welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans is a showcase of servicenow personalities that have punched above their weight and elevated the servicenow community titans of now is brought to you by me robert the duke fedoric if you want to see what i'm up to check out my website theduke.digital here you'll find all my cj and the duke episodes links to my youtube content and my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that win servicenow jobs hey everyone welcome to another titans of servicenow today we celebrate an early republic day in india and welcome india's latest entry into the titans pantheon he's a two-time knowledge speaker three-time community mvp and one-time dev mvp he sits at the top of the community rankings for itom he's the co-host of the lot and we protend podcast co-host of servicenow mavericks and co-host of the let's talk servicenow clubhouse he is an absolutely massive contributor to the servicenow ecosystem ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to introduce you to ashitosh the royal muno i didn't pay your last name right did i no it's right okay well thank you for being on the show actually tosh i'm sorry it took so long to get you on the show no problem uh robert thanks for having me this time uh it's my pleasure to be here all right so everybody knows we start at the start tell us how you got your start and service now ah interesting one so i am basically an engineer with the background and then i opted for my masters which was business administration in a city called pune in maharashtra india from there i got placed within an i.t company they hired me as a business analyst and in that company i was introduced to servicenow so i was actually i did they nominated me as a business analyst for a tool and which we know now servicenow but i was so excited with the capabilities of the tool i moved myself from the the business part to the technical part but i must say it was a very [Music] a tough journey for me because you know write no projects in the beginning so you need to learn on your own but yeah that was the time when i got introduced to servicenow and i started learning about servicenow in early 2014 and what part of the platform do you resonate the most with ah if you asked me two years ago it was item for sure because i am a big item fan i have worked on item i did four or five implementations from scratch for item like event management discovery service mapping provisioning part of it and if you ask me today i'm pro citizen developer uh fan i like flow designers integration up because app engine studio basically it has made life so easy for the cities and developers and for the organizations to quickly build their apps and deploy it and use it i would like to dive a lot deeper on that because i think the citizen developer concept has been around for quite a while there's been like lots of different changes and technologies added to the stack to support that and i think there's still a question mark in everybody's head on whether or not like citizen development works so why don't you give your opinion on that i mean you must think it works if you're investing your time in it right yeah definitely um to be honest i am doing it from last 2.5 years so um the delegated development part of servicenow has helped us to start this program within an organization trust me initially it was a tough journey but we had a vision we draw some boundaries that okay we will do citizen development but some specific parts of the platform we are not going to do and development for the whole platform so we started small and then we started adding some extra capabilities to our program so we started with simple catalog items then in rome or before rome then we got app engine studio which already is our life because the pipeline was there to deploy then you had table creator you had guided app engine creator so this all things kept adding on to our program which made our life easy but there were some drawbacks and the governance part of this citizen development program was really tough because we really made clear that who will approve this request for deployment who will approve the app development who will do the architecture work of this so we did a great discussion and within the organization the vision was very clear so it helped us to grow quickly from last 2.5 years if i consider i would have rated our citizen development program two or three out of ten and right now we are almost the csat score within the organization for our program is 7.9 which is pretty good yeah i mean it's obviously the organization considers it a positive experience right yeah um i wonder if you could go more specific about some of the difficulties because i think like everybody instinctually knows that there's a governance element to this we can't just let people run wild so maybe some specific uh specific things which you mean by governance and how it was difficult to implement a simple example is table creation because back then we had a different licensing model uh so we were paying based up so if i create a custom table we were paying so the person who is using the table or referring to the table has to be counted as a licensed user right so that part was very difficult to restrict people to create custom tables and give custom roles to that table so that part was very difficult for us but again app engine app fulfiller thing which came in uh before room we that sold us that solved the issue the second issue which we really faced was the credential storage because the limitation of cyber arc licenses actually was hampering us to do citizen development for the integration part because we went one step ahead and we wanted to also delegate some integration parts to the to the cities and developers and each team has their own credentials so that part was very difficult to handle because then we need to prove to our security teams that how secure the platform is and how we encrypt the data within the platform to convince your security team is always difficult so that was the major chunk where we gave our time i didn't even think about that angle right like we have this platform it's secure we know who develops on it but then you all of a sudden explode the number of people who develop on it and now there's a question mark for security um have you written anything on that specifically like the security component uh not yet but i have written uh one article which is which summarizes what components of servicenow platform uh contributes to citizen development we'll have that in the description below folks uh be sure to check that and and read that article yeah and one more thing which was very interesting within the organization was there were multiple devops teams who wanted to do development on the platform right so are we going to allow them to develop in the same scoped application or are we going to allow them to create different scoped application who is going to take that decision so it was our team we because we were the enablers and that governance part of approval of the scoped application was very important because we need to convince the day of stream that why should you go for a new scoped application or why should you share the common application so yeah interesting one we learned a lot that i should say do you find like at your organization when you say citizen developer are you actually talking about like a real dev that's not on the servicenow team or are you talking about somebody who does something else and they're just building their you know they're building in in a low code fashion oh so these were the devops teams who didn't even know anything within servicenow so we created our own training plan within the organization uh to give them a feeling of let's say for example what flow designer is what are update sets what is source control so we created a high level training material for them so they used to first get trained through it and then they used to get an access to this program without that they were not given access to this program so at least we used to make them familiar with the components of the tool and then only they used to get the access to this program so business owners basically or the developer streams i would name right i think what i was getting at is like of course you're training them whoever they are right but is the who of the program like are they developers before they go in uh not not mandatory okay so it was just anybody like anybody could raise their hand and jump into the program and then by the time they're familiar you know there would be a set of stuff that they could do at the end and you could be a developer going in or just a team manager or a director or uh whatever is that the case exactly and the program was so powerful that ultimately we have turned other technology developers into servicenow developers who joined our team eventually so that's the beauty you see that people started we basically migrated some other developers into servicenow developers all right um you also have a crazy pedigree of itom experience and itom is actually like it's a pretty big space right you got event management in there you got discovery in there service service mapping is itom too right yeah and would you say you're a master of that whole suite or is there a place where you like more than others i would say event management discovery and service mapping because i have done many implementations on these three topics i would not uh say that i am a specialist in a cloud governance and provisioning platform because that's very new for me as well and it's and the evolution of that particular pillar of that suite is huge because you should know aws for example azure google and i did not had a chance to conclude that but event management yes discovery and service mapping great because every day you get something new to learn new challenges yeah and it's very interesting to do these things because cmdb is heart of the system right and to improve it to make it accurate yeah you need to you need at least these three things item visibility and item health because i feel like itom's one of those space where everybody's constantly like pouring money into it and anytime there's like an expectation like a gut feel expectation like i j why do i do it on because i have to right any time you have that kind of mentality there's risk that you're just pouring money in and not recouping the value so what would you say is like a really common uh mistake in deploying discovery and service mapping and event management um that is interesting one because i have seen some customers that they adopt these technologies very late into their implementation so we should not delay this because like i said cmdb is heart of the system if you are doing a manual imports or if you are using some other tool which is charging you more for managing your cmdb so basically you have two tools where you are paying for the same capability so that was the mistake i have seen and my suggestion will be start early with ital specifically discovery because it will give you the whole infrastructure information and it will be up to date because i have seen many organizations they were still maintaining few data in excel sheets and then your procurement was hampered your software life cycle management was hampered about that assets uh and it was a mess so don't delay start as soon as possible uh with this item uh area all right and on event management i've i've come close to an event management implementation but i just i never um it never got off the ground from the business level they were looking for something that was more like um it was in healthcare right so they were looking at event management in terms of like the clinical aspect like if the if the surgeon drops the scalpel like that's an event we care about and can we get some kind of system that captures all of that like the tech the operations all of it what was the question i was going with here um but from my perspective it seems like the hardest bit of event management is having that abstraction layer above above the messages right or something that collates them together mainly this event management which i have worked on is monitoring your critical assets within the organization right so let's say you have a critical application which is running on a server so if the server goes down there should be automatically a p1 raised auto remediation should be in place for that particular server so all those things we did in the event management the evolution is really really good because machine learning ai has been now incorporated with event management which is contributing to do some analytics that okay in past one year for how much time it was down or what is the availability of this particular service within the organization and that analysis is done based upon the alerts and the events coming from the whole service map do you do you have to have a high level maturity to exploit those features or are they features that make the turning on of the functionality uh easier for the organization uh turning on because like i said the insights are very great if you adopt to these technologies you see the granular details and where the issue is exactly so it helps the how you say network engineers to quickly resolve the issues all right so you've done you've done a ton of stuff in the ecosystem over over a few years why don't you tell us a time where you thought your back was against the wall and you weren't sure you were gonna make it and there was nobody there to help you yeah so i will go in 2014 when i started actually my career for the first two year it was very difficult for me because no projects to work on so i was not getting any knowledge i was like okay should i continue with this technology or not how i will survive in this competitive market then i was introduced to the community and then i started looking at the community people used to ask the questions i used to try to solve them implement them in my personal instance for example and that actually triggered my learning path and after three years i started giving interviews because as soon as i started giving interviews after two years i was rejected terribly so and that triggered me basically so the rejection is always not bad it is actually good you should face rejection so that you will climb the ladder and that is what i think uh was the turning point in my career and then when i was four years experience in servicenow i got the first leader ever which actually turned my thinking towards the technology and i started giving more time more focus kept learning never gave up attitude yeah and now i'm here nice nice and then on the opposite side of that what's one of the things uh that you're most proud of in your years on service now i got a job directly from india into netherlands that's really a proud moment for me because you already know how competitive market it is in india so everybody wants a good job everybody wants to move from one country to another country so that was the proudest moment and why i got it because i got mvpi so that was the title which actually uh which actually um so there were let's say there were 10 people but that title was the title which kept me at the top so okay he's mvp he knows more uh about the tools so let's select him so that was the turning point that was uh community mvp award or the dev mvp award community mvp right right okay okay i have uh what i hope is not a super ignorant question okay but it's just i live over here in north america i myself have immigrated between two two different countries i started off in in canada and i immigrated to the us i'm a u.s citizen now is there like i guess i guess the only way to ask it is why is there such a motivation to to leave the country to to get out of india and to do your work in another country as opposed to just finding a good service now job in india what i think personally is uh the monetary benefits so when i was in the early stage of my career um with six seven eight years of experience i think it was the monetary benefits which we used to get were not that good that time but the situation is changing but when you come here or if you change the country there is a stability also so in terms of the work because i work for a product-based company so from consulting to product-based company i i feel that difference so i was really happy with that and then in general if you see everyone why everyone wants to move to a different country is because they want to grow in their career path as well so if i now go from here to india i will land at a let's say top tier within the organizations so within a less years of experience because if you keep switching between india also the market is so competitive you need to be upgraded you need to know everything uh that is expected definitely but the growth within the ladder is slowed down that is what uh my personal thinking is about this particular topic i appreciate that and i i hope i didn't offend anybody with the question itself but i just feel like it's um i mean not a day goes by where i you know i'm not asked hey like help me find uh jobs in other places i got a link that will come up right about here uh to a video i did on at least that perspective from the usa but i'm just you know i've always wondered like what drives that i want to get retired soon so i don't want to work for my 60 years oh hey man if i come here if i save something i can either start my own company move back to india so i can provide employment second part is i can have an early retirement with my savings so i can roam the world and and that's i have started seeing with the young generation and our generation at least that this is the thinking that people wants to save they want to they want to be stable financially and then they want to take risk uh either to get retired or start something on their own all right so uh let's switch tracks again if there was one thing you can change about either the product or the ecosystem or both uh what would it be i will start with the product so when i started understanding servicenow properly i have faced this issue of licensing you might have heard it from many other people but yeah it's really a pin because each customer each module follows different licensing mechanism and it is very hard to keep track of it so when we started for example with citizen development program we re-evaluated our licensing mechanism but what we were following in 2000 let's say 20 and what we have right now there is a huge difference so what i think personally is we should uh our service now should streamline this make it more transparent and there should be an easy way to track the licensing usage and everything because sometimes yeah we have subscription management but i think it is not updated properly because we still have some issues there so that's the one part i will definitely would like to change in the product and within the ecosystem this is going to be interesting uh the transparency between the hosts of the meetups and the people who want to actually participate because i want to share my knowledge but i am not able to find a right person or i don't know who is the host of a particular region because i want to present i want to share my knowledge to the ecosystem but i don't see that list or i don't know people whom i can reach out to and how they can help me to give me a slot within a quarter to present and are these are these people just industrious people like just uh servicenow community members who set up their own mini snugs or are you talking about like the official servicenow user groups no i'm talking about the meetups which are happening like for example in pune uh in bangalore so servicenow meetups official service official service now meetups okay and so you're saying it's it's difficult to find out who is running those so if you want to you know go to pune and and and present you just wouldn't know where to start right exactly yeah i felt that here in the us too there was a time where it was like i know why they did it it's just it really put a chilling effect on on the user groups it's just like at one point they were in chicago it was like okay partners aren't allowed unless you're sponsoring and it's like you know the attendance just dropped out i can see why because i'd hate to be like the one customer and then all the partners that are based out of chicago you have one customer and nine people trying to sell that customer at the same event but like now it's just so big it's just like why just take the reins off and make it easier to see yeah make it easier to see and and also what i think is maybe they should release the quarterly planning soon so and they should say okay there is a slot available here if anyone is interested yeah please sign up as a speaker like for knowledge they do for now forum they do now i'm struggling already from last two quarters to find a person so that's a pain for me uh at the moment what i love about you though is that it's kind of like hey if i can't find a way uh to do this via official channels like why don't we just bake our own and so you've got with you and dhruv doing mavericks and actually right about here there'll be a link to see dhruv's episode of titans but you and drew were doing mavericks and now you've got this uh let's talk servicenow clubhouse thing i was shocked i was shocked when you and dhruvan invited me onto the mavericks the first time and i show up and i'm like oh there's gonna be like you know a few people and we'll talk shop it'll be small and intimate and there's like 200 people there and i'm like if you guys can pull 200 people onto a zoom meeting for mavericks like what must your official meetups look like and the creator also goes to you right because the content was really helpful and people were there to listen to your real experience so i think that was the trigger to that audience number i don't know man i couldn't have been just for me but i love seeing that though right there's such a there's such a need not only for people who are like they want to consume everything they can to learn and up their game and service now but then there's other people who are just saying yeah well like we want to provide a space for that and and you guys are setting up mavericks and and let's talk servicenow on on clubhouse and all these people are coming what do you guys have um like is there a difference in the intent and content between mavericks and the clubhouse uh indeed so i will start with clubhouse first because it is latest we want to answer real-time questions of the audience so one question was should i go and adopt sap or should i keep working with servicenow so this kind of questions where people are stuck we want to help them to show their path so that's our main motto of let's talk service now clubhouse where we really want to keep it free flow anyone can join anyone can ask whatever questions they have even about the product we will try to solve that and we will share our experience and if we go to mavericks it was mainly intended for sharing the knowledge about particular stream in servicenow so we did grc we did uh um for example um what was it um yeah performance analytics for example you did that the finance finance module the latest one cooper did that um so the main intent was putting the audience into the tool giving them some real time use cases so that they can solve it and let them know that how out of the box this thing works so we were really staying away from the customizations but we were trying to build a service now resource who knows at least a high level of those modules okay so if i was uh new to the game and i didn't know kind of where to find these are there official channels to go and find out like when the next one on the schedule is how to access it for for let's talk service now we are going to release a schedule that is on plan because it was really a first episode in january so there will be one episode per month over the year so that schedule will be out soon but for mavericks we have a pause because uh and i'm proud to say that our 70 of the audience in the mavericks is at a good position in the servicenow ecosystem and out of india for example in uk germany netherlands so really proud and we are going to receive mavericks but with a different theme this time i don't have dates but yeah we will share it soon with the audience awesome uh good for you guys i just i was that's part of what drew me i got drove on the show too was just like on the i see him one day and he's asking questions on community and then it's like two weeks later two weeks later he's he's got this thing set up and and you're drawing huge crowds of people too so god bless you guys for doing that and being so successful on it and the thing is with clubhouse why it is easy to give the schedule is because it's our own time but with respect to mavericks we are inviting experts like you and you might have seen michael was there so to get their time is very difficult and the time is very precious also we can't really we can't really publish the schedule in advance is there anything else that you want to do that you haven't done yet yes attend more broadcast so for example locally in the netherlands i will be doing one podcast in april so i already know that and in future i want to be an entrepreneur so i'm really working hard towards it it takes a special something man i i'm trying myself i got a few entrepreneurial things going on but i remember i tried to start a servicenow partner it was called wolfpack cloud services oh my god um yeah and i want to do present in knowledge there you go yeah i mean they did the calls for call for speaker recently didn't they they did so i'm already working on one case study on that but i really want to present in front of the audience so i love the interaction yeah because right now what we did was recording so multiple texts yeah but um no i want to do that on the stage yeah it's exhilarating man it's yeah i did i did a couple and i'd say that i did a presentation at knowledge13 and that was like one of those moments for the servicenow career or it was like okay there was there was whatever i was before that point and then there's whatever i was after so uh man i hope and pray you get that uh that opportunity and hopefully i hear rumors that this year might be in person right so [Laughter] we literally had our tickets booked for knowledge 2020 and boom yeah i don't oh it just breaks my heart breaks my heart yeah have you been to in-person knowledges before though no so i was community mvp i got the invitation but you know uh visa is always a tricky part for people outside of us so no but i have i was going to travel but then it got cancelled but yeah i went to now forum in netherlands it was awesome that actually triggered me to be a speaker because respect you get and the way people start looking at you totally changes i definitely get that and if i could just talk about me for a second at knowledge knowledge11 was my first one and i'm blessed that i got to see because i've never i've never done a now forum and i want like at least i went to knowledges when they were small enough that i could get the now forum experience there but at knowledge11 i was like holy cow they got customers that are speaking and i wonder if someday i'll be good enough to speak out of knowledge like that's my goal that's my life goal is to be good enough to speak at knowledge and then next year i spoke like at knowledge12 i spoke and i'd encourage everybody who's watching it or maybe at the start get that inspiration now and don't think of it as a high bar on the ladder that's bar one you have it in you you can speak about something and like let that frame your mind as you're doing your work in service now is just approach every problem like what would speaking about this problem mean well it would mean that you would have to have slaying a dragon with you know in this effort but it can it can if you think about it that way you can turn around your whole approach to work in general right today it looks like oh recategorize the category tree right and it's like god damn it i don't want to do this stupid category tree reorganization thing and like what what's the dragon here that i really have to slay you know what i mean so that i can weave an epic tale about it and then go present it knowledge so if you present if you have every everything you look at is a potential way to present it knowledge it can completely it can completely change your mind about the work you do and how you do it yeah and the networking part is also important right when you go to knowledge or any forums like this your network grows and you meet great minds which influence you and motivates you to be like them so yeah yep so here's hope and knowledge 22 gives us that opportunity yeah all right ashitosh we are approaching time so final word is yours is there anything that you wish the ecosystem knew or any advice for the people on their way up yes the mentorship program is coming so it's here it's here yeah yeah it's here almost so yeah so i requested everyone who are new uh in the ecosystem to enroll for that because see me because we did latin we patent we invited great minds to speak on the forums we have learned so much from them in our podcast in mavericks and that is nothing but mentorship right you guys are providing your knowledge i really encourage people who are really struggling in their early careers to enroll for that particular program and for us people who are with more experience in service now try to mentor people so go help there create great content publish it and be always kind so that's my final statement awesome that's a good one and we'll have links in the description below for how to access that mentorship program and i'll take this opportunity big ups to earl duque of the dev mvp program for getting that set up together that was uh that's been his baby for a long time so congrats and and big ups to him for for getting that set up and if you see him or talk to him tell him stop dodging me and get on the titans podcast okay but now it's out now he can actually talk about it so hopefully uh yes hopefully he'll be on our shows all right ashutosh i hope you have a great night thanks for joining me earlier this morning and um welcome to titans so once again thanks for having me it was a pleasure to be here and it was exciting do you want your message in front of the best service now admins developers architects and product owners in the business want a conversation about your servicenow strategy and architecture you can reach me via my website at www.theduke.digital if you want to contribute to high frequency high quality servicenow content all you need to do is feed the algorithm with likes shares and comments thanks for watching