Platform – Page 2

Building The Perfect Architect – Part 2

By Greg Mest February 7, 2023Architecture, Design, Platform, ProductNo Comments

What makes a good ServiceNow architect? And what makes “architect” a misnomer? In part one, we discussed what an architect is within the ServiceNow and the larger IT ecosystems. Now, we’ll delve into design documentation - a key part of an architect’s deliverables, and some of the behaviors of folks who may have the title architect but whose actions belie the title. Documenting designs and implementations A good architect understands the value of documentation, and both creates and enforces documentation. My rules of thumb for documentation are: Any custom development that includes creating new tables needs design documentation. This does…

Building the Perfect Architect – Part 1

By Greg Mest January 11, 2023Architecture, Design, Platform, ProductNo Comments

What makes a good ServiceNow architect? And what makes “architect” a misnomer? “Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.” - Harry Seidler If you’re here and reading this, you probably have a concept of what a ServiceNow architect is. (In this context, “architect” means a ServiceNow technical architect.) And you’ve likely worked with folks who have the title “architect”, whether on implementation projects or as part of a larger IT ecosystem. But what does this mean, and what should it mean? I’ll spend the rest of this article…

Starting Your “EPA” (Environment Proficiency Activities)

By Greg Mest January 2, 2023Platform, UpgradesNo Comments

Tips for Optimizing your ServiceNow Instance Management Having been in the ServiceNow business for over 12 years, you begin to take certain things for granted. At least until you see someone doing something that you don’t expect and it makes you say, “hmm, maybe this isn’t common knowledge”. One such area where I’ve noticed this in recent years is the management of an overall ServiceNow environment - that which encompasses all your ServiceNow instances, and the processes and techniques by which configuration, code and data is built, moved and shared between them. In my experience, if done properly, this should…

Why Drive a Cadillac? Part 2

By Greg Mest April 20, 2022Architecture, Business Strategy, Design, Implementation, ITIL, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments

In Part 1, we examined the 5 Tiers of Service Management. This part focuses on the key differences between the tiers. Let's look at a couple of end-to-end processes through the lenses of tier 1 and 5 to illustrate the differences. Tiering Examples 1. User in building 3, floor 2, Accounting department reports an issue with accessing SAP. Root cause is a misconfigured switch port. Tier 1: User calls the Help Desk. A support agent opens a support ticket and does some basic troubleshooting - reboots, logs out and in. After 10 minutes, the agent tells the user they need…

Why Drive a Cadillac? Part 1

By Greg Mest April 20, 2022Architecture, Business Strategy, Design, Implementation, ITIL, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments

What do you want out of your Service Management? I had a client recently refer to ServiceNow as a “Cadillac Escalade”, and that they “just needed a Kia”. This is certainly a long way from when I started at ServiceNow in 2010 and the company and the platform was still just emerging from its “gutsy startup” phase. We've now reached the point where ServiceNow has become a “gold standard” in cloud platforms and Service Management, and customers are having to decide if they can afford such a high-end solution. Anyone who has spent time in business realizes that many decisions…

The Three Ws of Development

By Greg Mest January 3, 2022Architecture, Configuration, Custom Applications, Customization, Design, PlatformNo Comments

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…

A Good Leader Fears the Citizenry

By Greg Mest December 2, 2021Architecture, Custom Applications, Design, Platform, UpgradesNo Comments

“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

By Greg Mest October 2, 2021Custom Applications, PlatformNo Comments

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…

Breaking the Code – Designing for Configurable Maintenance

By Greg Mest July 7, 2021PlatformNo Comments

ServiceNow is nothing if not flexible. It certainly gives you options for achieving your business and development goals; some of these are obvious and well documented, and some feel like they’re on the “secret menu” for the die-hards only. Regardless, ServiceNow was designed as a flexible platform. Over the years I’ve seen this flexibility used in a myriad of ways, some really clever and some head-scratchers. Most fall somewhere in the middle. It’s also been the impetus for the rise of good and best practices, from tribal hearsay to attempted codification. But one thing I feel strongly about is using…

The Misconceptions of Upgradeability

By Greg Mest June 1, 2021PlatformNo Comments

The Blob is a 1958 American science fiction horror film whose storyline concerns a growing, alien amoeboid entity that comes to Earth from outer space inside a meteorite. It devours and dissolves citizens in small Pennsylvania communities as it grows larger, redder, and more aggressive each time it does so, eventually becoming larger than a building. In recent years in the ServiceNow ecosystem, one of the topics that has taken on a “blob-like” existence is upgradeability: the ability to perform an upgrade to the next ServiceNow release, how long it takes, how much it costs, how much remediation is required,…