Titans of #ServiceNow - Andy Ho 📜

welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and storytelling experiences that you want hey everyone welcome back to another episode of titans of servicenow it is so good to have you here tonight i have the man whose name is synonymous with training and certification a pillar of servicenow's knowledge proliferation from the early explosive growth days to the current explosive growth days i am so proud to introduce andy the historian ho thank you robert it's an honor and a privilege to be a part of this podcast let's get to it thanks so much for joining me buddy as always we start at the start how did you get your start with servicenow it's funny that you mentioned the historian nickname i've obviously been part of servicenow i'm going on my 10th year so i'm super proud to be part of the two-digit club it's an interesting story i actually have been a part of the i.t industry or world here in san diego for the better part of the last 20 years and when i first got here i started with a company called peregrine systems so at peregrine systems fred was our cto i was part of the training team over there and we had the falling out with the company went bankrupt a bunch of us went over to hp and then i bounced around in between and when we went bankrupt fred was like i'm getting out of dodge here and him and his brother rob started what we now know of a service now and so back then i think it was around 2006 the company had probably less than 30 employees at the time and they had tapped two of us saying hey we might need some trainers to come on board and this is back when i'm still out in front of customers doing the training myself so we were like okay let's go interview so my buddy went in the interview and this was the first formal office that servicenow has had in solana beach called the spaceship and he went in there and i don't think two chairs matched i think the roof was leaking i think he came back from that interview and goes buddy we're not going over there it is a mess and just from a physical structure standpoint and then it was an early startup and so we were both just starting families we're like there's no way we can do this right now i mean we're at hp it's a solid company let's just stay here so fast forward five years i had gone to another company still bouncing around the company that i was at previous to servicenow the couple of the people that gone over to servicenow had said hey you're in training some folks that know i t and itsm and because that's the focus that serves out the time and they go can you refer some folks to us and so i did started passing some people over there and then sure enough after a while they're like do you want to come over here and so that's right at the middle of 2011 the company was about 300 folks two offices one in london and then obviously the headquarters was in san diego at the time and so i came on board as a member of the training and certification team there were six of us we all sat in a conference room much like what fred in his early days too fred didn't have a corner office he didn't come in a suit and a tie he wore jeans and a t-shirt like the rest of us did and he worked in a conference room with all of his buddies and so that's what we did as well we had a conference room in our office and today fast forward 10 years there are almost 300 of us on the training and certification team in servicenow that's insane going from one to 300 in that amount of time and it's funny that you mentioned the big wooden starship it's been mentioned a couple times in the titan series there is a lot of stories to tell about that i remember i took training at the wooden starship ian bros taught me and three other people in a conference room and we're all like tightly squeezed around a round table think back i bet you none of the chairs match no none of them did no and and actually there was there was a shocking lack of chairs because that first floor hadn't been populated yet it was just a barren first floor and the only things that were being used were those second floor conference rooms around the perimeter of the circle we came in and they'd be like checked out this space dude this is where all the chairs are gonna go so that's something that even people at servicenow don't know is if you go into our instances we have two major ones one is high and one is surf now surf got its name from where we were at that wooden spaceship because we were literally 50 yards from the beach and one day we're coming up with this new instance for our customers high came before serve and so when surf came about the story is that we are trying to figure out what the name of this next instance was going to be and again for those of you who don't know what hi stands for our first customer facing instance robert do you know what hi stands for hosted itil buddy ask me something hard there you go yes you're right so hosted itil you got you gotta remember 16 years ago hosted was the term for cloud so that's how we got that and then how we got the name for surf was i think the story is that rob luddy was looking out his window out onto the surf because you could literally see the coastline from that second story and he's like surf that's what it is so that's how there's a little bit of surf's now trivia for you yep i remember the only thing on that first floor there was maybe a couple half-hazard desks but then there's a wall of surfboards and we were coming down from chicago i believe it was a fall of winter in chicago too and we look at that thing we're like that's a great artwork and they're like artwork we continue to have surfboards as i think for the first five years of our company when we were able small enough to take company photos we would always have a surfboard in our company photo so there's a definite throwback to that office back in the old days does fred surf i don't know if he does he is a very avid tennis fan and player as well as volleyball back in the old days if you if fred was in the office and you didn't know where he was in the office at three o'clock on the dot every day he was in the gym on stairmaster he always had all of the records that were on that stairmaster so that's he definitely kept himself active and i'm pretty sure he still does so there we go one thing you learned today is that fred never skips leg day right [Laughter] all right so you mentioned a little bit about how you came in on the training and certification side but how might people know you in the servicenow community for those who don't already i love the community aspect in general whether it's in my personal life and over my hobbies i think even professionally i think there's a space for this where obviously we have our servicenow community capital c where every once in a while answer questions there they're training and certification related i'm fairly active on linkedin i'm usually posting something once a day if not a couple times a week and then probably i think for the most place that i'm found is on twitter so if you find me on tech training tip i've started to do a little bit more personal stuff here and there in the evenings but during the day talking about trends in the industry i've been in the training industry for 25 years i've done everything from teaching high school math to graduate teaching assistant at northwestern university and then just in the tech training space so i've been in i've been a trainer i've been a course developer and i've been a manager of teams for probably the last 15 years or so andy's being super modest here so i'm going to rephrase his answer for him nobody understands that andy started and he was basically the training person and i remember being at a very early knowledge and being introduced to you and talking about someday we'll have certifications for this and i remember thinking at the time no way that's too buttoned up and formal but just look at today there's dozens of people that get certified admin every single day the amount of proliferation around the space that certifications has driven has been astounding and i certainly didn't have an idea of the scale at the time but andy did and here we are all these years later 300 people on the team and how many properties on servicenow basically revolve around certification now learning now creators good work man yeah i know i appreciate that obviously i don't take the credit it takes a village like i said there's almost 300 of us on the team but you're right when i started here we had one course that we delivered and that was sysadmin and that's now been rebranded as servicenow fundamentals but it's been a great journey along the way i don't see us stopping anytime soon from that one course that we had we went to scripting we went to implementation bootcamp which is now our platform implementation course like i said we immediately thought people are going to want to get certified on this people are going to want to prove to their customers that they know what they're doing we obviously in the last year we released now learning which is our learning platform we've got hundreds of videos in there actually fact we've got thousands of videos in there we've got hundreds of courses i think some of the stuff we're so proud of doing are the simulators are really a game changer and a differentiator in the market for us it's great to have classes it's great to have e-learning but to be able to get into the driver's seat of the car as i like to say i can't get away without using a car analogy you go into a class you read a book it's like reading the car manual to how to drive a car that's not going to tell you it's going to tell you a certain amount but you really learn how to drive a car by getting behind the wheel and rather than show you screenshots or mimic how it might be we actually put you in that driver's seat in our simulators and that's something that i think has been a hallmark for us at servicenow is that we have a team of folks that are on the cutting edge we don't just do what's like factory printed materials we're always looking to push the envelope to get folks to engage more with ultimately with the platform that's the important thing is we want ambassadors we want drivers of our servicenow platform if you could give one message to the servicenow community about training and certification i know there's all sorts of formal channels you got to go through to like announce this stuff but just one person to another person what would you tell the community about training and certification how long do we have i'm so passionate about learning in general obviously the point i just said was we want our servicenow ecosystem to really engage and learn our platform and make it work for you that's always been the message from fred it's always been a message from all of our ceos including bill right now and so i think how do you become a better dad how do you become a better driver of a car how do you become better at your hobbies or whatever like you learn you read books you talk to other folks you engage with a community when i think about my personal life i think there's so many ways that i learn a ton of stuff's on my phone it's on youtube it's in these apps and a lot of times people go into their professional lives and it mimics what i think you experience in process whether it's like working with i.t or working with hr sometimes it's cumbersome at work it's not as easy as like ordering something off of amazon in the training world especially specific to servicenow we try to do the same thing where we want to make it accessible to everybody if you're listening to this or if you're doing anything with search now the whole goal is to learn more and to learn how to do it i would argue that within our training portfolio we've got the basics the fundamentals the foundational concepts that you need to know anything about our platform everything from the performance analytics pieces to the itsm to itom to devops like it's all in there we cover a multitude of personas a lot of them are technical obviously we have the admin the implementer developer but we even go into business process consultants and project managers and my passion my goal is to bring that enablement to our ecosystem for those people that are just getting started with servicenow i think we've got a great learning path that's set up for you to get you started no matter where you are or what you're doing and i think that's just we want to continue to make that learning process fun and exciting obviously you're there to learn about the platform and you're there to do business bringing more ri to your company but at the end of the day why not have fun doing it i think that's why i've been at servicenow it's the longest place i've been any company that i've been at we really do just have fun inside the firewall so to speak and we try to make sure that our customers do as well you just said either whether it was the old days in the spaceship even now if you go to a knowledge even this last knowledge we had unfortunately had to do everything virtually we still bring those labs to you in a way that's digestible in a way that you can consume quickly and we put fun scenarios around it if anybody has taken any of our new on-demand courses if you can't feel uncomfortable going live to a servicenow fundamentals course or an itsm fundamentals course we put these nice little themes around it our ppm fundamentals course has a theme park you're there you're literally helping a theme park rebuild yeah we could just teach you the concepts but why not put a nice little theme around it long story short i think the passion that we all have on our training team it's the best group of individuals i've worked for no offense to anybody i've worked for in the past actually a lot of them are working with me now so i can feel comfortable saying that we all love what we do hopefully it comes to our training and we hope that our ecosystem continues to learn from all the things we put out for them what was the hardest moment what was the crucible for certifications and training from the beginning till now do you have any moments where you're like we are not going to make it i don't really get asked this question that often this is a good one there was an inflection point it happened probably four years ago actually it's more like five i think and the point i'm thinking of is in the early days of servicenow we were very much an itsm shop that's who we're competing with hp and bmc and a lot of incident problem and changes and even to this day sometimes how we lead with our customers or our prospects and right around that point we started to get into other industries we started bringing in itom hr csm we went outside our comfort zone the pool of folks that we were trying to hire at that point were very it was of a similar profile that was out there and so it's a two-fold to that and two parts to the answer is one finding the right people that had the industry expertise in places like financial management or in hr or customer service management finding those folks at least from a training standpoint i think across the company i think sales had the same issues i think marketing and across the board but to bring it back to training i think then what made it difficult was not only creating the content for it but as you mentioned at the time for the first five years that i was here we literally had two certifications we had the sysadmin certification and we had the implementer certification it was a one-size-fits-all it was yeah and i think a lot of folks were coming to me what do you mean implementer yeah 10 different parts of the platform the platform was just going too wide for you right yeah we needed a way to say you're an implementer and we're going to give you this certification but we're going to give it to you specific to iatsm or to differentiate partners that are out there or customers out there and so the the difficult part at that point was we literally went from two certifications to i want to say it was 18 in a matter of 12 months and so if you've been around long enough for this yeah i remember you flipped back about four or five years we cranked all these out in literally less than 18 months which if you know how hard it is to create high stakes certification it did come to a point for us i don't want to say it broke us but it certainly was the most challenging thing and i think we made it through it and we do have a program now that individuals can come in and prove their worth and it's not an easy thing to do and i think once people are certified one of my favorite things every day is to go into linkedin and people sharing their certificates like you said there's dozens of people that get certified every day i must like half a dozen of those folks post on their linkedin feed and i could not be more proud to be able to help people along in their careers and to be able to give them that certification and that ability to go get hired somewhere and to prove their worth and then on the opposite side of that what would you say is like your crowning achievement it's hard to pick one it's almost like saying which one's your favorite kid yeah yeah i really do believe that a lot of the stuff that we do is worthy of global awards and we have won global awards for a lot of things that we've done the simulators and the micro simulators are things that customers can do right now in now learning i know it's something we need to market better i don't know out there how many people recognize the power of these simulators it's literally you get to drive the car and take it out on the road we got a bunch of nerf balls set up everywhere so if you crash you can just restart and you don't have to do it in your own you're not going to do in your production environment even in your sandbox environments at work so we give you those instances we pay for those instances to get spun up and customers can come in and if it's like the analogy of driving the car again if i teach you what going from first to second gear is in a stick shift it's one thing for you to read it it's one thing for me to show you it and demo it it's one thing for you to see pictures of it done but it's a totally different thing if you got to get behind the wheel know how to step on the pedals right and know how to shift the gear box and so for us to let you do that in a live instance is a game changer for us as we develop more and more content in now learning the majority of the courses that we're putting out there have a simulator or what we call a micro sim so you know here's a task this is how you do it go try it spin up an instance go do it and come back and you can we can validate you since not only you go do it and you go i don't know if i did that you literally hit a validation button and it'll tell you hey robert you did this right or hey robert you did this wrong here's a link to a video on how you might have missed this you might want to read up more on this in a knowledge-based article so i think the introduction of the simulators to our ecosystem has is a game changer for us i won't let too much more out of the bag but we are working on some pretty cool stuff that's coming out hopefully this year leveraging more and more technology that's out there in the palm of people's hands augmented reality and virtual reality yeah it's uh i picked one kid for now but there's lots of other kids in the house and we love them all i really have to agree i think that simulator is a real aung sang hero in the whole servicenow ecosystem it's like the thing that does so much of the work but is it like effectively invisible nobody calls it the simulator or nobody attributes the magic of the simulator to servicenow because i quote the best technology is invisible and every day people are using them every day it's the linchpin of accumulating that knowledge but nobody's oh servicenow in that simulator is awesome to give a little bit of the history behind it it was born out of the early days where our partners were coming to us going i just took this great implementation course that's great it's you showed me how to drive the car but i i need to get on projects i need to shadow other people doing this or i just need to do it myself like how can i get that experience and so for us we were thinking we know what the implementation tasks are we know what that checklist is what if we just put that into an instance and what if we just started validating people just telling people like oh go set up the users go set up security and they can go hit a button and we can validate all it is validation so take it to a sort of mock field environment so that if they didn't have a customer to go to right away they at least had a simulator to go hey practice on me go this is what a customer would do in this order come for us and so i think that's where it was born out of the fact that we do it on our own i think this is sort of lost on people is that we're teaching you how to use the platform on the platform like when we won the award for this and we presented it to a group of my peers in the industry a lot of our tech competitors were there they could not believe because in order to simulate your own environments you often use e-learning tools you use captivate you use articulate you fake your way through it and there's nothing wrong with that sometimes we do it but in this case you really want to get the hands-on real world experience there's no better than the real thing and so we basically do that with guardrails to be able to help hey you did this right or hey you did this wrong and to give you that encouragement as you do it and that's something that it is the unsung hero i think we need to do a better job of promoting it and so i thank you for this platform my pleasure man is is there an opportunity or will there be an opportunity for technology partners to interface with the simulator team and build training content for store apps and inject that into the now learning ecosystem i got chills on my up and down my spine when you ask that question robert so we're obviously doing uh 2021 planning right now one of the if not the biggest charter that i have from a training standpoint this coming year is to leverage our greater community that's out there and it's something that we wanted to do for a while we've had a couple roadblocks along the way but i think we're ready to go we've been piloting this internally so the simple answer to your question is yes the longer answer to your question is let me set the table this way every once when i go on my phone and i look at the gaming industry and i love that as an example for training because there's a lot of parallels and if you play any games on your phone whether it's even as simple as candy crush or the popular like among us is a big thing around my kids right now if you want to learn more about games 99 of the time these folks that are learning about games and how to play better they're not going to the vendor to do that the vendor's telling them like oh these are the new features and these are what we think are the best way to use these features but the majority of the content creators and the majority of what people know as the influencers are people that actually use it people actually implement this people are actually playing them and so that's something for me that has been untapped and something that we've been looking to build our now learning platform to allow for this to happen to allow folks that are outside of servicenow to go well that's great you're telling us about the features you're telling us how it's supposed to be used great i'm the one that actually uses this on the day-to-day basis i'm the one that's actually figured out maybe shortcuts in and around a certain form or a workflow or a process or whatever it might be i think i have something to say about this and so why wouldn't we give these folks a megaphone and go robert get up get yourself a way to be able to create this content and get it out there for other folks to consume and you might think okay i'm not a developer of content i don't know the first thing about instructional design we're trying to create ways to put templates to put a process in place for somebody to come behind a microphone like we're doing right now talk about what they want to they can maybe record a demo and then just put that out there and then to take it a step further is for those who are a little bit more tech savvy or even not tech savvy there's places where we might be able to take proof of concepts and help them build their own simulator as well so i literally just got off a call an hour ago where our sim team we call them our sim team they're putting more and more enhancements in to make it easier for our own groups to build these simulators but at some point the roadmap is to open up the floodgates and allow anybody and everybody to do this because that's where people really want to learn from that i think that's why knowledge is such a fantastic event because it's customers talking to customers because they're the ones that are using it it's one thing for the vendor to say something like us it's another thing for a partner to say it but i think it's even more powerful when life talks to and i think that's where we want to make more and more of those connections in this coming year so i'm really looking forward to that so thanks for that question beyond greater capabilities for the ecosystem to contribute to now learning what's next for certification and training i won't give away too much because again i don't want to make it a promise but one thing that i can say and one thing that we're super passionate about as you're starting to see in now learning you're starting to see some badging that's a big part of it if you go to your profile and now learning right at the top there is whenever i log in i can always see my knowledge badges and badges that i've taken from certain courses we are definitely looking to expand not just the badging so there's two parts of this is the recognition piece we want to be able to recognize people more and more for what they do and what they know and so right now it's i think will would even agree it's fairly vanilla it's nothing against the dozens of certifications that we have but it's generally you have a mainline cert you have to go to a site you got to get proctored so i think we have somewhere around 20 of those sort of high stakes certifications we have a couple dozen of these micro certifications that we do the lower stakes you go watch your webinar you go through an e-learning and then you take a quiz online and you pass it we have our deltas as well we want to give more options to people that are out there that might say i don't need to be certified but i would love to tell my employer that i know how to do something and not just show them a transcript but to be able to show them a series of badges and so we're definitely working on the recognition side of things but also on the certification side of things we're looking to diversify our offering in the same way on the content side where you can take a live course or you can take a virtual live course or you can take an on-demand course where you can read a pdf multiple modalities to be able to learn in the same way we're trying to make sure we do that from a certification standpoint so that it's not just a one-size-fits-all but we have multiple ways of recognizing you the learner the user of our servicenow platform for what you know all right andy this is probably going to be the most controversial question that i've ever asked on titans and now so again i'll thank you in advance for getting to this point obviously when you ask a community a very enthusiastic community hey you got to get certified and the ecosystem is now more than ever driven off of certifications for connection to work but now you're telling everyday people okay there's a cost associated with the upkeep of your certifications it's fair to say that it's an unpopular like people don't want to have extra expenditure but i want to give you this opportunity to talk to the community and explain what that's all about so robert thank you for the opportunity boy the most controversial question gets to me yeah obviously for those of you who know me on social media you know that i try not to shy away from questions i think this is what shapes our programs having an ear to the ground and listening to our customers and our partners in terms of what works and what doesn't i think what people should recognize is a lot of this stuff is fairly fluid a lot of the stuff isn't a we're going to say it and this is the way it goes a lot of times we'll fumble and we got to get better and we take the feedback and we go and we go back to the drawing board and we come up with a better way of doing things so i'll start by saying that so whether it's a certification payment type of question or whether it's the conversion of our formats from instructor-led on-demand or whatever people might take issue to i think that's what i think that's what we're good at is we're good at taking the feedback and listening to it now specifically to your question yeah nobody likes to pay for stuff i want stuff for free right who wouldn't want stuff for free but i think what we're trying to do and i think i want to make clear is what i oftentimes see is people comment like oh this is just a money grab or people servicenow wants to make money off this first of all make it clear that if you look at the numbers we're not making a ton of money off of this this is not really a money play to service other programs that we're doing in the grand scheme of things i think it's relatively speaking it's a super small number so it's not about that think about it in general where anything in that you pay for in life right now if you go out there and you buy a really nice pair of headphones to listen to music on versus somebody giving you maybe even the same headphones for free you think about that intrinsic value to how you place the value on that object that you bought if you look across the industry it's the same thing things that are given away for free intrinsically or inherently for folks don't quite carry that same value now you might then why do you have to charge so much maybe you could just charge me 10 bucks instead of 200 bucks or whatever it might be or why am i renewing on looking at what we're looking at and looking at how often we release content and even listening to our customers saying yeah this we want people coming on board teaching us or implementing for us that really know what they're doing this is one way for us to be able to relatively speaking i don't think it's a huge cost i know for some folks it is so i'm not discounting that at all but i do feel like having that cost there does put the value there it does force people to think about whether or not i know some folks have dozens of certifications and obviously keeping up a dozen is going to cost a lot but then are you really working through all of them or do you need to focus on one or two or a handful of them again everybody's different i don't think an answer is going to satisfy everybody at all but hopefully that gives some insight to not just the fact that we're trying to align with what other industries and other competitors are doing but that in and of itself the idea of paying for something and having that cost inherent there maintains the value of what we do and i think anybody that's in business can understand you do need some revenue to keep the lights on but it's that's not really what we're looking to do it's really about maintaining that value to our ecosystem and knowing that it's an important thing to do and it's worth it i think at the end of the day thanks for having the courage to step out into the community and be able to say that flat out i know it's a pretty controversial topic thanks again for that we are at time so i'm going to give you the last word to the community first of all i love this platform that you have robert i love when you release episode after episode i'm super honored again to be a part of all this i've really enjoyed my last 10 years here at servicenow i would love to say this again in 10 more years when i've been here for 20. it's such a unique ecosystem that we have here it's so unique i love when new people join our team and sadly we weren't able to go to knowledge last year and we'll kind of see how things go for this coming year but it's one of my favorite things to see and engage with our customers and it's not only at knowledge it's in our snug events it's our now form events all the different things that go on around the world i always made the comment that if you didn't know you were coming to a tech conference you would have thought you walked into a religious cult meeting because just how rabid people are about learning our platform and a lot of times people go to these conferences and their boondoggles it's not the case for servicenow people are begging to get into sessions and people are so passionate about learning more and more about our platform i just love what fred has done making things open source and extensible it really does make things easier from a training standpoint as well for us to teach our ecosystem so we're just super excited about what's coming up in the coming year we know things are challenging in these times today but hopefully with things that we're putting out into now learning and our platform in general people will continue to be excited about what servicenow is doing for them all right andy thanks so much for joining me have a great rest of your day thanks robert all right bye-bye if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching you

Channel: Robert, The Duke, Fedoruk

Views: 446

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: servicenow, service-now, servicenowdev, servicenow training, servicenow certified, NowLearning, NowCreators, servicenow community

Id: KijkVkDuwvc

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020