hey everyone welcome back to titans of service now as always I am your host Robert the Duke of a doric it is so good to have you here thank you so much for your support ladies and gentlemen we have finally made it because no episode is going to give the Titans of service now series as much credibility as this single episode it is my pleasure and my honor to welcome tonight's guest the one and only Chuck Norris Tomasi Chuck thanks no pressure on that intro is there the pressures all on me dude is like oh how would you like to interview the face of ServiceNow on a moment's notice write my code one line at a time just like everybody else I got to use a debugger if there's nothing special about what I do or how I do it uh-huh because I have a lot of fun doing yeah I feel very lucky very blessed to be in the position I'm in so thank you everybody who is listening watching doing what you do keep on doing that service no development stuff and feeding the ideas that's what I thrive on that's what gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing you're out there doing some really cool stuff I'm still gobsmacked that I've got you here on Titan to service now cuz there's few Titans as Titanic as Chuck for those of us who were in the game early Chuck was kind of like one of those personas he had been there done that on ServiceNow even 12 years ago you're the one was who's telling all the Rockstar stories about how cool everything was that you had done was service now the platform at where you were and like I started 12 years ago was like wow someday I'm gonna be like Chuck III was a customer from 2008 to 2010 and that's kind of when I implemented ITSM we did so many majors a bit no 2008 is we were customer like number 205 we designed in October of 2008 say I remember weird dates like that that's that's my strange superpower it's like yes it got the innovation of the Year award at knowledge 10 I was a customer gonna get this 500 attendees at knowledge tab and if you were at knowledge 19 it was what about 20,000 bit of a difference between in the last 10 years yeah I miss knowledge 10 I wanted to go really badly but they're like oh we're already sending our other guy maybe next year and so knowledge 11 was my first one and it's just like you know you tell the new people they don't believe it knowledge 11 was in a tent yeah one of those big events Ted so you go to a golf outing or something they've got those massive huge white tents that are you know you can fit a thousand people in them and we did yeah it's kinda like a circus tent an old-time circus tent that is what's knowledge ten year first knowledge knowledge ten was my first knowledge that was in San Diego at the Omni I believe we had a pre-party there was pre con training it was just sysadmin course though there's a had an employee that was going to that so well he was doing sysadmin training Sunday Monday me and my third partner we went out and explored San Diego so we went up to Torrey Pines and we went to the USS Midway and then a little time then the conference really got started and met a lot of great people that are still at service now Doug schultzy Jared Latham who is no longer there but a lot of the names that people would recognize probably from the demo data more than anything right boa Jerry was there you know Jared Bennett was there it was it was a lot of fun and it was a bit of a different vibe back then still a lot of the same things where you know we're networking we're doing hands-on stuff where the vendor hall was actually like four little card tables in the hall there was no formal vendor space a man so knowledge 11 must have been a huge step up it was it was about twice the amount of people - I think there was a thousand or 1100 people at knowledge 11 yeah so it grew very rapidly and it was interesting to see I had the opportunity to go to knowledge 9 but didn't make it to that one and I would love to have that experience as well so everybody's first knowledge is a wonderful thing it's going to be very very different this year now that it's an only digital experience so that's new for us creating content and delivering it in how do we do all this stuff with the social isolation in place and whatnot so there's a lot of stuff going on right now yeah it's real I'm really interested to see how this one shakes down it's gonna be so different from anything that that we've done it would have been my tenth knowledge well I mean it is gonna be my 10th all know it for sure it is and I'm just I'm really anxious to see how it goes down because it would speak to the adaptability and agility to have a successful conference when like everything just blew up in their face it was the eleventh hour when the crisis struck basically from a event orchestration perspective yeah and so now the timing couldn't have been well the time it could have been worse it could have been you know a week before that's true we do have the experience adobe just had their online conference this past week as we record this I don't know when it'll be going out but it was somewhere in that April 1st 2nd timeframe okada had one later that week so it were observing and watching it seeing what works and kind of making the tweaks but there will be some that'll be pre-recorded to be something to be live they're still gonna be breakout sessions what's too long what's too short a lot a lot of dials to tune at this point but we've we got the the format laid down think more like watching Hulu or you Netflix or as Amazon Prime we're going to have channels of content you can tune into and tap into so a different experience time will be live so we would call Simula where you're watching recording but you've got live Q&A behind the scenes a lot of a lot of different formats that we're gonna roll out I am slated to be the channel host for creator con so I get to do some live introductions and anything could happen at that point effectively the same as being on stage like an MC so that's I'm looking forward to that I can't wait I kind of like in the situated you ever read the Martian but John it's Jonathan we're right uh I should know this cuz I wanted to interview for one of our podcasts all right and all I'm getting his movies on the Internet like the screenplay boy like who wrote the block to get off Mars he wrote the script to get off I better write myself a rescue it's Andy we're sorry Andy [Laughter] but the whole situation kinda reminds me of the Martian it's just like this crisis has happened and how are we gonna get our way out of it and then there's stuff that just happens along the way and you roll with the punches that's I hadn't heard that before but now that you mentioned it it kind of is yeah and if you solve enough problems it's gonna be successful yeah somebody early on I think it was like sales kick-off 11 or 12 it was an earlier one me where they used the whitewater rafting analogy enter and deal is what they call it uh-huh let's get in that river you deal with whatever comes at you yeah you've got to otherwise you're not going to survive so I don't mean to paint such a dark picture about it but it is interesting to see what the rapids are holding for us and I think was Thursday I got a lab assignment said here go build this workshop for we're building a crater con workshop nothing exists today there wasn't even a screenshot or a storyline or like oh okay so I've been slapping net together as fast as I can but I've done lab guides before my wife is great at proofing and testing them so we're gonna come up with this it'll happen yeah this is where we get to prove the kind of the fiber of ServiceNow we perceive it as being a forward-thinking agile talented company this is just an exquisite opportunity to prove it the circumstances are outside their control and we see the talent machine in place the management machine in place and see how it reacts to a massive curveball and I man I'm just looking forward to like podcasting about that so those of us have been in the system a while obviously know who Chuck Tomasi is and why but for those just entering the space how would people know you this would be a five-part series of five percent complete history how would they know me they know me from likely the tech now is that we've been doing since 2013 it's a technical webinar series that we do monthly targeted to ServiceNow developers and admins of all skill levels we do a wide variety of platform topics it might be record producers and interceptors one week it might be script includes the next it might be the latest platform features in Orlando so we're always trying to make sure that your saw is sharp we've got arrows in your quiver or whatever metaphor you want to use just to keep you aware enabled and and moving forward with the platform because when it comes down to it at the end of the day the developers are the ones that have to do the work to implement those solutions and and that's what I get passionate about and having been doing software development for over 30 years it really is a different mindset on service now because you don't have to start from the beginning with let's set up a sequel server in a VM there's like let's just jump in and start working on the data model to get the basic guts of our the framework of our app built out so it's fun it frankly is fun I'm working on more than one home project right now it's nothing to work of all the contributions you've made to the community over a years what's one of the ones that sticks out as being kind of your favorite the one either you most loved or the one that had the most unexpected results the one that keeps coming up on almost a weekly basis still this is eight or nine years ago I wrote one called ask why to encourage the developers to understand why they are implementing something it's one thing for somebody says hey I need this field to turn green or any dude and you can do that a thousand different ways and there's right ways and there's wrong ways but if you don't understand why it's turning green or why you need this field on a form you are going to run into a problem that one of my predecessors had in a former lifetime where he would put anything on that somebody would walk up to his office and say Chris I need this on my form and he would do it only to find out there's three other fields that do the same thing and now nobody's got a process but he's got a workflow nobody understands how to get data out that's meaningful and it was really an encouragement because there are some people in this world that will blindly implement a technical solution without understanding what the business requirement is behind it and that one I it warms my heart that people are still clicking that helpful link every once in a while going okay actually read it and it's got a fair number of reads was it a post on community about buildings I think it's a blog post on the community from 2012 Wow I have to go let's go find that yeah it's just called ask why it's the first I've heard of it when I think about the content that you've made that has had big impact I'm there's one that's more recent that really sticks out in my mind and it was the learned JavaScript on ServiceNow of course the video series yeah yeah that was released mid July of 2019 yeah yes recent but like that that's huge I can't it's so far overdue because when we started a scripting course about 2011-12 the prerequisite was you already know Java screwed yeah and I said we're gonna get this from below will you go to w3 schools or code Academy or you can you yes you can learn JavaScript but it's not doesn't have the ServiceNow finesse in it yeah you don't know the objects right that ServiceNow right you know that I didn't want to step on the toes of our training department there were wonderful people we've got that we have to protect but I wanted to get somebody set up I wanted to answer the question when I go to the developer meetups and somebody says yesterday I was an admin then this morning two developers just left now I'm a developer where do I get started yeah I get it and I wanted every week how do I become a developer quickly and I say don't ask me I didn't become a developer quickly everything I learned everything I learned about JavaScript I learned by doing it on ServiceNow over the course of 12 years and and now here I am and I'm not even you know you compare me to like a James Neil or any of the dev MVPs sometimes I feel like an ant crawling on the pages of a NASA rocket launch manual everybody knows something different they all have a different perspective the only different experiences and that's what I love I don't claim to know everything the platform is too darn big for any one person to know that so I tried to focus my attentions on integrations and custom applications and the platform concepts and and give those back the JavaScript thing was actually a labor of love that was no in my job charter I just said this is a need that needs to be filled did it in my free time apologize it was a couple of years overdue but in doing so I was able to structure it a little bit better I I was thinking about originally releasing it on udemy or lynda.com or LinkedIn learning and I said nah yeah this is this is free and open and let's just not no barrier to enter it it's on the it's now Developer Program YouTube channel so if you look for service not developer program you can find it there we'll put a link to it in the video description thank you for sure and again for all those asking me how about become a developer quickly like first of all consume that material and then we'll talk and it will take you from everything not to toot the own horn but everything from basic syntax understanding what variables are what's a good variable it's a bad variable it gets into condition statements and looping structures and takes you quite literally by the time you're done you'll be writing a script addressed API any like wall and passing objects back and forth and and you can use these short byte snippets it's 54 parts there's a few exercises along the way to test your knowledge and I structured it like a typical online training course and just went hey have fun with it put your answer in the comment or email me or whatever it's so it was it was a lot of fun to do it was a good exercise and it taught me a few things about audio/video production in that format as well so the problem is now everybody says can you do one on integrations can you do a service portal can you do it I'd love to if there were about six more of me thanks again for doing that by the way oh you're very welcome one thing I always preach in the industry is like when people are trying to come up in the ServiceNow space or trying to be bigger in the ServiceNow space I always tell them to embrace the non ServiceNow aspect of whatever it is they do because some of the most interesting ServiceNow resources that I've met in my time maybe didn't come from ITSM backgrounds or developer backgrounds but they did something that colored their perspective and their approach to whatever they did in the ServiceNow ecosystems I generally deal with like admins devs and architects and so one thing I try and ask everybody who comes on the show is what wildcard aspect from your life informed the way you approach what you bring to the ServiceNow community that's a great question and I'd have to say it was early in my career we owned a family business my dad was looking to a keep his nine kids busy in some way help offset the college costs so we started a small business around their hobbies just like my podcasting hobbyist felt fed well into my career they learned to scuba dive in the late 60s and started a scuba shop and as a result I had some small business experience starting at the tender age of about 10 years old so if I've been if my calculations are right I should be able to retire about 10 years ago that turned into a scuba diving charter business we did scuba charter operations in a little town in Upper Peninsula of Michigan called immunising Michigan and we would get store owners that would put together groups from around the Midwest and they would come up and spend a weekend with us we would do charter shipwreck diving and I learned so much about customer service in that role learning how to interact with customers who you could who you should be dead serious with and who you could you know tell dirty jokes to if you wanted to it was it was that kind of relationship building and a lot of the the stuff I still use that's a dirty word in my opinion but the tools in my toolbox come from those early experiences in my teenage years very very formative to how customer service should be done that worked out very very well when I started getting into IT in my 20s doing system administration taking care of UNIX workstations went up even when I was interacting with the engineers I'd get told you don't sound like typical computer nerd cuz you know you know how to talk to people I went yeah kinda that's what you need is you need to be able to interact with people listen and and hear what the problems are and then you can go solve them the short answer customer service from Cooper charters that's a great one and for those of you listening do the same thing before you ask what did you do what did you do what did you do think about what you've done and the difference that that's going to apply to what you bring in everybody brings something different and it's for me the highlight of you know 12 years of doing this is seeing those different shades those different it's almost like a recipe you know what are the ingredients you need to turn out that final product when it comes out of the oven it's yes anyone can put ingredients together but are there the right proportions did you bake at the right time we were watching a show on Netflix the other night called uh nailed it yes you know the show what episode I probably will not watch another one it had its moments and you know they're using technically the same ingredients and following the same recipe but they're getting a totally different result and it's laughable at times but that's everybody's got a different experience everybody's a little bit different in the way that they mix those ingredients you could also use a music metaphor if you want but yeah I already arranged the song right the you have arranged your cover of the song and actually speaking of covers one thing I like to do like when I'm teaching people to build I'm just like hey listen if you have if you've went to school if you've ever had a job just think of a BS problem that you hate it dealing with and then build a solution to that in service now and that's your training exercise and you're gonna have to learn about the work intake right how does it get there what happens to it when it's in there the work flow business logic you you want a process in the middle and then what do you want to report off of engage your performance by and then you put all those things together and essentially you've done a service now implementation I often start with especially with custom applications that start with stuff that's on my desktop what are my problems that I'm trying to solve because I know the requirements I know how to and I'll run into challenges well how do I solve this and then you got to reach out for help and say well what's the answer here who can I talk to who can I reach out to and by the end of that experience I've got not only my application that solves my needs but I've got a whole bunch of new skills that I can use for that and of course me being me I turn around and share them on a video being who you are and how long you've been in the game you must have seen so so much of the platform what part of the platform do you feel most aligned with it's changed over the years madad was when I was a customer watching her first demo and I saw a record producer I Wow simplified forms that ask pertinent real human questions and you get a record as an output that any reckoning yeah it's a you know I think the original one was the incident one it says what is the urgency of this request instead of just saying urgency and you like wow that's pretty freakin awesome three questions and you've got an incident they don't need to see this form that looks like a IRS income tax form on the back end if you don't want them to uh then I learned about things like table extensions and that was an oh wow moment wow you could take this task table and pretty much bake any process that has assignments and workflows and states and priorities they all share the same thing and get a rolled-up report of my work that's pretty amazing so I get excited about different things along the journey service portal is is still an exciting piece for me flow designer is an integration hub are becoming the lead horses lately I'm sure when we get more tools and capabilities for developers around the workspace and the whole now experience that was introduced in Orlando that's going to have some fun aspects of it as well mobile the the new mobile platform has been some good I don't want it to stay at the wrong way but challenges good challenges you know there's good stress and there's bad stress this is a good stress that yo hey go build this on the mobile platform far out that sounds fun so there's there's a lot of it that it kind of ebbs and flows and goes it depends I want the but the recent project is I feel like flow designer really had a breakout the year last year when it first came out there is still too much temptation just to keep using legacy workflow right and not enough people knew enough about it and I think it was it was a lot more advanced and it was intended to be well I mean when it was first released it was very much that whole citizen developer vibe yeah and there is certainly elements of it that lend itself very well that citizen developer experience but I feel like they got the right people constantly teaching the ecosystem about it like Andrew Barnes a live coding happy hour and stuff and I feel like 2019 like way at the beginning but 2019 was the year where I don't think about legacy workflow anymore I think I donate my first instinct is flow designer and the the the key for me was to stop thinking of flow designer as a new version of workflow it's actually like super duper steroid business rules is really what it got an action that's a trigger I mean you've got a trigger that has whether it's the record was created or updated or scheduled it's a scheduled job replacement as well it you can do email triggers I'm waiting for the one that triggers off of REST API so you can have a rest that triggers a flow I know you can do it from script and there's the flow API ID but I want a cleaner version of that so yeah there's some there's a there's some way to go and they recognize that on the roadmap one of the fun things about my job is I get a little bit of insight of what's coming in the next year so there's there's some good stuff coming and if you recognize any please please reach out to me and say hey Chuck I'd like better date manipulations cuz when I'm in the condition builder and I put a date field in there I can't say yeah data pill is greater than there's no calendar picker on this thing oh dang a custom action to do basic stuff like beginning of next month oh great so actually speaking of that how would people reach out to you they can reach me Chuck Tomasi at ServiceNow com there you go folks he o mas I or LinkedIn I think half the population gets ahold of me on LinkedIn first forget an open-door policy there is no door Chuck just gay is yawning ma access to Chuck Tomasi bring it on we usually end these with a little bit forward thinking and I know the crisis kind of puts a long shadow over what we think about in the future but if we could just kind of see even past the kovat nineteen crisis what are you most looking forward to in the ServiceNow ecosystem well you mentioned the co bid thing and and I am fully embracing the opportunities that this opens up a quick example is our developer meetups have gone virtual for the time being and some may continue to do so it allows me to attend Thursday night in Atlanta and next Tuesday in Oslo without flying all over the world not quite the same experience but I'm able to attend more of those so it and and I opened my eyes good that wasn't possible you know pre Co vid stuff so keep your eyes open for those opportunities what am I most excited about in the ServiceNow ecosystem yeah we're seeing more of what customers are doing I really really am eager to get some of this no code lo code stuff into the rest of the customer organisations so that they're power users and a process owners start building with guided app creator or what's coming next is called creator studio and and being able to build the bones of those applications and then freeing up the developers to do what developers love to do and that's write code for complex components that they can put into the workspace integrations that require scripting so you're building integration hub spokes service portal widgets you know that's I am still a developer inside of the heart of me as a computer scientist and it beats loud and proud because I get out of bed in the morning to write some pretty complex stuff not to put checkboxes on forms not to write reports that's like that's not what excites me and I know what excites the rest of you too is a let's let's add value to what people have already built and and having organizations recognize a service now as a platform that's a big hurdle we haven't quite knocked down yet and this copán stuff is the emergency apps that we put out are helping to open people's eyes to that go wow they turn those those things around in games yeah I'm just gonna take a quick tangent there cuz last week we had kind of a didn't Kim Kardashian tweet something about LA yeah like deployed deployed a Cove aid response app on ServiceNow and she basically called it out and so now we've got like kind of celebrity visibility but like I can't stop thinking about it Chuck how does a company get to the point where they can get smacked in the face by a big huge curveball like ovid and deploy an application on ServiceNow in response to it in the time that they did because like a lot of us struggle with getting getting an organization to think big with ServiceNow right yeah so it's it's just this question that burns in my mind what is the secret sauce what is the formula for getting an organization that can be that agile and that confident in the ServiceNow platform to respond to something this is like there's got nothing to do with ITSM right mm-hmm but a global business curve ball and start utilizing ServiceNow as the as the response mechanism to that I have two words McDermott he is a freaking genius when it comes to this kind of stuff granted some of its a little aggressive for some people's taste I mean he said internally on March 9th Yee most of the apps that you see didn't exist and we turned them around and got the core apps out there within a few days but he's the one who saw this as wow what an opportunity to a help the community that's first and foremost what it will let's help customers it's you know the world of work worked better for people it's just let's make the world better is what it should be shortened up to be granted them I'm not being endorsed by our marketing or corporate communications people on this one so that's that's really what it is first and I don't mean to sound so market ii and rah-rah-rah but that was brilliant to say let's solve problems and then secondary is hopefully customers will go wow that was pretty awesome yeah that that was that was built I meet any criticisms of being opportunistic there with they're not charging for it right we have a problem it's a big scary problem I'm not ashamed to admit you know I fear for right now I fear for what's down the road but here's a platform that we all love that we all build on and the company on a dime turned around and output some some decent applications and then gave them away for free like I clearly reject any kind of claims of opportunism right it's coming oh you're gonna you know use this to build your brand well listen we're gonna help a whole lot of people right in the what was the 60s or 70s when they had all those patents about safety things airbags and crumple zones and what and they gave them away they say this is just too valuable not to share with the rest of the automotive industry and and that's that's what came to mind first like we're giving these apps away that's awesome because it just makes the world a better place first and foremost yeah I'm gonna stick a fork in that positive note and I'll give you the final word Chuck thanks for being on the show but I'll give you the final word final word go learn something share something and have some fun doing it and you can be a hero to weisswurst Chuck thanks so much for joining me it's been an honor 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