Our six newest ServiceNow hackathon innovations!
Two weeks ago, we finally got to organize our first hackathon in over two years. This time on a smaller scale in Europe but nonetheless with great results. We’ve worked on some really cool innovations which we didn’t want to keep from you 😃
Why organize hackathons?
Hackathons provide our ServiceNow professionals the opportunity to learn and grow as a professional, socialize and innovate for both the company and our customers. We love to explore the platform and spot opportunities to make work flow even more!
Quickly jump to
Simplified reimbursement process for Finance and employees
Is your Finance dept getting tired of manually checking and correcting reimbursement requests (due to wrong invoice dates or VAT rates), and your employees frustrated about the way they need to search for values on the receipt and type them in a reimbursement request manually while they also need to attach the receipt?
Say no more! With an app built on top of Now Mobile, you can now snap a picture with the app, upload the photo (or a PDF) and then the expense lines with the total amount, VAT percentage, description, invoice date and name of the shop/restaurant/etc. are automatically populated in ServiceNow! For the techies among us, the picture of the receipt is encrypted and sent to an API, after which the API reads its contents using Machine Learning. Cool, right?!
Making knowledge sharing interactive and fun
Within our company, knowledge sharing is a big theme. This means writing down what you know and share it with coworkers. It was high time we made knowledge sharing a bit more fun, so we decided to introduce gamification.
We started the hackathon with drawing up the gamification basics: defining a clear goal (giving a sense of purpose), rules (limitations drive creativity), feedback (so you know how you’re doing) and rewards (halfway and at the end).
Once we figured that out, we built the entire award system in ServiceNow. The system awards points to colleagues based on knowledge sharing and interaction activities performed in several third-party applications like Workplace and SharePoint.
So, when you publish a knowledge article in SharePoint for example, you get 50 points. When you update the article, you get 20 points. When you obtain a new ServiceNow certification, you get 100 points. With your points, you achieve levels. For example, at 250 points you obtain the level of Freshman. Badges can be earned when performing certain actions in a set amount of time, like sharing 100 knowledge articles in 6 months. Then you get The Walking Wiki badge.
Personal and overall leader score boards help to keep everyone motivated. Every quarter, we’ll award someone the title of Knowledge Sharing Champion.
The different levels that can be obtained including point thresholds.
With all rules, badges, levels, etc. being super easy to set up, you can adjust the app entirely to your needs and apply it to any business process. So, if you’d like to get started with gamification in ServiceNow using our application, please holler! We’d love to help you make work more fun 😊
Managing cloud onboarding
A customer’s Architecture team working on a Cloud Center of Excellence, which helps DevOps teams onboard their application to the cloud (servers, computers, applications, etc.), needed a way to manage this cloud onboarding process.
During the hackathon, we assessed which ServiceNow product would solve this problem best. We found App Engine to be the best match. Next to that, we explored ways to get rid of manual checks and tasks, create insight and visibility, and thought of how the customer could maintain it by themselves (using Citizen Development).
Smarter Quality Assurance process
Our architects perform quality checks in customer instances to ensure high-quality code using our own Quality Assurance tooling. With our fast-growing company, it was time to think of smarter ways to let our Quality Assurance process grow with us.
At first, there was a bigger dependency on the architect to perform the checks, but now we use ServiceNow Instance Scan. This tool brings self-service QA to our consultants and customers in the customer’s instance and can be run at any time. This unburdens our architects, allowing them to focus on the next big things on ServiceNow and support even more of our teams and customers.
360º view on your operations
This OOTB plug & play scoped application built on top of ServiceNow ITSM with UI Builder provides Agents, Management and Executives with the right dashboarding to make informed decisions:
- Agents — An operational dashboard helps agents with workload awareness, decide what do to when and where and manage queues.
- Management — A cockpit kind of overview helps management efficiently run the IT department based on the right data. Think SLAs, KPIs, performance metrics, opened ticket volume trends, etc.
- Executives — With access to our 360˚ CIO dashboard, executives have all the insights they need to steer the IT organization on top level.
Fun fact: the application can be applied to any process in ServiceNow, making this solution highly versatile. No wonder this innovation became the WINNER of the hackathon!
4Industry Customer Success Package
Our sister company 4Industry also hacked along with us! They worked on a strategy (package incl. assets) to get plant directors and key shop floor workers on board about 4Industry.
They determined the scope of the project and way of execution. In the next weeks, the entire package will be created. When it’s ready to be deployed, they hope to enthuse many more about the power of 4Industry!
Interested?
Did any of these ServiceNow hackathon innovations spark your interest? Let us know! We’d be more than happy to tell you more about a particular or multiple innovations.
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