welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and storytelling experiences that you want hey everyone welcome to season two episode one of titans of now it is so good to have you here let's get 2021 off to a great start with a personality in the servicenow ecosystem whose star is really rising he's been in the ecosystem for four years but in a little over one year he's racked up over a hundred deep dive blog posts on the community he's been a massive contributor to helping ecosystem understand virtual agent ladies and gentlemen mark hoops rudolph thank you over great to be here thank you for your invitation uh the pleasure is mine my friend i've been waiting a while to get you and now you're finally here so why don't you tell the audience how you got your start in service now well back in 2016 i was working at the largest bank in the netherlands working on hp orchestration really enjoyed that great subject to work on great achievements we made in helping other departments and a really nice team we had so yeah the company uh decided to let go one third of the personnel so a bit more than over 20 000 people were let go and i was just one of them and at that time i was already in contact with my current employee and when i got the formal letter that i was let go i contacted them immediately and a week later the contract was signed eventually the first of november was a day at the office and the second day of november i was already on surfs now it's m implementation so yeah that was a start for me and actually what if it could have been already more than a decade for me within the servicenow space because when i came back from australia in 2006 i started my professional working career and the company i was at had two mainstreams colleagues working on hp products and colleagues working on bmc remedy and the colleagues on the bmc remedy side started shifting towards service now around 2009 i think so actually i missed out on that because i was on the hp side i'm sorry you hear that but anyway now uh a bit over four years in the servicenow space and uh enjoying it a lot so when you were when you said you were working on the hp side were you doing like ovsd yeah uh hp open view and then the the surfs and asset center decision center connected release control all those products yeah brings back so much pain i remember we were using ovsd before servicenow and my story of getting into servicenow starts with us googling what's better than ovsd and servicenow is was the top of the list so what a painful experience that product was looking back at it and comparing it with servicenow yeah that was really painful didn't it feel like something that they just knew was awful but they knew there was no nothing else to compare to it and so they just let their customers suffer well for me it felt like they knew they could get away with it and well the difficult thing with the hp products i found was it's all hp it serves and the asset center this is in the center whatever but actually it's not one product it's not one whole in theory you could tie everything to each other but in reality oh man it was such a crap there are separate apps and yeah but also also like different languages different oh man it was nothing to do with each other you could really see they would buy something from another company just relabel it hey and now we've got something extra within our brand again it's not that they are rebranding it oh man oh that's crazy servicenow used to have they called it the frankenstein slide and they showed all the products that composed the different hp ecosystem like who they were when they started and how it was the whole hp suite was really just a whole quote on quote assembled from all the different parts of other tools and it just it it didn't have any coherency and so when we saw all the things servicenow could do just under one umbrella one app and i'm pretty surprised that as they've acquired all these other products it's not a question of like the hp strategy of just stitch them all together and throw it out there and forget what the customers think who cares about the customers yeah it's more like no they rebuild it within service now and i gotta just stop and give them props for having that strategy at all yeah that's a huge difference and ah it's great how how serves now uh goes along with that that's really awesome so enough about hp how would how would people know you in the servicenow ecosystem well i actually hope they know me from basketball but uh well dutch basketball isn't that known um within the servicenow space well best chance would be from linkedin or the search now community i guess i do try to answer questions regularly and the community is also the place where i publish my articles and blogs i'm writing one article each week also every few weeks a blog and recently i also presented my first two live webinars for for servicenow on the virtual agent academy and i'm a proud member of the developer mvp program solidarity brother how did you get bitten by the bug like did you just write a couple blogs and just say oh i really like what's going on with this or what motivated you to get started there well the first thing would be the resources that are already out there it's so crazy how much you can find and i'm talking about the community the dog site the developer side a few years ago the wiki but also the content people are putting up on on youtube a series from chuck life coding happy hour all those things and also people like yourself putting up great content and sometimes also really ahead of the game so that's great and i thought also you know i benefited so much from all those resources and i still do but what can i do so i thought well let's start writing articles and also it's a challenge for myself and i can learn from it also you know developing my own skills a bit more i just came into it like that and try to do it every week sometimes i have a bit more subjects but i don't try to publish six things in one week and then six weeks nothing so i just try to keep up with one article each week yeah and just being doing that for more than a year yeah i think almost two years now in this rhythm just liking it i must say one third of the content is probably a further agent but also all kinds of other stuff a lot of that is technical so it could be on multi-load variable sets it could be technical best practices on performance but just liking it a lot and writing and yeah also the the comments that you get are really valuable some comments just about uplifting the level even more so you are learning more of it yourself again but also sometimes just comments like somebody from mexico would send you a message on linkedin and just mentioning their appreciation for for what you published do you have a favorite piece of content in that massive list probably some pieces but one of the most recent articles i did was actually about uh well on virtual agent but on the all all the available variables that are out there and actually they are almost not documented so they are hardly mentioned on the docks or whatever you can only find maybe 10 of the variables documented and i put on an article with more than 50 of them wow so those are some really nice hitting gems and it's also uh again something i i look back at a lot use it a lot so also i benefited from it myself but also others are commenting for like oh you saved me hours of work hours of searching and great great comments we'll have mark's master library of all the things that he's written but we'll also have that one in particular so if you just check the description below and click those that would be awesome so mark is it fair to say that you most resonate with virtual agent on servicenow well if you look at my uh at the content i'm publishing yeah for sure i like the concept and the topic a lot i think we can even do a lot more with verge agent and get a lot more out of it but to be honest if i look in the netherlands and and how many customers are using virgo agent it's not not that many it's still one an area the customers just have to to grow in and we have to really bring out more to the market i guess but it's certainly a topic i like a lot yeah so i've certainly seen servicenow push a lot harder on virtual agent and the partner ecosystem as well as being a more normative experience like you really shouldn't have servicenow without virtual agent so there's a lot of pressure i think in the ecosystem to get that up and running especially with the new economy being the way it is and everybody trying to make things faster and cut the corners what would you say is the hardest part about implementing virtual agent i think it's it's two things if you first look at the technical side of virgo agent and developing topics it's creating topics that are scalable maintainable reusable that's a really important thing because you can get lost pretty quickly in building massive topics that are just hard to maintain so that's a really important thing looking at the technical side but also looking at the functional slide virtual agent has some overlap with well using your portal using your no now mobile and things like that so you really have to think of a strategic strategy for why you are using the further agent what do you want to achieve things like that why don't you tell us about a time where you felt overwhelmed working with servicenow where maybe a project you didn't your back was against the wall you didn't think you were going to make it well that's a good one [Laughter] not sure if i have any sure there are some technical challenges but eventually you'll be able to to tackle them all for example uh i was working on a project with with google integrations and oauth and it was also really new for me and really thinking what to do with this but just searching just looking what resources are out there and suddenly you discover hey there are four episodes of uh life coding happy hour or know of watching them all and well they don't contain the exact answer but they give you leads to where to look and where to search and suddenly everything falls into place so eventually you'll be able to tackle tackle them all yeah and i think for me also the real hard times are not serves now specific but it's more personally when my basketball background is colliding with with working life so we'll take it from the opposite end then why don't you tell us about a time where you actually like slew a dragon a time in servicenow where you wielded the tool and you got results larger than you would have ever expected well there would probably be a project we did at an optician and that was also with a lot of integrations they also they already had servicenow xm csm but they wanted a custom app for their store information for hundreds of stores from four different brands two different countries and well the integrations was already a huge challenge and one of the integrations was about google and google my business really interesting because what they actually wanted is like you you're having incidental changes in your opening hours well can we have that published immediately on google you're having new stores or change store information can we publish it immediately we want to update the pictures of stores and well eventually even influenced the result results from google so yeah we did that and it was a huge achievement and what helped that company a lot with the online visibility i mean how cool is it that when you are searching for an optician in your town or in a specific street and well that company is constantly popping out it's uh yeah that was a that was a massive one really nice one nice really putting your mark on the world too right it's nice when you could kind of see that happening and that's one of the things i've loved about servicenow too is just you know it's companies that you you can do business with every day and you you have that insight that wow i know something behind the scenes there that nobody else knows that's really making this work you know like well yeah the funny thing is also because sometimes i wear glasses myself and sometimes i'm going to one of those brands and actually i know hey we did some some stuff for your parent company which serves now and also the pictures that those employees are placing now through serves now on google i know actually i had my hands on that yeah so yeah that's a lot of fun yeah the place i actually get my physical therapy for my shoulder is a servicenow customer i worked at for a very short period and it's just amazing to see the fruits of your labor in real life i think we don't get we don't get an opportunity to do that very often but it's a real pleasure when it does yeah really cool yeah okay if you could change one thing about either the product or the ecosystem what would it be well what immediately jumps in mind actually has been picked up by search now recently though anyway the the licensing structure if i just forget about the recent changes the past few years it's been like if you are designing an application trying to make it as maintainable as possible do great data modeling then actually you would get into trouble you would be penalized for actually doing an awesome job because of the licensing i mean potentially every table and every axis you are providing on it would be charged so that actually causes that you are not going for a nice data model not going for a maintainable solution or trying to fit multiple tables into one and using multiple views or reusing unused out of the box tables just to limit the licensing packs or for the recent custom application i built the customer did not did not had any custom apple licenses so i had to add item roles to make sure that the app would be counted within the itsm licenses well the app had nothing to do with idol so yeah really great crazy stuff have we locked horns on this topic before i seem to remember arguing with you about this i think we touched on this a little bit in one of the development meetings yeah so yeah yeah for me i could definitely understand what the spirit of what they were going for right and so my point is that everything costs something sure right and if you're gonna put a large enough solution into the platform then you should pay for that solution but i will say that whether or not i understood it and could articulate it the whole ecosystem clearly didn't right it was it was probably in a world of several licensing paradigms that people haven't liked it was by far the worst i remember at when bill mcdermott had his first sko he's like yeah we're gonna get rid of that and kudos to him i'm glad that they're they're doing it different now yeah absolutely yeah all right just give you the final word here i have a lot of like servicenow freshers watch titans of now and so i always like to take people who have been there done that what advice would you give to somebody starting off in the circus now ecosystem i think we are in a terrific space it serves now really great though what i especially like the resources that are out there and most of them for free like what i mentioned earlier for example the community the dark site the developer side and several people doing great videos and other contributions so my advice would be know your resources and know how to use them i mean you don't have to know everything from the top of your mind servicenow is also too massive to know everything you simply can't be an expert on csm hr vulnerability respawns application development etc you only need to know something from the top of your mind for certifications so know your resources get familiar with those resources get a feel to how to browse through those resources how to leverage them but also how to shorten your search connecting information with each other if you are able to do that then you can get really far yeah i agree i did a lot of this before service now and there was just nothing to compare to the scale of free information that you have available there all right mark thanks so much for joining us and you know enjoy the rest of your week thank you and thank you uh for having me my pleasure if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to 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