Something about my travels to England and Amsterdam this week are inspiring historically influenced thoughts…

If the cloud is a Magna Carta for the enterprise, then e pluribus unum is arguably a rallying cry for enterprise IT decision makers and workers.

C.H. Robinson is one of the world's largest third-party logistics providers, with more than 10,500 employees and gross revenues of more than $11 billion. Worldwide offices in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia serve more than 42,000 customers.

IT at C.H. Robinson initially implemented ServiceNow to consolidate a variety of IT tools that covered service request, incident, problem, change and knowledge management.

Several of my ServiceNow colleagues and I have been delivering a newly developed training curriculum to select ServiceNow business partners during the past few weeks. In fact, after participating in highly successful and well-received training sessions in Santa Clara, San Diego, and Boston, I'm now in England. We'll be training another group of partners here, then moving on to Amsterdam do to the same there.

Steve Bell, team lead for share services development at Santander Consumer USA, described his company’s implementation of the ServiceNow Mobile Interface during his presentation at the ServiceNow Knowledge13 user conference.

Another element common to well-run cities and well-run enterprises: they both rely upon effective, efficiently delivered shared services. In cities, these include things such as power, water, and roads and streets. In enterprises, shared services include departments and functions such as human resources, legal, finance, and engineering (for technology-centric businesses).

Take me down to the Enterprise City, where the tech's all cloud and processes are pretty, as Guns N' Roses might have sung and might yet sing someday. We can but hope.

How is an enterprise – your enterprise – like a city? How isn't it?

Both serve multiple sizable and often highly diverse constituencies. Each with its own set of requirements, constraints, and political considerations.

Neal Laufenberg, manager of IT at FICO, spoke at Knowledge 13 on his company’s success with the ServiceNow StartNow methodology for implementing ServiceNow. FICO is a predictive analytics company whose customers include 90 of the 100 largest U.S. financial institutions.

Laufenberg began with a question to the audience: “You’re leaving your old tool for a reason. Why waste time and effort trying to make your new solution look and feel like the old one?”

Knowledge13 had plenty of labs and breakout sessions devoted to the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform, the new App Creator, and the range and value of customer-created applications. But if you really wanted full immersion into the power and breadth of ServiceNow for custom apps, you had to check out the first-ever CreateNow Hackathon custom application competition and showcase.

Aaron Zuber, manager of IT at Cardinal Health, spoke at Knowledge13 on how ServiceNow has helped automate compliance health dashboards for the company.

Cardinal Health, “the Business behind HealthCare,” is a leading provider of products and services across healthcare supply chain. With $108 billion revenue, the company delivers pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to 60,000 sites daily.

If you listen to many ServiceNow customers and partners -- those who spoke at Knowledge13 and others -- two common messages emerge regarding CMDBs.

1. The CMDB can enable significant value across all ServiceNow functions, within and beyond IT.
2. The value users get out of their CMDBs is only as high as the quality of the information populating those databases.

In the old days, like last year, "BYOD" meant "bring your own device," a trend of letting users connect to corporate networks with their own devices. This trend creates a sometimes daunting management challenge for many IT people.

Knowledge events are not only an opportunity for our customers to learn and engage, it is also a fantastic place for our partners to get closer to the ServiceNow community. Being part of Knowledge through the sponsorship program is hugely valuable – we know this because some of our partners have been with us from the start, using the event as an opportunity to grow their business, building a bigger presence with each Knowledge, year after year.

Using four separate systems for order management was creating too much work for the IT Production Services (ITPS) group at Sony Pictures Entertainment. The team tracks software, licenses and hardware assets for three lines of business: motion pictures, TV and home entertainment. Over time, their IT landscape became fragmented among:

-The customer order management system
-The asset recovery management system
-An outdated application for billing, fulfillment and reporting
-Spreadsheets.

CreateNow Hackathon – And the winner is… KickIT

At the end of his keynote, I announced the winning team of the first ever CreateNow Hackathon: KickIT. Each team member received an Apple TV, and eternal bragging rights.

The winning application:

Application
KickIt

Description

Gartner says by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Based on CIO conversations here at Knowledge, I’d be shocked if it takes that long. What’s clear is there’s a transformation underway.

After months of preparation, we finally kicked off and completed our pre-conference training at Know13. We offered 25 separate 2-day sessions to cover the demand for the 9 different offerings. Over 900 customers, partners, and prospects attended, which is a phenomenal number.

During today’s ExpoNow exhibition, the four finalist teams of the first ever CreateNow Hackathon presented their applications to the general public. The audience could cast votes for the best app. Tomorrow morning, during my keynote speech, the winner will be announced.

Got cloud computing? Then you've probably got virtual machines (VMs) to provision and manage. Which means you've probably got problems.

One problem: VM sprawl. Uncontrolled growth of VMs across your environment. It's like server sprawl, only faster, and even more difficult to tame.

Another problem: opacity. The opposite of visibility. While your users are spinning up VMs at will, you have little to no visibility into what they're doing, or how it's affecting the overall state of your cloud operations infrastructure.

Congratulations to all the CreateNow Hackathon participants for building many truly innovative and fun applications on the ServiceNow platform. Over 20 teams entered the competition with hopes of fame and glory. After 11 hours of heads-down development, four teams emerged as finalists to show their creations in the Expo Hall. Each team has the opportunity to wow all attendees to earn votes to determine the grand champion. Come by the Expo hall during lunch to see the creations for yourself.

The finalists are:

We've been hosting an excellent group of journalists and analysts at Knowledge13. They've challenged us and helped us validate our strategy. As expected, many discussions have led back to cloud. I bristle at being asked about our "cloud strategy" or even at being complimented for being a "leader in cloud". A leader in what? Did we become meteorologists?

The CreateNow Hackathon is one of the side events here at Knowledge13. Over 20 teams of developers, representing both customers and partners, race the clock to create innovative and transformational uses of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. They have 11 hours to produce their best work and make it to the top-4 of top contenders entering the finals. Tomorrow morning, these four teams will present their solutions in the exhibition hall.

How do you avoid having workers sit around idle on their first day on the job? At Flextronics, a provider of electronics manufacturing services (EMS) with 200,000-plus employees at 3,000 sites in 30 countries on four continents, all that idle time adds up quickly.

At the ServiceNow Knowledge13 user conference, Sergio Bernal, senior ServiceNow administrator at Flextronics, described how his company faced the problem of delays in onboarding. His team realized that all the time and footsteps required to fill out forms, request network access and obtain user IDs led to:

Finally. A platform that enables regular people to create meaningful business applications. Without coding, and without creating more work and pain for their colleagues in IT.

The CreateNow Hackathon is almost here and I am very excited to be hosting this first ever event - on Tuesday May 14th from 1:20pm until midnight.

Our customers have been transforming IT using ServiceNow for years. But, only recently have you been able to fully exploit the power of the Service Automation Platform to create nearly any IT application to drive your business forward. We have seen our customers create workflow-driven applications on the platform for shipping logistics, vendor relations, credit card loyalty programs, facilities management, insurance claims, hotel reservations and much more.

Join KPMG and ServiceNow with a panel of leading Pharmaceutical enterprises to discuss the evolution of SaaS in the Pharma and Life Sciences industries.

For the second year in a row, you can get a jump-start on meeting peers and making the most of your Knowledge13 experience by attending the ‘Networking Now' event.

K13 will be the most important ServiceNow event of the year for the entire ServiceNow community. But why is it so significant for you, a ServiceNow partner? This might be a slightly redundant question, because if there is one group who get the value of Knowledge, it’s our partners – 763 of whom have registered to attend so far.

So what makes hundreds of busy people from all over the globe take time out of the office to spend time with their peers and ServiceNow? Is it love? We’d like to think so but according to the partners I speak to it’s more about gaining a clear commercial advantage through getting enabled, networking and interacting with customers and prospects.

I joined ServiceNow in March of 2012, as Director of Cloud Infrastructure (EMEA). I manage the EMEA Cloud Infrastructure teams which include Systems Engineering, Database Engineering and Network Engineering. I love what I do. ServiceNow is exciting. Our service is flexible, easy to use and encompasses so much of what IT has always needed: an effective and quick solution to common business problems. Every single person I work with shares a passion for our service, our customers and for our shared success.  
 

We are days away from the start of Knowledge13, one of the largest gatherings of IT professionals on the planet! And you can be sure this will NOT be your typical user conference.

To make sure you are prepared for what’s coming, here are 13 tips we’ve put together to ensure you not only make it through Knowledge13, but squeeze the most out of your trip:

The exclusive PartnerNow Summit at Knowledge 13 is designed specifically to provide our valued partner community with information and tools that will help you grow your ServiceNow business.

The PartnerNow Summit takes place Monday, May 13, 2013 from 12:00pm to 5:30pm. It will be comprised of the following three key sessions:

Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) is a global leader specializing in business travel management as well as meetings and events. CWT serves companies, government institutions and non-governmental organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries and territories.

The IT team at CWT was looking to remodel the way it ran IT service management. In doing so, it faced several challenges:

ITIL – IT needed to leverage ITIL best practices to optimize handling of service incidents and support requests.

KPMG, the premier sponsor of Knowledge13, has several informative sessions to help you excel with ServiceNow! Login today to sign up.

Here's a taste of what you'll learn:

Software Asset Management
with Troy McLaughlin, Manager

Join ServiceNow at the HDI conference in Las Vegas April 16 - 19, 2013. Our team will be located in the exhibition hall – stop by for a demo or to chat about Knowledge13!

Perhaps we'll see you at one of these sessions.

Breakfast Briefing: Delivering Premium Customer Support
Wednesday, April 17 at 7:30am
Presented by Accenture

Career Education Corporation (CEC) owns colleges, schools and universities on 90 campuses in North America and Europe. With more than 75,000 students around the world and no central repository for IT Service Management, individual campuses used to implement and manage their own stand-alone applications and systems.

CEC sought a single system of record for enterprise IT and was looking to solve five major pain points:

- Rigidity: There was no room for customization in the legacy service desk workflow-based tool that ran employee onboarding. The application wasn't scalable.

Organizations are faced with many auditing challenges and often find themselves defining controls in documents and spreadsheets, manually tracking audit task assignments and storing audit documentation in disparate locations. With the ServiceNow IT GRC functionality, organizations gain a central repository that contains policies, risks, controls, findings and more all in one place. It also provides a way to automate audit tasks for remediation efforts and a dashboard view to manage the entire audit process.

During our upcoming webinar you will:

• Learn how to manage policies and risks along with documenting controls to mitigate risks
• Witness how defined control tests automate control validation
• See how to generate remediation tasks when a test fails, along with combining tests into audits and subsequent reporting

RegisterNow

Selecting a service management solution is a critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The solution has a significant impact on your business and touches every person in your organization. To help with your decision, we recommend taking a long-term view and consider these tips:

1. Think beyond just implementing or replacing a Service Desk tool.

• Take this opportunity to transform your organization to provide more efficient, effective, and economical services.
• Select a service automation platform that empowers you to:

Join ServiceNow on March 19-20, 2013 in Sydney, Australia for the Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Data Center Summit. Today's Data Center continues to evolve, and IT leaders around the world must turn these daily improvements in infrastructure and process efficiency into tomorrow's business advantage.

Building upon the popularity of our first Knowledge13 webinar, this event will give you yet another sneak peak into new events being rolled out for Knowledge13, along with giving you even more details on how we're celebrating the innovations of our community. Come see why Knowledge13 this the can't miss event of the year!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013
8:00am – 9:00am PT | 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Language: English

Every enterprise relies upon multiple custom applications – to do things that you just can’t get packaged solutions to do and, in some cases, to provide competitive advantage. But those custom applications can be an Achilles heel as business needs and underlying technologies evolve. One size does not fit all, and not every available platform is appropriate for every custom application. So how to choose the best platform for each of your enterprise's custom applications?

On Wednesday, February 20 at the Pink Elephant conference, a dynamic panel of ServiceNow customers answered audience questions about avoiding the pitfalls that make IT so freak'n hard.

These customers have seen it all – from a historic government entity whose small team was resistant to change, to a global enterprise that bit off more scope than it could chew – to avoid the common sand traps of IT, the IT leaders recommended two things:

1) Find a single system of record to run IT, and
2) Take advantage of technology to continually improve services and drive new ones.

One of the great things about this modern technology stuff: interesting and unexpected interactions with smart, thoughtful people. Several weeks ago, I had a set of such interactions via Twitter with Matt Beran (@mattberan), Ian Clayton (@ianclayton), William Goddard (@W_Goddard), and Stuart Rance (@StuartRance), people you should be following if you aren't aleady.

Providing a good online shopping experience starts with understanding customer needs and expectations in order to deliver suitable goods and services. Employees expect a similar experience with a Service Catalog.

An effective business service catalog captures employee needs and communicates negotiated service offerings and service level agreements. However, hitting service level targets requires more than just listing services. It’s essential to provide an automated self-service portal and open communication.

Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Time: 8:00am - 9:00am PT | 11:00am-12:00pm ET

In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Provide a better customer experience with a role-based self-service catalog
• Improve efficiency while reducing risk by automating fulfillment
• Build trust by providing transparency into service level performance

Our special guest speaker, from a leading retailer, will share real-world experiences about how service catalog helps their business.

RegisterNow

Missed Monday's recap? Find it here.

Tuesday's keynotes began with the themes of innovation and change. Innovation, as we know, is an important part of the modern IT service management culture. Change describes today's enterprise IT landscape and the role of the CIO. Keeping in mind how quickly IT leaders need to respond in order to keep pace, Tuesday's keynote speakers had one consistent message to convey: Don't be swept aside by the tsunami of innovation and change; be proactive and get in front of it.

It seems the annual Pink Elephant conference has conditioned attendees to expect value, humor and awe, all before 9:00am. In a previous year, I was told, a keynote speaker came riding onto the stage bright and early on an actual elephant. This year, no live elephants could be found – but Monday's keynote and breakout presentations fell nothing short of expectations.

Over 5 highly educational and inspirational days, you can get trained, maximize your time, and save your company money. What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas. You will return home with literally more Knowledge.

Top 5 reasons to register for Knowledge now:

1. By far the most economical way to get ServiceNow training

Join ServiceNow and CoreSite at the Computer World Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference.
When: March 3-5, 2013
Where: JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort & Spa in Tucson, Arizona