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 have 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 everybody welcome back to another Titans of now I am so happy to return to the Titans Now series and today is my honor to interview the uh Community MVP and what's astounding about him being a community MVP is that it only took him three years of total servicenow experience to get there he is an absolute Legend on LinkedIn he's the guy who makes a couple statements a couple little uh profound discoveries gets 500 likes consistently he is just a very important pillar of our community a huge knowledge sharer and it's my pleasure to introduce you to Mike why Scott owl did I pronounce your last name right Mike yes this is pronounced correctly thank you awesome and it's a honor to be a guest of your serious Titans of service now when I entered the service now Universe um I came across your videos and videos from Chuck tomasley and both of you were my idols and um it's really a great great honor to be a guest here oh trust me brother the honor is mine so you've told me that your origin story in servicenow three years ago has been told all over the Internet maybe we can put a link below but why don't you kind of show us how you started in Tech you had a picture in the pre-show you want to share that again and and tell us where you began my career and Tech started when I was 12 years old and I was born in eastern part of Germany during that time um our country was named German Democratic Republic and in my computer Club I I had my first contact with the kind of computer and let me show but um so this was my first contact with computers the Eastern Germany version of a personal computer and um nowadays you only finders and museums and yes you see here the storage was um yeah cassette recorder I think it's the right word man and also the keyboard was really hard to hit the keys and and our monitor was the TV and black white to be um so later we asked we had some disk murders was a great enhancement but uh far away from what we have now in in the text what kind of things were you doing on that it was um that the the language you could use was a basic um a basic dialect and he only had um a prompt a console in a no no graphic interface and then you just wrote down small programs for calculating some things and um um yeah that's that's it so in three years of doing service now what part of the platform do you feel that you most resonate with due to my role as an architect of course I'm I'm highly interested in the in the in the foundation in the platform itself um all the technique around this all the yeah things you can do with this um but I also have a search for customer service management and I think this is really a great product because there are so many parts of this portals and then all the things also in the new chocolate release with all the AI stuff and um yeah one of my favorite products is customer service management and then the platform itself what's your most favorite thing that you've done on service now the thing you're most proud about yeah um I'm a current project um we have to integrate a lot of data sources and I wrote an integration for a high-speed import I imported um 4 million CIS from a remote system in two hours and yeah this was crazy 5 million in two hours yes how did you accomplish that you didn't obviously you didn't use just traditional import sets did you yeah I forget input it's it's too slow you have to do another way um yeah I think I will write an article about this but the the secret is using the source event table and and pulling all the things you import into the table and then you scale the creating or configuration items over the nodes no you have to to spread the import over the different nodes you have in your service now instance it's it's a bit complicated um not easy to explain but I think I will write an article about this and um illustrate with some pictures I think so man like that's a huge Dragon to slay I have been in situations where we've had to import like large numbers of Records man the last time I did it we had to break it up into you know a whole bunch of smaller chunks just to get it done like it would time out so if you're talking about that scale of activity on that short of time frame I think the community desperately needs to know how you accomplished that who knows maybe service now can get you a knowledge speaking session because that's that's pretty Fire Man so three years is kind of I think a lot of people would say that that's well not completely unknown it's still a very short interval to learn the Tool uh to such an extent that you have Ascend to the architecture ranks get your certified technical architect and then also like build such a following such a loyal and engaged following what do you think you've done differently um I think the difference is my experience um I do did not start the service now and and um implementing something I started my career as a software developer um in um 21 and then I developed myself as an architect a software architect at that time um the it um had not this world Architect no there were only developers and project managers so and uh there was a time when experienced developers colleagues former colleagues of mine um saw that there's something missing in between a kind of role which is um translating the world of a project manager and the customer to the world of a developer and so we um created together with our HR department this new kind of carrier path um for a software architect and we created a series of trainings and I took the first um round of this training and yeah and for many years I was um and I've worked as an architect later I changed my path to tried something different like project manager service manager requirements engineer so I had a lot of experience and different roles made a lot of larger and smaller projects and different Technologies so it was easier for me to jump on the train of service now no it was not completely new to me because another Hood so it's now only runs a tomcat you know it's a application server from an open source board so I was familiar with this also with implementing in JavaScript and all the HTML stuff and so on so for me was just another technology no and therefore it did not start from the beginning I wonder if you wouldn't mind giving us your impression about what the word architect means today I think like you said right a few years ago it was kind of like not a word we used and now it's a word we use frequently but it didn't come with like a really coherent set of accepted principles and now we have certified technical architect certified Master architect programs and so I wonder if you could give Mike's view of what it is an architect does and maybe a day in the life of an architect yeah as I said it's my personal View and I had a lot of discussions over the years regarding the spirit and and it was also interesting to see how servicenow um interprets this world no we have solution Architects um we have platform Architects we have now this training of a certified technical architect and all these worlds exists in the world of service now and and beside of that now I was familiar with a software architect or an I.T architect which is more working with that dogs and so on and it's difficult to to find a common definition of this but my personal view in my personal view an architect is a translator between the customer requirements and what we have to implement and he's also often the the lead for the developers someone they can challenge with and and um he designs the architecture whatever an architectures maybe a Java based software architecture it's um that there's more to do or a kind of architecture and service now there are less possibilities to design this architecture but you have some some ways and um yeah I think and also this war is changing over the time what we Define as an architect today is maybe different from what we see in 10 years for example now it's interesting how this role is developing over the years so I'm more the one who is siding together with the developers against any problems and and try to find Solutions I'm a Problem Solver and I'm not someone like you who was talking about the value of something no this is I I know I have to learn this um give me a problem I will solve this this is my definition of an architect why do you think you you're not um hold on a second let me see if I want to ask this question I kind of want to like dive deeper into problem solving versus value finding yeah the problem is um yeah I took this CTA training and I learned a lot um about um presenting and and um defining uh Solutions and so on um but in my my real life and my project it's difficult to to get this opportunity not to apply this knowledge in in my current project I am I'm handling issues I Implement something and and not only configuring really implementing software um in larger packages and so on and so I have not the time to to do this job because um maybe here in Germany but maybe also in other countries we have roles which fill this Gap Navi serious oriented people who who has the first contact with the customer who tried to convince them and um so for me it that they are not that many chances to to lift this role in a way service now things um and architect should um act so you're saying just I mean it could just be a separation of Duties at your current employer whereby say some top tier business analyst does all the value propositioning stuff versus you solve the technical barriers to deployment is that sound accurate now I think there's no hot um border I'm also part of any um presentations to the customer I support my colleagues with informations and and um illustrating the solution but not that often in other companies or other countries at the moment but maybe only at the moment I'm more involved than doing the project stuff in developing something working with my team in India and yeah and so on let's do customer contact and and gaining any any new projects so one question I get a bunch I wonder what your thoughts on it are is do you necessarily need a development background to be a good architect that many people discuss this um I think if you deal with service now it's not necessary because a lot of the platform is defined you cannot change it you have no contact to the to all the levels below your UI now you cannot control the the application servers um you have only small options to change something to scale something but this doesn't really requires any technical background you can read a lot you can get familiar with all the with all the technical stuff if you if you are ready for for learning something new and I think it's possible to to enter the world of service now without any technical background but just to be willing to learn you cannot do something without learning you have to take the trainings you to have to reach you have to watch videos you have to try something in your PDI but this is all this you also have described in all your videos and and so on what was one of the hardest servicenow concepts for you to learn when you first put hands on it I cannot give you any example because I'm always curious to learn to learn something new um sometimes it takes longer sometimes not I really have no idea what for example GRC is I never had contact with this no um so I have no idea of what this is but um but whatever I I touched um I could understand really fast because my brain is open for for this technical stuff and um different difficult for me to answer this well I think you gave a great answer like kind of like just publicly showing that you don't know anything about GRC is is kind of right up there um like I myself even though like I know cmdb I know Discovery I know how it works mechanically like I just find it excruciatingly difficult to get the value proposition of it right I'm not no I'm not talking about the book value proposition I'm talking about like you you crash landed a customer they're like we need to see MVP to blah blah blah and you know how do you how do you put it all together such that it actually provides something valuable and not just turn into constantly refining your Discovery so you're not pumping in like 10 million CIS every Discovery phase so that this covers this copy is one of them difficult disciplines we have to service now um I have a social discovery and um yeah it was really hard to to pass the exams you need a chance to to Really apply your knowledge because after one year you can start from the beginning regarding discovery yes I feel like it's um like it's a technical difficulty that is not the same as coding right yeah there's more to do with like infrastructure and networks and protocols and that kind of thing and so I think it's one of the hardest things for newcomers to pick up unless they've come from it like a solid solid background in I.T would you agree totally I agree and um yeah I cannot imagine how you can solve this if you have no experience with the technical background it's hot well speaking about hard we talked about like what was the hardest thing to learn um or things where where we got and I want to I want to just emphasize here to to the people listening like it's okay people talk to me about how I learn service now it's just like what do you mean learn service now it's kind of like saying learn construction now you know there's so many disciplines deep disciplines that take a lifetime of Mastery or years of Mastery You couldn't possibly learn the entire thing so you kind of got to pick pick and choose and it's okay to look at stuff and say like I'm not going to do that I'm never going to do that I'm going to focus my efforts here um but the question I wanted to ask you was like in your three year Journey what not necessarily the thing you're most proud of but what was the hardest thing that you had to contend with like you've ever been in a situation where you're like holy cow I don't know if I'm gonna make it and uh I'd love to hear about that how you dealt with it yeah um it was not any kind of problem I had to solve um I took the CTA training I was a member of the first official class uh at the end of 2021 and I had completely different expectations um regarding this Pro um no I thought we would do a lot of technical stuff Implement something create awesome applications and so on but nothing of this um we learned how to present something how to create presentations how to emphasize the value and so on and we always had to prepare something and and um you always had to present something in front of all the participants um it was always on Friday so and I was really nervous I never had done this before in front of a camera Runner I like staying in front of a class no like teaching something but this was completely new to me this situation though and I was really nervous I I trained my presentation many many times so and then I had to black out I started sweating and and this little Panic monster in my head said hello to me and uh um yeah I had to I think I had to stop the presentations and and I'm uh yeah it was a great help I was really supported by the um by the facilitator it was Sean McLean and he calmed me down and um and this was my my point where I jumped it into the water without able to to swim so now I'm able to to sit in front of a camera Runner talking to you like this um it was not possible two years ago and um so this was my hardest lecture um I had in my life so it's not service now related but it's something like I learned a personal skill yeah absolutely man like part of my journey like it's unquestionable to me the servicenow has made me a much better man in in many facets not just what kind of solutions I could build but kind of forcing me to confront and endure situations that I didn't like right so man shout out to Sean McLean thank you for helping Mike up on that and uh really appreciate everything you do in the community Sean so big shout out to you all right we're preaching the uh we're approaching the end of the recording Mike is there anything that you would advise servicenow newcomers on be curious always ask do not um things someone has recommended no um others asked why why is it that way how can we do it better where can I get the knowledge and and open the mind and and learn that everything is out there also started from the beginning I had nothing um my first contact with service now was entering this word in the Google um search and then I got the first results and I started started searching and and looking into all the portals there are in the community and and videos and um so everything is there you just have to find maybe the right answers and this takes a while but you also can ask someone so therefore if you have no idea how to how to proceed this journey ask someone um now there are ways to to get help for example the service now mentoring program I'm also a mentor in this program and um and and also in the community a lot of people are giving their support and um you need help but but in the service now Universe there are many many people many peoples who want to help you who want to give support and this is something I only experienced in this service notebook I never had this experience before in any of the other Technologies or vendors or however you want to call this that's a good point so shout out to Dan Braun shout out to uh Mark Obi shout out to all the members of the servicenow community I didn't have any experiences but prior to service now um Community wise but something I hear all the time from people it's that there is something different here so appreciate all of you who who helped build that all right Mike we are at time I want to thank you so much for joining us today really appreciate everything you do in the community um thank you so much I have to think it was a good pleasure for what thank you if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or LinkedIn profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via LinkedIn or the email pictured here as I offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right Robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1500 subscriber YouTube channel and mailing list and thousands of LinkedIn followers let's make sure your open positions get first go at the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the email picture here