morning everybody how's everyone doing today you having fun so far all right good okay audience participation this is good this is a good start so my name is Chris gear I run our I'm our technical director for our creator workflows our appd products on the service now platform um and so you we're excited to have everyone here today and we're going to talk a little bit about what a couple of agencies are doing internally around doing custom apps on the on the platform both with a little bit of different takes of how they've approached it so I think that'll be really fun to kind of hear a couple of different perspectives on how on how they've approached Mission apps on on the platform but I want to do a quick little uh we'll introduce ourselves and then we'll do a a little bit of an intro and then we'll get into it so clicker Works Howard do you want to introduce yourself real quick so I'm tardy I apologize as you guys can see getting around this place is quite entertaining um so I've been with the agency for about 14 years I've had about three different roles uh prior to coming to Federal service I worked for small it management consultancy working primarily in the US and Europe with private sector companies um the FDIC has been a customer of service now since 2016 and since 2020 I've been doing service now full-time for the agency cool Justin hey everybody I wasn't late um ying and yang here uh I've been been with USCIS since 2019 um right off the bat you know service now is is uh a part of oit at CIS and um coming from the Coast Guard uh 11 years there honestly I just really enjoy automating business process simplifying finding efficiency and I have found that service now makes that pretty simple if you can figure out how to do it so we've been picking away at it for for years and um yeah program manager platform owner and very good ready to chitchat well I appreciate you both joining me this morning want to do a click you know quick little intro here and talk a little bit about hey why are we here right why are people talking about low code no code and service now for building applications right and it really comes down to three things speed efficiency and experience how do you build stuff quickly how do you deliver Mission value quickly how do you make your Workforce more efficient and then how do you do both those things well still giving people a good experience right how do you kind of get that Holy Trinity of getting those three things together and as you can imagine there's challenges to doing that right you know I come from the software development background spent 20 plus years building custom systems you know and I look back at a lot of the stuff that I built and go you know I could have done that with loo if IID had those tools back in the day and been much more efficient had my Dev teams working on more you know more meaningful things um but today right everyone knows this right if you watch the news there's a shortage of tech Talent out there it's hard to get developers you know enough develop to build everything that's in your backlog is has anyone have a backlog that's perfectly cleared out yeah no okay so um the other part right I know this is not applicable to the federal space but go with me for a second there's Legacy systems out there right you know that might have been built that might have been built um without Integrations in mind right I was working with a customer they have a system that was built in 1964 that is still operational today uh turns out it doesn't have rust apis so uh you know how do how do you modernize how do you build around that how do you you know how do you make that better uh without replacing it because we all know that like a just rip and replace is not feasible in most you know in most applications out there it's expensive it's hard and it's risky in a lot of cases right and then last one is skyrocketing digital expectations my kid's going into college he wants to you know go into the workforce he doesn't want to work on a Mainframe it turns out um I don't know why I haven't figured out I'm working on figuring out why that is but right you know everyone wants to work on something they want to work on their mobile phone they want to work on their laptop they want to work remotely whatever else that might be and not everyone can do that right there's rules and regs around that but people still want a good experience and you heard um you know Chris talk this morning about if you just change the experience a little bit sometimes that's enough to get the response that you're looking for the business outcome that you're looking for uh and so when we talk with customers it's about hey how do I Empower more technologists I think you'll hear I think you'll hear both of them talk about what that looks like in their agencies how do I have more people contribute to delivering value in my ORD than just my it development team uh how do I modernize core systems without replacing them and then also how do I do it all at scale how do I do do this really fast uh you know if you guys have seen this right hey this is our stack uh the platform of platforms this is how we you know kind of fit together but I want to flip to this real quick and then we're going to get into the conversation um when we talk about doing applications on the platform everyone's used to the platform it's a powerful platform you can do a lot with it what we've done is we've given you two additional layers governance and easy to use app development tools you know so we want to unlock the platform for you so that you can do all the stuff out of the box as well as extending that and building your own unique stuff and we want to give you the tools to be able to do that and I think we'll hear a little bit about what that looks like so I'm going to leave it on this slide but then I'm going to look at my phone to get my questions my my approved questions to ask here um that makes two of us yeah so Howard we're gonna start with you right so hey can you just take a couple minutes and tell us you know maybe four or five minutes and tell us hey what what have you guys built what are some of the applic you built and what and more importantly what's the outcome that by having a low Code system to do that on that the outcomes you've driven at FDIC so since the fall of 20 uh 21 we've built uh a reasonable accommodation uh from the vaccine we have built a student loan repayment we have built a manager and um employee pay adjustment uh we've built a a request for information Network that our legal department department is built um vehicle registration um because we use wsd for uh parking so those are just a few of kind of the small scoped applications that we've built um since then I'd say what it has allowed us to do it's been incredibly responsive to um fairly immediate and Urgent business needs uh I'd say where we are privileged uh and we would not have been able to accomplish this is that we have uh Federal staff who I consider to be professional developers who understand the platform incredibly well and have been able to develop these applications uh at a fraction of the cost of what it would do from a outside Services perspective we've gone we've delivered pretty much every single one of these applications in four to eight weeks uh and that's probably not far off from the point in time in which we actually got the request so because we have the federal staff with the experience and knowledge of the platform they've been able to kind of look at what we've done for example with student loan repayment right it was an urgent need there was kind of some pressures to getting that work done we got the request in late April or yeah late April early may it was live to all employees by July the majority of that time was actually spent working with our stakeholders kind of reimagining what does a frictionless uh interaction between an employee and a benefits administrator look like because the they had only ever used PDF forms so I think maybe 80 to 90 hours of Total staff hours that includes working with our stakeholders to get that done cool all right now Justin I think you know looking at your you guys have approached Dev on the platform a little bit different than I think you know Howard has you know with what you've done so what um what have you guys done and how have you approached using you know the low code on the platform to solve you know the need that us yeah um so I'm going to say yes and everything Howard we we do all that but I I I thought for this talk today um story would be nice um and it for us it's a successful story um you guys all remember Co kind of changed everything um so um for CIS Co hit us in a particular way we are a feif funed agency so with uh the world shutting down um we were you know in in financial crisis and resources were thin um but that didn't stop the needs the business had incredible needs new needs never before seen needs so I'm I'm going to focus in on one specific need the business um needed the ability for our now all remote Workforce to get the materials and supplies they need to do their job to adjudicate our um our customers who are are looking for benefits and to become US citizens and Etc which is incredibly important so um the the need was for an application for them to manage uh kind of a Quee so that that that these employees could schedule a time to show up in a 10-minute window at a specific field office in a specific parking lot to have somebody drop a box in their trunk with of what they needed to to run their cases back at their house um service now was the perfect fit it's the bread and butter of the platform fortunately with the the crisis we didn't have the resources to quickly turn that around um during that time we had been exploring the low code no code and what we decided to do through a quick conversation with the business was to to approach citizen development the way I would Define it at its purest form which is the non-it professional the the person who's not a programmer who doesn't have the background in building software but enabling that person to build a workflow to build a form to to to build a simple application to ease their world create the efficiencies and you know achieve what they were trying to do so we basically started up a citizen development pilot on the service now uh platform and uh we we arranged some training we gave them access to service now's on demand training uh which is very thorough and within two months we had a scoped application kind of sandbox area Chris's Point governance and the low code enabled the business themselves outside of it they just took off they they built the app they wanted then they got crazy and they found out that they've got a lot of computer savvy folks in their shops and they just took off I think they within three months they had four or five simple applications that they were able to build themselves it was efficient we didn't have to go through explaining process explaining requirements to translate to developers they were doing it themselves and um really from an IT perspective we just supported uh their needs as as new new folks so that's kind of our little success story and and you know ultimately that led to us just uh recently this earlier this year uh awarding a very large contract epic contract which covers both development needs for us on not just snow but our other uh low code no code platforms that we have inous as well as um setting up that true citizen development opportunity at the agency across not just service now but all platforms yeah thank you for that I think that that's actually you know a really important thing to look at when when you're looking at development in your organization right how you know how are you approaching that and how are you meeting the needs that are coming in whether it be through a requirement coming in being evaluated being looked at and say okay this is a good fit for a you know a low code platform and then being built by it essentially using the platform as another tool in the it toolbox um which is why a lot of people get started using it or taking it all the way to the point where it's like hey you know what we could actually you know on one of the earlier slides I talked about how do you Empower more technology taking it to that step where you can really look at your staff and go okay you know we're going to give you you know some power to do your own stuff um but it's going to be within the guard rails we you know in the sandbox that we establish right and so you can you can have them be able to build stuff without having to have you know worry about things going completely rad because you've got that governance you've got that oversight you've got the you know you've got everything that looks looks into that so you're not surprised and I know that's a sticking point right but I love to ask the question um and you know the question how how many of you are doing citizen development today yeah I would argue you probably all are at some way shape or form right it's Excel it's access it's SharePoint it's it's whatever else right um and I think you know we you guys kind of recognize this as well there there is you know there are people building um value and Building Systems everywhere what it might just be an Excel spreadsheet right but there's people automating and automating their processes everywhere and there's you know and so what I always challenge people to do do is you know like like USIS did is look at it and say hey is there something better we can provide our folks with that not only makes it so that they can build a better you know a better application in their organization whether it be built by it or built by them themselves but it also gives the organization more control you know to reduce risk and to reduce data exitation and everything else because you've got it on a centralized platform versus distributed in everyone's laptop and everyone's desktop and everyone else throughout the organization so it's always an interesting thing to look at and figure out you know what that looks like but I thank you guys for both telling your stories last I want to go back to both of you and ask you know one other question um how much you know so actually audience question how many of you one of these two stories kind of resonates with you in your organization yeah handful okay so you know bad speaker choices so I think you know with with looking at that is Howard I'll start with you um you know what advice would you give someone who's you know saying hey you know we have a need in our organization to get started you know delivering value more rapidly maybe using a low code platform from your perspective what have you learned and what you know what advice would you give someone who's just getting started down that road uh first would be again you I don't know if this is necessarily advice but having Federal staff who are professional developers who understand the platform that you want to do low Cod no development in and have the ability to work with your colleagues on what it is they're actually trying to accomplish right because we all we all work for the same company the same agency there's a shared Vision there's a shared responsibility for trying to make things better for our colleagues that I think has been the most important factor for the success that we've seen I'd say the second bit of advice was reimagining how the work gets done right we have a lot of colleagues who've been using the same systems the same spreadsheets the same SharePoint sites for the last 10 years and they only think about getting the work done one particular way investing in someone who has the ability to have a conversation with these folks in a very kind of safe environment say have you considered changing what the interaction is going to be between the employees and yourselves how can we make your life better as well as the employees life better those two components have really been instrumental in why the agency has used service now for its scalability its security um because we're rolling these things out agency wide and that's a situation where those kind of uh factors really matter so Justin I'll pose the same question to you what advice you know you know for an organization that might be looking to go down the citizen development path right you know what advice would you give them to get started well I'm gonna go yes and again um but from the perspective that I I was choosing today I think there's probably two or three things that I would just throw out there a let the platform do what the platform was designed to do um when it comes to governance it's it's a scary thing to for it professionals to to open it up to the business and say yeah here's some access but you know you can the governance that's built into the platform provides that kind of safety net to protect the overarching platform two as a platform owner foundational data the more the more foundational data you have the and and the quality of that data the more opportunity there is for citizen developers to not have to recreate a simple world you know something as simple as a user table if you've got a healthy user table for your agency those sit devs didn't even question it they had access to all the names and people that they needed to add to groups of their of their app um thirdly and probably the most important in my mind because we're we're all it's all people Weare in the end you know Tech is Tech but we're all humans relieve that anxiety of learning Something New by providing something like training opportunities or uh what we did was we actually set up open hours and we had some of our uh professional devs cover those every you know other week cycle whatever just for a Sit Dev to have the ability to pick up a phone and say I'm stuck I don't know what to do here and the prodev can talk them through it train them that's going to be critical if if you don't keep fostering the learning curve people will lose interest and look for a different solution which is sometimes going back to excel so that's just kind of my two cents from what we've learned yeah know and I think that's good we talked with a lot of customers about that I like how do we get started you know how do we get started doing this I'm gonna add one more thing that I think I've seen um you know from other customers it's having a good way to um advertise your success advertise the success of the applications in the organization especially if it's being done outside of it because advertising that success allows other people to get inspired say well if they can do it I can do it too you know or if they if they were able to solve that use case my use case isn't that different you know even if it's built by you know the IT staff my use case isn't that different I just never considered using service now to solve for that you know people are able to see and make connections right between you know between one one use case and another use case how they could overlap or maybe hey maybe I can just extend what we built here a little bit to cover both sides and so there's the ability you know there's the ability to really look at that um in advertising that success advertising you know the value that the organization is getting out of those applications again just kind of breeds you know breeds that consistency and breeds that enthusiasm throughout the rest of the organization to be able to um you know to be able to do that so I know I will uh look to my look to our staff at the back I know we started a little bit late um but my timer also says that I have a few minutes left are we good to take a few questions from the audience all right um I think we got a couple minutes left if there's any questions from the audience um I'll turn it over to you I we have a mic walking around so they will come to you with a mic and then we will uh try to answer the question M so my question is to Howard uh you mentioned that the you built the scope application using Federal staff um I was just curious about where did you hire those federally staff with service now or you uh build their uh skills with in the within the agency so as I said we started as a customer in 2016 um our current we had several of the people that were working in the field throughout the US who were really trying to figure out how we do it service better and they started getting invested in how to uh use the platform to build out the catalog to kind of use and they invested in themselves to basically learn the platform what we did was we just opened up uh we created the positions and had those people who had really invested in themselves apply for those positions they had the technical background but it was all in-house developed Talent uh we didn't hire from the outside um what we did do from an outside hire and who's been you know the gift that keeps on giving is we did hire a service now architect as a federal staff person person uh and he's been tremendous in the progress that we've made so uh five internal uh one actually started as an intern uh and then the the recent uh external hire this past summer so to continue with the um question to you sir um in your Dev team do you also have any other um skill sets like business analyst project managers that kind of help facilitate you know uh new automations that you may be you know building within the the uh platform yes that work for the that support the dev folks yes sorry for the simple answer butas how's that for efficiency I think just to butcher is the question from the gentleman and the lady at the back is so now you have this um technical team in house and they have this training how do you retain them how do you retain them yes what are the incentives the incentives are kind of unique problems to solve I mean these are technologists like they they love the creative side of the stuff so when we give them creative problems to solve that they can run with that's all the exper that's what's working for them right is the opportunity so uh I think in our backlog which is nowhere near getting close to knock down to the level I think is appropriate there's more than enough demands to keep them interested in the work that we're doing okay so there's no like a pay raise or any other Financial incentive to keep them um I'm going to leave the financials and the benefits questions to the benefits and compensation side um obviously you know as long as people's basic needs are met and kind of their kind of you know Financial things are met you know that's nothing that I have control over um what we do have control over is kind of the creative opportunities kind of let them explore what the platform can do um and keep them interested from a technology perspective okay so I've can hear me I'm from the Department of energy and we're on that journey of Citizen Development I've got a instance for a sandb and trying to build a governance around it right right now because I've been doing it since Berlin and it's all been done under contractors right but I see the opportunity by leveraging the really smart people across energy and allowing them a place that they can come in and developing a Fed ramp environment instead of the community forum and building their own instance out there right U but I'm looking at change control processes you know all that type of governance around that so I can move things from that ciem development up into a production environment right just trying to get my head surrounded around all that and doing that with a contractor environment because I'm one deep as a Fed right so I don't have that so I want to know where you got your PDS posted so I can get your PDS right and try to get some feds hard thanks I'll chat with you after yeah yeah yeah I think you know to there we do have quite a few good success stories I mean that's that's a real scenario right hey I've got you know you know federal employee might be managing the governance the aspect the platform but it's a contractor multi-contract environment that might be delivering the applications we actually have several uh customers that have you know are in that and been very successful building applications so again happy to you know kind of talk and you know share some of that with you as well and and also real quick I don't want to take up too much time but it's it's interesting the conundrum that you're in and and in my experience going through this exercise I've kind of defined citizen development purely to the story that I told today that that non IT professional empowering them to create some type of automation some type of of technical assistance to their job from their perspective the conundrum with the the contract you've got your IT professional developers contract there's also another category that kind of fits in the middle I call it delegated developers you might call it Shadow it I'm not allowed to say that word in the office but I'm going to say it here you got Pro developers that you that that don't necessarily fall under your platform of governance and that is a serious challenge um that that we have lots of plans on on strengthening our policies our governance um letting the the platform do its own thing and and trying to reain that in um best advice for you discuss things proactively and not reactively when putting it on prod but we we can chat after in more detail I don't want to take up too much time yeah I think we got time for a couple more questions um it's question for both of you I guess uh I know you both spoke to kind of the positive aspects of empowering your people people that are leaning forward and want to change their processes I'm wondering if you how you navigated the ones that did want did not want to lean forward and we have a lot of processes that right you might have someone who wants to change it but their process heavily feeds into somebody else's process so if they're not willing to change that but somebody else is has that been good or bad or how have you navigated those challenges as you're the stance I take from an IT perspective is you can lead a horse to water is the horse going to drink it's on the horse seriously I mean bumped into those problems fine what naturally happens is just through attrition and lack of interest that issue becomes obsolete eventually focus on the positive and you'll be amazed and then to Chris's Point communicate those successes out it's Word of Mouth that really kind of gets these positive ideas flowing well if they built that over there could we do this over here absolutely you try it we'll help you out it's focus on the positive peer pressure does wonders all right I think we got time for one more question we'll sneak one in oh there was a couple hands up all the way back all right so both of you spoke to the governance aspect of how you wrot out your you know uh your program for low code no code so could you speak to the license management aspect of it if you could uh how are you managing your Licensing in regards to you know letting everyone being able to and my account manager is gonna be mad at me for asking this question but he's in here too but I'm curious to know I'm just curious to know I I actually haven't had that problem um right when we looked at what we we only buy what we use right and you know we have a very you know I don't have 100 uh employees across the organization you know you know banging on my door I want to develop applications I want to develop applications I have a handful of people what we've been doing is just making sure that we're right sized from a table perspective making sure that our license structure kind of meets kind of the demand that we have uh and it's just we only buy more when the demand actually warrants it and that's and if the demand comes and asks for it it's very easy for me to be able to say this is the request that is basically making this additional license purchase needed and from my story the only license actually required to enable those folks was one one license from service now which was the core app engine license and that you know that's that's the license that really gives you the power of the platform without diving into the major modules but that's as far as I'm going into that conversation because there's about 100 service now sales guys out there that I have to make in my car yeah it was a great question but I ain't doing it well good so I thank everybody for coming I think we're going to wrap up there so thank you for coming one Shameless plug is I I don't have the slide in here but if you want to learn more about how to build we actually run workshops in our office every month they're free we have our first one coming up at the end of at the end of April um feel free to grab me or find me on LinkedIn we'll get you the schedule get you know get get the dates and the sign up page for what that looks like but it's an opportunity for you to play with it or if you're staying tomorrow come to you know if you're signed up for one of our workshops tomorrow we'll be doing that here thank you for coming