oh welcome to this episode of Glide chat I'm Kali Alexander technical trainer here at Glide fast and I am flanked by some of the most brilliant lines in the servicenow community and they also happen to be my co-workers we are coming to you today because everyone that you see on the screen today has been honored by the servicenow ecosystem for their leadership for their contribution to the community and they have been awarded either Rising Star such as myself or developer or Community MVP so I want you to get to know a little bit about them so we're going to go around our virtual room and I like to start off with Sarah Sarah tell us a little bit about you tell us your name what awards you received and your current role here at Glide fast hi there I am Sarah Tolson uh I'm an architect at Glide fast and this is my second year being selected as a servicenow developer MVP I am right now shooting an air horn up in the sky for you so I'm happy that you are here I want to next go to Ryan tell us your name tell us you know the whole spill tell us your name tell us your current role and also the award and that'd be for everyone Ryan go ahead tell us about you hey everybody I'm Ryan Gillespie I'm a technical architect here at gladfast and for the second year running I am a servicenow developer Rising Star yes right on right on uh Adam tell us about yourself hi I'm Adam Shelley I'm a service delivery manager and techno senior technical consultant at glidefest and I'm a developer MVP this year yay congratulations congratulations Uma give us this bill tell us your name tell us your current role as well as the award you received from servicenow yep hello everyone my name is Uma agrawal and I'm working as a technical consultant in Glide fast and I have received the Rising Star Award for the first time so congratulations congratulations and finally but certainly not least Michael tell us about yourself hi name's Michael Jones I'm an architect here at gladfast and this is my third consecutive year as a servicenow community MVP wow wow congratulations congrats congratulations to all of you and let's talk about I'm really curious yes yes I want to know how were you introduced to servicenow I'm curious about what you were doing before servicenow and how you got here so we'll go in that same order Sarah let's kick it off my background is not I.T at all um the the time I got introduced to service now I was working in the city clerk's office in Daphne Alabama where I was living at the time um and a I was also doing uh graphic design as an independent designer and a friend of mine is a long time veteran of the platform showed me what this platform was capable of especially to build automations and better tools for my friends in the state and local government uh I got on board I began working on the platform um I really honed into service portal both design and development and just creating great uh great end user experiences via service portal on the platform I I love hearing that story because what I heard you say is that you had a graphic design background and now hearing that your role in service now includes service portal so I can see how that graphic design background helped to inform your work now because you know the word on these servicenow streets is that you are the queen of service portal so we're really lucky to have you here at Glide fast so congratulations to you I'm happy to to learn a little bit more about your journey uh Ryan tell us what's up how did you get here uh so I actually started out as an asset and configuration manager so that was my introduction to servicenow we tracked all of our assets and CIS in servicenow and the opportunity came up to take the CSA course and I met the person who was instructing the course and we became friends and they sort of just sucked me into all of this and so here I am today Ryan is known for a huge personality and so I'm not surprised that he was able to keep his ear to the ground and then you know finally make friends and then get kind of sucked into this ecosystem you know as you learn about each person in this virtual room you'll understand that each of us come from a different perspective and a different background but I just want to be clear were you working for a customer at the time when you got pulled into service now yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so we were tracking all of our companies assets and CIS it was pretty cool it was really it was a lot of fun actually and that's sort of why I decided to keep going down that path as I just really enjoyed using the platform and seeing all the things that we could do and you know at that time we were building out like ham Pro and Sam Pro ourselves so to see where that's come today is also really neat right right on and we're gonna I'm actually gonna Circle back to something that you just said a little bit later in this conversation so thank you for sharing that Adam tell us how you got here yeah so as you might guess from my background I have a musical background and I was actually pursuing a graduate performance degree um a masters in double bass performance at the University of Maryland I was also working at the it help desk at the time they started uh the process of a servicenow implementation while I was there I had developed a few processes that we were using and I was working with a partner to pull them out of the ancient Footprints implementation that we were on and bring it up to servicenow this was around 2015. from there moved to help desk at another organization said wow this knowledge base could really use some help can I work on it my manager at the time said yeah sure let's uh get you a knowledge manager role and that was kind of where I started looking under the hood with servicenow and then from there I kind of got into portals mostly because that's what got put on my plate at another customer and from now I'm at Glide Fest you've mentioned that you are also a musician and I can kind of hear it in your voice and you know your mic your sound is just so beautiful I'm curious about how you're able to intersect that artistic background with your work current work here at Glide fast and on the servicenow platform yeah uh so for me I think the biggest skill that transfers between the two is problem solving when you're practicing in the you know in the practice studio and you get to a passage and you're just like how do I get my hands to do this you break it down into smaller pieces what does breaking down a big problem into small pieces sound like Agile development story writing so um and I actually have been on the side working on a practice management mobile app in my PDI so there that's the real intersection right there I love hearing that I know one of the things that I do is that when I feel overwhelmed by something there's this East African quote that I say to myself the way to eat the elephant is one bite at a time and you remind me of that in speaking about your approach to Agile development and the intersection between your Artistic Endeavors and your current work and service now so thank you for sharing that I want to go to Uma tell us how you got here hey hi so my story is quite interesting at least for me so I started my career with Android development back in 2010 at that time to be honest I was not even aware what service now is and due to some location constraint I I had to you know move back to my home please there I was put into operations and support project there I was first introduced with servicenow as an end user so I was the one who was raising the incidents change you know implementing the changes uh and solving the problems so from end user perspective by that time as well I was I was loving this uh tool but then I was not aware that we can do customizations we can create our own applications and on all those things and in my you know one of the previous company I get to know that we can do all those things we can build our own applications and I know it has this is capable of lot many things and then I came to know like it has everything you talk about item it's there you talk about itsm it's it's there I mean GRC whatever process you talk about in business it's there on service now so that's when I kind of fell in love with it and I you know decided to explore it further and in the journey uh Robert Frederick was the first person who helped me uh who you know made me uh understood that uh it's not it's not a tool it's a kind of platform where we can build our own applications and uh yeah then the chain uh never you know kind of stopped after Robert he he was the one who taught me service now initially the core functionalities after that I kept on learning from the different sources like Community was there then the developer portal those things helped me a lot and glide fast and Prevost will send it light fast he helped me a lot getting the CSA done and Michael Lombardo of course who financed that cert even when I was not employee of the Glide far so that's the culture of Life first I loved and yeah that's the time and after that my own company gave me a break I cleared the interview for internal job posting and since then I never looked back and since then I'm working as a service now developer yeah it's sort of like the thing where like servicenow when you when you like step your foot into service now it just won't let you go and then when you combine that with this culture this amazing culture that we have at Glide fast you feel like you're in a fully supported environment one of the things that I heard in uh in your story was the importance of mentors and leading and helping you to move through your career Journey can you speak a little bit more about that yeah I mean um I would say these three people are in terms of mentors I've got the Duke Robert Frederick he was my first Mentor so I used to work during the day during my midnight I used to attend these sessions to understand service now Concepts and then next day I used to practice those things in my office so you know along with work so his mentorship has been like incredible and then uh after that uh I've got like many people but yes uh Robert and Travis these were two main pillars of my studies of service now I would say so yes mentorship makes the things really easy I would say uh if you get the mentorship you have somewhere to go right and you get stuck so yeah that has helped me a lot and then yeah Community I have asked lot many questions on community so that has helped me a lot as well so mentorship is is a bliss I would say if you get it sure absolutely and it's like the thing with mentorship is that now you're on the other side of that where because of your contributions to the community you're now acknowledged by servicenow as being one of the leaders here so this is a beautiful full circle story so yay yeah just a start I mean I mean just to start so yeah I would like to contribute more and more to the community absolutely absolutely so next Michael tell us how you got here absolutely I've had the I guess some almost standard issue journey of starting with I.T um started off at the service desk worked my way through a ton of positions doing just about everything ended up being a developer and was supporting a bunch of service request portal applications believe it or not you know interesting history point there used to be whole applications just dedicated to the service catalog and then Along Came servicenow was working for a multi-service provider and suddenly they had a customer that needed some support with servicenow they had no one that could even begin to touch the stuff so they just tossed me in with an ID and a link to Wiki and said go yes that's kind of been my my journey ever since so I just continued just being a shock trooper getting dropped in wherever there was a big problem that needed to be solved or something difficult no one else could figure out and worked for that company it's a good well 20 years total but in service now for about six years and then they decided to kind of take a different Direction with their Staffing so I took a chance on a small company called Cloud buyers they accepted me embraced The Eclectic talents that I brought to the table and sent me loose on the servicenow platform and I haven't looked back since it's interesting how those volunte experiences can make a world of difference in our career paths right absolutely you talked about how you were you're sort of like one of these these folks who kind of can get dropped into a situation and just kind of figure it out how has that if you can give us a kind of a view how has that served you well in your career in service now and at Glide fast well definitely one of the big challenges with any servicenow implementation is when someone else has developed something and then a problem shows up and that person's been gone for two years um having someone that can come in and actually you know tear the solution apart and figure out um you know what went wrong how to fix it that sort of thing um it's definitely been one of those Adventures right so having that kind of experience has definitely helped me as a developer because I I tend to build towards the ideal of making sure that everything that I build should be understandable by the next person that comes along and it shouldn't be built off of shall we say duct tape and baling wire right definitely definitely a good launching off point for your nickname Michael tell us your nickname Michael my nickname is the white hat gremlin and that's um sort of a joke because of the the white hat piece I'm a white hat hacker I love to tear things apart to make them better which also ties in with being a gremlin right they like to tear things apart um but also inspiration always strikes right around midnight so you can be working on the problem for you know all day all night and right around midnight right when you're about to turn in the towel that's when all of a sudden it all comes together and you're like oh I'm not sleeping tonight right right no you're not eating either you're not allowed to eat after midnight either no that's not the ghost right you're not sleeping you're not eating yes each year actually a couple times a year service now comes out with two updates we're right on the horizon of the Utah update and I'd like to know from each of you what you're most looking forward to in the Utah update and we'll start we're going to switch this up a little bit because I hate to put Sarah in the hot seat every single time so Ryan what are you looking forward to in this Utah update I thought maybe this was going to be like uh you know an update set we could just skip um uh so uh you know coming from the asset management space I'm really looking forward to the asset maintenance stuff and the asset Reclamation stuff in my previous life I built out so many reports and dashboards to get me some of that same data and it wasn't as as clean as I'm sure it will be in Utah with with everything that they've built out but I built out things like data certification tasks and reports and scheduled jobs and all sorts of other stuff to piecemeal a lot of that functionality together so to essentially save other people from having to do the same stuff I'm really looking forward to what servicenow's done there because that that's probably the one piece that was missing for a lot of us and I'd like to see something tied in a little bit more with you know Finance but I think that'll come down the road as that stuff grows out because Finance obviously has a big piece of that so we'll see if maybe that's even part of this I don't know yet right we haven't haven't really seen but I think that's really exciting for you you ask that Geeks out they're like myself yeah um the Utah release and we we had these as I mentioned two releases each year and going through all of the updates and I if I understand correctly it seems like the fall release has a little bit more robust offerings but when I was looking through the release notes for Utah I saw some interesting things and one of the things that I thought that I was really like kind of excited about because of a part of benevolence I guess is that there is a flow to be able to donate your assets um when they're no longer of service to your organization so I think that's a pretty key feature as well speaking of assets but I wanted yeah right yeah a lot of people and a lot of businesses do do that they'll donate them or um you know they may have a uh an iPad vendor let's say that they'll turn equipment into and as part of their agreement the that particular vendor may put pieces and parts back together to make it functional equipment and sell that or donate that and working with your organization to do that sort of stuff so that you know you can make some money from asset I'm just saying it's not just all burn baby burn you're not just you know ripping off ripping off the Benjamins a hundred percent yeah right can make some money so next Adam tell us what are you most looking forward to in the Utah release yeah um so I've done right now I've been exploring the new theme Builder that was just added for making the instance themes if any of you have done that on San Diego or Tokyo you know it's a little bit complicated there's a lot of information presented in a not very user-friendly Way theme Builder is a much nicer way to set up your instance theming so I've been playing around with that there's some UI Builder enhancements that I'm also looking forward to um so yeah a lot of front-end stuff yeah front end stuff you know it it makes you know the glitz the glamor of it all is in the front end stuff yeah for sure Uma what are you most looking forward to in the Utah update uh to be honest I've not gone through all the uh release notes but yes I've I've seen few things and which has been my pain point when I was in operations so I was like we used to get the tickets operation tickets from across the globe and they used to be in different languages and we used you know Google search and uh to understand what's there and reply back so I see there's one feature called language detection so I hope that will that will make the task easy for the people who are still in operations and working in the ticket so that's something more exciting for me because I've gone through that pain you know decoding the languages and the flying back right I think about you know we're here at Utah and perhaps like around September so we'll get the the next release and I I'm kind of curious what they're going to name it the only thing I can think of is Xanadu but but I'm not sure but but maybe we'll see more updates along the lines of what you're talking about um in that update so Michael what are you most looking forward to seeing or are there are there things that you would like to see in this release or future releases you know every time I get asked that question what would I like to see in my mind always immediately goes blank but you know 10 minutes from now I'll have 50 things I could tell you I'd love to see um so I would definitely Echo things about the theme Builder that I'm very excited about because one of the first things that every customer wants to see is they want to make that instance their own since making and simplifying that process is great I'm also interested in some of the enhancements that they're making in the CSM and fso space um something that they're expanding that I'm kind of excited to see they've put into core CSM is a service definitions for specific case types so that's something I'm I think that's a great feature that a lot of people can take advantage of sure absolutely I think theme Builder the updates there are going to be quite popular and that brings me to Sarah Sarah what are you most interested in seeing in this release and what would you like to see in future releases so Utah is bringing this dumb little feature that I absolutely love is the ability to group your favorites it's nice so your favorites list isn't just like this long list but you can actually group and categorize them especially in an instance where you're saving a lot of things or like in my PDI where I have a zillion different things going on it is extremely helpful and I just really appreciate it when servicenow takes the time to improve these little details these little features that make our lives as both developers and power users easier um so that for the Utah release and feature releases um I am really excited to see where service now takes their tools for end user experiences UI Builder is fantastic for building internal portals and things like that uh but with more organizations using servicenow as an end user or even public facing platform I'm really looking forward to see how servicenow tackles updating air replacing service portal in the future yeah I'm looking forward to that as well and I also appreciate what you said about those fine little details with their favorites because as I go through and I'm quite new to servicenow I realize that my favorites list has like a bunch of different things I'm like no wait a minute now where is it where is it but being able to group those things together can certainly make navigation a lot easier and it also your brain also appreciates that organization as well so that's that's a pretty cool uh update and I'm glad that you you brought that up finally I want to ask you all if you have a final thought that you would like to share with us and where can people find you on social and this time I want to start off with Adam yeah so I think my parting thought is get out there talk to others especially outside of your organization I think there's a lot of value in connecting with people in the community we have three people here four people here representing Community MVP Rising Star and um so whether that's the official servicenow Community for um the sndefs.com slack all the other places there's LinkedIn groups um just go out there and meet people talk to them none of the problems you run into are as unique as you think they are somebody's probably solved it already you just need to find them um and if you want to talk to me sndefs.com slack is the best place but I also have a link tree um it is link tree slash wizo Floyd w-i-z-0 f l o y d uh all of my socials are on there I giggle a little bit only because if any of you out there in the servicenow slack Community has been wondering who is Wizzle Floyd we have him right here in Adam Celly he's right here before us I thank you for your contribution to the community by the way I want to next ask Uma do you have any final thoughts for us and where can people find you on social uh yeah I would say I would like to Second what Adam said first of all please keep asking and uh yeah your problem is not unique so I would say community is a great place to collaborate so ask as many questions as you can and answer as many questions as you can that helps at the end and about where I can be found I am on Facebook and on LinkedIn foreign you can find her on Facebook and Linkedin and we'll certainly leave everyone's um social Handles in the description for this video and let's skip over to Michael Michael do you have any final thoughts for us and where can people find you sure so I would definitely Echo the sentiment that Community is is a great place to participate I've found that helping others is one of the best ways for me to improve myself because looking at the problems other people are having has helped prepare me for things that I've run into in and out in the wild and in the real world that I never would have thought of so it's a great place to learn and both you know for yourself and to to help others I'm it can be found definitely out on community and on LinkedIn one of the things that you said that it reminds me that one of my mentors and you mentioned him too Uma Robert fedoric he said when your learning service now or you just kind of want to stay abreast of what's going on is every day just spend five minutes reading some of the posts in the community you'll start to understand like what's going on in the community what's going on the platform and then you'll start to discover that you can start answering those questions so I'm thinking a lot about what you just said Michael and kind of tying it with what Uma offered as well I want to next go to Sarah what about you where can people find you and do you have any final thoughts for us I am on LinkedIn and the snw slack um I also add content to my blog at portlaurum.com uh which focuses on design and development um service portal uh my goal there is to teach developers on the platform that design is not scary it's not magical and that we are all more than capable of learning it as a skill um as for final thoughts uh I want to encourage everyone out there in service now land um no matter where you are or what background you come from to remember that your experiences are valuable additions to your work on this platform uh like I mentioned earlier development is not my first career um my public administration and design uh don't be afraid to embrace this community and sharpen your skills and contribute your unique perspective to this platform's ecosystem thank you thank you for that I really appreciate that and finally Ryan tell us your final thoughts final thoughts uh no matter where you go there you are if you ain't first you're last um no um seriously the the community is a great place to learn and grow as others have said a lot of what I have learned today I've gotten from the community and I try my best to give back I think Michael was alluding to you know there there's a lot of stuff that's going on out there and it's helpful for you to look at some of the issues other people are having so that you can learn a group from those uh you know hopefully somebody has a solution um but there's stuff that's out there from even gosh I found someone from like seven years ago that it's I could I could still use that same solution today so the community is a great place to to learn things and find information and and I highly encourage people to participate out there Google is most certainly your best friend otherwise because there is so much content out there from so many different resources um that if you were to Google you know like servicenow Discovery you might find a really great service now you know like YouTube channel from somebody like us that's creating that sort of content um but you can find me I'm on LinkedIn as Lord Ryan Gillespie I'm on Twitter as uh the man the myth The Legend and I'm on YouTube as the man that met the legend and uh Uma and I are going to be best friends on Facebook so [Laughter] much Ryan you know one you said do your Googles when you're looking for uh for some of your answers and certainly absolutely use the search function in the community you'll be amazed the question I believe that Adam I think may have said like the the issue or the question you may have may not be as unique as you think if you just get in there and do your Googles or go into the community and do a search you'll be amazed that you can find you know a number of solutions to the problem you may be facing one of the things that I wanted to end our episode with today is that the importance of mentorship the importance of community and I'm one of the type of people that I teach to learn and that's something that I was able to to figure out in my former life as a as a school teacher is that whenever I taught students A New Concept out there first thing that they needed to do was to teach it to their next door neighbor because when you do that you kind of feel responsible for that person and it firms up your own knowledge so I just want to say that I am so proud to be flanked by you all I'm so proud to be working with you and to be among you in the leadership and the MVPs and Rising Stars so thank you for participating and for everyone out there stay curious and let's go [Music] thank you [Music]