hey this is troy with another workflow wednesday welcome to the middle of june uh time flies i think we know that and and today i want to talk about two things you know as as i talk about now with troy i've said there's really two main themes for these conversations and workflow wednesday is i want to talk about what's happening in the business world right now and what's happening on the servicenow platform the now platform and today is a mix of both of those um it goes without saying that if you glance across the news you fill up your car with gas the economy is under a lot of pressure call it a recession or not but either way there's tremendous pressure on the business world and on the economy in and one of the things that we find particularly as we look at what servicenow offers to businesses is the time is now to look at investing in digital transformation why do i say that when when pressure starts that's when old school rolodexes get cleared out and one of the ways to look at it is is you can invest now in looking at efficiencies and looking at how do you take that staff that is increasingly harder to find harder to retain how do you help them do the best work possible in your organization that's taking some of those mundane tasks and finding ways to automate them use machine learning use artificial intelligence use ways that you can have a trusted system as david allen of getting things done would say right and you'd have a trusted system that i know where this work is going to go in your digital transformation if you look at your different processes where in your organization from your customers your clients through that front end as they ask for more business do business with you as they ask for support as they look at visibility to see how that work is going as it progresses through to the back end to the different teams that are engaged in delivering the value that your organization provides to the marketplace servicenow is poised to help that flow of work go better and improve the experience not only for your clients but also for your employees investing in that effort to move from manual processes where i used to run down the hall to try to get things done to really having a trusted system that can really work across the enterprise to coordinate different systems whether they're your custom interfaces or their standard interfaces that you commonly encounter in enterprises servicenow can reach out and engage with each of those to provide that consistent control tower if you will that looks across how work from the customers to employees can be improved in a time like this as pressures mount in the economy investing in those efficiencies is is going to be essential because those companies that do so are the ones that are going to excel and survive those that don't likely fall back in the midterm and as you look at the long term very likely they'll disappear and so yes it's a tough time finding staff is tough there's i've seen more and more companies say man i need staff i've got more work than i have staff that's a common common theme and servicenow provides a way to help address some of that find the right staff let them do the right work in your organization and find ways to automate the other work that would have kept them busy doing maybe non-essential tasks automate that invest in digital transformation right now and come out of this turmoil of the economy stronger more efficient and prepared for what's next because the pace of change is not constant the pace of change is accelerating and so invest now in digital transformation and that is really where servicenow focuses and so if you want some help with that reach out to me love to connect you with others at third era servicenow is all we do we are a growing servicenow elite partner we're nearing 700 employees and if you think about certified master architects there are a limited quantity of those that if you're unaware of what a certified master architect is is insider servicenow if you look at the different education different certifications you can get if you climb that ladder as far as you can go you can earn a cred an accreditation called a certified master architect there's few of them in the world maybe over 200 over half of the market service now at third era we have 13 certified master architects and three certified technical architects what that means is we have resources that come alongside you and can listen to your business needs listen to your your where you're at in your business from your clients all the way back to your employees and the processes are in between and help explore together what digital transformation utilizing servicenow could look like reach out for me and let's talk about how we could do that in your organization and if i can't help you directly i'll connect you with someone that can the other thing that i want to talk about today is i'm going to actually shift shift things around a little bit because i'm going to move to the technical side of the house as i've talked with different companies over time one of the things that comes up is the concept of technical drift and i've seen that show up in two different ways one is drift of what you've implemented versus out of the box you know maybe you're moving away from some of the best practices and coding efforts you're moving away from you know staying current with the patches you're staying a little more isolated right and and you deviate from best practice and out of box how do you recover from that the other place that i see technical drift is between different instances now if you're unfamiliar with servicenow and the way that it typically works in a client environment is there's different instances the minimum would be out of a production instance and a development instance more common is to have three out of development test and prod but each organization can decide what's best and there are many times where you could have more you could have dev test prod and a training instance they could have development instances for different teams to be working in but each of these instances have their own version of the servicenow software and that needs to be managed so that production is the key but those pre-production instances must be kept in sync and i've met different companies over time and and as i've talked with different people that your mileage still may vary right there there is no definitive answer of what's the best way to keep these different instances in sync it varies the two extremes that i've seen i'll talk about both of them one is is a client that every time you go through a major release you kind of have to get all of your instances in sync because they have to be upgraded to run the same software and those major releases from servicenow come out every six months so think about that scenario if if you had devtest and prod and you update those instances six months with a new upgrade from servicenow as your developers work they try promoting things in the test maybe that doesn't work they need to re-promote they need to move things into prod maybe they change some things here and there trying to keep things in sync but sometimes life happens over those six months you can have pretty significant drift where prada is over here and and dev and test might vary a little bit that's harder to manage the trade-off is the goodness is that they're not spending time cloning back it's not that complicated but it is an effort it does take time the other extreme that i've seen is a client that really embraced much more of the dev ops or continuous improvement continuous development type mentality where their test instance in particular was cloned back made identical to prod every weekend now most of that is automated as as teams worked in development they knew as they tried to promote things that was done with development they're ready to promote and to test they had one week to use tests to go through and verify their their testing do user acceptance testing or you know any other type of testing that they wanted because that instance was going to be wiped back to match production at the next end of that week it put a little bit of pressure on testing but it also encourages the teams to automate as much as possible in those deployment steps they can promote update sets run some background scripts or post production or post promotion scripts that would do other things that would often be done fingers on keyboard to automate it that rigger helped them minimize drift because test was always something reliable and in that instance you know there was was additional work both in making sure those clones worked making sure that every time you had to do testing that spanned multiple weeks there's multiple promotions but what happened in that environment is their promotion into production was more often than not a non-event because they've tested their promotion into test in a very reliable manner in a system that they knew was had not drifted from production and so one of the questions i have for you is in the the comments below whether you find this on linkedin on youtube or on twitter i'd love to hear from you if you're using servicenow what's your frequency of cloning back your different instances are you doing once a week every other week every month as needed every six months we're in that continuum between every week and every six months are you as you're managing your pre-production instances and if you're doing something more frequent than that i'd love to hear that how that's working for you and more importantly i'd love to hear what else you've automated remember we talked about digital transformation that transformation also affects our internal teams as we do development as we do promotion and we look at how we automate those steps so there's less fingers on keyboard but there's more dependence on watching that technology move in a trusted manner so we know that we're minimizing drift we're also speeding time to value as our business users see how servicenow can impact the way they do business what happens more often than not is there is a growing backlog of need users coming out of the different parts of the business saying i see what this department has over here can i have some of that and we see that from the products that servicenow has brought to market they've just came out and with the last release procurement service automation working very tightly with your procurement groups to manage that process well within servicenow again it's just another example but there are so many different things that span the platform to automate things so two things that come to mind let me change back to this camera over here two things that come to mind again reach out to me love to talk to you love to connect you with other parts of your of third era or other ways they can help you but practical tools practical things you can get service third era has two different things that come to mind one is our instance analyzer if you look at the servicenow store yeah servicenow has an application store go out and search for it the third era instance analyzer for a long time running has been the number one rated app in the app store what it is is it's an application that your administrators can download into one of your pre-production environments and as you run it it looks at how things are configured how things are set up and it looks for deviations from best practice now i will say this if you haven't run this application before and you run it it may feel overwhelming because it will find a number of different things reach out to myself or someone else from third era and we'll set up a time for our subject matter experts to walk through the output of the instance analyzer to help you understand where there are times where a little deviation from best practice might be acceptable if not encouraged but help you also learn how to prioritize which things really should be looked at maybe those are some security concerns maybe there's some other things that are going to make updates to future releases and future updates more difficult but look at the servicenow instance analyzer from third era put it in one of your pre-production environments and run it and then also reach out to third era reach out to myself and let's sit down and go through that together and see how we could help your technology drift as you deviate from best practice the other free assessment is is maybe a little deviation from that except in this world cyber is such a concern the cyber attack surface if you will the number of things in our enterprise that have ip addresses multiplies exponentially with each one of those additions comes a vulnerability a point that cyber attackers can jump in most organizations that we encounter either have or are looking to grow their cyber security practices there are a number of different tools that can be involved they don't all have to be servicenow of course but what thirdera has put together is a security hardening assessment it's no charge but we come in and look at the processes ask some questions about which tools you're using how they work together how you identify vulnerabilities enrich them prioritize them and address them to resolve them and keep that secure to harden your cybersecurity attack surface if that's something that you're interested again it's no charge reach out to myself or someone else from third era and ask about our cyber security hardening assessment again takes us a couple hours of your staff's time because i know they're very busy and within a couple of weeks it gives you a clear set of recommendations and road maps of things that you could do to improve your digital transformation around how you handle cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats looking primarily at how vulnerability response is managed and how all of those components all those things with ip addresses cis in the itil itil world how your cis are configured servicenow does a lot of that with a capability called configuration compliance our security hardening assessment really looks at it from those two bases how do we know what's in your environment how do you know that it's configured to comply with your recommendations and your standards and how do you find those vulnerabilities prioritize them best and resolve them as quickly as possible so with those two things reach out to myself so call to action really what is your pace and timing for keeping your pre-production instances cloned back let me know love to start a discussion with you again youtube linkedin or twitter wherever you find this add some comments i'll be watching for them and i'd love to hear from you the other part is if you're wondering about what you could do to address cyber security better and harden that cyber attack surface reach out to someone like myself at third era and let's do a security hardening assessment for you and give you some recommendations again at no charge because now is the time to invest find ways that in this turbulent economy they can invest in in looking for efficiencies in your organization and tighten security so that you don't end up suffering a security incident that could be detrimental again thanks so much this is troy possola from third era and thank you for tuning in to workflow wednesday i look forward to hearing back from you and we'll see you next week