovery, Service Catalog and extending the platform to other shared services in their organisations.
Update on Customer Success Management
Jeff Buckham, Director for Customer Success, presented on the aims of his organisation within ServiceNow
I think customers were interested to hear that CSMs are measured on satisfaction (and customer success!). To paraphrase Jeff, in the SaaS industry we rely on repeat customers.. they need to be successful.
Big Bang Theory
David Bayley from Brother presented on how his organisation transformed from being customers of another large ITSM provider to selecting, adopting and using ServiceNow.
It was an honest appraisal - we don't claim to have a "everything including the kitchen sink" approach to our product, and he framed our strengths well. We build on our core platform rather than trying to integrate different acquisitions into a suite
Outage Management and Coaching Loops
After lunch the group split into two breakout sessions. Outage Management by Lee Childs from Partners in IT and Coaching Loops by myself.
I can't tell you much about Lee's session unfortunately. I felt the Coaching Loops talk went well and it sparked some interesting conversations amongst the group.
An organisations culture is going to be important when implementing a Coaching system - some attendees wondered how their Servicedesk staff would feel by being given frequent feedback. My answer was that Coaching Loops is a tool - it needs to be used as part of an organisation shift in it's attitude towards improving performance.
Burning Questions
The group came back into a single room for the remainder of the day. Shane Parsons, from Warwick University, lead a session of burning questions from the group. The questions (or points of discussion) were more focussed on "Service" rather than "Product". This underlines the point that customers often see innovation and features as second-place to continuously good service and reliability.
Warranty over Utility you might say. The points were noted down and will be forwarded to the relevant teams inside ServiceNow
Ask the expert panel
Chris Pope, Senior Director Product Management, took the group through the features that are likely to be included in our Berlin release and beyond.
A lot of time was spent on Software Asset Management and other Configuration Management topics - if there was a theme throughout the day I'd say it was CMDB.
In summary...
A really great User Group meeting today - Thanks to Partners in IT, Lewis Martin, Nikki Baker and Lucia Jelley for organising. I definitely enjoyed the day.
