Avoiding app sprawl in the age of GenAI with ServiceNow
As you know, I do a lot of traveling for ServiceNow, and I probably meet with about, 200-250 CIOs and business leaders and tech leaders every year, and every week I'm hearing about this. “Gregg, this sounds great. I've heard this promise before. Every few years in technology, there's a new platform and a new tool that's going to change all of our lives, we get to build lots of stuff really fast.” We'll get to it in a little bit, but with the introduction of Gen AI into this, the opportunity to build lots more stuff and sprawl is going to even get accelerated on a scale that we've never even seen before. So you've got to have some governance and you've got to have some guardrails and get your head around this so that you don't make the mistakes of the past. Nobody wants another Lotus Notes where we have thousands of Lotus Notes sprawled throughout the company. We don't know what they do, or SharePoint. Every department's got dozens of SharePoint sites and we don't know what they do. So my best advice to a customer on this is that you've got to have some gates and at the front-end of it before you let somebody build something, you've got to have a front-end gate that takes care of that ideation. Before you let somebody just go off and build something with a tool, you want to make sure you know what they're building, from both a business and a technology standpoint. So at ServiceNow, we have our own low-code citizen developer program. We drink our own champagne, we practice what we preach. I'm a part of this program. But before we let anybody build something with App Engine or low-code tools, we just make sure, a little checking, it can be done in a few minutes, maybe a few hours. One, does the business want this being built? Two, technically, is it possible? And then three, does it exist elsewhere? Let's check our CMDB our configuration management database. Let's see if this exists somewhere else in the organization because we don't want to take on technical debt. I'll be very honest with you. I've tried to submit ideas into this program. Hey, I got a really cool Creator Workflows mobile app I want to build, and I've been told, “No, Greg, we already, thanks, but no thanks., we have applications at the company that already do that.” And at the end of it, it's really good governance. They don't want me creating more technical debt. But then we do another check at the end. It's very important for our customers that are worried about sprawl and quality and having too many apps. Before the app goes into production, we do a check. We do a little bit of a health scan, some automated tests. We do a configuration review, we do a tech review, so that we make sure that the application is of a certain quality before it goes into production. And this way, if the developer leaves tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. It's been documented what the app does. We've run it through some tests so we know it's not going to fail and we're not just taking on debt for Central IT to manage, and now it can go into production where you can monitor the business usage. Hey, you said a 1,000 people we're going to use this on the front-end. Hey, only 10 people are using it. Or at the opposite maybe 10,000 people are using it and we're getting more value out of it. But you can start to get a sense of that, and since it's on ServiceNow, we can register it as an asset and we can register it as a configuration item in our CMDB where you start to manage the app as an asset. Who's using it? What's the configuration? And if no one's using it, let's free up the licenses, let's retire it. And so these are the ways that I recommend and ServiceNow is recommending you take a look at the sprawl and the governance. So you do some checks on the beginning for the ideation to make sure you're not accruing more debt, and then you make sure you monitor in production. You manage it as an asset so that you can retire it so you don't wind up ten years from now with a bunch of App Engine apps sprawled throughout your company. These are the two major ways that ServiceNow is really helping customers avoid that sprawl and avoid the lack of governance so that you can run a report and know instantly what people are building. And I don't want to mention any other competitive platforms. That's not the case with some other platforms. I have access to some of these other platforms where I can build apps that my CIO never knows about. That's not a good thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i-GkzTXapM