in this episode of titans of now we interview Mike Barr servicenow developer and hacker extraordinaire tons of links in the description below so be sure to check that out remember the end goal of titans of ServiceNow is an interview with the man himself mr. Fred ludie but I can't do it alone so if you enjoy this content please like and share it through your network if you want to know what I'm up to lately I invite you to check out vivid charts stop exporting data off platform for reporting hey everyone welcome back to the titans of now series it is so good to have you here today I have someone on the show I've been hoping to interview for quite a while a resource I've washed moved from beginner to an absolute master of the ServiceNow platform I met him back in 2013 when I was leaving a major hospitality brand and I selected him to succeed me and where I tilled the earth he planted a whole freaking forest I can tell you he's one of the best minds in the entire ServiceNow ecosystem in terms of just how far you can push the ServiceNow platform ladies and gentlemen mr. Michael Barr thank you for having me thank you Robert and well deserved Mike I'm so glad to have you here so as usual we always start at the start Michael why don't you tell everyone how you got your start in the ServiceNow ecosystem sure before I started getting into ServiceNow I was a help desk technician for about eight years or so and we got the unfortunate news that our entire department was getting outsourced to another company part of that deal was we needed to have one ticketing system five people were chosen to stay on with the company I was the six and I had to migrate the internal ticketing system to ServiceNow I kind of got thrown into the wolves with this where I basically had to learn ServiceNow development single sign-on and the whole architecture of the platform at a moment's notice and I only had 90 days to do it and I was successful the app is still in use today and that was seven years ago not many people know this about you I know it about you but you the way you can come to grips with new tech is really astounding I mean I've worked in tech for better part of 20 years and I've met very few people that can come to grip with brand-new technology like you could so what of tech experiences you have before service now are you already like what you would call it a developer or I was a developer at heart prior to service now I did a little bit of Java programming PHP HTML did not know a lick of JavaScript Stack Overflow in Google were my best friends I just I love technology ma I love everything about technology and if once I find something that piques my interest I want to know everything about it I want to know how it works you know what makes it tick and then how can I use this technology whatever it is and take it to the next level what I'd like to coin the term of hacking the platform any platform whether it's a product or a technology how can I use this technology and take it to the next level huh what can I do that no one else has done before why don't you tell the audience have been about some of those things that you have done one of the technologies that I embrace when I was working at a hospitality company the biggest thing that we dealt with was translation I want to see this information in my native language you'd be surprised how important that is for global companies because words can be picked out of context and it's very hard to understand what one is saying to another and if it's not in their native language so to start because ServiceNow does have language translations but it's it takes a very long time to implement it's not an easy feat to accomplish for one language imagine having to do it 10 times over for you know many different languages so what I did was I took the concept of Google Translate and I embedded it into the ServiceNow platform so when you come into the platform just like you would see on your wet on a website you can change the language to your native language and then I took it a step further so one of the things that we also do is we talk to each other you know it's not just through a ticket or a record or an email sometimes you want to have a conversation with someone so I took it to the next level of how can I do this in real-time through connect and that was one of the things that I added to my Google Translate share project is that you can talk to someone in connect for free in real time in their native languages so I can be in English talking with someone in Spanish I could be someone that speaks Spanish talking to someone that speaks Japanese or Chinese kind of like Babel Fish in the middle right yeah did I actually get deployed live anywhere it's on shared today most people don't know about it I mean when people think Google Translate they're thinking about their forms their you know the text on the screen but there is a little hidden gem in there that you can also do it with connect and connect is free right so if you're thinking about a conversational platform you got teens slack etc they come in a price this is in service now which is just out of the base platform well dumb question cuz I haven't messed around in that virtual agent chat space tis does chat and virtual agent run over the connect infrastructure is it completely separate it is completely separate as far as I'm aware I could be wrong but and I haven't touched virtual agent yet but the platform itself where the data goes I believe they're separate so it was actually gonna be one of my one minute more Orlando videos because they did put some interesting new translation stuff in there but I just remember seeing it I'm like I still only half of what mike has because you had that ability to have like a full-on two-way conversation exactly and the cool thing is is that it's not just a two-way conversation with Connect it's a group conversation so I can be talking in English and have someone that speaks French Spanish Chinese Japanese you know whatever we can all be in a group conversation and when one person says one thing it's all translated into your language so it it does repeat the text you know in the chat space but at least you're now able to have that conversation and see what the other person is saying even if you don't speak their native language it's really cool I wonder if there's a an AI use case if you built a framework for the translation engine to learn how one language translates to the next maybe you're saying earlier about words being taken out of context or it's just like the word has the wrong connotation exactly like yeah right and so it's like okay you say something English to Spanish and it's just the wrong word like and so it sounds funny or insulting but it's fine going in English to Russian and so maybe if there is interfaces where people could kind of contribute to the machine like this is a bad word right or this isn't the best word and then the machine learns okay the next time when somebody's mentioning problems with a server in a place then I describe the place as this instead of that it's actually really cool that you brought that up because that's one of the other things that I've tried to take to the next level and service now is definitely getting there in the predictive intelligence space and using AI and things like that but it's very prescriptive you know you can categorize your incidents you can assign them and things like that is very prescriptive which is great but I wanted to do something more I wanted to see how I can take my own AI and integrate that with ServiceNow and last year at knowledge mark Scott did exactly that it was the best knowledge session of that year where basically he used his own AI system with a mid server and was able to classify whether or not an image was a hot dog or not hot dog and that is something that I think a lot of companies can benefit from because like I said with ServiceNow you get this with this you can build your own AI system so as an example I built an AI on my own mid server that did take a classification just to see if I could do it I took all the data from the incident table mm-hmm and I went and classified it in my own AI and then at the end of the day I was able to take a short description of an incident look at who you are your location and what have you and be able to send to the right group the first time every time so that was like kind of a proof of concept that I started with where you can take your data put it somewhere else run your own AI do your own training validate it and then send that data back to service now the thinking bit is outside ServiceNow and you use the mid server to reach it so within ServiceNow you're like go call this something that is optimized for a I thought and you just say go think on this and then return me the answer but the thinking bit not thinking engine is outside ServiceNow exactly exactly that's really cool that's really cool actually it's funny you mentioned Mark Scott we're talking about mid servers in his Titans of now we named him mr. mid server but I just want to make sure everybody knows that Michael bar is definitely in the mid server Posse as well there's like a handful of people that know just oh like know everything there is to know about mid servers and all the super exotic use cases and thank you thank you yeah me and him had a really good conversation on the ServiceNow docker mid server pet project that I did and we were talking about just-in-time mid servers spin up do something and then spin down and there's a lot there's a lot of power into something like that it's nice here too right it's just it doesn't hang out there waiting for its for its credentials to be exploited or to get hacked in any way it's just it's only alive for the transaction so to speak exactly exactly and you're using resources it's minimal but again you're using power you're using a piece of hardware like something is there that's just sitting and waiting for something to happen whereas with this it just it spins up it happens and then it's done until you need it again the other plus side of doing something like that is scalability you can take that model if you will and build clusters of mid servers that can do anything I've always looked at mid servers as being this basic utilitarian thing that helped me in discovery but then you sit with Michael bar and you realize there's a whole realm of untapped potential in these things and so it's great to have these conversations with them and get a bigger picture definitely one takeaway that I would say to anyone that has had any doubts about a mid server don't they are awesome and if you go in with the mindset of if I can run this on my own computer locally you can do it with the mid server if you want to run a Python script you can do it through a mid server if you want to run an ojs app you can do it through a mid server so the possibilities are limitless right and that's where ServiceNow is I don't wanna call it an identity crisis but they kind of have this fluid idea of ServiceNow is for local developers Oh service now is for pro code developers but I think it takes that kind of deep code mentality to look at a mid server and says this sits on one of my local machines communicates with a apparatus in the cloud and I can run scripts on it so yeah it's like it seems like such a simple collection of truths that can have profound potential and you and Mark are really spearheading the community in terms of thinking what you can do with a mid server I really hope that continues absolutely when one didn't came out and they took out the Java package for mid servers that was the one of the first things that I did was okay there's Java is out Oracle is gonna be charging customers for right Java use how do I rewrite this an open JDK so I did and I posted it on the community a how to on how to convert your Java Enterprise to open JDK and then what was really cool about that is after I wrote the article service now within a month made it available in open JDK in Madrid so that's one of the other things that I really love about ServiceNow is that for some things their turnaround is fast and they really do listen to their customers so Mike at the start we mentioned that you and I shared shared of working experience I worked at hospitality brand and then when I left you came and took over for me but I wanted to talk a little bit about what that brand had to offer the rest of the community because I think now more than ever people are starting to realize oh it's not just an ITSM tool but this was back in what 2013 yes right so like seven years ago almost eight years ago this brand that on the whole isn't even a large ServiceNow customer but they were really blazing the trail for what can the platform do absolutely so the reason why we have customer service case management in my opinion today is because of the application you built for this company on how to manage external customer cases and you took it to a next level of case actions and we loved the way that it worked so after you left and I jumped on we started taking it to the next level of automation as an example for an AHA fatality company there'd be a case were like let's just say bad service and so the customer calls up they had a bad service or they had issues with their their invoice whatever the case may be they log the case in ServiceNow and then we needed some type of action okay so here's the inquiry the issue or whatever whatever you want to call it and then the agent has to do so whether it's provide a refund provide a discount wherever that action is and we had to log that we had these case action instances and at first it was just logging it this is what I did what we wanted to do after that is okay how can we take some of this and actually automate it so that you can apply the case action of and I'm using a very broad example of like cancel the reservation so we put in a case action of cancel and we want to do some automation around whether that's sending an email maybe talking to an internal reservation system mm-hmm within the hospitality industry your chances are you're working with not just one not just two but probably five or ten different systems depending on what what the case may be and so what we try to do is take away that interaction from those five ten whatever however many systems that you need to do in order to perform that action because there's always a there's a lot of swivel-chair happening within the hospitality industry on where you go for what and for what reason and depending on maybe your this type of customer so you have to go here and do this here first and then go there so what we try to do is really take that away from the agent because it's just for a lack of better term it's confusing very yeah very confusing and imagine trying to zooming - it is and imagine trying to train someone and like like most call centers the turnover is usually very high mm-hmm so when you have to train someone to do that you're spending more money on boarding a new employee that you may not may or may not retain so what we try to do is take that away from them and say just go here log your case and then put in the action and then we'll do the best for you um and in a lot of cases in a call center it can be challenging to find out who are you you know what I mean when I call in and I'm John Smith okay you are one of 10,000 John's that's how do I find you that was another thing that we did you know my team but we built in an integration to the reservation system so that we can find you or find your reservation pull all that information into the case for the agent so that we know automatically like who you are and it's all there because that's the other thing is to confirm who you are we have to go into various system check this check that we took that part away and it led to faster resolutions a better customer experience you know you've been through the phone tree or getting transferred you're like who are you oh I'm for the tenth time I'm Mike it's my email address like you should have this I know I know I'm especially heard the reservation number or the booking code or whatever - exactly the last question you usually give is if you have the choice to change one thing about the ServiceNow ecosystem or talk about something that you're most excited about in the future where would you go one of the things I'm most excited about is service now as new analytics Center and they've been talking about it for some time now is it's basically a Google for your service now data I mean how cool is that I mean everybody all day every day I use Google like nobody's business I go into Google and I ask you know what this how do I do that what's the number on this and right now it because it's in its infancy search now isn't there just yet but I'm envisioning that down the road that this will be the interface for your service now data so let me give you an idea of what it can do right now do you got your text box and you ask the number of critical incidents open today and it gives you your critical incidents open today and that's really right now all it does and you can drill into the data you can look at it you can display it as a bar chart or a pie chart or a list you can you can define that and you can see that at a moment's notice because that we're a very reactive society I don't know what I want until I know what I want and so when you have something like that where I'm like you know what what is this and I can just ask that question and ServiceNow returns me back that data it's a really powerful tool now what about what about updating that data well yeah yes you basically like voice your update to the ticket exactly so get on your desktop computer and if anybody has one in five years right right so like a good example is like alright I have a major incident outlook is down or email is down and you've got these incidents flowing in my email doesn't work my email doesn't work whatever and usually a service desk agent is finding these incidents and associating them with a parent incident you know etc blah blah blah blah blah whereas with this like you can say give me all the email tickets open in the past hour okay relate them to this parent incident you know I mean like finally the data and then now go do something with it yeah get me all the incidents created for this CI in the past three hours and associated with this problem and outage record exactly exactly the power and that is it's limitless and the cool thing about what ServiceNow did with this they have with tables of like synonyms as well as well as like keywords so for overdue there's a keyword of overdue and you can apply a JavaScript function or like a glide code query that says overdue equals anything that has a due date of yesterday or before so as a customer you can apply your own terminology and it will know what you mean it's very much in its infancy but the power behind it and the way that they're building it it's gonna be insane on what people do with it within the next I'd say your so when I start really advertising and broadcasting it because I just see a lot of power in it you can just like imagine the times on Star Trek where they're just like computer do this for me and it gets done and there's still times where you're you know you're trying to relate a bunch of records to something else or you're drilling three or four levels deep or your dot walking three or four levels up and you think man it would take me a tenth of time if I could just say it and be understood exactly I mean I've got a presentation that I have to do right here are my five questions or here's the questions that my bosses want answered I could type them in there and then boom I get the data back if I further analyze the data great but imagine building a dashboard or something like that just based on asking five questions and boom I have a dashboard or the possibilities are limitless was like that okay Mike we're basically at time so last word is yours stay curious there's always something new to learn with what ServiceNow and what the technology out there the possibilities are endless oh man I ain't doubt the trees pleasure having you onboard Mike thank you so much Robert I really appreciate it 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 the like button and sharing with your network see the description for relevant links thanks for watching