Last week I attended Knowledge ’10, a user conference for Service-Now.com, in San Diego California. Unlike the HDI National Conference, Knowledge is focused on one product, one vendor. Service-now.com is a web based SaaS (software as a service) IT service management software solution. While most customers use the hosted/cloud solution, the software can be installed on site. The software is built around the ITIL model providing incident, problem, change, release, knowledge, and project management and service (request catalog).

The conference is held each year in April in San Diego (where the company is headquartered.) Cost for the conference is $1200 (early bird rate >60d in advance is $999) which includes two days of pre-conference admin or ITIL v2-v3 bridge training (a $1000 value.) The admin training is valuable if you are a new customer or have employees that are new to Service-Now.com. The ITIL training is useful if you’ve previously been trained on ITIL v2 and want to make that leap without going through all the v3 training. If you attend one of those, then the rest of the conference is practically free.

The conference officially began Monday night with a reception to meet the Service-Now.com developers. Service-now.com did something very smart – they color coded the lanyards. Customers wore black, Service-Now.com had orange (aka “Orange Necks”, a term coined by Matt Beran), and white for Service-now.com partners. Other conferences have done similar things with colored shirts or tags than hang off the name badges. From what I heard, attendance was around 500 which was nearly double last year’s attendance. That’s impressive for a product that has about 400 customers to date.

I attended the conference with two of my employees (Scott Hetzel, Titletown HDI Newsletter Editor, and Chris Smith). Chris was there to attend admin training and get as much out of his first “real world” business trip while Scott and I were there to answer some nagging questions and learn all we could to implement Change Management and an effective CMDB. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I urged Scott and Chris to make notes about questions/problems they could take to the conference. Before the reception was over, my list was empty. The value of the conference was quickly becoming apparent.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the three of us attended various sessions with our main objectives in mind. Also during the week, we could schedule 30 minute one-on-one sessions with developers and engineers to solve whatever problems we like. We spent 30 minutes talking to Bob Alexander, our support manager regarding an intermittent performance issue we have been seeing over the last couple months. Within the 30 minutes, he diagnosed the problem as our virtual server running low on memory and proposed a change request. Thinking about our own internal processes, I could see that same 30 minute session taking up to 30 days to resolve. I’m sold on SaaS!

Later in the week I also met with Christen Mitchell to discuss localization. During our rapid deployment, we didn’t always have the luxury of doing the Spanish and Chinese translations for field, options, and other text we developed. Now we find ourselves with a hodge-podge of translated and non-translated text. Christen showed me how to put the system in “learn” mode to identify items that required additional translations, how to get the translations made, install the new translations once they were made, and best practices for development going forward. I should note that one of the key reasons my boss agreed to let us go was to spend time with the developers to resolve current issues and learn what we could. This objective was definitely fulfilled. This was the first year they offered the one-on-one sessions. I’d call it a huge success.

Most of the sessions were done by the Service-now.com employees regarding new features coming out in May. These were highlighted at Tuesday morning’s keynote address by Fred Luddy, CEO. The Service-Now.com employees did a wonderful job. Some sessions were panels or case studies. These were also informative because it gave us a chance to see what other companies did with their deployments or continuous improvement. A couple key takeaways from those were 1) If you are implementing a new tool such as Service-Now.com, always re-assess your processes. Don’t just implement the old process on the new tool or you’ll miss key enabling features. 2) Minimize your customizations if at all possible (see #1.) A few sessions were labs where people got a chance to learn and improve their skills on several of the key features of the software. Service-now.com had a conference portal setup to allow attendees to request and provision their own instance of the software for these labs. They used their own software to register the request and automatically provision the VM. Very slick.

It wouldn’t be a conference without the people. I met a lot of great people throughout the week and look forward even more to keeping in touch with them. I can’t say enough good things about the Service-now.com employees. Fred Luddy sets a passionate tone that resonates throughout the culture. The other customers were also wonderful to talk to about their processes, implementation, current projects, and more. Whether they were front line support, system admins/developers, or management, they all were happy with the product.

One other takeaway from the conference was the consideration of leveraging one of the Service-now.com partners to assist with our change management/CMDB implementation. That remains one of the few pieces of our IT service management toolset that is not part of Service-now.com that needs to be. What often happens with our implementations is that we stand up something small and simple and then continue to build on it. While we have a decent request process built around an in-house tool, we have very little ITIL knowledge to guide us to “a better way”. Without a framework, we’ll take that small piece and continue to “nickle and dime” our enhancements for years until we have a Frankenstein tool built on another learn-as-we-go process. To make the tool and process successful, I am putting together a proposal for my boss to partner with someone who has done this before.

At the closing keynote on Thursday afternoon, they announced the winner of the first Innovation of the Year Award. Of 20 entries, we were selected as one of the three finalists. Blue Cross and Progressive Energy were the other two with very impressive additions to the change management component that took months of man hours to develop. Our entry was a loaner reservation system that took about 40 hours to implement based on an idea we had mentioned to Service-Now.com a few months ago and they prototyped in about 20 minutes. I’m honored to say that our system won. Service-now.com is considering making the addition a standard plugin. I was blown away. We have three conference fees and lodging covered for next year. I look forward to returning next year.