Now Summit Amsterdam

Last week I attended, together with some of my colleagues at ASP, the Now Summit in Amsterdam. This is a one-day technology and business conference that brings together ServiceNow experts in IT, HR, customer service, and security, their partners, existing customers and prospects.

Now Summit is organized in such a way that one is able to follow multiple tracks. Whether you are in IT, security, HR, or customer service, you can learn how you can deliver great experiences and transform how work gets done throughout your enterprise. Now Summit allows for customers and prospects to explore powerful solutions, build lasting relationships, and extend the value of a ServiceNow investment in exciting, new ways.

Now Summit Amsterdam: sessions attended

At ASP, we are both partner and customer of ServiceNow. It was a great experience meeting with my peers and experts from ServiceNow. Now Summit is all about learning from the best, connecting, sharing best practices, getting inspired, and having fun.
Now Summit Amsterdam offers keynote presentations and education sessions. I attended the following sessions: Keynote session by Dave Wright – ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer -, customer sessions from Nationale Nederlanden, Heineken, ING, followed by the closing session from Chris Pope – Vice President of Innovation ServiceNow.

The Keynote session was all about making work simple and productive across the enterprise. In our professional lives, antiquated processes can make it difficult to get our needs met as quickly and easily. With ServiceNow, that’s about to change. Dave Wright explained how digital transformation on the Now Platform takes customers into a new era of intuitive and intelligent experiences.

After the keynote session, I attended a session from Nationale Nederlanden (NN). NN group uses ServiceNow to achieve a single, efficient enterprise service management model across multiple departments and companies. This session was oriented towards continuous delivery with ServiceNow. They showcased how DevOps (mainly CI/CD practices) are possible for COTS applications. Key in their message was the statement that technology components of DevOps require lots of tooling, configurations and integrations. These are generally quite easy to install, configure and integrate, but the big challenge is to overcome obstacles on following levels: dependencies, politics, access, mentality. The process of developing on the ServiceNow platform within NN consists of a high level of automated processes. My top takeaway from this session is: It is not about doing Agile, it is about being Agile.

Heineken talked about how they use ServiceNow for managing incidents in their supply chain. Think of leakage in factories, broken machinery etc. To summarize, they implemented incident management outside of IT incidents. This is the power of the platform. Customers can use native platform features and use these to apply on multiple business processes.

Pepijn Merkies and Henk Coppens, both Agile Product Owners at ING talked about the new organization that has been put in place within ING. Time to market and innovation are the current challenges of all companies. ING started with a new approach to cope with these by the creation of BizzDevOps teams consisting of IT and business professionals to accelerate innovation and change at pace. ING replaced software from Clarity, Jira and HP. What I take away from this session is the fact that the ServiceNow platform is able to support customers in their journey towards agility.

The closing keynote from Chris Pope was all about the new features in the latest release of ServiceNow. The audience got a great demo on Virtual Agent, Agent Workspace, Integration Hub, Mobile Studio to name a few.

We had a great day in Amsterdam, we came back full of ideas and energy. We are more than happy to explain, show, demonstrate, discuss the massive possibilities of the platform with you.