Technical debt: from governance gaps to expansion
Ondaro
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Dec 13, 2024
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video
I was hoping you could talk to those watching and listening about some of the impacts of that technical debt that you basically inherited. Yeah. Well, the one thing is our organization, we’re a large global electric utility. And as far as ServiceNow is concerned, we’ve historically been and still even today handle through managed services. And that’s because the internal team itself at AES, we just haven’t had, I think, enough people that know ServiceNow well enough to say, “Hey, I’m somebody who can administrate the platform or develop on the platform.” And beyond that, just the fact that we’ve run pretty lean lets you start to realize that, due to the amount of skipped updates that we have, people probably aren’t really managing. And that’s where I think I started to identify right away that governance was probably lacking a little bit. The fact that there was so many skipped items— and those skipped items themselves— there were not anything being done to address them. It was just skipped and no action taken. And what that meant for us was, and what it means for ServiceNow is that we weren’t seeing the fruits of all of the major releases. You could go into the release notes and say, “Hey, they’re doing this great thing with major incident, or they’re doing this other thing within SecOps.” We weren’t seeing the benefits of a lot of those changes that were coming, because ServiceNow skips those things if you’ve made customizations to them. So the fact that we had so many, it was an instance that we had in place for six years prior to me coming on board, and the fact that we were global, we started out in Brazil. Brazil initially managed our ServiceNow instance. Then it got handed off to one managed service partner, then another managed service partner, and then another. And over time, it expanded into Argentina and other areas of Latin America, El Salvador, the United States. We were all using the platform. And we were, essentially, as we grew, expanding from the ground level what Brazil had put in place. Beyond the skipped items, what it meant, too, was right away, I’d go into tickets when I first came here, and short description and a lot of things on incidents or on some of the stuff within Agile enhancements and stories. They were in Spanish. They were in Portuguese. And so it was probably a matter of either people looking that were working on those tickets, as for fillers. They probably looked at those and said, “Oh, I’m not going to take that on.” And it’s just sad because it wasn’t in their native language. Or they were going in and opening it up and copying and pasting things into Google Translate and getting the best guess on what people were trying to say, and then working those tickets and updating them in their own native language. And it just became a big disconnect between the fulfillers and between the people that were submitting tickets. And so all those things added up to a platform that was in a bit of disarray. There wasn’t really any gatekeeping going on. There were things, like I said, in multiple languages without dynamic translation in place. And it was just something that we needed to get our arms around and figure out how did we want to proceed forward at that point with where we were at with the state of the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2S9B43uK2k