There is a dark irony in a business buying a powerful tech system they can’t use because it’s too complex. This happens every day, and companies vastly under-utilize their resources because no one in the department can harness the full power of the tools they’re using. Simplicity has become a new law in tech development precisely to counter this problem.

To shed some light on the philosophy of simplicity, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Pat Casey, SVP and GM of the Platform Business Unit at ServiceNow, Inc., during the ServiceNow Knowledge16 conference.

A passion for simplicity

“You’re passionate about things you believe in,” Casey said, referring to his belief that people should have a pleasant experience when using technology. When people learn a skill to use technology, he said, they fight against anything that lowers the barriers to entry; it’s like a technological elitism. The company, though, wants to get their tech out the broadest amount of people.

Anyone can make tech work for themselves, Casey said, but the trick is making it work for everyone else. “Our goal is to see cool stuff get built,” he said. “The more people build on ServiceNow, the more excited we get.”

Running a single system

ServiceNow is a multi-instance architecture, and every customer has a unique software stack. “We’ve always had a platform underpinning ServiceNow, so all the tools are built on the ServiceNow platform,” Casey explained. “We invest heavily in tools and functionality to let businesses run a single system with multiple groups inside it.”

There are a lot of companies running ServiceNow for critical processes, and they also use it for non-critical functions. Delegated development means the team that runs the critical processes is not the same group that deals with the non-critical applications. ServiceNow can delegate who is allowed to touch what. This is a great way for people using ServiceNow to bring it out more broadly across their organization, Casey said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE