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 and welcome to another episode of titans of servicenow our first episode of 2022 i'm super excited about today's guest because he is an expert in topics that are extremely timely and important he is a servicenow developer par excellence he is an expert in the servicenow grc app and he is interested in the compliance and privacy spaces in general he is a member of servicenow's 2021 dev mvp cohort and host of the phil goes deep youtube channel links are in the description below ladies and gentlemen i am so honored to introduce phil deep swann thank you so much uh it's an honor to be here it's an honor to be invited onto this show so thank you so much pleasure is mine we are experimenting with a brand new format this time around we're trying to actually capture the video so if you see me staring off screen while i'm asking questions old habits die hard no problem no problem we'll see how it goes so we always start at the start how did you get your start in the servicenow ecosystem phil sure so um 2014 um i took a took a role in change management for a hospitality company and you know they were managing 800 hotels 400 restaurants and a few thousand coffee shops so you can imagine my disbelief when they showed me the process which was to take change requests from a lotus notes mailbox open up that email take the rfc word document attached and then copy and paste all the information into servicenow and um you know something didn't really feel right there and uh and it didn't look right either because the latest version at that time was was fuji but they were on calgary um so i started asking questions and it just seemed to be certain the answers i was getting back was surrounded by some fear you know there was fear of the unknown there was no ownership of this platform there was a fear of upgrading it there was a fear of making any changes to it so you know i kind of became poacher and game keeper there um i started attending servicenow user groups snugs now forums and getting involved on the community and really for myself i started to build some confidence in in knowing what was going on with the platform that i was able to actually influence some changes there so i was building confidence in myself and also in the organization so started working as an interface with a partner at the time and went from that kind of lotus notes group mailbox entry point to building a self-service portal on cms and did some integration with bmc discovery tool moved that into the cmdb and made change management actually work almost like it was intended to [Music] so yeah that was for me the place where i found that servicenow was going to be my home for a while in terms of my career you know there's a there's a career here and this tool is really powerful if you get the most out of it if you invest in it that's super interesting so you like you were on the change management process side of the house yeah yeah wow well see that just goes to show you like everybody talks about how do i get into service now like there's so many unconventional ways to get into it and i keep saying a lot of the more interesting stories that you hear and and a lot of the more interesting resources you can talk to are people who took it a completely unconventional route in yeah and you can imagine like running the cab each week and having to present your own changes to that cab um so like that's what i said kind of saying poacher versus gamekeeper but we really built confidence there because i i set up a standard change and a weekly release maintenance window so we were pushing through agile kind of incremental improvements each week but that confidence level really increased it started off as this scary thing like don't touch it don't change it and then it was actually you know we were doing internal community as well so trying to get the wider parts of the business um involved and start to leverage that as well so everybody kind of falls in love with servicenow in their own way so it's clear you fell in love with it because you sidestep from change management into being the groundskeeper for servicenow can you describe the aha moment where you said oh man this is going to change everything i think the our home aha moment for me was was when you know my background before that so i was in change management and looking at infrastructure and kind of itil uh processes but my background was actually in software development so i started in mainframe database queries sql unix scripts my first program was actually written in assembler but i was learning html css and javascript and i remember working with the partner that was very helpful i actually shout out knoll chat out swapnil because those guys really helped me learn and showed me that it was possible to learn servicenow at that time but i remember cracking open like a business rule or something and being like oh it's just javascript oh i know javascript you know it might have been a few years but i was like hello old friend [Laughter] so that for me was like ah that's how it works but it was server-side rather than what i'd learned was kind of client-side javascript so yeah that was like oh i know this stuff i can i can do something here i don't want to put you in a bad place because i know the partner you work for has a very specific service now niche but what part of the platform do you like working on most sure well you know it would be too obvious for me to say grc for example but obviously that that's where i found my home i think but in terms of platform features there's two things both of them were really uh released in quebec and ui builder you know i don't know what we call i'm going to call it ui 17. i'm going to go out on a limb and just call it ui 17. i know that's not right and i know that people won't agree with me but i've now experienced next experience ui builder as a as a piece of functionality that enables anybody with with the right skills the right access to actually make service now make sense you know that look and feel we've been stuck on this kind of form and list ui user interface for so long ui builder really starts to bring together all of those related elements of a process of a workflow so being able to present meaningful information and even build those components as well i feel like ui builder and the new ui stuff is is really groundbreaking and i've i find myself keep coming back to that and and trying to get comfortable there and the other thing i want to mention is instant scan because i think that that's another thing that really can add value at all different levels within within that process whether it be the development cycle or even looking at best practice for a particular process we definitely got to go off the beaten path and talk about both of those okay so uh particularly ui builder so i've been watching this kind of manifest for a while now and like i've always been coming at things from the reporting side and it always felt so arbitrary so artificial that oh i go to the dashboard and that shows me numbers and graphs and kind of information i need but then i have to go to a form to do stuff with the stuff yeah and i've always kind of it's always felt arbitrary lists are different than forms are different than dashboards half the time we're putting lists on our dashboards it's like why can't these things all just be one experience is that what you think that they're going for with this thing for sure uh for sure i mean i don't know if you've ever tried to embed a report onto a form way back in 1912 yep yeah so like trying to embed charts and trying to present meaningful information i mean pa brought something out recently that was like embedded analytics or something sort of performed but you can see meaningful related information you know that was another try and then like you say the other way around building a dashboard and trying to drive some of your process from the dashboard right i always think that reports are going to support the process so i want to know how many records i've got in each given state and where to focus my attention but like you say once you click that lit you click that element of the chart you go to the list and then you're back in the form and then you lose that context for me ui builder is very much about solving some of that context switching it's also about you know in in the world of um grc the data model is so vast and the the complexity of some of the data that we're dealing with is so many clicks away that you can get lost you can forget where you came from and that breadcrumb in the in the ui builder in the now experience as well like finding your way back home being able to relate the information that i'm looking at right now to some of the wider context and build those experiences in a meaningful way for the organization i think that that's going to really help drive adoption especially for in in my space like in grc world the customers and privacy as well the customers that we're dealing with are not i.t people so you're having different conversations with them so trying to get them to think about their world in terms of a process is always a challenge anyway but then trying to get them to understand the form and the list you know related lists form sections menu on the left trying to understand that user interface is part of the reason that it's quite difficult to get people really fully bought into the power of service now i think so for me the now experience is really going to help drive adoption so the thing i worry about now experience is how accessible is it and you know what i mean like yeah we talked about forms and lists and dashboards kind of being like the three things we had to work with before and while we feel like the distinction between those is arbitrary they're also primitive which also means they scale very well right we could take literally anybody and teach them how to modify forms and lists and to some extent dashboards but it's still relatively like a low learning curve what about this now experience or are they calling it next experience now or i'm never quite sure but how accessible is that like is are we gonna have to ramp up a huge like tech discipline before the rest of the market can consume this yeah i mean it's like i say came out in quebec which is pretty much a year ago now right when ui builder first launched in quebec and rome came out and some real significant changes were made to the back end of the ui builder capability now i don't know all of the technical stuff here so excuse my ignorance in a lot of ways yes we are going to have to learn this new world right and the power and the potential is is yet to be realized there so you know i'm playing around in the background with like building a custom component and i'm following a lab and i'm like okay now i get it that that's doing that right but i feel that what i'm learning there has got so much more longevity than trying to learn uh jelly for example so what are what are our options do we learn something that's very much aligned to industry okay it's not industry standard right the web component stuff that's been implemented into servicenow um you know speak to the likes of travis and so on about why those things are different um in terms of virtual dom and you know all these things that i'm not really that okay with but yeah we need there's a huge amount of enablement and and brad and the team have done an amazing job at getting the dev site sharing that information sharing that knowledge and the product team in the background are really listening to the feedback and i think it's going to get easier i think it's going to get better the amount of components that are coming now out of the box is really going to enable the kind of low code scenario but ui builder isn't quite low code yet you still need to write some json you still need to connect things which maybe is not going to be that intuitive for an end user today but i think this is just part of the journey and the ui builder in the future i i think will really be easily adopted by a wider audience right now it's a bit of a um a bit of a a weird place i think are you gonna do some phil goes deep episodes on it you know what i was doing some i was trying to dig in um i think one of the more popular episodes that i did was like how hard can it ui be um you know and you know i had i've had brad on thanks brad for coming on i've tried to drill into it but in no way have i explored it to the level that like ashley has done and she's written blogs yeah and she's really helped me learn so i'm i'm still far behind the curve i feel but maybe still far ahead of some people that haven't even tried yet well that's what i'm afraid of really like yeah i mean i might be super frank about it right we got dev mvps and in the entire dev mvp program we got ashley who's blazing the trails we got to get her on an episode too and like the dev mvp program is kind of like trying to keep up with with ashley but there's thousands and thousands and thousands of servicenow resources and how fast can we move that whole that whole population upwards you know what i mean there was also the ninjas we've got a shout out that ninja the ninjas yes they had to change the name i can't remember where it was from but then whoever was involved in that project of of sharing that information yes was also really helpful to enable people in the community i think the one thing we can do from you know even i'm probably never going to be an expert in that stuff is to promote it and to socialize it and talk about it in a way you know i talk with customers and they're saying i want to change the form because of x and i'm saying to them you know let's not worry too much about that let's get comfortable with this process and the user interface part of it we are going to be able to solve that now we've got workspaces coming out of the box at product line which is also going to drive that adoption um you know when it comes to configuring things i think we'll be driven by by the needs of the customer but the stuff i'm seeing gives me confidence that this is this is the right thing and i don't believe it is just another ui i know in the past we've tried multiple uis i mentioned calgary right calgary changed in fuji then service portal came out in helsinki and we're on what we're on ui 16 now was that geneva or something where they brought in real-time presence and all of these things we've we've tried and we've learned along the way i feel like and having had my hands on rtp version of san diego it's at the right point now where this is something that is going to be the ui of uis and it's going to be able to evolve without being a new ui it's going to evolve within itself that that's how i feel that's what my heart is saying to me but then i've also got some some other things in my head saying what if yeah you know like how how much how far should i go with this but i'm really loving learning about it and i think it's it's a massive step change and for the good of the entire platform i hope it's as flexible as they want it to be because when you first get bitten by the servicenow bug and everybody's like oh it can do anything right it could do anything and all the business apps can go on service now but then i was a point in my life where i started walking into like mature apps in other spaces and i realized that like there's just some things that you can't do in servicenow the way we have it today without essentially rebuilding years of somebody else's app do you know what i mean and it's because we're kind of trapped in this work is about forms lists and dashboards but some people work off of maps zoomable maps some people work off of like um gosh if you ever look at some of the apps big big aggra uses they've got yeah it's a list but they've got you know little flashing lights in the cells to tell you oh hey this tractor has 50 less tire air capacity or something like that their interfaces are so tuned to the experience not what that's what keeps those apps on those apps and not on service now yeah i think that one of the key points to note with ui builder is for me at least what i realized with it is that it's really separating the presentation layer so all the stuff that we know and love about servicenow and where it's real power is where we talk about its data model and its workflows right whether it be a business rule uh or you know an actual workflow or a flow designer however we want to make those elements of the work flow through that organization that none of that changes ui builder just puts the layer on top of it so we're not changing anything other than the way we consume that information so if i click and change a record that will still trigger the same flow so if you're talking about an organization there that's built you know what sounds like a heavily customized ui page and made it look beautiful that's great you could do the same thing now you could rebuild that in ui builder rather than just writing hard-coded scripts or you know embedding ui macros into your ui page those would become a now component and then you've just got to hook up the data but otherwise it's much of a muchness there's no difference between a ui page and a now ui page there's no difference i'm saying there's no difference in principle right presentation layers of the data and they just allow you that interaction and those event hooks to come in if i click a button it does x there's no difference there it's just the technologies change the language that we use and i'm not a fan of jelly there used to be a joke that was like there's 20 people in the world that know jelly and 15 of them work for service now i'd like to know who those people are i mean that was i mean it was years ago it was back i mean 19. probably next now then 1912. yeah all right let's talk about the second one let's talk about uh instant scan as soon as i saw that i'm like oh this is another like pivot point for for the platform because i always wrestled with when i was doing being the architect for customers like i always wrestled with this idea that the vendors should plug and play into my paradigm but instead the ecosystem had been so sorely missing like enough talent that a customer wouldn't know what to do and so they would just trust whatever any vendor came in and said and then that vendor would be would set the standard forever after you know what i mean and so with instant scan i feel like there's a opportunity for customers to to reclaim control over their own standards it's so extensible there and you you can use it for different purposes you can scan at different levels you can scan the entire instance you can scan an app you can scan an update set you can scan a file and any combination of those things in reality so the checks that you want to scan with you know you can bundle into suites and you can execute a sweet scan on an app on an update set or on the whole instance so that flexibility and the ability to create and define your own checks or even take some from elsewhere you know on the servicenow dev program have got a github which was part of the 2021 hacktoberfest there's some default checks in there so you can pull that down and actually bundle them up as an app and we've done a similar thing we've got our own kind of project standard level checks all living in an app that we can deploy to a customer instance as part of a project and make sure that we are aligned on standards and and highlighting any findings we can use instant scan before we start the project or at the end of the project or at every stage throughout it we can enable the customer to drive their priorities and other features on the backlog you know like hygiene stories one of the jokes corey and i have is like we're always trying to find the customer whose system law grows the fastest so we're always trading stories like i had one that it would grow by half a million or grow by a million a day so it'd be like by lunchtime it would be half a million records and then he got to a customer site that would like a quarter million dollar a quarter million log entries an hour and so that put us on the bugaboo of don't put open log statements in your scripts right yeah before you move them to prod make sure that they're commented out and that to me is just like that's one more thing you could just have ready inside your instant scan so that if you got a vendor partner or something they go to close that update set you just say hold on a second let me scan through there yep you got five open log statements like go back and close them before we go to change control and it's just you could schedule it you could do it transactionally i am just so excited about what this thing can do yeah and you know as well the point around logs it's a different topic here we digress a little bit more but you don't even need to put all those logs in your scripts anymore we've got script debugger it's got log points in yeah stop putting logs in in the first place but let's use instant scan to make sure that we we catch them just in case because i know there might always be a point where we do need to but there shouldn't be as many of them right and they shouldn't slip through to production so instant scan is going to kind of protect that going forward and even highlight those which exist um in the past so instant scanner i think is one of the one of the game changers and i've got a shout out shout out um mark ruff for his work on that i mean that guy is a machine and actually we'll have a link to his episode in in the description below he's a titan as well one thing that we will keep season to season is uh the war stories right everybody loves to hear about a time where you know you felt like your back was against the wall nobody was there to help you it was do or die what was the hardest point in your servicenow career so far yeah when i thought about this question um a little bit beforehand maybe i'm going to answer this in a different way to to others because it's it's less of a technical side of it and what i was thinking about here was actually you know the hardest time in in my career out since getting started with servicenow i think was was really about my career and knowing when it's time to move on and knowing when those opportunities that are in front of you maybe aren't going to stay they're going to start to peter out and what conversations that you should be having with your manager with your team about where you want to go and what your ambitions are and i i found that that was one of the toughest things because that's what moved me into the servicenow space and moved me into the consultancy space it was around those conversations and about understanding that you know i found this sweet spot for me where i know that service now is is the place um you know where i can build a career and that grc within servicenow is is an even sweeter spot for me but that's the kind of work i want to do and i know there's loads of work there so being able to have those conversations and make the right decision for me i think was was the hardest time because i i did have a hard time getting to the point where i realized my own value in service now and i don't know if that's answering your question rob or if i should think about some actual war stories but that was kind of the thing that sprung to mind for me no it's whatever you feel in your heart right like where did you feel the most struggle on the opposite side of that well what do you feel is like your main accomplishment i think getting to this point i mean in the grc world it's such a hot topic now that it feels like i got in at the right time it couldn't have happened at a better time for me to have moved into that world with a level of experience you know and being one of those people that was around from the beginning of when scoped apps were first there so my first project in grc was moving off of the legacy grc into scoped apps okay so so being around and seeing grc as a application evolve to this point there's a couple of things that i was involved in i can't take full credit at a tool for but seeing how we were able to take the indicators in grc they were running for something like in one customer running for like four days at a time like non-stop you could just go into the logs and watch the the sequel queries going up into the millions it was doing some real heavy heavy lifting and i'll shout out courtney because really he masterminded this but he took that i mean we looked at it together we talked about it we tried things like moving to glide aggregate like moving certain things but what we ended up doing was re-engineering the entire indicator api to execute in a certain way and do all the analysis at the javascript level and you would have thought that after a few million rows stored in a javascript object that maybe javascript might fall over and run out of memory but it didn't it just held tight and we squashed it from like four days to something like four hours still a long time to run but the results at the end were the same but the way it achieved that result and for me that was a massive learning curve to watch somebody like courtney who's he's got war stories i mean he can he can tell you some stuff but for him to be able to look at it and go here's an angle and being able to learn that there's always another angle in the platform i love to speak to some people that have been around like 10 years plus and ask them how would you solve this there's always something in the platform that is still going to help somebody at some point that no one knows about all right you have a hard stop coming up so i'm gonna offer you the final word you have any advice for up and comers or anything that you wish somebody knew about servicenow you know this is maybe the one question i didn't uh prepare for i went through all your bullet points you know what's the one thing for me i think just knowing how to like learning how to learn mark said it best on the on the live coding happy hour stuff like know your resources that's something that i think really rung out for me i was like yeah that that's important but knowing where to go for things but it's not just that like when you're on your own on the platform it's just you and the platform and those people aren't around or or maybe you've you've exploited every resource you can and you still can't find the answer knowing how to learn knowing how to dig into service now when i started learning grc there was nobody to learn it from really there was no training there was no certifications you just had to learn it so i was tasked with migrating from legacy to scoped apps the first thing i did was go in and look at the data model and i drew out the data model and then i went through and drew out all the columns and then i went through and looked at all the logic that was running on all of those tables and said well done if i create a record here that triggers a business rule that creates a record over there and then i would refer back to the docs and find the narrative find the way that servicenow talks about this stuff and be able to have that conversation but i knew kind of intimately how it was being done as well from exploring there and and from looking into it and that data model i used to maintain that every release next release came out i would go through and go there's a new column and you've got a lovely diagram rob about these kind of edge cases and the the what is it the future stuff the the kind of things we're going to try and there's loads of that in in grc you know you can look at grc's features look at his architecture but the way that's built even if you didn't care about compliance or risk you can learn so much from the way grc is implemented some of that architectural design i mentioned indicators some of those problems have been solved now in the baseline but you can still go into it and realize how powerful servicenow could be for your application for your use case you can take stuff from glc and apply it you know whether it be table extension script include extension dig in have a look click around explore it don't rely on somebody else telling you how it is check for yourself and that that's really my my learning i think buddy i am going to make a separate video of just this part like just this question and answer because like this is not um it's not like every once in a while somebody that's like every single day every single day i get at least one linkedin message sometimes two or more like tell me the steps step step step step steps tell me the exact like 1.1 1.2 1.3 2 2.1 tell me all the sub steps on how to learn whatever fill in the blank on servicenow and it's like a i don't think it works that way half the time right like what how do you how do you approach learning development step wise there isn't you can go all sideways and up and down and some things you get faster and slower so it's not so much learn the steps it's learn how to break it open and examine the component pieces learn what questions to ask not what steps to take right yeah and it just it was so profound what you said about like okay well let's start with the data structure and then you know now once i know how the tables interact let's look at the columns and then once i look at the columns let's start deconstructing the business logic and then let's compare it version to version and i i swear to god if you just did that on whatever you're learning in service now two versions you'll be ahead of everybody you'll be ahead of everybody yeah then you've got to try and marry up then the the what it's doing with the why it's doing it for sure or the sales material that they got on now learning half the time like it's literally it's all there for the taking um if there was one line that you you needed to know in service now is tablename.config and i do it uppercase because i like it in a new tab but dot config for that table it's going to open up all of the configuration records related to that table um and that is going to drive like 90 85 90 of the the information that you need to know how that thing works when i click here why does that happen you know it it it's there for the taking and then you've got the disco app that i've been kind of working with it's on share but that answers some of the questions for you as well right that will scan your app and bring you a visualization of it that that business rule calls that script include and and that's why i built it is because i want to know how apps are built i want to know how they interact all right you have a hard stop so i'm going to stop you from talking uh folks we i got counting like eight different things that i got to put into the links of this episode so please check the description below there's going to be a ton of useful links for you to exploit and uh and up your game phil thanks so much for coming on the show i really appreciate it thanks for having me take care you too bye-bye hey everyone welcome to another that's another thing i do miracles in post-production so don't be afraid to just pause and repeat yourself not words do you want your message in front of the best servicenow 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