hi Chuck here with a quick note to let you know that this episode on data governance was so full of great information that it went a little longer than our standard break point episode so I opted to break it into two parts this is part one of my discussion with kasturi nagapon and Samir Kumar Pandey from servicenow on data governance I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did producing it and now on with part one it might not seem like an important topic at first but if you choose to ignore data governance as you do an implementation it can get extremely costly later on our guests today discuss what data governance is and why it's important to every developer welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins Builders developers and of course all of the Curious individuals that I always say with yet most love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode I've got the pleasure of talking to not just one but two people on this one this is a rare episode where we talked to two guests I have with me kasori nagapon who's a senior platform architect and CMA at servicenow and Samir Kumar Pandi principal platform architect and CMA we have two CMAs on here from servicenow that's amazing how are you both today doing great fantastic how about you I'm in the presence of Holiness I CMAs are rare now that that is a certified Master architect if I have my acronyms in my initialization is correct right that's that's absolutely right spot on you spent the money spent the time and got the title congratulations to both of you thank you thank you uh welcome to break point before we jump into Data governance uh let's let's learn a little bit about each one of you because story go ahead hello Chuck into all the listeners today I'm kasturi nagapan platform architect from India working in servicenow for over a year and a half and I started my service now uh way back in 2010 and uh started as a developer and then progressed as a solution architect consultant lead multiple roles help the customers work across the globe and India transformation journey in this current rule as a platform architect I play as a trusted advisor and make sure that my customers have right strategies in place align to the best practices and make sure to take try technical decisions and help them achieve their business outcomes that's that's primarily my role all righty and Samir how about you hello Chuck and everyone listening to us good morning good afternoon good evening first of all way based on wherever you are currently I'm Samir Kumar Pandey I'm working pretty much like custody I'm also working as impact platform architect uh so whatever kasuri has said uh reciprocates my or covers my introduction as well my role encompasses helping customers establish architecture blueprint for service now transformation Journey that they are in making sure platform is healthy uh proactively giving them suggestions or recommendations based on the versions that they are in or the release that they're consuming or based on the product usage also helping them with design reviews setting up their governance model running helping them run the technical governance board as well in short it is to make customer maximize the outcome based on the service now I'm investment that they have done now because sure you mentioned you were servicenow developer starting in 2010 what did you do before that what did you work on before servicenow I was into a support Joy more of a I.T support where uh it was it was more to help the customers in resolving incidents managing escalations and other support work which I was doing and I would admit that doing or working on that kind of environment early in my career helped me to understand how to handle customers and how to manage customer escalations and after that my aspiration to work on development made me to land in service now be back in 2010 and that's how the journey started and Samir how about you what was life like before servicenow and life was uh different so I started out as Improvement consultant or process Improvement consultant my role included looking at the processes whether they are fit for use and fit for purpose making sure improvements through Six Sigma and cmy and other process models I transitioned to itsm Consulting and Tool Consulting in around 2007 and that was primarily looking at HP product ecosystem around 2011 is when I moved to servicenow platform started providing Consulting as functional consultant took over then role as architect this year is when I started out in service now so you've both had quite the bit of experience 2010 2011 that's uh that's a considerable amount of time and I obviously lent itself well to your completion of the CMA program tell me a little bit about that because Siri what did you find most challenging about the CMA real quick I before we're still going to get it today to Governors don't worry listener we're getting to data governance but um I just want to stick in a couple of facts since we've got two people with CMA let's I want to just find out a little bit more about what was what was the most challenging about that well I would say that enrolling for CMA is so far the best decision that I've taken and when I did my CMA two years back during pandemic it was I had to do take this program virtually and doing a virtual presentation itself was one of the biggest challenge that I had to put through and all thanks to my cohort members and the CMA learning team it did help me to sharpen my presentation skills and then become more confident and not just doing in person as well as virtually and second a challenge that I was facing is to deliver an outcome based presentation which is the essence of the program or something that's very uh a key takeaway that I would say from this program as well so those were the challenges but I'm hoping that I was able to overcome a bit at least and got my learnings from there well you didn't fail miserably because you got your certifications yes I'd say yeah but you make a good point this isn't the end of the journey it's just a part of the journey yeah yeah Samir let's let's take another angle what did you find most valuable about the CMA program well there were multiple benefits but I'll restrict myself to two uh so first being I'm now part of uh ever growing helpful community of CMAs as well as getting mentored continuously by the mentors from servicenow and various Experts of service now these CMAs belong to different organizations not just servicenow and from different geographies so they bring in their experience and contribution and share knowledge so that is very enriching second important valuable contribution or benefit that I see from this program is making me confident in managing these outcome based discussions with leadership apply to this there was less focus on business outcomes it was not successing now I'm deliberately I'm more aware about being succinct in my conversations good point we had a topic about that recently on breakpoint of how to talk to customers actually I think that was almost two years ago now that I think about it time goes by so fast I've lost all control of time during to the pandemic is that true one more question to get to know you before we move on to data governance when you're not at work a story what do you enjoy doing I regularly follow my fitness routine and very recently I've started practicing meditation and yoga and I would see that it has really helped me to stay calm and compose during any stressful day that I had and other than that I like to cook for my family I try to try different recipes try some recipes online and that's that's that's another stress Buster I would say so those are the things that I do regularly and Samir how about you what do you enjoy when you're not working on servicenow I have to son I love to play with them both indoor and outdoor games we also are a great moral fan superhero comics fan the one which we are actually saving for December holidays movie watch is uh wakanda forever it's a new release from Marvel so that's one thing that I'm planning for we can uh sorry holidays sorry all right I did watch it and I guarantee you will like it all right on to data governance as we came here to talk about because story can you explain what data governance is and why our developers should care provides insights of how you can manage and use data again just to reiterate data becomes a foundation for any implementation or any transformation that you're going and for developers these are the four points that I would say they need to take care of one data ownership that is who is the who are the data owners and who is responsible for managing and maintaining the data quality second being data management the standards or the golden rules that you define that can help us in monitoring and managing the data qualities and help us in Audits and make sure the data is accurate the third being the actual data architecture on how the data is structured model and then it is consistently and easily accessible and fourth being the data security it's very very important on how you're managing your pii or the personal identity information security rules and any other privacy or regulation laws that's specific for a country developer it's important that we know all these aspects that way they can make sure that the implementation is successful for any customer that they are working on so that's why it's important for the developers to know wow there are so many stories that come back to mind when I think about that data ownership especially when something changes in the data stream if servicenow is consuming data from another system for example and that data changes that can totally ruin your whole data model yes your process it gets really messy if you don't understand who owns the data and communicate with those people about potential changes say look if you are going to do anything please please please let me know that is mandatory exactly the data management standards kind of folds into that as well because to a developer like you said data is the underpinnings it's the foundation of your process your application and if you don't have a firm grasp on what it is what it looks like how it's coming in where it's going out the Privacy the security all of that you might as well give up now it's not all about let's go talk to the incident table it's on the system and it's fine there's even data governance concerned with that you should be aware so it it it really is something that you need to think about consciously because it's omnipresent it's always there oh yeah okay a little bit passionate about this because I've I've got some Battle Scars over the years for when things go wrong as as I'm sure everybody will at some point uh Samir your turn how should a developer think about data governance well I'll try to build upon the top point that you were mentioning about data so we are surrounded by data whether we realize it or not so we are producing we are ingesting data we are processing that data we are outputting some data through that process that data is used for analytics for decision making now it's no matter how great the technical solution is if the bad data gets in it will be process and be outputted as a royally bad data and it will result in a bad decision making cxos and CIS depend upon the data to make a decision now at this moment when we look at servicenow we broadly categorize data into eight broad areas including reporting data transactional data product setup data common Services data integration data maintenance data and many more but overall we categorize those as eight broad categories now developers have to understand when they are talking to customers they have to understand the purpose of the data and Aid in the right kind of decision making if they feel that data ownership is not identified or if there is a bad data or if that data is not meant to be in service now for example the point that kasturi was bringing in was let's say Pia information SSN do I have to have the data am I going to make any decision out of that with in service now is it really important for me for my process to actually work upon if not then probably I don't need that data so all these kind of questioning customers today want somebody to question and ask these ask these questions in this story grooming session so that these decision making can happen as developers are placed really great these days to ask these questions conventionally if you look at it data was primary responsibility of business process Consultants or Bas but now customers ask for these developers to be in this requirement Gathering sessions which means that developers are better placed so they have opportunity to influence these kind of decision making in with respect to data developers also have to understand some best practices commonly ignored these are small mistakes but can happen with experienced developers with novice developers beginners intermediates anybody for example should I be mapping Boolean field in my transform map should I be or missing the coalescing on the field creating duplicity or when I am pulling the data let's say proof a user data from let's say workday or ldap am I in a situation where I can create duplicity in the records or my data source is trustable or not uh am I going to create duplicate companies in company records a lot of our customers run into these situations it looks very common sense to not have these duplicate data but it happens then last point that I want developers to focus but not the least is the migration project when we are all surrounded with the projects where we are migrating from one system over to service now when we are doing such kind of large scale implementations there is set of data that customer wants to be moved on to service now should we be moving every data or should some of that data be archived somewhere else so again developers have to everybody in the project our listeners should be asking these kind of questions in short data governance helps answer all of these areas and being aware about data governance or these right practices helps in asking right questions that is great information I have so much to add but I know we have more to cover yeah a lot of stories about when you get into the Integrations and you start exchanging information with other systems it gives another order of magnitude to the importance of data governance all right I can't resist I have to do a quick example I was importing information from YouTube for the servicenow karaoke app many listeners know that I wrote that over the last several years and we had a karaoke party at knowledge hope to have another one again the information from different channels comes in in such a dirty format some are title Dash artists some are artists Dash title some are just a big mess some channels don't even they're not even consistent with their own standards they don't have any standards it becomes a nightmare how do you handle that because you can't just say everybody's giving me the same data in the same format YouTube is it's got a rest API it it comes in and I know the fields are right but getting that individual pieces and parts out of there can be a real nightmare and unless you sat down and mapped this out as to how you're going to do it that affects the solution you'll be implementing my decision was I need a script to parse all of this apart for each Channel and when it doesn't abide by its own standards then I have to do some manual manipulation but I've automated as much as humanly possible over the last three years sometimes you actually have to see the data coming in and experience it and and feel it viscerally to go what is the problem we're trying to solve and then you can start automating it so that it comes in in a cleaner format later that's just one piece of the whole governance equation is is how do you import and understand and and normalize this because like you said sometimes duplicate records are necessary and sometimes they're not sometimes you want to avoid them at all costs that needs to be understood on the front end okay I I I I'll try to limit the personal experiences because again we've got a lot to cover back to you because Story how do you decide what data to migrate for transformation projects that's that's a great question Chuck and I would admit that I have done this exercise with almost all the customers that I've worked with and based on my experience these are the three important criteria that any developer or consultant should consider number one know the authenticity of the data yes make sure that you completely audit the source of data like how some may mentioned otherwise it will result in duplicates make sure that the normalization happens before you start one example that I've seen in almost all the implementation I've worked is that the employee information or the user data comes from multiple sources and if you don't have a Clarity or proper validation on which source is going to bring in what information then I'm sure it's going to be a big challenge when you do the migration or when you do the data import and to that point you need to understand if you're getting it from different sources yes different sources may have different coalesce or different unique keys I remember doing this as a customer one of them was the employee ID the other one was the email address that's right you have to realize what is that key or keys to to normalize that to avoid duplicate records that's where I got to the earlier example of talk to those people that are Upstream because we did this for uh we had our employees coming in from an HR database in the UK and they decided to migrate systems and not tell us and suddenly all the employee IDs changed from that system and now I have duplicate records it's like why are there true to Charlie mcentees in our servicenow instance oh they decided to change the HR database on the other end without telling us and now I have to de-duplicate that which is a real pain when you think about it because I've got old records referencing the old Charlie and the new records referencing the new Charlie and which one is right and how do you go update and find all those reference Fields this is where it gets really messy if you don't have that governance and communication in place that's absolutely your spot on Chuck and one other example that I can add on is even if multiple sources are bringing in the same data it is also important to decide which one to choose like if if you have multiple sources which is bringing in the phone numbers make sure which is the source that you want to bring into the service now so that's that's absolutely spot on and second point that developers should take care is the purpose why do you actually need it in the new system uh I've always seen customers asking for uh can you migrate all the open requests into the new system that's that's absolutely not required not just because of the effort that it takes but the data model gets changed and it also occupies a lot of space in the new system with with no purpose that it solves so we need to understand the purpose and have Clarity on why it is required and third and most important point is the relevance to data so migrating an outdated knowledge articles that's that's never going to be used in the new system please don't do that make sure we have proper process consultation and uh Workshop that happens before you actually go ahead and do the migration so these are the three things that I would call the developer should take it and in my experience with all the points that I have set knowledge articles is something which you will have to migrate when you do a transformation project but after careful consideration if those articles are still relevant make sure you categorize those articles and have a proper uh place where who can access and who are the right owners and also Define the validity and approvals to it right and uh we already spoke much about the users and Foundation data input of course that is required and I'm also seeing customers doing a one-time input of CIS just to make sure that the operations are running uh that's that's okay if the discovery is not completely set up and finally regarding the open request it's okay if you want to migrate the in-flight request part please don't ever migrate the historical records and bring the complete chunk into the new system it's a strict No-No so that's that would be my recommendation for the Developers I've been in that situation as well it was a long time ago but it still holds up I mean when we did our migration back in 2008 same thing so authenticity of the data the purpose why do you need this and the relevance of that data very important stuff hello listener this is Chuck here with a quick notice and as mentioned at the top of the show this is a two-parter and this concludes part one be sure to listen to the next episode for part two with my discussion with custorian Samir for more great information on data governance please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening hey I did that one in one take that was awesome oh we have two questions for you in a row I think it was just prepared it that way Samir tell me all the new and cool stuff that's uh related to David I will get through this podcast well thank you very much Samir and I didn't forget your name it just didn't come out and now you know what the nonsense of making a podcast looks like hahaha