architectural structure

Wherefore Architecture?

If ServiceNow is built to support Citizen developers, why do we need ServiceNow architects? “Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.” - Ralph Caplan Introduction For almost 14 years in the ServiceNow space, and across a rapid expansion of the exosystem, it has been interesting to observe and analyze various organization’s approaches to developing and maintaining their ServiceNow environment. Specifically, how do organizations manage the inflow of business needs, the distribution and velocity of development, configuration and administrative work, and the ongoing maintenance of the platform? As the footprint of ServiceNow has expanded conjunctionally…
Where, When and Why

The Three Ws of Development

Where, When and Why you should do your development In journalism, there’s the concept of the Five W questions whose answers are fundamental to getting the information needed: Who What When Where Why I want to talk about what I call the “Three Ws of Development” in the ServiceNow realm. These three are: When, Where and Why. We’re going to skip the questions “Who” and “What”. Why? Because “who” is a question for hiring managers, recruiting, and resource vetting. And “what” is (too often) the focus of most if not all training and documentation. Do you need to get the…
Citizenry

A Good Leader Fears the Citizenry

“a camel is a horse designed by a committee” - Proverb Over the past few years, there’s been a movement in the business world to espouse the concept of “citizen development”. Gartner defines a citizen developer in this way: A citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT. Gartner: Definition of Citizen Developer ServiceNow has espoused this concept…
To Scope or Not to Scope

To Scope or Not to Scope

ServiceNow introduced the concept of Scoped Applications in the Fuji release. From their documentation: Application scoping protects applications by identifying and restricting access to application files and data. By default, all custom applications have a private scope that uniquely identifies them and their associated artifacts with a namespace identifier. The application scope prevents naming conflicts and allows the contextual development environment to determine what changes, if any, are permitted. Source: Application scope Each ServiceNow application has an application scope that determines which of its resources are available to other parts of the system. Application scoping ensures that one application does…