Enterprise architect by day. A datacenter in the house by night.

I graduated from Western Carolina in May 2007, right as the financial crisis got going, and spent months looking for work. That December I took an as-needed job on Novant Health’s help desk, resetting passwords.

Everything I knew was hands-on: PCs I’d built, hardware I’d troubleshot, a year of campus tech support. I expected to end up in field services. By 2011 I was one of the more senior people on the desk, training the new service desk agents. When Novant started its move to ServiceNow that year, I helped with service desk testing and validation on the rollout. I could see it was solving a bigger problem than tickets. I figured it would probably give me a career, so I decided to stick with it, before anyone offered me a ServiceNow job. That was the bet.

Not long after go-live in 2012, I moved off the help desk into process work as the problem and knowledge management coordinator, which in practice meant pretty much everything that wasn’t the change manager’s or the incident manager’s job. Then I got roped into major incidents, and for a few years I ran point on the outage calls. ServiceNow had no major incident module yet, so we built the process by hand: get the right teams moving on a fix, get word out to stakeholders, keep the updates coming on a schedule. Outages came more often than anyone wanted. That time was wild.

By 2016 the process work bored me. A new manager saw it and offered me development instead, and I made the move. He also brought in someone who set the bar for the whole team. Before moving on, that person hired a replacement, told the new hire to mentor me, and told me to be a sponge. I was. I learned to code mostly on my own, but the drive to do it came from my mentor. He expected me to keep up, so I put in the hours on my own time to make sure I could.

Before the pandemic I built an integration that tied Epic’s content management tickets, its change control at the time, to ServiceNow change management. Flow Designer wasn’t ready for the job, so I wrote it in script includes, REST messages, and script actions. It was a hodgepodge of make-it-work. I co-presented it at Knowledge 21 with two colleagues. Last I heard, it’s still running in production.

For about three years, 2018 to 2021, that ServiceNow team was just killing it. We had a session at Knowledge 19 and two more at Knowledge 21, and ServiceNow published customer stories on our Predictive Intelligence and citizen development work. Three people who came through that team went on to work for ServiceNow itself. Some of the best in the business, and I still hold them in high regard. Those years are good memories.

In 2021 I helped Novant implement ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management. That December I left as a Developer II, fourteen years after the password resets.