In continuing coverage of this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 event from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE welcomed the Senior Director of Product Marketing for ServiceNow, Craig McDonogh, to discuss their Innovation of the Year (IotY) award, to be voted on by attendees of the conference.

McDonogh described the IotY submission process and award as an opportunity for users of the ServiceNow platform to really shine. “It helps to advertise to their colleagues and peers, showing what they are doing with ServiceNow,” he explained.

The early days of the award and its submission process were conducted by e-mail. It wasn’t too long ServiceNow recognized they should probably build out a more formal way for their customers to submit their unique fixes to problems they encountered, most of which were centered around improving the processes they were already running on the platform.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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“The entries we receive now, as compared to early on, are far more complex,” McDonogh stated. “Some are coming in even with video. This year, we received 51 entries for consideration. We had one guy that sent in an entry that dealt with wanting to manage his wedding with ServiceNow. Not all of them deal with business.”

The process of winnowing down submissions to the selected finalists involves a ServiceNow panel that includes long-term employees and the founders of the company. “We all go through the applications and review each one,” McDonogh said. The panel then selects the six most innovative solutions as finalists. The winner is then selected by the audience at the Knowledge event.

“Of these innovations, how many are going to be commercial products? How many will make it onto Share,” asked theCUBE co-host Jeff Frick.

“Hopefully all will go on Share. Since announcing Share we see that these things can be shared a lot more easily,” stated McDonogh. “But in reality, these are all applications that were built to solve specific problems that were happening internally.”

The App Creator rolled out last year has been a driver at making it far easier for people to submit their innovations for consideration, noted co-founder and CEO of Wikibon, Dave Vellante. McDonogh agreed with that assertion and stated that the Service Creator, announced today, would be another big leap forward for clients of ServiceNow. “I don’t know Java but I can build you any ServiceNow application you want,” he stated. “It’s very easy to do. We are making it even easier so a real business person can take it and start using it right away.”

With Service Creator being the next step in that evolution, McDonogh claimed that you no longer need to be an IT professional to work on the platform. “You just need to know your process you are trying to execute. You just drag and drop it onto a form,” he said.

This ease of use really speaks to the incoming generation of employees who thrive in an atmosphere of constant flow. “[They] are used to interacting with technology in the same way we are aiming to make Service Creator. It’s all about ease of use,” McDonogh stated.

The key component for making the list of finalists for Innovation of the Year is understanding the problem you are trying to solve. “If you look at our finalists,” McDonogh commented, “they had a process in place. It was just that the process took too long. So they automated them on ServiceNow. One submission claimed they had a process that took 15 minutes just to place an order. Now they can place that order in 15 seconds.”

ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2014 event continues through May 1 and SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE will continue to present live coverage of the conference.

photo credit: Chim Chim via photopin cc