 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE, we're live at Moscone South in San Francisco. This is the ServiceNow Knowledge 14 conference. I'm Dave Vellante here with Jeff Frick. theCUBE is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Atticus Tyson is here, he's the CIO of Intuit, he's attending a parallel event that ServiceNow has going on. Which is the CIO Decisions event. I think it's about 100 CIOs. Atticus, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, happy to be here. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about what's going on over there at the CIO Decisions event. So as you said, it's about 100 CIOs. Having some good discussions about the future of the role of the CIO and listening to some good speakers and getting together to be able to talk and share. What are some of the big themes that you guys are talking about? Well the big theme is the shift of IT really from being about systems of records, to systems of engagement. And how we engage with lines of business to really enable growth. And it's less about cost savings and what we used to do. Yeah, so the whole notion, I mean I love Frank Sluglund's keynote this morning, sort of the message of turning IT from a cost center into a producer of value. It sounds good, right? But when you get down to it and you're in the front lines and you're talking to a lot of CIOs, trying to do more with less, a lot of times they don't have the budget, they don't have the time, they don't have the management buy-in or the board buy-in. Interestingly, we were just talking to Dave Wright. We were asking him about, will more CIOs come out of the business? Because that was one of Frank's sort of prescriptions. You really need to have a CIO who knows as much about the business as the business people. And that's the discussion that they should be having, not a technology discussion. It's rare, you happen to be one that came out of the business. So talk a little bit about some of the roles that you've played into it and how you ended up as a CIO. Sure, so I've been with the company almost 13 years and I've had four major jobs, one leading the IP protection program for the company, product management for the small business division and then heading up engineering and now in IT. And the main reason I joined the IT group is I was always hearing the reason we couldn't do something was because of IT. And so rather than complain about it, fix it. So I joined them and it's hard. Exactly what you talked about is we have to still run the company with all of our existing systems of record while we're innovating, while we're trying to tell a new story, while we're trying to train our existing employees who are great at running these older systems but don't necessarily know the new paradigms. So it's shifting everything while still running the railroad, which is difficult. So from a business perspective, when you're sort of running the business, how was Intuit using technology as a differentiator and as a competitive advantage? Well, one of the things, since our main product is technology, really our whole community, our whole set of employees are technical people. And so we're trying to embed technology everywhere. And one of the things that's happening also is the line between what's traditionally IT and what's product is blurring. So if you're a customer and you want to pay your bill or you want to change your address, you have to do that inside the product in a way that's easy. And so we as an IT group have to figure out how to work within that framework and have a great experience and do it. Okay, so the line between the IT group and the product group is much more blurred you're saying it into it than it would be a manufacturer. Absolutely. And in fact, one of the things I've been doing is really making the IT group more like a product group, hiring product managers. I actually have a whole design staff that designs experiences end to end. And so if you were to walk into a room, you might not know who's from IT or who's from the product team. Yeah, okay. And so are the discussions that, what are they like, the discussions that you're having with the business folks? I mean, you're talking about, their P&L, how to grow their profitability, how to increase their margins, how to expand their channel. I mean, are those the conversations that you're having? Absolutely. And how do we really provide a great experience for our agents who work with customers? How to provide great end-to-end customer experiences? How are we as the IT group enabling them to do more for customers and create that one-on-one engagement that we want to do? So, Atticus, what's been the reception kind of coming in from the outsider, if you will, from the other side of the wall within the IT focus? I'm sure you have probably some expectations that were completely incorrect, some assumptions that weren't necessarily there. So how have they taken to you? And also, there's a lot of talk about transforming kind of IT people from service providers in terms of pencil pushers and form pillar outers to strategic thinkers adding business value. Are they receptive to that? Was that a hard message to get across? How is it actually happening? Yeah, absolutely receptive. And I think if anybody's learned more, it's me more than them. I've learned kind of the importance of the IT organization and how embedded it is with actually operating the company. And I've found people there who've wanted for a long time to be able to have these kinds of conversations. But they've been relegated, if you will, to handling tickets. And so once we can provide the framework and really align the work we're doing in IT with driving growth, with driving value, the conversations get easier, they get more meaningful, and the people doing the work really enjoy it much more. So is there a secret formula that you can share with either CIOs that haven't been on the business side or business practitioners that haven't really been on the other side of better ways to bridge that gap or to collaborate or make it easier? I think the way that worked for me was really trying to get aligned around KPIs or key performance indicators. Sit down with a business leader and say what are the three or four metrics that I can really help in driving your business? Is it contacts? Is it average handle time? Which it usually isn't. Is it more of a transactional net promoter score based on satisfaction with dealing with the agent? What are those right indicators for you as a business leader? And then let's measure ourselves there. And I'll be responsible as the technology guy for figuring out the right technology to make that happen. But we're going to focus everybody in IT and the business on the same measurements. And how have you been able to carve additional resources to go after those types of objectives versus we always hear about the unbelievable amount of percentage just to keep the lights on and keep things running? Exactly, and that's really an internal conversation that we've got to have because I'm definitely not getting more budget. And so it is around how do we get more efficient and automate with what we already have, work with vendors to help us get better while we shift resources over to the new because I'm definitely not getting more budget. You're not getting more budget. So, Atticus, you've run engineering organizations. So you've got at least technical background from that standpoint. I'm a software engineer, right? But you mentioned off camera, you're not the acronym guy. Right, right. So you hang out with the Hadoop world, forget it, right? Pig and Hive and Scoop and Yarn. Right, okay, so, and you've been in the business side of things. So when you come back into a role, you come to a role of the technology head, how do you organize to tap that technical expertise? Not that you necessarily lack, but the currency. Yeah. The acronym, so how do you organize that you meet on your CTO? Do you have, you know, did you have to change the organization or did you inherit one that actually worked? I wonder if you could describe that a little bit. Great question, I think the biggest thing I changed about the organization when I came in is when I came, it was organized around systems. So there was a Siebel team and there was an IVR team. And what instead we did is we created a sales care and marketing team. And we said, you know, you're really accountable for driving a great sales care and marketing experience for end users and for agents. And I don't really care what technology you're using. And so don't be a legion to the technology because as we all know, Salesforce is great today. Five years from now, they may not be. And I don't want to get so blind that I don't see the next thing coming. And so I have an expectation of people in those groups that they're always looking for the next thing as well. So it was a classic stovepipe. Now, what kind of friction did that cause? Well, the friction is really kind of my own learning is how interconnected all of the enterprise really is. It's nice and easy to say there's a sales care marketing team and there's a finance team. But those two systems really have to integrate and talk together and learning how to bridge that gap in a way that doesn't create a lot of bureaucracy is something we're still learning to do. And what has been the impact of that change? Have you been able, is there anything discernible at this point or actually how long you've been a CIO? So CIO since June. Okay, so relatively new. Yeah, okay. But I was heading engineering within, I worked for the CIO for about a year before that. So I've been in IT for about two years. Okay, and what has the impact been of that organizational change? Has it been discernible? I think it has, I think there's two main things. One is much greater transparency with our business partners of how we're spending the dollars. And I've invited them in to sit with us at the table and help us allocate those resources together. So, and a greater appreciation on their side of the trade-offs we have to make while we still run the business but try to do the innovation. That's one. And then the other is really creating some great innovation coming out of the team. Because when they feel like they're a legion to the sales and care engineer who's out on the floor, like one of the things I've done at Intuit we're famous for something called the Follow Me Home. Where we actually go to our customers' homes and watch them use the product. We did the same thing, where we did a follow and agent. So we went to the call center and actually watched agents work and asked them what was difficult about using the product. We had engineers doing that, not product managers. So they can actually see the problem first. Did you drove that initiative? Absolutely. Was that considered innovative? It seems so basic, right? But everyone's so busy and doesn't really have time to do something. And creating the time to do it. And even getting the cooperation from the managers of the agents to do it. Because they just want to be on the floor taking calls. But actually having somebody looking over their shoulder asking what worked about that, what didn't work. It was a little bit of organizational pushback but once they understood the value, they got on board. And were there any aha moments that came out of that? Or was it more incremental? Several. And mostly around just screen design and call flow and why did we have you do four clicks when you could do it in two clicks to really allow the agent to focus more on their interaction with the customer and not their interaction with the product. So I want to shift gears a little bit. So when you were into it, right? You guys used to send out disks and CDs and you had to change your model to a cloud based application. Which is the kind of classic, do you kill your own business or you let somebody else kill it for you? Talk a little bit about how that knowledge helped you within trying to transform the IT department. Great question. I mean, because as we've been running a digital or an online product for well over 12 years now, both in TurboTax and in QuickBooks, and we've learned a lot in how to just run that kind of experience. And so now as cloud based IT offerings are coming along, we already really understand kind of what they're doing on their side. And one of the things we've been really pushing for, I think along with other people in the industry is more transparency into those cloud providers. Sometimes you'd think that they just want to run it as a utility, but as a technologist, I want to know more about how their service is running. So I know how to rely on it. And that's been, I think, a tension in the industry. And we got a wrap, but I want to just, Atticus, get your take. So you're new to service now, right? Yes. You're bringing it in. And we're going live in about a month. Okay, so you've been through the proof of concept. What are your expectations? Where are you going to point it? So I think first off, just the agents who resolve tickets are going to have a much better experience than what we had before, which was a combination of some homegrown systems and a couple of other vendors. So a much better agent experience during the resolving and a much better employee experience putting in tickets and also much better visibility into the workflow end-to-end. Great. Atticus Tyson, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Good luck in your new role. Looks like you're having an impact and kind of a poster child for the service now vision of a CIO. So appreciate you coming on. Thanks, happy to do it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're live from Moscone in San Francisco. Right back.