This is the one where I most run the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon. However, I don’t think I’m wrong, and hopefully my explanation bears this out.
* – A play on the famous James Carville quote about the economy, not implying that ServiceNow folks are stupid
As many know, ServiceNow has been through 4 CEOs: Fred Luddy, Frank Slootman, John Donohoe, Bill McDermott; and as most know, Fred was the founder. Fred at his heart is a developer. (From Broke To Billionaire: How Fred Luddy Built The World’s Most Innovative Company) From Forbes:
Luddy hit on a revolutionary idea he had learned from three decades of programming: As the company’s name suggests, he’d deliver office services over the internet, on a subscription basis (monthly, per customer), updated easily without requiring customers to manually download software from disks on different operating systems. As this was 2003, Luddy proved to be a software-as-a-service pioneer, pushing a user-friendly interface designed for the average office worker…
The market’s response: “Meh.”
“We had this really great, simple platform for creating workflows, and we would go to people and say, Hey, you can do all these things with this, and they just weren’t interested,” recalls Luddy, who at one point sold a car to make payroll. “So we went back and said, Okay, we say this is this great tool for doing things like IT-support management, so why don’t we back that up and make an IT-support product?” This time the market bit.
I think there are two takeaways from this: ServiceNow was designed as a platform first, and the market only bit on the vision after Fred and team layered pre-canned applications (products) on top. The product just happened to be ITSM, because that’s what Fred knew from Peregrine, and the market was ripe for innovation in this space.
If you’ve seen Fred speak about his original vision for the platform, you know it came out of his desire to have a tool that could easily re-create form-based processes. Why do something on a paper form if it could easily be re-created in a computer based- system? So the platform was designed around this concept – the rapid development of form-based applications. This included the following elements:
- The ability to create new tables in the database
- A set of database field types that have inherent UI functionality (e.g. Reference and Journal fields)
- Inherent UI elements on top of (almost) any database table
- The ability to extend existing database table and inherit not only the data elements, but the UI and flow elements as well (as needed)
- The ability to create and run graphical workflows against (almost) any database table
- The ability to send and receive email notifications against (almost) any database table
- Graphical and script-based configuration elements that let you manage the UI to business process needs
- Server-side script-based business logic elements
- Graphical and script-based security configuration
The real key in this is the inherent elements that were “baked” into every table in the database, even those created by customer admins. If you create a new table, you automatically get default form and list views of that table’s data, and the ability to add or layer any of the other listed aspects to it. So customers could quickly spin-up new applications by creating tables and configuring how it is presented in form, lists and reports, and layer in business logic as desired.
Similarly, the original developers simply used these platform elements – that any ServiceNow platform administrator can access – to create a set of ITSM applications. In the 15+ years since, ServiceNow development has continued to use these elements to build other application sets: Customer Service, Human Resources, IT Operations Management, etc. But what hasn’t changed is the platform under these applications.
All of this is to say that the real power of ServiceNow is the platform, not the applications that sit on top of it. I realize that the average ServiceNow admin and/or developer doesn’t have the insight into the history, standards, business processes and other elements of every application and application suite in the platform. (For example, I have very little knowledge of all the reasons HR Management is built the way it’s built.) So there’s value to having knowledge and expertise behind the creation of a particular business application. However – and this is where the curmudgeon in me emerges – what has happened in recent years – really since Fred stepped back and stepped down from the company – is ServiceNow has tilted its marketing focus from being a platform company that happened to do ITSM, to being a product company that happens to run on a flexible platform. I doubt this shift was fully intentional or fully clean; rather, it’s been a gradual shift based on several factors:
- Changes in company leadership: ServiceNow is now on its fourth CEO, along with the requisite management changes that happen along with it. Each change brings in leadership with their own histories and biases, without the knowledge of the platform’s history.
- Responding to market feedback: I’ve heard from C-level ServiceNow folks that the platform direction is at least partially dictated by conversations had with customer C-level folks. These are conversations that rarely focus on underlying technology but rather broad business needs, particularly financial in nature. There’s a reason “stick to out of the box” became a thing, and this is a big part of it.
- Aligning to shareholder needs: Going public means the company is driven by quarterly and annual financial results moreso than innovation. You can draw a straight line from the ServiceNow product releases of recent years – and their accompanying licensing – to quarterly financial goals that edify the markets. (For a great read on what this mentality does to companies, see Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, ISBN: 978-0062060242.) It’s easy to draw a straight line from Importance of Financials to Licensing to Focus on Product and not Platform. You can’t easily sell Platform improvements, but you can easily sell and market new Products.
You can’t necessarily argue with the results. (Check the share price.) My concern is that like a lot of successful companies that lose sight of what made them great, the turn from Platform to Product will catch up with them sooner or later. It’s a testament to how great the core platform is that the success continues, but as the complexity of the Products ServiceNow builds on top of it continues to increase, and admins and developers are hamstrung by the need to stay out of the box – rather than adopting the platform to their business needs – one wonders how much Platform goodwill will erode over time.
Last note: I’ve been saying for years now that it feels incongruous every time I attend a Knowledge conference and hear, “Upgrade-proof your instance – Stay out of the box!” in one ear and eye, and in the other, “CreatorCon! Create anything on ServiceNow!”. This incongruity goes hand in hand with what I’ve outlined in this article. Ultimately, I still love the platform but struggle to love its products.
(I’ll have more about “out of the box” and “upgrade proofing” in other articles.)
