hey everyone welcome to another qa session with the duke today we are taking a question that came in from servicenow twitter and it is how do i interview a servicenow architect now remember that the duke is a pragmatist so i know there's all kinds of situations out there where on paper the admin the dev and the architect have a ton of overlap and sometimes there's the same people but if you want somebody primarily for the responsibility of architecture you have to realize that it is a different type of job and so the first question i would ask is what does an architect have to maximize versus a dev the other thing i do is look for people with at least one multi-year stint at the servicenow customer because there's certain things that the consulting track doesn't teach you in life and that is what solutions scale and are sustainable over the long term and so if you find one of those people i would ask them what the overarching theme of their time at that customer was as it relates to servicenow now it's no secret that this servicenow architect is going to be embroiled in a lot of political battles in their time so i would definitely ask them about the hardest political battle they've ever fought and how they succeeded alternatively you could ask them the hardest political battle that they fought and lost and what lessons have they learned this one isn't really a question but be sure to tell your hr department not to mess things up by making really weird requirements like a four-year college degree and here's a hard truth you're never gonna find a resource that can do everything architect developer implementer admin whatever so the successful servicenow customers of the future are gonna have to learn how to bring in vendors as needed across multiple disciplines i predict that there's going to be very few monolithic servicenow partners that can do everything so a good question to ask your architect is how they would structure a program such that you can plug and play vendors at will this is a chicago rat trap it's a sign that you've got some pretty nasty company in your building ask your architect what the sure signs are of a failed or failing implementation and for that matter ask them what the worst mess they ever had to clean up was now the toolbox of the architect is changing rapidly so a very good question would be to ask them what tools have come out in the last version or two or are coming out that will really enhance this servicenow architect's position you'll want to listen to things like script tracer upgrade center instant scan things of that nature ask them about their accomplishments but pay careful attention if they're expressing things in terms of the components they use to build then they might be better off as a developer or a local developer or just a builder an architect will want to express things in terms of the benefits to the business so the difference would be something like i gathered requirements and built with business rules script includes forms and service portals to satisfy the requirements versus somebody who says i designed an application for an incoming call center that reduced license spend by x and training time by y the latter is the one you want for the architect you can also ask your architect what makes a solution scalable and by scalable i mean if this is good for 10 people is it going to be good for 100 people or maybe a thousand people and along with scalability ask your potential architect about sustainability and by sustainability i mean can the solution hold out for a year can it hold out for five years how do i ensure the longevity of all the solutions on my servicenow instance my name is robert fedoric and one of the things that i do in the servicenow ecosystem is connect companies with talent now if you're trying to vet or find servicenow talent or if you are the servicenow talent and you're looking for better opportunities go ahead and look in the description below you're going to see a bunch of links there for how to contact me i'm also dropping in a couple podcasts that i've done with my friend corey that goes into much deeper detail in a deeper way than i can cover on just this one video this has been another qa session with the duke live from the streets of chicago i love you all want the best for you please keep those questions coming to my inbox