Now on Now: 100 to 1,000! How we amplified app development with no-code tools

Hi everyone, we are here today to talk about, how we amplified our app development with no-code apps. So let's get started. My name is Gireesh Patil. I'm Director of Platform Products at ServiceNow and we are the team which launched Citizen Development Program three years back, and currently we have no-code apps which are helping amplify the app development for our businesses. I have Krishna here with me, who is a principal product manager within our team. So today we are going to look at how, just in a brief, how we like started with Citizen Development Program, how we used it, and then how we moved into creating no-code apps and what all no-code apps we have created, and then what benefits we are getting from those no-code apps. So as we all have heard, like the app development is getting democratized and moving towards like businesses also want to build their own apps as it provides various advantages to do that. It reduces the time the IT has to go through the cycle of developing an app, that's the major like advantage. By 2026 as per Gartner, 80% of app development will happen outside of IT. So what we did was we envisioned this three years back, and we created a Citizen Developer Program. What that does is basically allowed our business units to build their apps, and how we did it is basically, we used our low-code platform app engine studio and enabled our Citizen Developers within business units by training them. So we have thousand plus Citizen Developers who are trained. We created Citizen Development champions, which in turn helped us identify the right apps which should be approved to build, and helped us in enabling the developers by providing them the trainings which are needed, like how to use App Engine Studio, how to use Workflows, how to use ServiceNow. So they don't need to learn like coding, but they should know the platform in which they are building the app. With IT sponsorship and involvement and business being on board, we were able to create real world apps, which were right away hit with the business because they were created by the business. So what we learned from our is, it's a very easy uptake when business is building the apps. There is no marketing involved from IT. So if suppose we bring in a new product, we need to market it within business for its usage, and how to empower them to use it. But with these apps we learned that they are readily using it because they built it for certain use cases. We also created a ecosystem which enabled business to certify thousand plus application developers, which are like low-code app developers. And trust me when I say this, we have people in finance, sales and marketing. They are very interested in developing their own apps. But since we are running this for last three years, we started noticing that there is a common theme among the apps. Like people in finance want to organize their events, so they are creating multiple event management apps. So if there are some sessions or hackathons and they want to conduct surveys, they are creating multiple apps. Like sales is creating a separate app for surveys, finance is creating a separate app for surveys or collection of data for that matter, they are creating similar apps for those use cases. What we did was we segued into the, we identified those themes. We worked with our businesses to identify the apps which would make sense to have them readily available in production to use. That's why we created no-code apps, which are basically MyForms, MySheets, collaboration calendar and event organizer. What these apps do is they allow you to use these apps readily, in production instance. I'll just take an example of collaboration calendar, say suppose, you are running a comms team and you are using various driving, various customer events, various communications which have to go in different time zones. The same communication has to go in different time zones. You have a single calendar to manage that. What it does is basically it shows you all the events which are happening today, this week and this month. It's brings the data together into one view. Having said that, I'll hand it over to Krishna, he'll take us in detail of each of these apps. - Thank you Gireesh. So we have an amazing set of apps that we have already built started using it, because these are some of the problems we faced, and we are now extending that to all of you, you know, to try. So MyForms is a classic example of a feedback campaign that you wanna run, but what about data? Data security, right? So we asked those questions to ourselves, and we were like, we wanna have an app that is in-house, collects all the data, does reporting, onboard, right? So as you can see all of these different nuances, built right into the app. So we'll take you through a quick demo of what MyForms is capable today with Gen AI. So we have recently introduced the flavor of Gen AI. So what is form building? You know, you type a set of questions and those questions is sent off to a set of recipients. You collect the responses. What if Gen AI can do that for you? You just have to type a single prompt, and the prompt is understood and a question set is created for you. You can rephrase those questions, you can create a number of questions that you want. So there's all of these aspects built into this app readily available today, right? Now, once you send this, you start receiving responses. Let's say you send it off to 1600 people, you have a lot of texts to go through. We also introduced summarization. So it actually collects this, summarizes that into positive and negative comments. There are a lot more capabilities which you know, we cannot cover here. We would also welcome you to our booth to try this out. But that is a classic example of how Gene AI is actually making its way into these no-code apps today. Now let's look at, you know, form responses. So as you start to, you know, put in these responses, it can also help you with what kind of suggestions that you might wanna fill in. So, but from a sender's perspective, from a recipient's perspective, it's taken care end to end. So these are full fledged apps. Now let's you know, hold his finger and then move forward. The next one is MySheets. I'm pretty sure in the audience you have gone to your development team and say, "Hey, I wanna have heterogeneous data, coming from different tables. Can you build me that?" The answer is remote tables, database views. What if an app can do that for you? So today MySheets can build a spreadsheet for you where you can pull data from different ServiceNow tables, create a spreadsheet, get a view across the board. These are some of the capabilities that already exist. And this is again, the data is in-house, it is secure and it is shareable. You can collaborate with and other users in your instance. Let's go to the next one Gireesh, thanks. Collaboration calendar, as Gireesh was mentioning, we had a classic example of somebody from the comms team or the marketing team come to us, and say, "Hey, I manage calendars across different time zones. I have to go to six different calendars. And it's always changing, the data's always changing. Can we unify this?" So the punchline for is there is one view, where all the events come into one single space to give you like that comprehensive event landscape, right? Moving along we have event organizer. This is an end-to-end app for your event management. From the organizer's perspective. From the attendee's perspective, you can build custom registration pages. You can go so far as to build your own custom sections with custom fields in it, you know, travel and accommodation, dietary preferences. These are all the different flexibilities that you have with your app. So a common horizontal across this is, this is in your ServiceNow instance. It's ready to go, you can just start using it right away. The data is secure in your ServiceNow instance, and it is shareable and you can collaborate with your, you know, teammates. With that Gireesh. - Now that you have seen what we have done with our Citizen Development Program and no-code apps, we wanted to share that with you, and that's why we have created a app gallery. What this is basically not just a collection of what our Citizen Developers built, but we also work with some of our customers and partners, to create a showcase of apps, which gives you examples of what is the possibility with ServiceNow platform. There are close to 70 apps right now on app gallery. You can just access it, check it out, what those apps are. We have like created a filter based on departments, say suppose you are from HR department and you want to see what other customers have built for their HR department. Like the apps they have shared with on the app gallery. So you can say like international transfer. So they have built an app for international transfer. You can just look at the idea. This is not a place to download, but you can look at the idea, get your like innovation flowing, and then maybe you want to build similar app or get an idea and combine two ideas and build an app like that. So that's the app gallery for you. And what are the benefits we reaped out of our no-code apps? So we have thousand plus forms getting created every month and we are like not a huge company. We are like 20,000 people close to 20,000 people. ServiceNow is close to 20,000 people but still have 1,000 plus forms getting built every month. We have more than 1000 sheets created, which are being shared and collaborated upon. We are collecting data from other users on these sheet, and 500 plus calendars created, which in turn are helping cross geographical teams, collaborate, create that one view and operate from like a single calendar across different teams as well. There are 100 plus events organized by using event organizer and these are virtual as well as in-person events. All these apps are available for our customers for free on the store innovation lab. On the next slide I will have the QR code for that, but there are 150 plus customers who are using these apps and we have heard like a lot of good feedback. Like as soon as we plugged in, people started using it, they started creating forms, using sheets and like whatnot. With the collaboration calendar, they created calendars for change management and release management clubbed together, cross different releases and they were able to reap the benefits of collaboration calendars. Now we'll take questions. Yes. - Interesting. You mentioned HR as an example because we do have someone from HR who was very interested. We have given the Citizen Developer role, but then like in terms of certification, how do they get certified? I didn't get that part where you said. - So we had our internal Citizen Developer Certification Program and what we did was we took help from Now Learning and we created our own because our own instances configured in a certain way. So we took, created some training material based on our instance. And Now Learning like just familiarizing them with platform, with app engine studio. And then we also had, in the initial stages, we had a team of two to three people who used to help them. Like if you have a question, how do I do this? We used to help them in learning that. And based on those steps, like there were three to four steps, once you complete those steps, you became a certified Citizen Developer, you get a badge, you get like get to part of the hackathons, you get to guide other Citizen Developers. So like people in our finance team, sales team were very excited, like they're enabling other people as well. And then we had like some smaller, what do you call as like gifts giveaways, to encourage them to educate others as well as complete the certification program as well. So for customers like us, what do you recommend? Like if I have the platform team and I have like all the business partners ready to, you know, chime in. So what do you recommend? Like if I give them this, if I wanna implement Citizen Development, if I wanna embrace all the business partners to work in a platform, what kind of a certification should I... Like we started with fundamentals. - Yeah, start with fundamentals. There is a certification in Now Learning for App Engine Studio. - Oh, okay. - You can use that. And if you like, our booth is right here now- - Okay I can stop by. - You can stop by, I'll share like the how we did it. - Thank you. - Any more questions? I guess that's it. Thank you everyone. - Have a good one. (audience clapping)