Platform

It’s the Platform, Stupid*

April 20, 2021Posted inBusiness Strategy, PlatformNo Comments
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…
Service Requests

Not All Requests for Service are Service Requests

March 1, 2021Posted inBusiness Strategy, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments
This is a topic as old as the ServiceNow platform. Since the initial applications built on ServiceNow were ITSM, from the ITIL framework, Service Request has been a point of interest for years. The generally accepted ITIL definition of a Service Request is “request from a user or a user’s authorized representative that initiates a service action which has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery”. (This differentiates from Incident, in that it doesn’t involve a restoration of Service.) The key part of this is “agreed as a normal part of service delivery”. Companies often struggle with what…
State of the State

The State of State

January 10, 2021Posted inPlatformNo Comments
I consider this my first “blog” about a ServiceNow platform issue, but one that formed itself as a customer email back in 2013. In the years since, the problem hasn’t gone away; in fact, it’s only grown as the platform has expanded. Background: Throughout ServiceNow's product history, there have been multiple ways to handle the "state" of a Task and its extended tables. At times, the state field that existed on Task served for all extended tables, and divergent values were done through the Choice list table. Extended tables use the Task level states unless "overridden" by table specific values…