The top ServiceNow experts you should be following

Anyone who works with ServiceNow is lucky to be working within an ecosystem full of passionate advocates willing to share their knowledge and expertise.

That means no matter where you are in your ServiceNow journey—whether you’re now to the platform and looking implement it within your organization, or you’re a professional with many years under your belt—there’s a number of places you can go for news, tips, and guidance on ServiceNow.

You may also be too busy to spend time looking for new resources. We’ve done the hard work for you and brought together seven top ServiceNow influencers that should be on your radar, as well as finding out where they go for their news.

Give them a follow to hear some great insights into working with ServiceNow, as well as information on the latest technical updates!

Travis Toulson
VP of Product

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

How quickly you can get started on solving business problems. No setup, no build tools, no complications. You just pull up the ServiceNow instance and get to work solving problems.

The one ServiceNow tip that Travis recommends everyone does ASAP:

Surround yourself with the right team.  ServiceNow is full of challenges, both technical and non-technical. The right team can help you navigate those and help you grow.

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

I follow a bunch of folks, probably too many to mention, but here’s the top ones:

1. ServiceNow Guru
2. Jace Benson
3. ServiceNow Elite
4. Kalaiarasan Pushpanathan’s Unlearn Series
5. Nathan Firth’s ServicePortal.io
6. And of course anything from the ServiceNow developer advocate types, such as Chuck Tomasi, Andrew Barnes, Brad Tilton and Dave Slusher.

Find Travis:

Dan Grady
Senior Advisory Solution Consultant, Performance Analytics and Reporting

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

That’s like asking me if I have a favorite child. There are many things I love about ServiceNow and I love them all “most” equally. The love starts with ServiceNow’s understanding that experience impacts productivity. That understanding has manifested itself in a focus on continually improving the experiences employees, customers, business partners have when they engage ServiceNow as part of their day. Every release of the platform, it seems as if something that improves the way work gets done has been enhanced significantly. Most recently it was consumer grade mobile capabilities, before that a native Virtual Agent. The list goes on and on.

As a non-developer, I also appreciate that the focus on experience extends to those who are involved in authoring experiences for others. The fact that an organization could potentially put the power to develop and maintain a Virtual Agent experience in the hands of someone within the line of business, someone who really understands where it could make the biggest impact, that definitely increases the likelihood of long-term sustainable success and scales the value an organization will get out of the NowPlatform.

Too many organizations focus their data efforts on producing executive and management level dashboards. The reality is that the numbers on those dashboards don’t move just because we have executive and management level dashboards, they only move when we start influencing the behaviors of all of the other stakeholders involved in delivering on those outcomes.

Traditionally, organizations have struggled to get analytics beyond the corner offices and into the hands of the folks on the frontline. The native reporting, analytics and predictive intelligence (machine learning) capabilities of the NowPlatform not only automate the production of the more traditional high level dashboards, but also drives intelligence into workflows or experiences that anyone in the business can be engaged in (even if they might not even know it). For someone who has spent their entire career trying to help companies find ways in which they can use data to make a measurable impact, it’s exciting to watch as they take advantage of these offerings, and exponentially increase the value of their data.”

The one ServiceNow tip that Dan recommends everyone does ASAP:

Don’t look at measurement and analytics as an afterthought, make it part of your day one plan. If you are reading this article, you’re probably pretty passionate about ServiceNow, and I bet you’ve got some ideas on how you can use the NowPlatform to make an additional impact at your organization. Acting on that idea will require some sort of investment—time, money, resources. Being able to articulate the value that you’ve already received, or how embedded analytics and intelligence can create future value at a reduced cost will be key to making your case.

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

There are two main resources for me—the ServiceNow Community, and the Workflow site, which produces a ton of thought leadership content.

Find Dan:

Nathan Firth
President and Chief Portal Officer

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

My passion is in user experience, so I love the flexibility of the ServiceNow platform. It delivers beautiful employee experiences (using Service Portal) while solving complex business problems, in a quick and efficient way.

The one ServiceNow tip that Nathan recommends everyone does ASAP:

Take the time to really learn JavaScript. I see so many developers on ServiceNow just copying, pasting, and hacking together scripts and then wondering why everything keeps breaking.

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

I love Jace Benson’s blog. But funny enough, my most frequent blog is my own. A lot of the content I create on there is for my own reference, so I’m always going back and reading my own posts.

Find Nathan:

Mark Scott
Senior Software Architect

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

The unification of data is the coolest thing ever! We don’t have to write crazy APIs or integrations to allow an enterprise to access their data. ServiceNow enables companies to make very complicated data mappings, digestions and linkages without an insane amount of customization and technical debt.

The one ServiceNow tip that Mark recommends everyone does ASAP:

Give lots of thought to your ITOM practices. If you’ve implemented CMDB, make sure that all of your assets/CIs are being discovered successfully. Sit down with technical resources who have knowledge of the physical network architecture and make them part of the process. Additionally, ensure ServiceNow becomes part of the network infrastructure process as well. A well planned and clean CMDB is the basis for any successful ServiceNow implementation, and is great insurance that it won’t become shelfware.

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

There’s a few places. On Twitter, @NowSupport is great for keeping informed of patch fixes and the ServiceNow community in general, @jacebenson is an excellent developer resource and just a nice guy. John’s website hasn’t been updated in a while but if you’re looking for deep, deep technical resources on the ServiceNow platform, this is the place. Specifically, his work on MID servers holds up to this day, even though it was written in 2012.

Find Mark:

John Benedetti
Architect and Developer

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

How easy it is to focus on rapid deployment of business and process flow solutions out of the box while still being able to work outside the box with scripting and integrations when the solution requires it.

The one ServiceNow tip that John recommends everyone does ASAP:

Join the Developer Community and spin up your own Personal Development Instance.  Tinker and experiment!

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

The subreddit /r/servicenow/ as well as that community’s dedicated Slack channel.

Find John:

Ryan Gillespie
Platform Solutions Consultant

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

I love how agile the platform is. For me, I always use the LEGO analogy in how I approach using ServiceNow. It’s LEGO for adults—I have all of these pieces and parts that I can put together, and the only question I feel I need to ask myself isn’t ‘can I?’, the question I always ask is ‘but should I?’

The one ServiceNow tip that Ryan recommends everyone does ASAP:

There’s a huge difference between customization and configuration. Understand the difference and evaluate your instance. Configuration isn’t a bad thing, scoped applications aren’t a bad thing. Over customization is a bad thing! Before implementation, or while vetting an enhancement, make sure you really need it, that it’ll provide value and that people will actually use it. Too frequently, a stakeholder fights tooth and nail for a new field to be added to a form, and then nobody uses it. Also, leverage governance and reporting!

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

Besides the ServiceNow newsletters, Community, conferences and SNUGs, I really do read the Acorio blog posts. It’s impossible to know everything and I feel I work with the brightest and best people in the world. I gain a lot from my teammates every day, and one of the ways I learn something new is to see what they’ve put together for the good of the ecosystem. The Acorio “Candid” podcast is also really good. I’m not plugging here—I really do read and listen to them! Even if I wasn’t an Acorian, I’d still do it because there’s a lot of great information to be had.

Find Ryan:

Goran Lundquvist
Senior Application Developer

What he loves most about using ServiceNow:

The possibilities that exist within the platform. And how can I not mention the community and the people?!

The one ServiceNow tip that Goran recommends everyone does ASAP:

Get up to speed with the new functionalities that come with each latest release. Never stop learning and, of course, join SNDevs on slack!

His favourite podcast, blog or resource to learn and keep up to date about ServiceNow:

Hmm… tough one. I try to keep up with the ServiceNow Community YouTube channel. There you have the TechNow Episodes, Chuck Live stream, Live Code Happy Hour, and much more.

Find Goran:

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