Titans of #ServiceNow - Carleen Carter

welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans is a showcase of servicenow personalities that have punched above their weight and elevated the servicenow community titans of now is brought to you by me robert the duke fedoric if you want to see what i'm up to check out my website theduke.digital here you'll find all my cj and the duke episodes links to my youtube content and my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that win servicenow jobs hey everyone welcome back to another titans of now so good to have you here this episode's titan has been a long-standing member of the servicenow community of real og working both at mothership and at servicenow partners she has been a legendary trainer and those of us who have been in the ecosystem long enough may have actually had their admin course with her she is a long time servicenow architect and has been the backbone of one of the most legendary servicenow partners in existence it is my pleasure to introduce you to carlene for keeps carter [Laughter] oh thank you thank you very much for having me i'm honored to be here it's my pleasure sorry i didn't have you sooner well i've been starting to get back into the community to spread my knowledge around and not just keep it to myself isn't it crazy that you could take like a couple year hiatus of being involved in the community and then it's like most of the people haven't heard of you before yes exactly this definitely exploded i mean it's still such a small ecosystem still there are people jumping from customer to customer and partner to partner but there are a considerable more amount of people here in the community and involved in servicenow today than there was when i first started that's really why we have titans of servicenow too is just there's so many people who you know essentially had the whole team up on their back running that touchdown and i just want people to know like where it all came from who were the people who made it go and there's tens of thousands of us now but time was there were dozens yes we could all fit around the conference room table that's right just help each other out that's right i remember being at the wooden spaceship and were you ever at the wooden spaceship i was that is where the majority of my servicenow career was i just remember going there and the bottom floor was completely bare except for a set of surfboards on one wall and we were like we're like cool decoration and they're like what decoration [Music] it wasn't really a decoration people would actually take those surfboards and go surfing during lunch or after after work but there's a big empty space there like this is where all the desks are gonna go it did it did eventually get filled up with a large cube uh with desks in there and several of the professional services people that were based in san diego were all in that all on conference calls all at the same time was kind of like a bullpen and we did our best then we ended up moving to the carmel mountain buildings i think it was okay so i forgot to ask the question so let's look we're talking about your start at servicenow what did you how did you start at servicenow i think if we really want to figure out how i started servicenow we have to go back a few years before that i worked at a large desktop outsourcing company and i started right out of high school on a service desk and i was a csat data analyst i actually don't even remember what the title was but i basically called people back after they had had an incident or request completed and i asked them how our technician did so customer satisfaction surveys as you can imagine i didn't do that for very long because it was automated yeah i was gonna say people did that well yes it was a great foray into it for somebody who again was literally out of high school so after that was automated i moved up to the actual service desk and i started taking emails that came into our group email box and i created tickets from those and then that was automated oh the the processing of tickets yes so like i literally took that email copied and pasted it into a ticket got the right category on it routed it to the right place so you used to be an inbound action huh i did my claim to fame i was an inbound action yes so then after that was automated i then started answering phones and i think my favorite thing to do was set up an outlook profile just when it actually resolved the server name i don't know why that was just that was like golden for me so i mean it was really all this real real basic stuff that you learn being on a you know a basic service desk that was all all of those positions were as a subcontractor to that company and they eventually started looking for full-time employment i still stayed with that company but i ended up on the back end of the service desk as a workflow coordinator who took tickets that came from the service desk make sure they were categorized correctly and then assigned them to people and i i'm sure you can guess where this is going oh i'm thinking are we gonna have a category tree talk here and i'm just gonna go enough no crazy rant they didn't need actually they didn't actually need people to do that that could be automated right so i'm racing against automation after automation and it actually didn't it didn't bother me because nobody actually wants to do any of those things i could do a lot more more fun stuff but anyway so at that point they offered me this new and inciting exciting project that was supposed to be 30 days long and they called it it asset management and that was never automated unfortunately some of the things that i was doing was was not automated but it was not a 30-day project if you are familiar at all with it asset management it's never done there's no hey let's go do something for 30 days and then work yeah again yeah so i first did a lot of things where we had our desktop technicians capturing information and then sending it to me the effects and then i would fax it over to an offshore team to actually put it in data entry and that should have actually been automated but it actually was faster for me to type that in rather than standing at a fax machine all day i was i was really hungry to find something that wasn't like these administrative tasks right so i started making myself more known in the desktop area and eight years in a college degree later i did a lot of things with its management but i was looking for something else and the only way to move up within that company was to move out of san diego so i started talking to some of my former colleagues and landed an interview with servicenow professional services it was 2008 and i really thought that the position was like a business analyst because that's kind of what i had been looking for i didn't have any javascript experience i did have an html class from college but i didn't really do much with that um so i was thrown right into the fire i think on my third week i was sent to ohio and i had never seen snow so there's a lot of firsts going on we're working with with javascript the and the ohio state guys they they actually were afraid because their rental car company had given me a mustang so drive in the snow holy cow for a second there i thought you were calling servicenow snow like you had never seen something no no you're not one of those people are you no i i had never seen snow falling and this was the first time i actually made the hotel receptionist come outside after work one day and take a picture of me making a snow angel was a snowpacky enough to do that it was although i don't know that i would have known the difference anyway so long story short that was probably the shortest part of my overall career because i spent the next three years at servicenow then was at a small boutique firm called efficient technology and now i am at a choreo what did you do for that first little bit at servicenow i did a lot of different things i was definitely technical on a lot of projects but i also was thrown into teaching the basic sysadmin class so as you mentioned during the intro between 2009 and 2011 there was almost a 50 50 chance that i was your basic system admin trainer if it was on the west coast it was probably me if it was on the east coast it was probably ian ian bros he did my training yeah i actually just saw him at the last in-person knowledge which seems like it was a decade over a decade ago and that had been the first time i had seen him in a long time he's a great guy and what are you doing now so i just hit seven years at a choreo so over 12 years total on the platform so i think the shorter answer probably would have been what haven't i done i served in just about every single role on project i did actually do em for a couple projects but never again thank you to all the ems out there you are wonderful i don't wanna do your job yeah the good ones are miraculous right yes exactly mostly i've been a technical architect i also do a lot of work with our pre-sales and sales folks to help close deals and talk to them about how our delivery team is our experts in in their areas and how we will not just do exactly what you tell us to do we're going to question and make sure that what you're asking for is actually something that's going to live on and be scalable you know all the ables scalable maintainable upgradeable all of those things all the ables is going to be the sound bite for this episode thank you for that that is so so good so you've done a lot of things with servicenow but what is the one thing that resonates the most with you like for me it's reporting and thinking about things in terms of outcomes how about you so my favorite thing to do is take kind of a complex problem that somebody wasn't sure exactly how to solve and figure out how to solve it with as much out of the box as possible and that sometimes just seems like oh carly you just don't want to do any work it's actually not the case i want to make sure that i'm not building something that is going to break in you know a couple releases or something like that so let me give you an example i was recently working with a customer who provides data center services and they were implementing itsm and csm and they were not using servicenow discovery they were using another tool to bring in all of their cmdb data and they needed a way to automate the creation of install base items which is part of the csm suite and i could have just gone and written very custom script include that you know just just created the install base items that they had specifically mentioned but what i decided to do instead was extend the data lookup tables and create rules so we created install base items for all of the managed services for all of their server monitoring for all of their different things and i set up condition filters and you know active flag all of that stuff so that it they could actually maintain it and not have to touch my code ever again in theory it's what they call data driven right exactly exactly um using data driven and dynamic everywhere in the platform has been my mission we've just heard about one thing you're super proud of but could you tell us about and this could overlap a bit but could you tell us about a time where you didn't think you were going to make it but you just it was just way too you know what i mean yeah the place where your back's against the wall and it's only you like nobody's gonna get you out of it absolutely so there's been a lot of different things that anybody who's been on the platform for any length of time has run into one of these things before there was the one time that i used 500 cpu on an instance with a global business rule because at the time this was early on i did not know that you were supposed to wrap your global business rule in a function i never did that again please do not shoot me but i also was an administrator on high for a while and i was trying to do some some clean up there and some of the cleanup accidentally deleted the default view not a good situation and actually one of your other titans yelled at me a lot for doing it although i did prove that it was not my update set but actually deleted it jared latham was that that titan and we're friends now we became friends again um more recently i accidentally turned on a customer an email in a customer's dev instance and sent a bunch of comms to their external customers which doesn't seem like a big deal but it is actually a big deal and one is external customers right yeah the more difficult part was to actually own up to actually doing it and then running a bunch of quick queries and scripts to figure out exactly who we sent emails to so that they could target their we're sorry we're we're doing a new service now deployment communication back to them i think that there's been a lot of times where i was doing a actually i was doing a re-implementation for a customer and i was a technical architect and we had planned everything down to the minute and we had done as much like prepping with servicenow as we could and at that time we were supposed to cut over everything fell apart none of the actions that we needed servicenow to actually do were occurring and so i was we were all in a war room and i was scrambling around to try to figure out how we would solve the problem and came up with some interesting solutions to to bridge the gap until we could get those servicenow pieces up and running but if you're ever doing a re-implementation make sure you involve servicenow early and often no kidding so it was it was a re-architecture project yeah and you know for long-term customers i don't like to think that there's any shame in doing a re-implementation for long-term customers half the stuff that's there today more than half the stuff that's there today wasn't there and so in order to do something you had to build it and sometimes after years and years and years of building it the right answer is to just okay let's start fresh and be able to take advantage of all of the new functionality there is the option of trying to go unravel yourself from all of the years of building but usually the return on investment isn't there if you've been a long long long long term customer yeah the whole like tech debt thing right and it's just yeah you know in some ways i understand you can't wait for service now all the time like i the example i always bring up is itbm with timecard days it's in the it's in the system now but for everybody who is doing monthly billing based off of time prior to that like what were they supposed to do not do that so like there's stuff you had to build i'm still of the opinion that if you have good architecture and good principles and practices that you can make that drag on for a very long time like good architecture is good architecture but yes yeah absolutely and there will think there are things that are were built in back in 2009 that are still running great today on on different customers i think that like its management is another great example i think they service now kind of avoided it for a long time and then when was it jakarta no jakarta was when sam came out it was it was one of the early city releases when they released the new asset management tables that are basically syncing with the cmdb and then now i mean we're just now seeing light years of enhancements that are going into software asset management and hardware asset management and a lot of the things that are out there disposal processes refresh processes i could swear every single partner has built over and over again at least one you know one time and there are some of those will probably live on for quite a while until it just really makes sense for those customers who have some of that functionality to switch on to something like hardware asset management pro people say asset management and i liken that to saying construction like what are you talking about there's like dozens of disciplines within this umbrella you don't umbrella is exactly the term that i use and when i have my it asset management workshop that i used to have this giant rainbow umbrella and all of the things that asset management is underneath it and you know i say asset management is never done but asset management is also everybody's responsibility it's your responsibility as an employee of a company who has given you equipment to be a good steward of that equipment not to throw it off into a pool or kick it down the road at an airport because you're angry or something like that that's part of asset management in addition to all the way up to getting to that utopia of total cost of ownership and understanding not just how much something costs when you first buy it but how much is going to cost you over the time that you have it from a maintenance perspective all the software that goes on it you know all of the technicians that you're paying to support it if it doesn't work or train people if they're not as tech savvy as as they need to be it's all of the money that goes into owning just a laptop is much more than than the cost of it at the checkout counter yeah can we just sit on asset management for a bit why isn't asset management the single hottest thing in the servicenow community and i say that because like i never came up in that asset management discipline and i think listen if you take one thing away from this presentation folks go and sit with somebody in asset management like not a servicenow expert in certain asset management but like an asset manager who's probably going to be in your finance or accounting departments right yeah yeah and just talk to them about the dollar signs involved in this yeah and that's one of the reasons why servers now hit software asset management first is because of the money that you could save because people just buy and buy and buy and buy and buy licenses because they don't have an idea of how much that they have or ones that they could reclaim people who may have moved departments and don't actually need adobe you know most expensive anymore all of those different things really add up to a lot of dollars and i always like to recommend that customers start out with hardware asset management before trying to tackle software asset management because if you don't have an understanding of the hardware that's out in their your environment it doesn't matter how much reporting you're going to do on software if you're missing a whole slew of servers or a whole slew of laptops then your numbers are going to be off and and your compliance is going to be off ultimately but yeah i don't know why i think the idea that i mentioned earlier that it asset management is everybody's responsibility a lot of folks are very resistant to that so i also mentioned when i was an asset manager i had our desktop technicians collecting asset management information for me every incident where they went out they would write down the asset tag number who it was assigned to and the location and if they if they were nice to me they would write down any additional information i could validate and then we would actually not just do the data entry that i mentioned but we would actually validate that against our database and if something was vastly off we would then go investigate it but there was this mind shift that all it asset management stuff was has to has to be done by the asset managers which it's actually not true i mean there's procurement there's the finance department there's the actual asset managers who may set the policies and do some investigations but we also have auto discovery right an auto discovery tool is doing asset management if you haven't seen something on the network in whatever your threshold is 30 days 60 90 days if you have information from your ticketing system from your auto discovery tool that's going to help you try to find that asset and actually the sooner you look for it is the more chance you have to actually find it and not just classify it as missing at some point i think one thing a lot of people have trouble with in the asset management space though is this idea that if i've discovered it and if it's in the cmdb then it is an asset no not everything should be an asset so that's also something that we talk about a lot in our asset management workshops so there's their software asset manager there's software assets there's hardware assets and then there's consumables and each company kind of defines their different rules for consumables i like to talk about them like keyboards mice monitors is one that can go either way especially the really large ones are big ticket items but things like hard drives hard drives discovered by servicenow discovery and tracking that beyond just discovering what's inside of the device is actually incredibly labor-intensive especially once you it might be moved around and what's the importance of that there is some security importance around that and after something comes out of the environment you may be disposing of it you might have that hard drive sit on your in your depot or your stock room for a while as a quarantine just in case or legal hold but there's plenty of things that are discovered by discovery or any uh auto discovery tool that don't have any sort of financial impact to the company because my my layman's dumb litmus test right i've always told people is it's an asset when finance tells you it's an asset yeah yeah it has to have some sort of financial impact to the company so like depreciation or licensing cost or you know maintenance cost or something like that you might have contracts against an asset a lot of those things but a business service a business service is not an asset that's not necessarily well it is discoverable through service mapping more but it's more of an intangible thing right it is made up of a lot of assets that's right yeah i think people need to realize that it is like it isn't a financial term it is not an i.t term people were saying assets and asset managements like before we had typewriters yeah another good example is uh virtual machines so because virtual machines get discovered as computers they will often just automatically create an asset and you can actually avoid that by finding those virtual machine models and putting the asset tracking strategy to don't create assets and that's going to help you get rid of a lot of assets that you can't find physically well i mean that could be a huge problem wouldn't it because if you're logging them as assets and finance thinks they're assets then they're putting a certain amount of depreciation which could mean that they're fudging the numbers if not by intent yeah yeah finance usually uses the numbers from the erp rather than necessarily numbers from servicenow but that's not to say that the details from servicenow never get back to finance but it's more of finance typically will take their word as gold rather than something that you might have shown from servicenow so as an asset manager it's your job to help them understand that whatever you're showing to them might be true but you don't actually need virtual machines even if you have to count licenses so i have software licenses for those you really only need them in the cmdb because software asset management uses the software installs table and the install table is tied to cis it's not tied to assets the licenses themselves have to be assets but the virtual devices that the things are on do not have to be assets so wow that was a lot about itam but is there any other parts of the platform that you really resonate with yes absolutely i i obviously have a background in it so i end up on those projects a lot and i'm a great contributor to those projects but i would love to actually be working more on the platform itself and in custom apps and other spaces like csm i also have service desk experience too a lot of automation service that's experienced if you were paying attention at the beginning the thing you said at the beginning was all the ables and yes you know it's clear that you have some flair for like just general architecture as well which is a thing separate from the actual implementations that you can do there is a discipline of those who just stand watch over it all and say let's hold off that tech doomsday for as long as possible so it seems like you have some flair for that as well i i do and i don't think that we have mentioned i don't talk about it a whole lot but i am one of the first certified master architects so i was in the pilot cohort which was in 2019 i think there's about 120-ish of them today in the world so it's pr it's a privilege to be part of that group okay you must have some piece of advice for people just making their service now journey what would you tell people to be mindful of or any advice you could give you can go wide but there's no way that you will ever know anything there's not one person on this planet that knows absolutely everything that's going on at in servicenow at any one point in time and so i think trying to find a place where you have experience or you have a particular affinity for if you didn't even if you don't know it very well you know maybe portal or csm or hr do your research try to specialize in that area don't forget the other areas of the platform but having that specialization will help you understand how it's going on in the platform i think if you're first starting out very very first starting out i want everybody to think very carefully about adding check boxes to your tables think again and then think like 73 more times my hands are waving you might i don't know that and then just don't don't do it a check box type field only ever has two options and i talked about scalability earlier checkboxes don't scale think about how you or your customer is going to be using this in the future and build for that that's going to help you not have to do that re-implementation and and it's not just check boxes although i i say check boxes are the bane of my existence but think about the long game how is this going to be used you don't have to try to boil the ocean but don't code yourself into a corner by limiting your options i think the other thing is at atf automated test framework adding that as you develop and not trying to wait till the end to do it because at that point it's an insurmountable task and everything else will be more important than that we actually implemented a policy internally that you can't push anything to production unless it has atf and if atf doesn't apply then we just do test steps but it has to have some of those things in order to be pushed to production amen amen and not just atf too but like i'm gonna just jump on my documentation just like grab the bat and beat that dead horse for a little bit if you don't mind because a lot of people say oh it takes so much time so it must not be valuable like no first of all it is super valuable it's super valuable and the reason it takes too long is because you wait like a full week weeks month after the deployment to go back and try and remember what you did and why to document it and if you'd just been doing it while you're in the weeds it would have been way easier exactly and and i think the opposite is true it's not it takes so much time so it's not valuable it takes so much time and it is one of the most valuable things because if you spend the time to do it now you will not have to spend the time to do repeated tests over and over and over and over again which is not stuff that developers don't want to have to do yeah atf's a monster right like it's i don't know if it's just i haven't looked at it for long enough or i haven't got enough time in the seat but it strikes me as it's honorous right it's not um it is kind of tedious yeah it is because you have to write out everything it's like it's even more intensive than just writing out test steps because you have to make sure that the doing you're telling the system to do every little thing and something that might be described as one line on a test script could actually be four or five actions in a test well actually it's funny i don't take sponsorships on titans of now but somebody you mentioned earlier jared latham has got a titans episode and i think everybody should go take a look at that one as well if you're interested in atf and the difficulty to value proposition there's some useful stuff in that episode i think the last thing that i would say to somebody starting out new is to be willing to be wrong you're going to learn a heck of a lot more from being wrong than just being successful the first time every time definitely celebrate your successes but don't be afraid of being wrong don't be afraid of failing to do something because it will you will learn from it definitely and the sage advice and a great final word carlene we are at time i want to thank you so much for being on the show thanks thank you all right we will talk to pleasure thanks bye do you want your message in front of the best servicenow admins developers architects and product owners in the business want a conversation about your servicenow strategy and architecture you can reach me via my website at www.theduke.digital if you want to contribute to high frequency high quality servicenow content all you need to do is feed the algorithm with likes shares and comments thanks for watching

Channel: Robert, The Duke, Fedoruk

Views: 191

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: servicenow, service-now, servicenowdev, TitansOfServiceNow, ServiceNow Certified Master Architect, servicenow architecture, ServiceNow Asset Management

Id: mgsAi_eXhDE

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021