in this episode of titans of ServiceNow we interview Chris York oldest of old-school ServiceNow experts and chief simplification officer of lumen tons of links in the description below so be sure to check them out Titans have now reaches a broad audience of ServiceNow developers and customers so if you'd like to sponsor this content please check out the sponsorship email below if you want to know what I'm up to lately I invite you to check out vivid charts and stop exporting data off platform for reporting hey everyone welcome back to titans of ServiceNow my name is Robert fedora it is so good to have you here folks today I have someone who was trained by none other than Fred ludie himself he's a longtime mover and shaker in the ServiceNow ecosystem I'm so proud to have won a hackathon with him he is the owner of Lua gent ladies and gentlemen Chris York hey Robert it's great to be here thanks for having me thank thanks for showing up man I really appreciate it so the way this usually works is we start at the start so why don't you tell us how you got your start in the ServiceNow scores well since you introduced me as being trained by Fred ruddy himself I should probably start there kind of blew the point for you so I've been in the IT Service Management space for quite a long time for over 20 years and I was a consultant implementing the HP Paragon products when Fred started ServiceNow so he was looking for service out partners we knew each other at the Peregrine days so he reached out and we connected so he flew out to Colorado which is where I live he sat side by side with me at my desk we had our laptops and I spent about half a day with Fred him showing me glide records and scripting and nip laid in the platform and my mind was blown to say the least right I fell in love with it within the first hour there was no turning back after that that was back in 2004 and I thought customers on the HP Peregrine product so I had a transition it took me about a year and a half to get my customers transitioned over but eventually I was doing nothing but ServiceNow Wow Fred flew out to you Saturday or table what a wild experience I had no idea you know hindsight's 20/20 obviously but if I can go back in time and capitalize on that moment I definitely would have done things a lot differently oh yeah how would you done differently I probably would have said hey Fred let me join up with servers now and be part of the company instead of just you know partner with an company but at the time there is less than 10 employees you know David Lou and Bo and you know the original gang or it was all there but that was about it I remember like for us they were grown a little bit but I remember being at the big wooden spaceship when it was empty and they're like this is where all the desks are gonna go and I can imagine this right yeah yeah exactly and we didn't even like we knew it was awesome but who would have thought it would grow so big hey listen when you when you had that first exposure to it what really grabbed you the flexibility and the speed of development because the platforms I was working on at the time you know they're your traditional enterprise apps where it takes weeks and months to do simple things and you could do those in minutes on the platform and it was kind of evident because I was literally in the middle of projects where I would take a task that had to do on this other platform and I asked Fred okay how would you do that exact same scenario that I just tried to do before you showed up here and he would just whip it out in a few minutes and I was just mind opening for me did you get the idea of it being like bigger than IT in those first few moments I didn't know I I wish I could say I had the foresight for that but I was still in that IT world and trenched in there I'll tell you another story that really showed the power of the platform so at the time the product didn't have very much in it as far as out-of-the-box applications there's incident management change management CMDB that was about it that's all there was we went to one of my existing customers and I was working on a Service Catalog project for them and we showed them fred Letty actually and I flew out together the two of us were we're in their conference room he's demoing the product himself to them and they said that looks great and all but does it do this and they described what a service catalog was at that time back in 2004 wasn't widely known and Fred said no it doesn't do that now but can I come back and do another demo for you tomorrow so would we so we arranged the demo for the next day cuz this was in the afternoon so Fred literally went back to his hotel room built service catalogue and demo two of them the next day and what he built was the basics of what's in the platform today with the whole rack and riddim and SC tasks and all that that was built that night Chris York first eyes to see the service catalogue again my mind was blown I'm like he build an application overnight I don't know how long he spent on it you know Fred probably only maybe an hour to I guess it was running because they didn't have workflow back then right they had execution plans yeah it was delivery plans execution plan business rules all that was there they don't know the pain these youngins do they have I mean brilliant for its time but you imagine building workflow with no GUI oh yeah so tell me about a moment where you did see the writing on the wall where you're like holy cow this goes this is bigger than what I T can imagine it's probably because the platform was so light in the beginning almost every implementation project as on required a custom application to rebuild and in the early days of service now as you may recall the licensing model was extremely simple it was a it was a flat per user fee for everything right you can build as many custom maps as you wanted so that opened the door to oh hey you have this excel spreadsheet over there you have this app built on whatever tool we started to absorbing everything we could into the service now because we could it didn't increase the license count at all and it was easy to build it it was it was a no-brainer and that started opening my eyes to hey we can build anything I remember just the wild stuff I built in the early days I remember I was doing a project for a company that had a private fleet of planes for their executives to jet around the country and they had a hangar and they needed a way to manage the reservation system for the airplanes and so we built it on servers now you can go reserve a plane and you can order catering to be delivered to the plane at 3 o'clock for takeoff if at 3:30 type of thing and we put all that in the application and you know even things like maintenance tasks recurring like once a month you need to oil the hangar doors and you need mow the grass around the the runway every week type of thing all of that was built into this application something I would have never imagined in a million years that you'd build on an IT absol so that was an early app that you that you made with the platform tell us about one of your favorite apps that you've seen done as I evolved with the product and companies get bigger and projects get bigger I'm actually building less and less custom apps it's more about getting people to use what's already there and it's been a major shift over the years coming up from where everything's custom to now you try not to make anything custom it's taking a long time to get there where do you draw the line because I I've always embraced both sides of that coin what I do say is don't get in service now sway I probably built one of the first project management apps figuring they'd never go project management and eventually they did so naturally you want to use what they're packaging but what if like do you still hold that philosophy when you're talking about some customer specific operational app yeah that's a great question I I definitely have had that same experience you know you spend a lot of time building an app and then serves now comes out with their own version of it and it makes yours look like child's play right based on their their resources versus you and that's natural to happen in certain domains but as soon as you start reaching out into those non IT domains I think those opportunities are much much more obvious to be able to take that application and build it on the path without the risk of service now coming out with their own release of that now I don't think they're coming out with an airplane hangar reservation system anytime soon but they did come up with ideation that is true so for those of you who don't know Chris and I were two of seven-person team in 2013 he won a hackathon building an ideation engine we tried to build Kickstarter in service now I still think that's a good idea we've never commercialized on that but it seems like a good application to have I feel like they're almost there right - some of the social aspects we put in or the really cool front-end but they have the concepts of volunteering resource in volunteering cost and that kind of stuff well I don't think it matches most corporate cultures right for the this concept of having a the ability to take part of your budget and donate it to a pet project I don't think that's the real-world scenario it sounds good right we think of like you know the Google ten percent you know you spend your extra time on things that you want to work on but most organizations just aren't there I have seen that dynamic play out a number of times too and building for this idea we have in our head versus building for a reality that exists well that's what's so fun about hackathons right you can just build what you want and how you want it to work and don't have to operate in the real world you're constantly hamstrung though by requirements that you know really limit the potential of an application I think sometimes because of corporate cultures or dynamics or organizational challenges you rarely get an opportunity to build an app the way it needs to be built and you have to build it in the culture that you're that you're working for at the time let's lean into that a little bit you built you build for reality and not for an ideology or built for reality and not an ideal I'll try to think of some specific examples as I'm talking here but just in general it seems to be because everything I do as a consultant is project based right you have a statement of work that's driving the work and you have set of deliverables that you have to build towards so you have this conflict of interest right you you want to get paid because you want to match your statement of work and deliver what you said you're going to deliver and then the customer has project requirements right we have to get these things done in a certain amount of time with a certain amount of resources so they always have these constraints around the project that tends to limit what you can actually do now I'm not talking about like over engineering something so it's this perfect model it's more about just having the flexibility to go any any direction you need to based off of what's actually happening taking on that more agile approach where and a Lean Thinking approach where you have an experiment you you build something to test your hypotheses collect the actual results from it and then you iterate on off of that where it seems like you're trying to define your requirements based off of these prayer and build something that's delivered both instead of experimenting probably rambled a little bit there but did that make sense yeah it makes a lot of sense and I find there's such tension in my mind once you've been in the consulting seat long enough you go place to place to place you learn something over and over and over again and you're like okay this is it's at least common practice if not best practice so you start forming a corpus of knowledge of things you could take somewhere and then you come into another environment and you say just do this it's best practices but then at some point that calcifies and becomes too rigid and then you're not dealing with the reality on the ground anymore yeah I totally get that I'm right there with you I think everybody is trying to seek for this holy grail of best practice when they really should be striving towards what's my best practice not what the standard best practice is right frankly I don't care what other people are doing I want to know I want to compare myself to myself or my company to my company right here's how my operations work last month here's you know my mean time to resolution here's how many cases I closed whatever metric you're measuring that's your metric now let's do something to improve it and compare our own operations to what we did last month so many people are striving towards comparing themselves to others that it's just kind of a race towards mediocrity well how do you know what the scope of our operation was right like we struggled with this and my first customer where I was a ServiceNow customer we have this team come in and they're like we're you know we're way more expensive than IT in other advertising brands I'm like yeah but we like we do everything like White Glove of the wazoo right somebody picks up the phone we come running we have black helicopter assault commando support and so how are you gonna take their cost per unit and our cost per unit and say we're worse yeah it's not a fair comparison at all is it yeah the units are different basic I mean maybe the fact I'm just getting older and more gray hairs too it's just there's nothing as rigid as you think it is having the open mind and the ability to observe and react is more important than anything I the line I always tell my clients you know it's called software not hardware it's it's it's okay we can change it right let's this is what we know with the knowledge we have today let's put it in place it might not be perfect it might not be the final solution but that's okay we can change it tomorrow and I think getting people past this concept of they gotta get things perfect is a real challenge people want to overanalyze things they want to put it in the perfect solution put the minimum out there and and test it and get the data back and then change it after that yeah they think they'll only ever get that one project it's like no this thing's gonna grow so I noticed on your LinkedIn profile for a long time you've had the title chief simplification officer why don't you tell us a little bit about what that means to you yeah and that title actually have had it for a while it came about because of knowledge actually you know how when you're filling out your registration for a knowledge event you have to put your title well if you're a one-man freelance company you don't really have a title right you do you do everything so I never really had a title for myself so it's out there thinking one day I got to come up with the title for this application form and I started thinking about what I actually do and half of my day is spent trying to battle this complexity verse simplicity ongoing battle that's always there so it came up with the chief simplification officer you definitely picking a sign in that war huh absolutely absolutely you know I think simplicity wins any day over complexity and and you've probably seen this in every industry in every business no matter what you're doing they try to make things overly complex right right and for no other reasons and maybe they're trying to justify their jobs maybe they're trying to justify something or maybe they just feel that they got to overanalyze things but just simplify just just say no get rid of things I spend a lot of my times taking things off for the forms and and taking things out of workflows and instead of adding things yeah I think it comes from that what if place like what if this happens what if somebody needs to report off of that and they have kind of extraneous stuff and when I try and tell people is like a space shuttle is really complex really complex but it also has one job and it has absolutely thing else extra but to do that job yeah that's it's a very specific use case or look at something like the kiosk to check in at the airport it's it's usually a pretty simple interface it's stripped down and it has one job to check you in and get get you a boarding pass right mm-hmm and you have only what you need on the form but think about the complexity behind the scenes I'm sure there's massive systems and workflows and databases and other things that have to integrate with that to make it work but the user interface is very simple and that's what I'm striving towards your service now is I want simple user interfaces simple use cases one task purpose things and then all the complications you hide behind the scenes in the automation in the workflow do you do much with CMDB at all yeah seem to be as part of every project naturally it seems like it like everybody wants to take it to that level of complexity right away right let's discover everything and their relationships so how do you bring some complexity to a CMDB deployment I'm a big lean student I'd love studying the principles of lean and the Toyota systems you know that originated at lean in here but basically I have this concept called the five why's you have kids right so yeah think about when your kids were two and three and they just asked why over everything you know why why why and they just keep taking it to the nth level you keep doing the same thing when somebody says okay we need to collect this information or we need to track this detail and my first question is why you know they can usually come up with an answer for that and then whatever that answer is you ask why again eventually you get down to well actually we don't actually need this anymore or it doesn't make sense right that's what I was saying sometimes I spent half my day saying no or taking things out because I'm trying to convince people that that's not actually necessary to to do that and it often starts with the five why exercise sound the five why's is that a Chris York thing or is that a lean ideology no that's the lean thing I didn't make that up everything I know I got from someone else I have no original thoughts yeah well I mean we're all kind of aggregates of the things that we've put into our brain but it takes something special to synthesize it and output to something that's more refined that's everybody's gift to each other so if anybody was interested in like learning more about lien do you have any like materials or books you'd recommend it's kind of a primer to lien yeah for sure I have lots of lots of books I have I love books I read probably a book every week or two that's I'm a lifelong learner and that's how I learned the best is I read and then I go try to apply it a little bit about my background in case you don't know I am a three-time college dropout never graduated so I've attempted college three times but never found the the will to finish it up because it's just not the way I learn I'm I can't sit in a classroom and go through that the course material that was just not not me I love to read instead so I'd have to go through my books but off the top of my head I'm the lean startup which has really taken lean applied to the entrepreneurial startup communities something else that I found that has helped me tremendously is this concept of job to be done well I first learned about it from the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen he I don't know if he coined it there's some debate about who actually coined that term enough but essentially you have to look beyond what people are asking for and try to figure out what's the underlying job that they're trying to accomplish or what are they hiring a product or service to do for them to to accomplish and I use that concept all the time and there's several books around that that I can recommend like I love finding service now talent that didn't come up in IT or at least had something outside of IT that really informed their approach to service now you've obviously been an IT a long time you came up with the Peregrine systems but something else that was nothing to do with IT that really informed how you approached your service now journey I did start an IT I've been a technology nerd my whole life and middle school I was playing with computers in high school and my first real job out of high school was working for a computer retailer and doing computer installs and stuff and then my first real job outside of that was working an NIT on a on a help desk um so that's actually where I did start but it wasn't until I started learning about the process underneath things and service management IT Service Management that the light bulb went off on and said you know what technology is great as an enabler but you can't solve the problems with just technology alone and that's where I really started honing my consulting practice and really where I positioned myself is that perfect blend between process and culture and technology all mixed together to form the right solution because if you're too heavy on one or the other it's not going to be a good solution I think half of my servers now projects are cleaning up failed servers now implementations and it has absolutely nothing to do with the technology you and I both can attest to how great the platform is so what makes a ServiceNow implementation fail it's not the platform and it's all those soft skills behind there that I think are people are lacking at the moment and just recognizing when to use the technology and when not to use it when to say no and when to say yes and that's something that didn't happen overnight though it's something that's happened in over years and years of trial and experience which is how I learned best right try something if it doesn't work try something else until it does we're obviously in the middle of knowledge so we're gonna get keynote really soon about what's coming up in the next version what are you most excited about you know I really hope there's a bigger emphasis on the application portfolio management and I think it's called continual service management's or continue improving mail but I can't remember the exact name these are areas that are relatively new in the platform you don't have a lot of emphasis I think at the moment but I think there's tremendous potential on them there's a lot of waste out in the environments out there you know people have hundreds of applications that have all these crossover points that do the same things and but they're not aware of it bringing awareness to that an opportunity to improve continuously I think is is really important I'm a big fan of APM have you've done a implementation of it yet I haven't and that's one of the things I'm excited about I've played around it within my own demo environments and I've studied it and practice using it and I'm waiting for a customer that's mature enough to actually implement it successfully I'm finding that a lot of organizations just aren't quite there yet it takes an appetite to be able to spite that off to say yeah we're gonna take on application portfolio management if you think about it there's all these sunk costs into applications and people have existing organizations and resources invested into them by making it transparent that there's waste there you're exposing things that people don't want exposed it takes a unique person to be able to to willingly take on that exposure right I jokingly call EPM the final boss of ServiceNow because it just seems like there's you've got to have a whole bunch of other stuff right first but man what a use case once you do to just look at your whole organization's apps and when do we have to make a decision on what we're gonna do with these things where there's where's the duplication where are we exposed I think it's a brilliant use case I think you could you could almost sell the entire platform off of that as a journey you do this this and this right you get to do APM this pandemic with covin 19 forcing this economic shutdown essentially in this this downturn of our economy is gonna really open the opportunities for things like APM is that as companies start tightening their belts and their budgets are shrinking they're gonna have to look for opportunities to save dramatically and I think that's an opportunity for them is to look at all their application portfolio identify the waste and be able to streamline that and they're operating much more lean while the pandemic is not a good thing it's gonna have some good benefits I think because of where it's gonna draw people's attention to and and force people to focus on becoming more efficient I pray for everybody's safety and health and well-being during his time but from a long-term societal perspective there's just there's no growth without that kind of challenge I remember a time when people are talking about like is service now like if it goes public doesn't have enough emphasis to go and I'm like this is the good times man and service now was rocketing out of like it's skyrocketing when when the housing crisis was going on like everybody thought that the economy was just gonna go away but their service now just like climbing up the ladder and it's just because it kind of always has that cost saving slash automation slash more efficiency angle to it which makes it at least somewhat recession-proof in my opinion yeah I actually even grow during recessions where other people would be cutting back ServiceNow is an opportunity to send money on automation people people are still gonna have money they might have headcount freezes where they can't hire employees or they have to cut back certain departments and that's where you got to have the automation take over alright Chris it was a pleasure having you on the show thanks again for coming I will leave the last word for you so if there's any words of encouragement you would give to the people coming up or important lessons you've learned or anything that you would change about the ecosystem awesome well I appreciate you having me Robert glad to be here and as far as the last word I think I'll take what you said there in a word for those people coming up I think back to early on in my career as a consultant and learning ServiceNow I'd find myself in situations where you know customer would ask me hey can you implement this or can you do this feature or do you have any experience with this particular module half the time the answer was no but I would say nope but I can learn it and I'd spend some time cramming before the project and learning it and just getting in there and figuring it out so you need some confidence in your learning ability and your ability to grasp new things and apply them so don't be worried about hey I don't know that so I'm gonna steer away from it I don't know anything about seeing to be so I'm not gonna take on a senior project because of that I would say let go your fear and jump into the deep end with both feet wise words thanks again for coming Chris really appreciate it all right thanks for having me Robert if you'd like to sponsor this channels content contact me via the email address pictured here if you'd like to contribute to high quality high frequency content consider a donation if not I still appreciate your viewership consider hitting a like button and sharing with your network see the description for relevant links thanks for watching you