 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante at wikibon.org. And this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles, continuous production. We're here at Knowledge. And as you know, we're also broadcasting live from Sapphire now down in Orlando. We're also at Google I-O. The tweet stream is just being inundated with Google I-O traffic, so we're trying to get some words, words in edgewise with the no13 hashtag. You can tweet me, I'm at D.Vellante. And we're here, we're doing wall-to-wall coverage myself and Jeff Frick. Of course, John Furrier's down at Sapphire. And we're here with practitioners from Yale University. Dorothy Artali is focused on the knowledge side of the operation, and Ricardo Chevera is the IT director at Yale University. I feel smarter just being hanging out with you guys. Of course, I'm from Harvard, Mass, so there you go. We're right near Princeton, so we've got the whole Ivy League covered here. But so anyway, thanks for taking some time out and welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having us. Glad to be here. So this is a great conference. We've been all morning and into the afternoon sort of digging into how practitioners are using service now. We've come to a lot of events and we'd love to sort of test how what the vendor says matches with what the customer base says. And I have to say the alignment is very high. But, so Ricardo, why don't we start with you in just in terms of your role at Yale, your IT director. So you've got a broad scope, what do you do there? So I'm part of the service management team. And we're primarily charged with setting up and running our service management program, which includes all of our idle processes. We're currently running incident management, problem change, release, knowledge management. So it's a combination of looking at the, and implementing and improving the processes, but also how it's implemented and act upon with the tool and our tool choice, the service now. So it's both at the tool level and the process level. And we also have a charge with working on governance issues for the entire IT organization. Okay, and Dorothy, obviously a lot of knowledge at Yale. So what is your role as kind of the knowledge management person? So it's very, knowledge is very important to Yale and there's a lot of groups within the IT organization that have their own repositories of knowledge. And we're trying to get it all into one knowledge base so that everybody can share everybody else's knowledge. So we can provide rock solid services for our clients. So when they call our help desk, our help desk can accommodate them or help them with their problems or just give them information and to build the confidence in our clients and to get the same information from day to day which is important and to not rediscover knowledge just because it's in my head doesn't mean it's in your head. So it's very important. We want to increase efficiency without rediscovering information. And it's just a very important practice at Yale. Knowledge management is fairly new. The position's only been open a year. I've been in it since the beginning of August. We've done a lot with knowledge and we look forward to doing a lot more and using service now as a tool currently. Tell me some knowledge. Is knowledge the kind of thing you know when you see it or do you guys rigorously define knowledge? What is knowledge? Knowledge is how to do something. We have service providers that provide how to back up a computer or email. And so we consider the owners of the service subject matter experts and we need them to write information about their subject so our tier one support can help our clients and have the most accurate information to help our clients. So how do you proactively try to go out and get people to create this knowledge? Are you trying to capture existing knowledge? Is it a bit of both? So it is a bit of both and we're starting to require when we roll out a new service that knowledge needs to be there. Not the day after the new services rolled out but weeks before so we can educate the tier one support that are helping the clients. I think Rick Smith said yesterday in his talk that client confidence, you know our first impressions for our clients is our tier one support and if our tier one support knows how to help them it's going to boost the confidence for our clients and that's very important to us. So Ricardo the impetus for bringing in service now was the service now classic incident, problem change management, is that right? Yes so we knew that we wanted basically a more formalized process improvement program. Idle is sort of the, considered the de facto standard for how to run an IT shop and we adopted it as our operating model and we also, but once we have that process in place we still need a tool in order to implement it, to act on it and give us something, a concrete way of managing our work and service now is very well aligned with the best practices that Idle lays out. You said, I tell, I thought you were saying Idle, okay got it. So I was thinking autonomy there for a second ITIL. Yes. Okay and so you start with the, as I say, the classic change problem incident management and then Dorothy, how did service now come into your domain? Did you write an app? Did it sort of, was it a natural up-growth of? So it was a new position that Yale created. They felt they needed a dedicated knowledge manager. I came from a long technical background and took the job, applied for the job as a knowledge manager and accepted the job and it's just been a really fun year working with people and seeing how much knowledge we have out there and to build the knowledge base and working with all the different groups and making them realize the value of knowledge that it is important to get it out of our heads and onto paper. So how did you start using service now? How did I start using service now? I was a client at first so I used change management incident problem and then when I got the job they had already had the knowledge base set up. They just didn't have a dedicated person at the time to work on the knowledge. Okay so how does that work? Is there an app or a module inside of service now? There's a module inside of service now and it was already set up. So that's out of the box. So there's a knowledge base. And now what kind of customization did you have to do if any? So it's still, we're still today using it pretty much out of the box and I have written some Visio diagrams on workflow and we are going to start automating that process within the next few months to streamline it a little. Now I know Rick Smith is coming in shortly but before we get off the knowledge piece I really want to understand sort of how you would recommend folks that are trying to tackle similar problems. How would you recommend that they go about initiating this type of project and what kinds of things would you recommend? What would you not do if you had to do it over again? Those types of things. Well I think it's important to have your dedicated knowledge manager trying to rolling out knowledge. One of the biggest things that we did was create a subject matter experts list and we went to each service owner and found out who their experts were. And from their experts we created authors and editors and author can draft an article and an editor would check the article for its quality, for its content, for its grammatical and spelling. You have all little things that you need to check there and that helps build the foundation and get the quality information in there. Then you have to go out and campaign. To get adoption of it. To get adoption of it. And it's what's in it for me? Well for the service owner you're going to get better exposure. When we create a knowledge article we are going to populate certain fields in an incident for you which is going to give you better metrics at the end of the day for your reporting. For the help tier one support it is going to help them have confidence when they're on the phone with the client. It's going to help them answer the call and not have to escalate the call to somebody. For our clients it's not only going to answer the question for them but they're going to see the value and have the confidence in IT. And then for leadership they're just going to see all the benefits about running a more efficient IT organization and notice that we're closing calls faster, our clients are happier. What's the user experience like? I mean I'm imagining if I can't figure something out I do what everybody else does. I Google it. So is that a similar user experience with inside service now? So today at Yale we actually have a feed from service now to our website and we have a section called how to articles and those are knowledge-based articles but our clients don't see them as knowledge-based articles. They see them as nice little pretty web pages and it shows them how to configure their email or possibly a problem with a backup. Certain things that they would be able to handle themselves but not the technical documentation that would stay in service now for our IT employees. Okay so you guys publish those how-tos post up on your website they search it like they would search anything and then the actual creation of the content where does that occur? That occurs outside of service now? No that's inside service. In service now. Okay so essentially you use it as a publishing platform and a content management system. Yep. Okay I'm just learning about all these other things service now can do. Okay this is good drill down. So that was the customization that we did at Yale with the feed from service now our web tool is Drupal. So we feed the information into Drupal onto our website and it looks all, it makes everything skin the same on the website. Okay so Drupal is your content management system essentially at the back end. For the web. The presentation layer for the website. Okay great and fascinating. Okay Dorothy last word and then we're going to switch you out bring Rick in, talk about metrics. Any final thoughts on knowledge for your peers or just closing thoughts? So knowledge just make sure that you, it is a process, it's not a tool. The tool is service now, knowledge is a process you want to incorporate it in change, incident, problem in the other processes. It supports the other processes. It's very important. It's a change in culture. Getting the other processes as people are using, opening an incident to check knowledge, to find the information there so they can close it to get faster so they can help the client. And I think that's the most important takeaway to change the culture so they're not thinking of it as a tool but as a process. Dorothy thank you very much for sharing that insight. Okay Dorothy is going to swap out now with and we'll in a moment introduce Rick Smith. But Ricardo I want to come back to you and talk a little bit about how service now is being used today. We talked about that but how you see it being used in the future. So is this something that you see continuing to expand in terms of new applications? We saw app creator announced yesterday. Are you guys, do you envision taking advantage of that? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Sure. I mean we got into this process and came to service now looking primarily for service management platform. And we need something to do ITSM and it does that well and is extremely versatile and flexible in that regard. So we're continuing to build that out and we have some of the core processes in place. We're going to be moving, we're working on a CMDB now configuration management database, looking at release manager, a lot of other processes in order to continue to mature the program. There's also a lot of possibilities because we have the ability to as you say create new apps. The app creators giving us a lot more flexibility. There are areas where we can actually tie in better with some of our functional partners non-IT departments. Not necessarily to do non-IT functions but to more fully leverage the interactions that we have with other departments on campus. So what was life like before you brought in service now? Can you paint a picture for us? So it was, there were a lot of ad hoc and inconsistent processes. So there were some areas that were, where we were sort of trying to practice good process management. And so some areas where we were consistent, other parts of the organization weren't doing it. There was not a consistency in process from end to end. There also wasn't real consistency in what I would call service ownership. So the discussion of when an issue happens or something breaks, who owns it? And oftentimes we're very IT focused and saying well this widget is broken and that belongs to them so it's not my issue or it's not my area, it's someone else's area. A lot of finger pointing. The finger pointing or just sort of checking within your own silo, very structured, very siloed. Hot potato wing, it's not my problem. That too, right. Checking if it's your system, if it's not your system then you're done. But now we have this notion of ownership of an actual service, not necessarily an application or a technical widget, but an overall service. And there are a lot of technical components that go into making that service available. For email for example, it isn't just the email server that you have to check if you're the owner of that service. You also have to care about the network, you also have to care about support, the endpoint device like your laptop or your phone. All of those things need to be in place in order for people to use your service. And so you have that accountability as a service owner for that end to end. And we've been developing and maturing this concept hand in hand with our process improvement and with the use of a tool service now. And it sounds like you're in the process of building out your CMDB, is that correct? That's right. Okay, so how's that work? You sort of, you bring in pieces one at a time, you tear down the old ones. Talk about how you get rid of stuff. So decommissioning things is something which doesn't happen often enough. There's a small party, it's a small, people get really excited when we finally do turn off an old server or decommission an old application. All too often we launch something new and it runs side by side with the old legacy systems. And decommissioning the old stuff isn't always part of the project plan for launching something new. What we're doing now with the CMDB is defining what our CIs are, what our configuration items are. For example, we now have a canonical list of all the applications that we own and run in our organization. It's extremely long and complicated, but we've settled on it and of course it's going to be an organic thing and change. But it lives in our CMDB and we can now, soon when we release this into our service now and since we'll be able to point to and say it's this application for which there's an issue or this application we're going to make a change to and it will all be looking at the same list, same data. And that's going to be a great step forward. Okay, Rick Smith has joined us. He is the Director of Metrics and Quality Assurance at Yale University. Rick, welcome, thanks for coming on. My pleasure. So the metrics is obviously a hot topic, particularly when you're implementing a system like this. Talk about your role, what scope do you have and then we'll get into the metrics discussion. Sure. Oh, my primary responsibility is to ensure quality throughout the ITS systems and services that we provide. It's also to direct us toward being client-focused and that we make fact-based decisions whenever possible as opposed to making decisions based on anecdotal information. Yeah, okay, so you come into this role, you obviously don't have a blank piece of paper. Every organization has metrics. Some of the organizations have too many metrics. So what was the situation like when you came into this role and if you can talk about a pre-service now and post-service now? I think as I came into the role, Yale was much like many other organizations where there was a plethora of data, but little information. People were inundated with hundreds and thousands of reports, but those reports weren't synthesized to give them actionable information, things that they could take action on to improve. And I guess in that same vein, looking at where we were and where we are now through the use of service now, it allowed us to categorize that data, synthesize information from it, and generate scorecards and dashboards that were much more actionable and allowed our managers to better perform their services and improve service to our clients. Did that categorization, did you have to do that manually? How did that all come about? Are there facilities to help you sort of automate that classification? Well, the classification and one of the rules or principles that we use is to go with the critical few versus the useful many. And what we saw is there are a lot of things that we can measure, but not everything that can be should be. There has to be a return on that investment. The things that we measure have to be those things that give us the greatest benefit and add the greatest value. The other thing that are kind of principle that we employed is we found out there are five things really that a client is really interested in and contributes to satisfaction. And we kind of defined that in a mnemonic that we call FACE, F-A-C-E. And so the key metrics were fast, accurate, cost efficient and easy. And what we found is if you at least had two to three metrics in that fast, accurate, cost effective and easy, you were pretty much on target to meeting your client satisfaction needs and world class service. Okay, so that's good advice, boil it down to it, don't boil the ocean. Exactly. Just take a few metrics that matter that are actually going to drive your organization or your business if you're a commercial entity. So how do people, how do you use those metrics? How do people get access to them? How does it affect change? How they access it. As part of a service now, we were able to configure some standard reports or global reports that were developed for our managers that made it easy for them to access information that they needed. One of the insights that doesn't seem like there should be that great of an insight but we looked at the name in its service now, in HVW. And really that was the real advantage that we found with service now is it provided immediate feedback in terms of how the service or process was performing right now. Our challenge then once we knew how it's performing now is that we also then had to see how are we performing in the past and how did we hope to perform in the future? And the triangulation of those three are the things that guide our managers in providing service, good service. Okay, so the key is get the right metrics. So you get to the point, you get the right metrics. Then you got to put them in the right people's hands. Exactly. And then you get to the really old maximum if you can't manage it or you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So then how does it affect ongoing improvement? Presumably you're doing this to get better. So can you talk about that a little bit in terms of how you guys have improved and maybe the role that service now has played there? Well, one of the examples and in fact in the presentation that I gave yesterday, we used a chart that showed that prior to service now, when we were looking at our incident management system, the call abandonment rate is the number of calls that were coming in and those that were being abandoned were somewhere north of 25%, not a very good performance. The issue was that our managers really couldn't, didn't have transparency into that number. And this was again a great insight for us and it just shows that it doesn't have to be complex or onerous, but if your metrics or your performance are transparent and you provide that information to the managers in real time, action will occur. In fact, where we saw the abandonment rate at 25%, once we got the metrics in and started providing those reports to the managers, we saw it drop in less than, I think it was about three weeks, to less than three to 4% of calls were abandoned. That's a tremendous improvement and the only action that we had put in place at that time was simply providing transparency and immediacy of information to the managers. How are you guys providing service to your end users? Is it, you've said calls a couple of times, is that the main touch point, is pick up a phone, email, chat, how do you interact with them? What are the channels? So we have various channels for tier one support, like primary, when something breaks and you need help with the biggest and most immediate way to get help is by phone. You have a help desk that's open all day long, agents are standing by all times, but we also do intake by email. There are also field reps who do health calls, basically technicians who do out in the field go to the people's desk side visits, some things that just can't be fixed remotely, but a lot can and when it does need actual personal visit, we have technicians who go out in the field. We're looking into opening up other channels, exploring chat options as well, other things like that. The metrics that you're tracking and the initiative is primarily focused on IT, right? Do you envision pointing that at the business at some point in time and if so, how are they going to feel about you tracking metrics about, so I can say business, obviously it's a university, I mean the sort of organization. Well, I think there is a lot of synergies to be had between ourselves and a lot of functional partners. So we work very closely with people in HR and finance and procurement and those are traditional business organizations. They just do the business at HR, finance for a major university. And they have their own call, some of them have their own call centers, they have their own service metrics and I think what we're finding is that there's a lot of commonalities in what we're tracking, things we're trying to do and things that they're trying to do. So I would envision in the future a lot of sharing and cross-pollination of the kind of metrics that we're reporting on kind of process improvement programs. At kind of a higher level, what's sort of driving your organization, what's changing in your quote unquote business? I mean, you're Yale, right? I mean, you got this great reputation but college is so competitive these days. What's driving your business? What's driving you to change? Sure, well I think for IT, our main mission is to advance the mission of the university. We don't exist just for the sake of IT. We're not an IT shop that develops application to the research. We live and breathe to advance the mission of Yale University, which is to, it's all about the creation, preservation and dissemination of knowledge. So next week, Yale will be celebrating our 312th commencement. So we've been around for a long time, had a great tradition. But there's also a constant need for innovation for developing new products, new services to advance the university. So we have faculty members doing, providing great courses, we have researchers doing cutting it, research in all the sciences and medical areas. And all the work that they do, whether it's in a classroom, whether it's in a lab, whether it's in any environment requires IT. And so if we want Yale to be the best that it can be, we need to provide the best services for all those aspects. How much automation have you affected and how has that changed over? How long have you installed service now? Just a year now. Okay, so have you been able to implement a sort of serious IT automation initiative and how far are you there? Not as far as we'd like. And we have plans for moving in that direction. So right now we've developed a very user-friendly and comprehensive service catalog on our website. So you can go to our website and you can see pretty much everything that IT offers. All the different services we offer, who they're eligible for, how much they cost, how to get them. And it's regularly updated. And so it's a great first step forward. And it's actually not a small feat to try to list and document all the services you have that you provide to your clients. But what you can't do is then click a button and have it magically provisioned or magically order it in the sort of Amazon shopping cart experience that we all come to know and love. And so what we're using service now is to provide that back-end workflow mechanism so that you can go to our website and say, yes, that sounds like a really interesting service. I want one of those and click it and it knows who you are and it sends off the request to the right people and it gets either automatically provisioned if it's an account or ordered if you want a cell phone or a laptop or something. And so service now is helping us to automate and provide that kind of provisioning. So Rick, as you achieve that greater levels of automation, will that change your metrics or will it just make them better? Well, I think as we implement those changes, what the metrics will do is to show us the progress that we've made or not made, but we believe that it'll really show us the progress that we've made. It will give us objective basis to kind of track where we're going and to show from where, from whence we've come. I mean, it's early days for you guys, but I've been asking all the practitioners here, what they'd like service now to do better, what's on their to-do list, what could they do to make your life easier? I know you're kind of still adopting the platform, so maybe it's not an appropriate question for you, but I'll ask it anyway. Well, I think as with any vendor partner, what we always really like is visibility into what their roadmap is. So we always want to know, okay, what are you working on? What are your priorities? Do they match up with our priorities? I think our clients want input in what the company's working on. And so they're telling us, okay, this is what's going to be in the calculator release or in the Dublin release in the future. And we want to be able to raise our hands. So you know that, actually, these things are more important to us than those things, or it'd be great if you worked on this feature over here, provide that kind of ongoing feedback. I think generally the receptive, but I think that's an ongoing issue for us. Yeah, now, as far as cloud generally goes, you guys like totally on the cloud bandwagon, you going hard after SaaS, after cloud infrastructure and the like, are you more selective? I think what makes sense, we're very enthusiastic in certain areas. Obviously, one of the big selling points for service now is that it is a cloud application, so it's very nimble in that regard. We also have a significant sales force presence throughout the university, and it's probably growing. So in certain areas, we do have cloud option strategies. In other areas where it makes less sense, we're not pursuing it as aggressively. On the whole, I think we're very cloud friendly shop, but I think that's something which, you know, we look at it from a strategic point of view, which, where does it make sense to do that? Where does it make less sense? All right, we have to break. So, Ricardo and Rick, thanks for coming on. And also Dorothy, you really appreciate your perspectives. Good luck with the initiative and the adoption, and again, thanks for sharing your insights with our audience. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We're right back. Beth White is in the house, so we're going to talk to her about knowledge, about service now's, you know, marketing message. How do you make marketing a source of value for CIOs and IT practitioners? That's a key topic that I want to talk to Beth about. So keep it right there, we're right back after this word. Rock and roll. It's probably five or six times I've been on theCUBE now. Right, you know, at first, the guys are just fun to work with. Matt, welcome back. Hey, always a pleasure to be in theCUBE. Hey, I'm about to go on theCUBE, you never know. A three-time veteran of being on theCUBE. I hope many, many more. Chad Sackets, Chad, welcome to theCUBE. Dave, John, it's great to be here, man. I keep coming back because great insightful questions from John and from Dave. What face-melting action have you seen here at the event and I know there's a lot of it. It's a great vehicle to communicate with a broad audience, a lot of folks watch. Great to have you back. Good job. All right, Craig Nunez, VP of Marketing at HP Storch. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. When people mention theCUBE, they're like, oh my God, I saw you on theCUBE and they're all excited about it. It's an experience, it's not just information. They experience kind of what's going on there. It's like real time, it's like they were there. That was like going to the gym. Legendary IBMer, CEO of Symantec and now CEO of Virtual Instrument. Great to have you on theCUBE. So for theCUBE to be here at a conference like this, it's got 15,000, 20,000 people and sharing that live around.