ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Citizen Development. I'm Kim Kaull, and I am a product marketing manager here at ServiceNow on our App Engine product. So citizen development is near and dear to my heart. I lead our citizen dev messaging. Today, we're specifically going to dive into how to scale citizen development program while keeping your risk in check. As you may already know, citizen development really seems like a great idea on the surface. You have more people creating apps, you're tapping into the domain expertise of people who actually want to solve their own business challenges. But as we also know, with things that sound too good to be true at first, there is some careful consideration and rigorous planning that you actually need to undertake in order to have a successful program that's going to enter, scale safely and drive results for your organization. So just as a quick reminder, before we dive in, we'll have that Q&A open, please feel free to put your questions in the box throughout the session, and let's get started. So today, we're incredibly lucky to have 2 of our experts joining us as speakers, Dale Dunkerley and Paige Duffey. Dale and Paige are both leaders on our product success team, and they have deep expertise in implementing and guiding the growth of some of the most successful citizen development programs out there. So before we go ahead and pass it over to the two of them, we need 2 things. I'll give you a quick preview of our agenda, and we'll kick it off with a poll. So here's our agenda: We're going to go through the low-code promise and overview, really just some context level setting; look at governance within low-code, why is it so important, what types are there, how you get started with it because this is really a foundation of your whole citizen development program. Citizen development in low-code is our next point, and then we'll wrap with how the platform actually helps you with governance because this is so important in ServiceNow and next steps. So a little bit of fun at first, let's go to a poll and here's our question. What is the main reason that you're building or you're interested in building on a citizen development program? So I'll leave this up here for about a minute or so and let you go ahead and answer. And I will read out the multiple choices that we have. Challenge or reason one, our core developer team is overwhelmed, got above that backlog. We need to increase our development capacity. Also a good one, we want lines of business to be able to solve their own challenges by building apps directly. Or we must build applications faster to keep up with demand. We'll go ahead and give you a few seconds to answer. [Operator Instructions]. You can also access the resource materials, and we have a bunch of stuff in here in the resource list panel. And then at the very end, if you could please give us a huge favor and submit the survey that will pop up when the webinar is completely over. We really appreciate that feedback. Okay, results are coming in. Thank you so much for participating in the poll. Now I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Dale. Dale take us away.

Thanks, thanks, Kim, for the introduction. So let's just remind ourselves a little bit about what low-code can do for us. And as Kim has mentioned, it's all about App Engine and creative workflows. Ultimately, we're looking at developing applications that are not necessarily part of the common suite of applications. They're all -- they're not out-of-the-box apps, they're specifically built, they can be simple, they can be mission-critical, but they are part of our general scoped apps type of development. And ultimately, what we're looking to do here is federate application development. However, ServiceNow does a lot of the platform lifting, heavy lifting for ourselves of building apps by abstracting away from dev complexity and from those developers. And remember, we're still using the platform as a base with all the workflows, reference models, out of the box, kind of synchronization, scoped apps, other stuff. We've got loads of things we can connect it to it. And because all of those apps are delivered on the single platform, we have some built-in governance capabilities, which ensures that enterprise standards and compliance are kept at a maximum. Thus, the developer is creating and configuring apps with low-code type of strategy, maximize their business functionality much quicker and much easier than ones that don't. The final apps are, therefore, much more user-centric, easier to manage and much safer to scale. And through things like citizen developer programs, as you just talked about, you can turn anyone with a [ low ] level of IT skill into a potential developer, as the tools that enable these programs are fairly straightforward, very easy to use. One of those things we were just talking about there just Kim was mentioning a citizen developer. Now developer -- citizen developer can make a term for a lot of people in IT, especially the ones who have been around for a very long time, very uncomfortable because essentially, code is still code, whether it's low code, whether it's high code or pro code, there are still risk-associated with code. And but with some appropriate governance, and we feel a low-risk, low-code strategy is definitely achievable with every implementation of the App Engine. And through this webinar we'll explore some of those items that make up that particular governance. So let's talk about the low-code promise, right? Low-code is there to ensure that we've got the right level of kind of usability and functionality that we need to have when we're doing our normal development through things like App Studio or other studios and scope apps, but using things like App Engine Studio and App Engine Management Center to make it kind of come alive. And what's the real promise we've got with that low code one? What we're looking to do with Citizen Developer and low-code promises is to have faster innovation. What we're looking to do is, as we all know, the COVID-19 health mandates and all of the other initiatives that we've had over the last couple of years, has meant that IT specifically within large enterprises and other enterprises, has to change really fast. And that's not slowing down. It's not just a blip on the radar. And we're going to move away from it. Everybody's got used to that pace now. Everybody has to move and change as fast as we can. We want to build apps in days and weeks, not months, years and long programs anymore. And what we are -- by doing that, we also need to free up pro developers for those specialized projects. We can't just be a single source, churn them in, churn them out type of application where you can just sit there and wait for that to happen. You can do that and you can scale if you have the ability to do so, but that can be quite resource-intensive as well. But through the low-code promise and App Engine Studio and App Engine Management Center, we can also give you much better user satisfaction through the transparency of looking at user satisfaction. Ultimately, that low-code promise on this one allows you to build those apps in a much more consumer-based type of fashion. Everybody uses eBay, Amazon, all of those types of ones. Everybody is used to using those on their phones. Why can't we use those at work? Everybody from a lot of the top-level CIOs are realizing that that's the way IT needs to be consumed. That's how people use it every day of their lives. They want to use that at work. By doing that, we need to anticipate what those customers and employees need, and who better to anticipate those needs than the people who own their own apps and need to deliver those apps. Therefore, by owning and delivering their own apps and making the changes themselves, they can actually be the ones who actually are responsible for making sure that the priorities, as they come up are moving the way they need to. And by doing this, we can get a much more better efficiency of scale. We can go on and talk about how low-code can be part of the main strategy for doing any type of bespoke app. You could start with that as a strategy and only need to go to mission-critical or pro code types of things when it's needed rather than actually going the other way and say, there are some specific use cases. Now that doesn't mean we can't have a hybrid approach. And if you're maturing a citizen development program, you probably want to be starting small. We'll talk about that in a moment. But for the most time, we want people to be able to get engaged and get updated very quickly. Because in my opinion, I think doing citizen development is going to -- for overall application development is going to do what agile did to waterfall development. It's going to speed it up and kind of really knock it out of the water when it says they're going, how do you actually want to start developing. So our product success, we've -- as Kim has said, we spend a lot of time with our customers. We've implemented quite a few different programs. I myself have also come from a customer, and we've done lots and lots of implementations around citizen development. We've developed some citizen development leading practices. And the first and foremost part of this one is the vision and the plan. So what you want to be doing is understanding your key purpose. What is it that you want to build citizen development and/or low-code specifically for? You need to understand what's going to make up your foundational element and where do you want to go? Ultimately, the next step then is focusing that program, really understanding how we can kind of make sure that your first steps are the right steps. They have the right level of engagement. You have the right level of people, you have the right level of use case that you want to [indiscernible]. We'll delve into a little bit more kind of what these leading practices we'll be looking at. Once we've got that focusing on there, what you need to do is enable and empower anybody who is part of that initial part of the program to establish that model. And also make sure that they really understand how they can be supported through that life cycle. And the last, but definitely not least, and it's the one we probably spent a lot of customers doing, is establishing the guardrails and establishing their governance within low-code, which means you need to decide what an application life cycle is. And if you already have apps and are part of App Engine and all that, you probably have one, but it's good to reiterate how that will work within your low-code and citizen development program. But ultimately, what we always advocate for is automating their development process and automating those guardrails. So let's get into that into a little bit more detail. So the vision in the plan, as I just discussed, was we're looking at value realization, business alignment, looking at what productivity gains we want to be looking at, sort of backlog, all of that information. But one of the key elements behind this one as with any program, you need to have management support. You need to have commitment not only from management but from the people in the team to make sure the resources that are part of doing this have the right level of skill, but also have the right time commitment. This is not a part-time job, it's not something we can kind of do just on the sideline. Ultimately, we also then to make sure that we need to do the things like marketing that success, marketing the right level of information to the right people and actually building on that success, but making sure there's a commitment behind it. Once we've understood exactly how we're going to do that and what their plan is, focusing that program about identifying those use cases, just the initial ones around does it have the right business acumen in terms of when it makes the right message we sent across. Is there a technical one where it's not too big for some of these ones and have lots of integrations and [indiscernible], just something simple and powerful that will actually make those particular use cases initially quite well. But one of the things you also do need to consider when you're looking at program is recruiting the right citizen developers to make that work. We don't want pure business users. What we really want is more of an IT savvy type of users who can help you along with the journey and give you the right feedback as you're going along. Once you've selected use cases in your citizen developers, what we want to do, get it into is now learning and look at your own approved citizen developer programs. Ultimately, we have our own. As you know, we've got our own trainings and other areas where we can do the citizen development. However, you also want to bolster that with some of your own trade, your own guidelines, your own governance. Now maybe for the first couple of rounds you're still building that. But essentially, that governance around what they can and what they can't do during their training is vitally important because you want to be able to tell them where they can go, where they cannot. Eventually, you'll get your point of probably automating that and making sure that it's something that they can't do, not necessarily telling them not to do it. And that's honestly the easiest and best method we found. But as we were talking earlier, putting that support model, that big wrapper around all of them to actually then say, how do I engage, where do I get my technical support. This isn't working the way I expected to do after my training. All of that information you need to put around that. It can't just be a, here's your training and let them go. You need to make sure that you maybe align a couple of pro-developers with them just to make sure they get through the right -- the first couple of steps, putting some communities of practice in there where you can kind of talk about each of the experiences and work it through. The other one is establishing those guardrails. Those guardrails themselves are things like the application life cycle as you've got up the top there, which we'll talk more a little bit later on in the webinar. But what we've also got is how do we keep that application life cycle in check. We've got App Engine Management Center and the default pipeline to actually move things across. We've got testing frameworks and instant scans of where that lands in certain parts of the platforms to ensure that it fit for purpose and passes on the checks. We've got other development tools and code reviews and approvals and that type of thing that could be also be manually done initially as well that provides a level of governance of is it fit for purpose? Is it not going to break anything which reduces that risk further around how we actually do that deployment into production. And of course, you've got your support and operations, which, in all honesty is part of the general operations of the platform. So let's just kind of revisit that just for a minute, right? Just to boil it down because I know I've talked a lot, quite a lot about it. So I'm just going to boil it down to some key decision areas. Select the right use cases, make sure it's the right use cases in the right format for the right way. We can help you with some criteria for that, enable that citizen developer to make sure that they have right training and right support or else they're not going to feel like they're engaged and that they can actually do what has been asked for them. And most importantly, establish those guardrails through the governance. And that will definitely bring you along that low-code application type of scenario in both their journey and make sure you commit to it and market your successes as much as you need to. Okay. All right, with that, I'll pass it over to Kim.

Thanks, Dale. Okay. So yes, lots to think about. I'm looking at this, thinking, oh my gosh, I don't know if I could be a citizen developer. But I think my family has enlisted me as tech support at home. So being recruited unwillingly in one regard, but thank you so much. So let's deal another poll here. This one is unsurprisingly about the challenges that might come along with starting a citizen development program. So here we go. What is your #1 challenge in pursuing a citizen development strategy? This could be if you're already pursuing a development program or if you are intending to, what do you anticipate might be a challenge? And we could potentially help you out with. So if you could do the multiple choice, I'll read them out again, just to be consistent. Options are: We believe in citizen development, but winning internal buy-in, that's the uphill battle; governance, giving citizen developers admin access, you're crazy, that seems high risk; how do we maintain and grow a program once it's off the ground, it's really hard; um, where do we start? I'll give you a few seconds to answer. And just as a last reminder, you can submit any questions for the Q&A panel that we are going to have after Paige speaks, while waiting if you have already submitted your answer. And then please submit your survey at the very, very end when it pops up on your screen. Okay. Looks like people are answering. Great. Okay. Thank you so much for participating in the poll. It's nice to have you engage in this session, and we really appreciate the feedback. So I'm going to pass it back to Dale to take it away once again.

Thanks very much, Kim. So thanks for a bit of a break. But I guess why is really governance that important on these ones. Yes, we can put some manual things in place, but ultimately, we're talking about governance as a whole. Well, really, what we're looking to do is we want to deliver on that low-code promise. We want to make sure that we have -- that is faster, that we have that user satisfaction and we have that efficiency. But by doing so, governance needs to be designed specifically if you're looking at speed to be flexible, but have the same level of control because governance can be a hindrance or it can be an enabler. And essentially, what we're looking to do by having the right level of governance that is either automated or has a greater level of efficiency, it means you can maintain the speed and increase your speed but maintain the standards and controls throughout your application life cycle and through its normal development. What we're also looking to the governance is we want to make sure that the right user experience in there. It's at the entire ethos, the middle of governance is all about how do we actually make sure that the users themselves can see what's going on. So we need to make sure that it's transparent, people can see where the development is, who needs to approve what. It needs to be task-like, like a lot of things inside ServiceNow. But with a little bit more transparency and an ability to see let's kind of follow the bouncing ball and make sure it runs the way it needs to. The other thing that we've got there is a greater scale of efficiency. Governance is there to manage mostly risk. The risk behind moving from one part of the platform to another platform to another platform in terms of new instances. And what we then need to do is make sure that as risk-free and as trouble-free as possible by automating that through some of the deployments and the testing and instant scans and some decision development areas. It makes sure that, that risk is kept to a minimum. There's always going to be required maintenance on all of those aspects, but it requires maintenance on all governance. There's always a I need to view it and see it to do as fit. But by technically doing it, you're also removing an element of human error and an assessment of risk that could be differentiated between one person to another person when they're actually trying to kind of push across. So with that said, I'm going to stop talking now. I'm going to pass it across over to Paige Duffey, who's going to talk to you all through the different types of governance and how that applies in the platform.

Thanks, Dale. All right. So I'm going to talk to you first off about a few different types of governance. So as you can see here, there are 3 types of governance that we're focusing on. First up is your business governance. This really works to establish your center of excellence, things like your scrum processes, and then really outline the processes to guide your citizen development program, like what training is required, what's required as far as demand intake, what questions you need to ask. Next, I'm actually going to jump down to operational governance and then move back up. So this is really operational piece. What's your release cycle? And do you want your citizen developers to follow that same release cycle? What are the requirements around changes? Are they required to put in changes? Things of that nature. And then we come back to technical governance. This focuses in on the tools and technologies used to enforce the governance established at the business and operational levels. But that really leads us into one of the most important parts that we've already touched on a little bit, and that's your application life cycle. So we really want to focus on how we put guardrails in place that cover all those areas of governance that mitigate the risk, but we also want it to be reasonable and not get in the way of innovation. So we want to encourage our citizen developers by not getting in their way but also prevent them from making a mistake. So we kind of do that by looking at this application life cycle. And really, every app should have the same life cycle. If you're already developing apps in your system, as Dale said, you probably already have an application life cycle. You can easily take that life cycle and apply it to citizen developers. Some parts of it may be a little bit different, but the overall general idea of the life cycle should be pretty similar. We start with our intake. So these are the questions that you're going to ask to route to the right platform into the right decision-makers. Next, we move into the build part, and this is really making sure that your citizen developers have the proper support while they're building their application. Next, we move into validate, and that's ensuring all apps are reviewed and tested to the same standard. Next up is deployment. So releasing those apps to production, and is that based on your existing company requirements. Next is maintenance. I did kind of break this to a part from this diagram, but I wanted to specifically hit on maintenance because it's a really key decision point that I don't think a lot of people think about. But who's responsible for maintaining ongoing maintenance and support for that application? Is it your citizen development department or maybe if that crosses a certain threshold, it moves back to central IT and support. That's a decision that you want to make before that application ever makes it to production. Next up, we want to monitor our apps. So is the app healthy? Is it being used. And then when it's not being used anymore, we want to know when it's okay to retire it. We don't want to have a bunch of technical debt on the platform that's not actually bringing any value or use to the company. So again, you really want to make sure that you treat the citizen development apps like they have a real life, life cycle. But as we move into this next slide, you'll see that we've taken that same application life cycle concept and we've created tools to help manage it. And these tools align us at guardrails that don't cycle that innovation that we're wanting to promote from your citizen developers. I won't get too into the weeds on these right now because we're going to cover some of them here in the next few slides. So next up, if we kind of zoom in on that application life cycle, and we look specifically at that validation and deployment piece, we can highlight some of the automation that App Engine pipelines provide. So this is an example pipeline. You've got just kind of a standard dev, test stage and prod. But this App Engine pipeline, it allows you to kind of automate the movement between the instances. So in this particular instance, something moves from dev down to the app repo, up into test once it's approved, then it validates policy and practices with instance scan and it tests the apps with ATF. Once approved again, it moves back into the application repo, back up into staging, we run those instance scans with ATF again. And then once it's finally approved and ready to go into production or automatically move into production. And so if you want to know a little bit more about pipelines and AEMC or App Engine Management Center, which I'll be covering here in a second, Dale is actually doing a knowledge lab this year. So if you're interested in learning how to set this up, definitely attend. Next up a little bit about App Engine Management Center. So App Engine Management Center really takes all the pieces and parts such as application intake, App Engine Studio and pipelines and put them into one view. So from here, you kind of get that end-to-end low-code governance view. You get to know what's going on in your instance, and it just helps you manage all aspects of that application life cycle that we were just talking about. You can also view adoption metrics, you can manage your developers and you can keep an eye on what's moving to your pipelines. Next up, I am actually going to hand it over to Tom to do a demo. So we will rejoin as soon as the demo is complete.

To realize the true benefit low-code app development can have on your business, it's critical that you build on a platform that allows you to govern citizen development at scale. App Engine Management Center on the ServiceNow platform equips you with everything necessary to manage all aspects of low-code app dev. With this all-new App Engine capability, you can control the intake of new applications, streamline developer collaboration and manage the app deployment process in a manner that is custom tailored to your infrastructure. Let's take a look at this powerful capability in action by watching an application go from concept to production deployment using an expedient and efficiently controlled process made possible via App Engine Management Center. It all starts with an idea. Carla Humble, a marketing operations director had a flash of inspiration recently about how she could streamline the way her company puts on marketing events of any size. Carla hasn't built an app before. So to get started, she applies to be a citizen developer using App Engine's out of the box app intake form. This forum helps Carla think like an experienced low-code developer by addressing some of the key details upfront, questions like, is the process repeatable? And will the app require access to sensitive data or info from other departments, can help builders design an app properly from the get-go? With the basic info complete, Carla submits the app idea for her admins to review. From here, we move to the admin perspective, joining Able Tutor in App Engine Management Center. The dashboard offers a bird's eye view to all aspects of low-code governance, including collaboration requests, deployment tasks, overview of the app deployment pipeline and, of course, intake application requests. Able opens up the request from Carla and after ensuring the app concept complies to their company's guidelines, he approves. This approval will send off an automatic notification e-mail to Carla and grant her the necessary system access. Given the flexibility of the ServiceNow platform, you could also incorporate your own welcome packages or references to trading materials as part of this process. Excited by the approval, Carla gets the right to work on our marketing event management app with our newly granted access to App Engine Studio. This low-code development environment provides a unified experience for developers of all skill levels providing a range of tools that can help builders develop nearly any type of app. Data within App Engine Studio can be imported, developed from scratch or extended from existing ServiceNow constructs. The tooling in App Engine Studio insurers users can seamlessly go from data model to form development, all the way to policy and rules all in one place. With our initial data models complete, Carla can add an array of consumer-grade end user experiences spanning everything from dedicated portals and admin workspaces to mobile apps and catalog items. These end user experiences are brought to life by logic and automation, whether it's a modular decision table or a streamlined workflow, App Engine allows you to easily develop flexible and reusable automation to power any use case. Should the need arise, you can amplify the functionality of your app by leveraging the wide array of solutions available via automation engine. This will allow you to incorporate things like low-code API integrations and even robotic process automation. Flow Designer makes it easy to develop this automation and even offers a diagram view that makes understanding complex logic as easy as tracing a flow diagram with your cursor. This flowchart style perspective gives builders an easy way to design their automation with intuitive depictions of things like conditionals and branching logic. After just a few days, Carla is ready to release the first version of our marketing event management app. But before she does, she wants to invite a few experts to help her get started on version 2. Using the built-in collaboration features of App Engine Studio, she can extend an invite to both a visual designer and integration expert to help her take this app to the next level. For now though, Carla is confident her app can start adding value to her team, so she submits the app for deployment. After outlining some release notes, the deployment request is now safely in the hands of her admins. Back in App Engine Management Center, Able notices a few new items to address. He first opens up the collaboration request Carla sent out and performs a quick verification before approval. Using this mechanism and App Engine's collaborator descriptors, his team ensures that access to low-code development tools is provisioned in a rational fashion, providing experts with access to the right builders for their needs. With the collaboration request approved, Able can address the app deployment request. After a review of the application, Able can sign off on the deployment request, confirming that the app's data models, end user experiences, automation, integrations and security policies meet the standards outlined by his Citizen Development Center of Excellence. That due diligence enables him to authorize the app's promotion to their test instance. At this phase, App Engine automatically generates a test using ServiceNow's automated test framework that can be extended per the needs of the business. This test phase also includes an instance scan to ensure best practice and security issues are brought to the admin team's attention. Once complete, all logs associated with these tests are available on the deployment request record, providing full traceability regarding this app's journey to production. Satisfied with the test results, Able approve the next phase of deployment, authorizing promotion to the stage instance. Within Stage, the application will go through any final evaluation necessary before transition to production. This step will help ensure you that integrations are functioning properly, permissions are working as planned and could even give a handful of early adopters a chance to test out the app. The final approval will promote this application to the production instance, once again handling all of the migration of this app's code with a single click of a button. This particular deployment pipeline involves 4 different instances, but the flexible pipeline configuration of App Engine Management Center means that you can set up any type of pipeline that fits your needs, perhaps just 2 instances or maybe even 5. With this final push, Carla's app is now safely in production and ready to meet the demands of her business. The comprehensive record of this deployment request will always be available with an App Engine Management Center, offering a variety of helpful resources such as the deployment environment results page, which gives a quick summary regarding issues found during deployment. This powerful new capability makes it easy for everyone to participate in the low-code revolution and gives administrators peace of mind as they build out and govern their citizen development practice. The customizability of this framework means you can tailor the process to fit your needs, whether that entails offering collaboration descriptors that match your organization or customization of your deployment pipeline to align with your instance setup. And of course, the best part is that all of these solutions are available in one unified place, the ServiceNow platform. For more information, please be sure to check out servicenow.com. Thanks for checking out this demo, and have a great day.

Awesome. So that was a lot of information that hopefully gives you a better idea of how you can use your ServiceNow platform, specifically with citizen developers and in particular, on the governance angle, a little bit more color on how the citizen developers would work with you as admin or whoever they need to in an organization to not go rogue and help out adding value. I'm going to wrap this up here, and then we'll move on to the Q&A. This slide is just a little bit of a credibility building that ServiceNow is really a leader in this area. So before when I introduced Paige and Dale saying that they are experts in this, like ServiceNow truly is here in great hands with having all your questions answered on how to build and keep growing a citizen development program, look at this in our resources. So if you want to dive into any of these analyst reports or customer views on specifically how citizen development program function within the ServiceNow platform, please add it to your reading list. And in addition to that, we have customer references and playbooks written out. That will also include in our resources to really give you an example a real life on how to start and continue citizen dev programs. Last plug for additional resources. We have the demo that we linked here, our citizen dev learning plan along with on-demand webinars. And with that matter taken care of, let's go to some questions that we have been getting while we've been talking.

So I'm going to go ahead and facilitate the questions, but we will hand it back over to our experts to get them answered. All right, let's see. Okay. First question we have here is very practically, let's say, I have a few citizen developers up and running. How do I decide what should they work on? You mentioned you have criteria for use cases. Can you help me out with what that is?

Right, so definitely, so typically, the use cases that you're looking for are things that maybe are already in Excel spreadsheets or that are repeatable processes or task-based processes that just aren't in the system that allows them to utilize those tasks. So you're really looking for those things that maybe someone has a Microsoft form out there that drops into an Excel spreadsheet or the spreadsheet that is ever growing that is now 30 thousand rows, but each one they're marking off as they're completing it. So you're really looking for processes like that. Just something that's going to be repeatable, that's assignable that's something you can track like that.

Okay. Thank you. Dale, did you have anything you wanted to add to that question?

No, not really. I completely agree with what Paige said. It's about kind of focusing the right kind of use case. You want something nice and simple, but something that got a good impact to it, right, a good story that you could market as well. You need to be able to showcase that this is not something that it's just like a bespoke app. But a lot of customers, especially in the App Engine space, what they will do is they'll take even other task-based ones like an e-mail box that they're managing at the moment. And they want to have a portal on a form, create some tasks with some notifications that doesn't necessarily fit the usual request process. And they can then kind of build something for themselves. So I completely agree with Paige, but there's loads of examples out there. And as I said earlier, more than likely the people who have got it have got their own examples of their own demand about people are asking for. The criteria behind that one is keep it simple, keep it easy for you to be able to kind of work on it and also keep the people who are requesting it at a quite a, I wouldn't say, a senior level, but got a good level of experience that can actually help you along with usage of the development program.

Awesome. So keeping it enough for the citizen developer to actually tackle it and accomplish it. And then I am excited about the internal marketing because those marketers get excited when you can have the real use case to say, "hey, everyone else at the company. This actually works". So that's great, thank you.

Sorry, I would even add to that with the marketing piece. I found that, that is one of the most successful ways to get more citizen developers involved in more apps build in the system is to tell them, tell the company what you did and how effective it was. And you'll just have people banging at your door.

So a lot of those conversations actually end up with. Did you know that process is even on ServiceNow. I didn't even know that was in there and having that seamless transition from one to the other, they just go, "but what about all my data and all of the things we've got opened and all of the things". With our kind of citizen developer program and some of the stuff you can build in App Engine Studio, it's seamless. You literally take the data with you. You take your all history and other information with it. You don't have to kind of start again fresh.

Okay, let's answer another question. Here is one about AEMC, okay, how do I track what apps my citizen developers are creating when it comes time to clone, I don't want to have a huge number of apps, but I have to sift through to figure out which ones to back up.

It's always a tough question, to be honest, with cloning and App Engine Management Center. I mean the key question for us as well is if you already have scoped apps, which most people will invest in, you just have to follow the same process. So App Engine Management Center and a scoped app within App Engine Studios is no different to a normal scoped app that you'd have within Studio. So you can go through and ultimately keep all of that information into it or you can have it in the app repo, where you can actually kind of save it and use it. The only problem we have when you're cloning down to places like to test and some of those other areas, you've got a master source of data, you can always kind of after the clone, push your data, push it all the way back up using the same pipeline after it's been set up where you can kind of reinstall those apps. When it gets down to the developer instance in terms of cloning it down. It does get a little bit more tricky, but it is achievable to be able to kind of clone it down and actually keep the development point. We understand that there's also a little work, what we call App [ pool ]. You get a lot of developers, especially after the first couple of integrations of citizen developer where everybody starts up something with a great idea, [ never ] makes it to production. But there is an application life cycle where you can also retire some stuff as well in terms of kind of keeping that data in that kind of that initial momentum kind of quite clean. But yes, there are ways to do it. But to be honest, I'm not sure we have fair amount of time to go through the complexity about how we could do that.

I would agree with what you're saying, Dale. And I would add to that, as far as App [ pool ] is concerned, with the Utah release, there have actually been some changes in the permissions. So now you can grant access to App Engine Management Center to manage apps but not create them. So perhaps for all assuming that you're concerned about or an issue that you're having, then perhaps you need to take a step back and look at who's able to create those apps. We have had some companies that they wanted their centralized dev team to do all the initial app creation, so that the shell of the app and then your citizen developers were only able to come in and added the app after the fact, they were not able to actually create it.

It's a good way to kind of start and do maturing in a very centralizing governance way, especially if you're worried about kind of risk and all the stuff we see from a few different customers.

Great. Thank you Okay. Here is one other one [indiscernible], can I track the usage of an app once it's actually in production?

So yes, I've briefly touched on this back a few slides, but there are -- there's quite a bit of metrics information within App Engine Management Center. And honestly, with each release, it seems to be getting more and more robust. So you can see the actual usage of the app, how many requests are being made and things of that nature.

Okay. We have time for one more question, and then we will wrap it up. Okay, here's another very practical one. Can I add approvers so that someone from each BU approves the apps that are created by their citizen developers?

Yes, so I'll take that one. The approval model is definitely flexible so you can actually add in the different approvers. But like any approver that sits within the platform, you have to put rules around that, right? You have to actually say, is there a first level approval or second level approval, third level approval? Or do I need approval from each one from a group? Do I need to only have one approval from the same group that goes into it? So you do while technically, it's possible to go into those particular areas to actually put the right level of approval and governance onto those ones, what we sometimes find with our customers is making sure the right levels of approvals go to the right people to kind of do that because scoped apps are just that. Those apps for those particular BUs in those units, and essentially, what you're doing is trying to put this in a nice little bottle for them to be able to kind of push this one out. So technically, it's possible. Do we see it a lot? Probably not that much, but we do see -- we do see some interesting matrices of approval, especially right in the beginning when it comes to kind of doing citizen development and general kind of app development at that level.

Awesome, thank you. Okay. So we have -- we have a number of more questions, but if we didn't get to answer your question live, please -- please include your question anyway in the chat, and we will follow up at some point with you to answer it directly and absolutely appreciate everyone participating today in the Q&A. It's my favorite part of every presentation because you really get to the nitty-gritty of product, and you learn how much Dale and Paige actually know by answering on the spot for us. So that's all we have. Let me go to our last closing resources once again. Here is a link for all of our on-demand webinars. There's lots more where this came from. If you enjoy this, please check it out. And also if you love our ServiceNow product, tell your peers, if you go on this G2 platform, you can submit peer insights and this actually is a really important part of not only our analyst relations, but our customer relations as well. So you can receive a $25 Amazon gift card for it. It's always great to have. I love being a one-click wonder personally. So go ahead and write a quick review, we would really appreciate it. And Knowledge is coming up. So let's get ready for that. And if you're not already attending, please check out our information on Knowledge as well. Thank you again so much for attending today. We really appreciate it, and look forward to seeing all of the great things you do with your citizen development program.