On the last day of ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge 13 event, it was time to meet the winners of the Hackathon contest. Jeff Frick’s guests on theCube were Hackathon winners Robert Fedoruk and Adam Mason, who talked a bit about their inspiration and success story.

It was somewhat expected that in the age of social web, social networks would end up playing a big role.  Enter Twitter, an excellent platform for bouncing around ideas, where Adam and Robert met each other, despite coming from different industries and working for different companies.

Weeks before the Hackathon, they connected on Twitter, started a Google Hangout, and began kicking out ideas. The regulations of ServiceNow officials were pretty straight-forward: using a clean instance of the latest release and creating everything from scratch. They had the liberty to build anything as long as they didn’t bring their own code. Everything needed to be done on the fly.

They had a lot of ideas, and a lot of good ones, but Robert came with the idea of taking the concept of Kickstarter (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and Project) and putting that into ServiceNow in order to utilize it to prioritize IT projects, and “incubate” them before they go live.

The team consisted of seven people, and they were initially worried about the hierarchy, the workflow and the leadership. Luckily for them, the chemistry was just perfect and the RedBull plentiful, and so they managed to pull through.

Arguing their decision to pursue this idea, Adam and Robert highlighted that a lot of times the decisions are made in a black box, with nobody providing any insights. Besides, it was always single projects at a time. And if there are no budgets for them, the projects simply go away.

Adam and Robert played with the possibility of people in the company coming up with an idea, and then, just by the spirit of the goodness behind this initiative, other people would decide to collaborate. They could either fund it, or staff it.

“We wanted to capture whatever essence there was between asking and the PMO”, said Adam.

Their idea sparked a lot of interest, they were selected in the top 4 (from 20 teams), and eventually won.  The app, which is called Kick It Now, needs some polishing, but it’s fully functional.

Apart from the fame and glory, the team members won an Apple TV each “and a handshake”.

Their success is an innovative example of using the popular resources available right now (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social media) to raise money, to implement these ideas into IT, to find bits and pieces of budget and/or resources that people can contribute to a common goal.

It’s also a reinforcement of the theme of the show. Because of this tool, the thought process behind enterprise collaboration is changing, becoming more business-centric. More automation means more innovation and more time to ponder upon bigger things than filling out forms.