this podcast was made with anchor anchor is the easiest way to create and publish her podcast it's free creation tools with it allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone a computer helps you distribute your podcast it's super simple to publish to Spotify Apple podcast Google Play any of the major ones you can make money from your podcast there's no minimum listenership so they make it super easy to monetize its really everything you need to make a podcast in one place so why don't you go out and download the free anchor app or go to anchor fm and get started hello welcome to the second episode of server sharp and we're talking about all things service now I think in this episode we're gonna dive into some content and talk about customizations and configuration the difference between the two may be some misconceptions about the to which there are lots of yeah you know some of you might think this is a little bit basic but I think it's very important you know if you're not a developer or an admin if you're a process owner or a manager it's really important to kind of know about these things that understand Wynn's appropriate to use them because you know if you overuse customizations you kind of create a problem for moving forward and for upgrades and things like that for if you don't use them enough then you hamstring your business a little bit you can't get things done yeah and as you know as an admin and the developer it's important to come convey exactly what these things are in order to get them to understand when you say the level of effort is what it is they need to understand hey this is a customization this is not a configuration and it helps with them in the understanding that there is work here and there is warning bells and so it's important to know first what a configuration is what a customization is and what the difference is yeah I think ServiceNow is like a lot of things that's deceptively simple you know so when things just work you think well it's easy to get them to work you know you get in your car and you start it and it just works and that's great but there's a lot things that go on behind the scenes and if something breaks down or you need to change or add something it's not as easy as just you know hitting a button or changing a knob and or turn it on of and I think that that's you know the same thing that goes with ServiceNow well and it's really important to understand that if you do do a customization how to do it how to do it correctly where to do it and and honestly what business need is there in weighing out you know do we want to keep it out of the box do we want to customize it how important is it a lot of different things that come into play and we'll cover a little bit about so to get basic about it configuration item is just a native Native piece of ServiceNow it's just something where you maybe change your name right be customize a name group support groups you know things like assignment curves you know these are any kind of basic notification settings preferences within ServiceNow these are the you know inherent capabilities of the tools that address basic business needs without changing the configuration data that changes it functionally to where it works differently so to put it in layman's terms you might think of a personalization that's it yeah it's maybe your company's right yeah I wanna I want to add this I want to add that I want to you know create this list create that list you know things that are pretty innocuous want to have neon green text and bright pink backgrounds if that's what you like so that's the customization part of it and that's anytime you implement ServiceNow you're going to do or that sorry that's the configuration part and anytime you implement service now there's configuration that has to be done correct that's correct yeah there's configuration that has to be done just to be able to use the tool you can't use it as well out of the box just without doing any kind of configuration this is not possible and that true for every module pretty much yeah yeah every model has to be configured for your organization and the customization wise if you want to keep it directly out of the box you can creep it you know directly out of the box but you're still going to have to do some configuration yeah and to keep it out of the I mean you've got to understand that if you're gonna do that then ServiceNow has made some assumptions and some decisions about how the design is and so you have to align your business processes to the way ServiceNow is doing it or you have to do some customizations right absolutely absolutely the customizations I know that is a become a dirty word and ServiceNow but it is it is not all bad and there are ways to do it correctly to where you're not impacting the organization or the the way the system runs there are certain kinds of scripting that don't work and you know there are there's knowledge here that has to be kind of consumed before you know whether or not that particular customization is going to work or not yeah I think that touching back on what you saying about misconception or getting a bad rap that one of the misconceptions is that ServiceNow can just be dropped in and turned on and that's true if your organization matches exactly what ServiceNow defaulted to whenever they made their design decisions and things like that but in the majority of organizations you're gonna do some realizing even in those honestly yeah I mean think about it we still have to add groups right we still have to make sure we know where to send the work well out of the native out-of-the-box it doesn't know any of that yeah well let's config the right well--that's config yeah the customization is a little different yeah you know the customizations are more like client scripts UI policies business rules changing the ACLs changing widgets in the portal so there's so many different customizations that people want to do and honestly a lot of times they can do it using out-of-the-box stuff so and there is a right way to do that so you don't have to write a whole new program we're not talking about that level of customization we're talking about using built-in tools to extend the functionality of those there's a lot a lot of opportunity to do that and especially if if you have the the business need I mean when you when you look at having to have a customization you want to look at things like you know what's the potential impact the instance are we willing to support the customization from now on forever you know is it going to require is the customization requires to fit the business requirement I mean if it's absolutely needed if it's if it's needed by the organization then as we're not saying don't do it we're saying we want to try and reduce those as much as possible and is if it is that way do we need to create a custom application or something custom instead of using that and there's ways to use these if you have a a business need to say change a business rule you know week you can copy that business rule you can save it and use it separately and then it doesn't affect you as much on upgrades same things with widgets on the portal if you absolutely have a business need and you need to change the angular or bootstrap within it all you have to do is copy the widget make those changes that you need to make input the new widget into the into the portal page and and there it is you've got an edited version but the one that is ServiceNow still gets upgraded when it goes to the upgrade time and as a business owner and a process and I think it's important to recognize that with any application and with ServiceNow in particular you do have to make these customizations to get the desired results sometimes but you've also got to know that that laying on down the road that there is a consequence to doing that and you've got to make that balance you've got to make sure you're doing that balance equation and figuring out do I really need this top right this way do I need to change my process a little bit to accommodate this or am I willing to later on down the road have to pull this customization out because one of the things ServiceNow does with a major release every six months is a lot of stuff that gets customized and built out of the business needs gets re-engineered by ServiceNow or not engine but it's engineered into the platform by ServiceNow is a native application and so if you've been running a ServiceNow instance for five years chances are there's probably out-of-the-box functionality now that wasn't available when you first setup and there's some customizations that you can pull out and maybe make your instance a little less complex to maintain which I write we were in the the number three customer service now in the history of ServiceNow that when when we started using ServiceNow we started using it when it was still in his closet in his apartment okay so this is like early on so in that is one of the three instances that we had we have that old old instance and we had one that was just like four months old and some of the functionality and a majority of the functionality was there on both sides that this old instance we had to build on and tack on and customize that was built into the ServiceNow platform you know right off the bat out of the box ready to go and so when they went when I started looking at that I think that we have when we upgraded to Kingston we rolled 900 configuration items backed out of the box just with that upgrade alone yeah that's awesome be able to pull that out and smooth things out going forward because that that reduces the amount of testing you have to do going forward reduces the amount of work that goes into doing an upgrade and keeping things up today correct yeah absolutely it makes everything run smoothly and it makes it easier to troubleshoot you know we don't talk about troubleshooting ServiceNow near enough when it when you're talking about a heavily customized instance troubleshooting took an enormous amount of time for me to do versus the the the instance that was new and like a brand-new Maserati right you got you got a 19-12 you know there are 1950's moderate Maserati and you got a brand new one and the brand new one it ran so well but when there was an error man you could diagnose it really easily the the old the older version man it was tough to figure out what's wrong and it because and it was because we owned such a large part of it and when you own that much of it you're spending most of your time as the admin developer our architect trying to figure out how is this broke where is it who did it and it makes it very complicated I'm sure there were a lot of bread comes though because I'm sure that every person that went in there and did a customization really documented there yes please document these document we all hate it yeah so it's it's like I wonder what business world this did yes and and I think I looked at one of the the base tables the CI table and there was somewhere around a thousand ACLs on that table Wow and for those of you that don't speak geek as well ACL as access control yes that's those are the rules that who can see what and unfortunately that's way too many there shouldn't be that many ACLs on any kind of table anywhere in ServiceNow so we've talked a little bit about what the the two things are what's a what's a good example of say a customization that was really good that was really useful for the for the client so it's really important we did we've done lots of different customizations that works tremely important we did we added some fields to the to the to the CMDB the computer table that we allowed we were able to export into a sequel database run some magic on it to check compliance from a couple of other systems and feed that information back into the system and all it took was a couple of reports and as an aunt one extra field but we had a legal business requirement the requirement was we have to check compliance right on these systems and so it was do I build something completely separate or do I add a field to the CI table and we ended adding a couple of fields to show compliance but that was by far the the better route to take than trying to build something custom completely custom in an application and that but if you're gonna get really super complicated and it needs to be some crazy thing where you're changing a bunch of say you have a change management plan you know system that in in the change management you have to do additional Cavs differently and so you end up having one change and you're wanting to do another one there's no sense in doing that there's no sense in customizing so much that it's not anything like it is out of the box if you're gonna do that keep what you have build something external build an application you know build something that is separate from the global sphere sphere so that you're not causing those problems during upgrades because they're not checking your code it's your custom code now you still own it but you're gonna own it if you configure eight there to change to a configuration on the on the base table yeah yeah I think that you know you bring up a really good point about just because you can do something it doesn't mean you do something and you know there's there's a lot of bad rap I think that you get for having multiple ways of doing things but you've got to have some common sense about it sometimes you've got to have some of those external tools you can't just have one tool to do everything although ServiceNow is getting to be very very very good at lots of different things there are still things that it's better to do outside of the platform better to maybe sometimes sanitize the data outside of the platform like you're talking about and bring it into the platform just to keep it from costing you an extra hundred hours of upgrade time you know and if you're paying consultants to help you with upgrade time you know that could be a lot of money for that hundred hours so I think you know from a business owner standpoint you know strategy is important you know it's I know it's hard we've all got deadlines we've all got things we've got to get done and the easy thing is to say do this do this do this do this but I think it's well worth stopping and talking to the developers talking to your admins and working through with them this is what I need to accomplish as a business owner help me figure out what the best way to accomplish this is without creating a lot of technical debt without hamstringing us later on and then be willing be flexible - do I need to change our process you know what if they're wanting you to do major customization you need to do a couple things you just say hey is there a business need if they say yes there's a business needs and you need to ask five wise right the the five wise asked why why why why why me like that you know really annoying you know a little kid just keep asking why because if there's not enough good wise then you shouldn't be doing it yeah and you know on the developer side you can't just look at the business owner when they bring the requirements go man you're stupid do that and as a business owner you can't just look at the developers that go man you're lazy gotta communicate you got to work out together to figure out what the best use of these this is because there is no absolute right or wrong when it comes to how much customization or how much config do I need to do and in service now can do anything you know that's the one thing that I've always said everybody who's ever asked me can you do that and the answer is always yes servers now can do anything the question is should you right right is what you kids back to your previous point should we do this and if you can communicate that effectively and then I I say do it there's lots of good applications especially integrations I mean a lot of good reasons to do some you know customization I think I think you know tie it back to those business objectives does this meet a strategic objective for this time frame and if it does does it meet it under the budget that we needed to be under because if it's going to cost us say $50,000 to do this heavy customization or gonna get $50,000 plus worth of benefit cuz you need to get $100,000 worth of benefits some reason they think developers are free I mean when you work for an organization they're like hey and we need you to do this you're the developer but you know there's 50 other things that you need to do so they need to understand that hey this is gonna take X amount hours and they have to understand the the actual impact that they're going to make in the instance and then the future you can say well you know what if I change this that means I'm gonna have to spend another hour every time we do an upgrade and every time you just keep keep a ticker right all right so you've increased it by about three weeks now do you want to stop now you really got to communicate those things and make sure that they understand that yeah and I'll go back and say I don't think any business owner anywhere thinks developers are free true sure it just feels like it maybe as a business owner that's not doing the technical not doing the development it's hard to know exactly how much time you're talking about you know we've used a classic example before about you know right you know make me a button yeah yeah well that's easy you know you drag a button you are element onto the the UI and there you've got a button well now I want the button to do something well that's different yeah you know you didn't say you wanted to do anything right you know so there's it's complicated I can put a name on a UI action yeah but that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna do anything what do you want it to do and so simple it might just be a simple button that were as a business owner asking someone to put in but behind the scenes that button might need a whole engine built right you know what I mean and so from the developer side you I think it's important to step back and figure out how do i quantify this yeah to the business owner that this is gonna take probably a hundred hours so this is going to take 150 hours and I think that I'm just gonna say this is throwing in some free advice I guess that you got to create an environment where it's okay to say it's gonna take this long and not be afraid to think that that means leader competent or not or not doing a good job or not very efficient and don't go in and threaten to hire someone offshore or someone else to come in and say you know well they can do it for faster and cheaper because they can't I mean in some cases they might be able to in some cases they might not be you're not supposed to say that but I can tell you this when you kill morale yeah you lose productivity lose productivity you lose money well and I think it's also important to start with hey I have this policy I'd like to show you here's where I think when we should do customizations here's the kind of things that considered customizations here are configurations because they may think that it's a configuration but it's really a real heavy customization I can tell you many times they're like hey I need you to do X and I'm like yeah if I change the entire system you know like what and I'm like well that's not the way it works yeah so that I think it's really important hmm yeah it's really important to know that there's two two ways of looking at things and the developer looks at it one way and the leader looks at it a different way so absolutely I think we went off the original topically we did it was a very good discussion occasionally a little bit longer than what we what we thought we were gonna go but I think it's been good content let us know what you think send us an email at service sharp at sharp stone group comm or ping us on LinkedIn or if we ever get around to setting up any other social media accounts we'll post those up and yeah yeah so we'll publish it out go ahead and forward it to all your friends tell them that you love us and that were your favorite people to listen I'll send it to the one person on my LinkedIn right yeah okay thank you very much we're glad to glad to have you think if you're listening we appreciate your time check us out serviced sharp at sharp stone group comm check out sharp stone group as well for any and all consulting or leadership needs thanks things