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 back to another episode of titans of servicenow today i am so happy to finally get some indian representation into the pantheon this gentleman caught my eye suddenly being everywhere in the servicenow space and connecting people with knowledge and people with other people everywhere he went you might know him as the host of journey to the stars which has now become servicenow mavericks ladies and gentlemen drove the maverick gupta nama stay true namaste over hi audience how you doing man i'm fine i'm really fine we always start with how people got their start so tell us how you got your start in the servicenow ecosystem so my servicenow story is somewhat different i completed my engineering in 2016 and then i joined pcs and i was trained in powershell java and pl sql so servicenow was nowhere there in my career path and then in jail 2016 i guess i became part of one project they were already using servicenow and kind of quite mature and large my role was to help servicenow team with the powershell script they require for automation majorly user or user administration tickets so like change of manager extending of an account so they want someone to write those powershell scripts so imagine a fresher was introduced to a tool that they were using for automation people usually start their service now journey with admin stuff and i started my service now journey with orchestration and workflows so i could feel like someone has given me iron man suit and i can literally achieve anything how did you cope with starting in the deep end because to perform the orchestration stuff you obviously would have had to know about workflow or flow designer if it was out at the time and just service now as unique javascript objects how did you contend with not knowing that but still doing the work i would say that the help from community was there i mean at that time i used to trouble go on and chuck a lot and ask them what silly question i have asked them it was a platform that you know i just simply fall in love and the result was like i developed few solutions back to back that was pending for like six months i developed them in 15 days i have to put an example one would be mobile device management that include air watch integration and other one could be three strike policy that has out of office thing to consider as per the contract and i still remember my manager posted a choice after this whether i want to join servicenow team or i want to continue with data center we used to call it 20 and i was like boss i am in absolute love with this platform arnold i would like to make my career in servicenow so that is how i got my start and then i started very from very beginning and from very scratch and visited history and since joining and and all the stuff you've done in the community so far how would people know you people would know me as a host of journey to star series and as as an and organization some of the great folks were also discussing about my habit of constantly pushing stuff into community i won't tell you their names but they are like their podcast is quite famous so it's not equal speed it's you're talking about cj and the duke brother aren't you yeah we're we're not that famous come on you are man you are no we're not someday we will be and especially with your retweets man because not many people know this but uh some people know i have a mailing list with servicenow and it had a decent momentum but it was kind of topping off around 450 500 people and i posted one thing and drew retweeted it and i went to bed and i woke up in the morning and i had 250 more subscribers overnight so you're the famous one and i'm riding your coattails oh it's the opposite thing all right cool so tell us about the kind of things that happen on journey to the stars or or now uh what you call servicenow mavericks so journey to star series um we we call one of the famous personality like we called you in one of our sessions for itbn we called chuck tomasi we had alex derby so we give people the participant an opportunity to directly ask how a rapid fire kind of thing with the experts get their guidance what i got from my initial days i want the people to get the same i know it's tough for chuck tomasi to answer every message but he i know he tried his level best but getting one hour of their time and let people ask their question instead of me asking on their behalf so that is the whole idea about servicenow journey to star series and we digitally transformed it to servicenow maverick so if you remember when we were organizing journey to our series we used to have google forms and then excels to shoot out emails manually now we have digitally transformed ourselves and we have taken it to servicenow memory it is one of the reason for starting servicenow memory other one is to cope up with some of the things that are missing in servicenow meetup thing developer program they are trying very hard they are literally supporting everything even they they might support me as well but kind of thing that were missing i just want to fill those gaps like i'll put an example like if we have a meetup today next would be after three months and in the meetup we have one session of 20 minutes on event and another session on reporting then on maybe in some grc eco space and when we have the next meetup then we'll have different set of things so what we decided is like we'll start with one module we'll pick up that we'll study that for one hour then in the next meetup that will happen in maximum 30 to 45 days we'll pick up from where we left and we'll try to complete that end to end so already lots of people have confirmed that they would be there they have registered second thing it's not only about these sessions like then more meetup is about networking so i want to give people an opportunity to connect like i put an example then when i was in bangalore i used to be a at a powershell group if you remember three years back there used to be one game called pokemon go that that went very viral and even i am one of those crazy guys that used to play that in the knights so there's a place in bangalore we call it cuban park so one of the organizers from powershell community what he did he invited everyone it's an open event that come to cuban park at this time we'll catch pokemons together we'll sit together we'll discuss powershell as well so it's like we went down and we celeb we almost cast lots of pokemon but the moment that i that motivated me was like when we were tired we sit in a big circle and the common thing was powershell so we were discussing that so that is what i want to give that opportunity to people that we are having you can have a dosa at terminal or you can roam around delhi discuss that i mean that is going to help you more in your target tomorrow if i want to search a job in my area that friend of mine with whom i have spent this much time i am connected he knows about my ability he will help you or i'll help them so that is the whole concept behind service only that's awesome man what a story and what a contribution to the community and really appreciate you for that in this short time i've gotten to know you drove i've seen you talk about cmdb i've seen you talk about orchestration i've seen you talk about just general coding principles and i've seen you talk about grc what is your secret for going so wide in such a short amount of time you want to know about the secret sausage secret sauce buddy secret sauce sauce [Laughter] the other one is nobody wants to know how the sausages are made okay so i'll tell you my secret okay so it's i call it three-four-step strategy that i usually follow first i usually focus on why this product has been developed or what is the reason behind that person is ready to pay that much amount for this thing and the best place to get that is the partner portal read their sales first called decks read about those modules understand which business problem they are solving once you get an idea about that your fifty percent of the job is done second step i'll go in the doc site and just start from very beginning till very end do all the stuffs on my pdi get a good amount of hands on make myself more comfortable and took the last step to have a practice i go on community specific forum i just see the solved questions i read the question i'll based on my learning i'll try to provide an approach and then read the answer what is an accepted solution and then compare my learning and once i'm a bit confident then i'll just try to solve those questions in the community and contribute i want to focus on the first part of that answer especially for our audience can you just repeat the first one again first one it's important to understand why this product has been developed or what is the reason behind the people are paying this much the organization are paying this much understand that first and the best part to understand is the sales deck the sales deck you start with the sales deck and even periodically i especially with performance analysts i go back and review that thing like once a year at least because i feel like it's too easy to get into a rut and just kind of treat these things as everyday life oh i got a scope of work i gotta complete and i just gotta go through the motions one more time and you kind of lose sight about the fact that something about this product made people pull out their wallets and the only reason they pulled out their wallets is because they see some kind of transformational value in this and sometimes just quote-unquote just doing the implementation doesn't get you there you gotta make sure you leave that implementation with that value that they were hoping for intact by knowing the sales reason why this exists the buyer's reason for why this exists you can eliminate a whole bunch of side tracks within the project but you can also make sure that when you leave like the customer is happy sorry i totally went on a rant there and the best part it helps you and the customer to be on the same page from very beginning you understand their business they understand what they want and that could be a starting point for a great implementation i also like your third one where you say okay like now that i think i know what i'm doing let me go to the community and see the answer questions and see if my answer lines up with the answers provided that's pretty keen and i never would have thought of that i generally what i tell people is go to the unanswered questions and try and answer them but you don't get this you don't get the same kind of like safety net of the accepted answer it's a validation of your knowledge is very important i mean and to do practice it's very important all right with all the things you've been exposed to in the space are there any areas of service now that stick out more than others as places you want to work more or just resonates in your heart i recently started working on grc another secops module and i'm in absolute love with that thing i mean i always had that security background during my college days i was one of the most notorious hacker you will find in delhi i mean i troubled my college friends my relatives maybe professors as well i did every bad thing that a hacker could do and i don't want to get into much more details but i always wanted to make a career in that direction and at that point i couldn't but now i can and with service now i could see myself transforming from a hacker to a more mature security professional still a long part to cover but yes it has started i hope it has helped me transform from that black hat thing to white hat and that has given me one of my best events of my life that is being a google hall of famer other than that my daily job includes itsm item csm as well other than if i go out of that my current area of interest is virtual agent with nlp and process automation designer do you feel like the the black hat background gives you a kind of unique perspective or advantage in the secops space exactly you should know how to break before you could build that unless you don't know how one can break that wall how would you make it stop okay my listeners really love this question but can you tell us a time where you didn't think you were gonna make it your back was against the wall it was just up to you and how you got through it so i'll tell you one situation in my last organization we had a client visit and they were struggling with their c-set management so key stat is basically a score that a person gives once his issue is resolved or something like that so ideally in idle scenario either the happiest customer or the most unhappy customer will fill that survey and the major chunk was not filling that survey and lots of responses that they were getting from customer was negative but they don't have any way to measure so i suggested i firstly i researched about it a lot and i don't know i was like what to do i mean the service now is giving you service people are not filling in then what should be done then i while i was exploring that i get to know about sentimental analysis and service now that was free that comes free i guess it was in market or new york so what we did we developed a solution around that uh we divided that solution into two approaches reactive one and a proactive one reactive is like whenever the customer is updating a ticket based on his comments we just do some sentimental analysis and if it is tending towards negative that the customer is not happy sounding it's not sounding very happy or is not comfortable or some sorts of anger pointers are there so we just escalate that we're dropping an email to manager or making the assignee to focus on that boss this is the ticket that is going in negative direction first focus on this this is one of the approaches other thing that we provided was proactive approach once after a month we have a report that this is the average customer score like this group has scored 8.5 out of 10 and this group has scored six so the one who has scored six you can go for their training you can improve your customer score there itself so i remember that guy was very happy he's from some reinsurance company and he literally told me that my visit to india from us you have give me that value have already given me that value i will definitely take it forward and it has brought some business to my last organization and it was kind of a clue and i felt very happy about that so it is one of the moments those are the war stories i live for man all these years later and i still my favorite question is tell me about a dragon you slew tell me about winning the day and and doing something awesome on the platform so thanks for sharing that and there was one moment that is quite personal my personal favorite uh when i started my service law journey i like every pressure i went on to youtube search for servicenow sessions and i was majorly looking for integration stuff so at that time josh and dave slusher used to go for live coding happy hours and i was like a fan used to watch those things and i got lucky that in that same year in time span of like two months we had a developer day in our in our area i attended that and i found that dave and josh were teaching integration live there so that is kind of a fan moment for me i can't express that in words that i am sitting with them eating with them the people whom i have been admiring i have been seeing them learning from them and that has a very big impact on me i mean it's hard to believe but that developer day had a very hard good impact on me that after that i did started with some integration one was google assistant that brought lots of fame and one of the dirtiest thing that i have done with servicenow platform is i integrated it with instagram so what it was doing it's a chatbot thing so it brought in my instagram photos and in a chat format i asked the user which on which photo you want fake likes so i select one photo and that in the background all of those things are happening i put on 300 likes on one photo in just a matter of two seconds so that is the dirtiest thing that i have done but that is kind of integration impact that i had on all right if you could change one thing about either the product or the ecosystem what would it be so there would be two actually one would be virtual agent so i'll give you an example i recently implemented virtual agent and i got the opportunity to see the logs what people are asking for so that we can improve so there was scenarios where people have entered a chat flow and they don't want to be in that chat flow so for example if someone started like i want to create a ticket it will take you to create an incident chat and then it will ask you for short description i have read the short description i don't want to create an incident i want to order a laptop i want to create a ticket for a laptop servicenow virtual agent to make it more adaptable across the business organizations or they need to improve this thing is already there in various other chatbots that uses their intelligence like salesforce chatbot uses their einstein thing and second thing that i would really prefer to have is virtual agent should have that sentimental analysis thing there are scenarios where i know your virtual agent is good at creating tickets i mean if someone wants to create an incident virtual agent can help him out and get the task done but there are situations where human intervention is important in spite of the fact that machine can handle that so if a user is entering and suppose he's entering some issue and that things like tends to do some sentimental analysis after doing sentimental analysis if it tends like it's anger or negative thing then that agent should step back and give the control to the live agent automatically and that is doable i have done that i have seen that that is quite doable and that would literally improve virtual agent a long way to go but it can improve second thing yeah i i was just gonna say like this is the second time this week i've heard virtual agent and measuring success of virtual agent in a more nuanced way like we can detect that they got from the start to the end of the virtual agent but can we adequately detect that they were happy with the results exactly like what good is automating it if it effectively makes their sentiment invisible you could be like a hundred percent completion in pissing a whole lot of people off right yeah and the focus currently focuses on putting in the right direction they are not focusing on if someone has gone into the wrong chat then how to take him back to the thing and restart that thing it's all current focus is on in the beginning itself they want the person to be in the right chat they are asking them again and again that's one of the things that could improve second one is the updates it so i have created one small utility that when you complete and updates it you have a ui action visible that downloads a document since updates it has everything what i have done like client scripts or everything the changes that i have done so that document has those information and the space for developer to explain the reason why he has done so documentation is very important and the developers hate that so we have to find a middleweight somewhere and that i feel could be a middleweight and that is again very doable have you ever been burnt on a like a bad documentation gig accelerators that we have like do this just install this and you have a oh accelerators yes oh i hate accelerators i'm sorry i gotta say i hate accelerators precisely for that reason because they just there's that confusion between oh we can't tell you what's in the accelerator because that's our ip i'm like you're putting in my system how could you not document it and what if someone has put a back door or a kind of thing i mean in security terms what if you that oscillator is using some sort of scripts in the background powershell scripts and and it is just burning your environment no one can verify that yeah tell me about it there's just all kinds of risk all kinds of risk so we're approaching time drove i want to give you the final word so anything you'd like the ecosystem to know about you or your work or anything that you would give advice to freshers for floors yours freshers okay so there's a kind of ratta is going in the community you might have also seen that the people are running behind certificates like anything i am really a very last person who should talk about this but i could feel that people are running behind certificates and they are almost taking negative paths i mean if you go in the system you will find dumps for everything and the portion bank is not changing nothing is happening and it's like a drug someone is taking a hard drug if you using dumps that's what i feel i mean you take a shortcut at this moment but at the later stage it will ruin your career you won't have the confidence since you haven't gone through that hard way you don't know the concepts and if you start it in the initial page itself and when you grow and when you it's like suppose you do it for admin when you go for iit sim or anything you were not able to clear admin on your own the your mind is set in such a manner that it will again force you to you know search for dumps for that as well so it's i would prefer don't go for that that is one piece of advice i usually give to how do we turn that around like i wrestle with this too oh man especially like you could spend a day scrolling linkedin and all you'll get is people's posts of micro certifications which are just like hey i can read for 30 minutes and then take an open book test on what i just finished reading how do we turn it around see i'll give you one approach i don't know whether that would be apt or not but somewhat with the training i mean you can't teach someone uh in two days you can't teach someone service now that is horrible thing that i have currently going in and secondly you need to revise your question bank i mean the questions that were in i did in new york release people are still getting those questions so that is worst thing that is there and thirdly the people need to understand there should be some worth attached to it i mean i cleared google certification cloud architect because one of my friend david challenged me to do that and what he did he showed me one of the jackets that you get if you clear that certificate so i don't know i mean either make the training hard or make the certification hard but you need to increase its worth that's what i feel yeah i quite agree all right drove we're at time i want to thank you not only for being on the show but also again for for all you've done for me twice you've really exposed me to a wider audience once just retweeting that thing that got my mailing list up but also inviting me on to your maverick show for the itbm session uh that really made a difference in my life and want to thank you for that as well it was my pleasure to have you there buddy people really love that and it's hard to get that kind of information or experience from other communities i haven't seen in any community the leaders are behaving this way they are helping building leaders that is the best part of the servicenbc 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 contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching foreign