 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Knowledge 15, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and we're here, this is theCUBE, and we've been unpacking the experience that is ServiceNow Knowledge 15. This is our third knowledge, we did 13, 14, and now 15, and we're very excited to be here. Nicole Tate and Van Tranner here, the two consultants in the IT service management space happen to be focused on healthcare right now, but they got a lot of experience, a couple IT practitioners. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to see you. Thanks, having us. So, Nicole, let me start with you. So, is your first knowledge, or you've been to a couple of knowledge shows? So, I started back in New Orleans, was that 12, I guess? Knowledge 12. Yeah, all right. So, wow, you've seen the transformation of knowledge along with the evolution of ServiceNow, what do you think about this one? So, I'm amazed at the first knowledge I attended, I remember being overwhelmed, I hadn't even implemented my first phase. And so, I'm sitting in these sessions and I'm just like, wow, these people are rock stars, look at all these cool things that they're doing, and I came back very energized, very revived, and started on my own journey after that, and now I'm seeing some of these same people coming up and being their own rock stars and kind of watching the conference grow, it's really impressive. So, if you go back, Van, a few years ago, so the IT, and still in many organizations, the whipping child of the organization, but we've really seen a transformation in that role for particularly the clients that are here, the customers that are here, maybe you could talk about that in your own experience. Yeah, I started with ServiceNow back probably in 2007, and so back then, it was something that was shown as something, there's an easy platform that you can easily configure, and through the growth of ServiceNow, it's become more complicated and clients have had more requirements. So then we've seen more dedicated roles to this profession, and a lot of resources are needed to be successful in the complication that we have today, especially in the healthcare industry, so it's gonna get more complicated, and there'll be need to be more people involved to make it successful. So you're both relatively new to healthcare, right? I mean, certainly with the last 12 months or so, or less in the case of Nicole. But you've got a lot of experience, consulting with different organizations around, and what's different about healthcare, Nicole? What are your first impressions? So I think healthcare has been one of these things that's very complicated, and rightfully so, it's people's health, it's their lives. But with recent legislation and recent things that are coming down, healthcare's being forced to be more of a product, more of a service, right? And as the cost per patient rises, and you're getting less back from insurance, right, you have to get creative, and there's gonna have to be some disruption in this industry, and I see ServiceNow as a platform that will be able to streamline a lot of these complex processes, put some automation behind it, and really reduce some costs. So you think it'll reduce our bills? I hope so. So Van, let's talk about your experiences with ServiceNow. You said it started in 2007, did I hear that right? That's when I first used it. Okay, how did that all come about? It's still fairly new at that time, so when our service desk was replacing a tool, it was just something that we brought in, and then I worked at the help desk at that time, so I was in charge of just sort of configuring it to replace our old tool at that time. And so, and since then, I've just kind of did a little fudging here and there, and but as I went through my career, I've had more dedicated part in ServiceNow, and so now I'm a full-time developer, and so I'm just doing it a lot, a lot more now. And Nicole, you were standing off camera, your experiences, you were one of the first to go beyond IT. Maybe you could tell us about that. Yeah, so when I came to the New Orleans conference, I was just worried about it's an IT tool, and as I was sitting there listening to some of the sessions and some of the use cases, I thought, you know, there's something unique here, we can take this really far. So I came back and I did a really aggressive roadmap, and I showed my boss, and he says, you're trying to do everything in six months, and I said, fine, give me 12, and he says, okay, good luck, whatever, go do whatever you need to do, and I met with HR, facilities, accounts payable, engineering, and then we rolled out 15 business apps in 18 months. You're vicious. Very, but it was really nice because we had everybody using the same platform, and once you get everybody using the same platform, then you can automate your enterprise processes. So this stuff that everybody has a piece of that before you'd have to take outside of a workflow, you'd have to go door knocking and say, hey, it's your turn to do your part. Now we just hit the now button, right? And it just goes. Everybody just got an automated task to do their piece, they would do that piece, you'd go to the next piece. We were able to bring a lot of products to market very fast for that held on. So you were breaking ice, new ground. How did you go about succeeding there? Just take us through kind of the steps that you talked about. Yeah, initially HR came to me and says, you know, we do what you do. And I said, no, we're IT, you don't do what we do. And he says, no, absolutely, we have incidents. And I'm like. Yes, we do know you don't, yes we do know you don't. Okay, let's now really have a conversation. And he starts to walk me through. He says, yeah, if you didn't get paid, what would you think that was? And I'm like, oh, that's a really big incident. And he said, yeah, exactly. So I need something that I can have as a portal for employees to come through and get services from HR. And I was like, that makes a lot of sense. You know, let's go ahead and do this. So we did a proof of concept where we got everybody in the room and did an eight hour jam session. And we came out of that with actually a really good app. It took three weeks to roll it out because we had to do change management and some training to the field. But time to market was literally four weeks and we had an enterprise HR, you know, case automation piece to it. So it was really cool. Well, but okay, but there was no app creator back then, right? No. So how did that all work? So it was me. I just right clicked and created an app and did a table and prayed that I did it right. And you're a coder by background? I am not. I'm definitely from the business side of the house. So I did the proof of concept. And then I had a developer come in and do some of the security and some of the more complex logic that was needed to support something like HR. But there's a lot of sensitivity to data and things like that. Havan, you were a developer by background? No, I come from the service that side. But you're a service now developer? But now I'm a service now developer. So you guys are the low coders or no coders as they say? Yeah. How'd you get into being a developer in service now? Well, starting at the service desk, you know, at that time I just took calls and wrote up incidents and I moved into the application space and I still had a hand in service now and I did a little bit more coding in my application role. And then in my consulting role, then that's when I start to do more coding and stuff like that. And so then, so that's how I got in that space and I liked coding. People wouldn't have to call me as much as when I worked at the service desk, I was able to concentrate more and not be pulled into different directions. And as a developer, I can just focus on what I'm working on in front of my screen at that time. Okay, so I'm envisioning, you know, code, right, as code. I see our developers, they got code all over the place and I understand it. Maybe it's HTML, maybe it's Python, whatever it is. So what's it like to be a service now developer? It's not so much different from that. It's just you have to know that there's some proprietary functions within the service now system, but it's mostly JavaScript based and there's some jelly and then you can do some HTML in the CMS front too. But the service now has a lot of tools that sort of make it a little bit easier for people who don't code very much, as well as those who do code very much. And then it kind of gives them shortcuts and they don't have to write everything themselves. So today's developer in the service now can have the options to make it really complex that they need to or they can use the out of box tools to help them configure their application in a more efficient manner. It helps with better practice. And you don't have a computer science background? I have a computer science background. Oh, okay, so that helped. It does help, yeah. Okay, so you've taken courses and you understand logic and you written some code, maybe not commercially, but in Nicole, did you have a computer science background? I don't, I have an MBA, I'm straight up business. Now, okay, and do you consider yourself now a service now developer or no? You just sort of broke the ice. So I'm definitely capable of putting together, as part of my role as being a champion for the organization, identifying solution opportunities, I can put together a POC or a proof of concept within the tool and show people what they could do, what life could be like if they use service now. And then when you actually want to roll something out to production and have security and some automated business rules and things like that, you know, I'll partner with Van and say, help me, this is the things that we want to go ahead and do. Here's some of the additional harder requirements that we need to solve here. But yeah, I'm capable of going in and doing stuff to it, but the Java pieces and things like that, I let the experts handle that. So what makes a good developer and how does that compare to what makes a good service now developer? There's got to be similarities. Are there differences? Can you talk about that? There are slight differences. What makes a good service now developer is that you're aware of the best practice and you use the proprietary functions within the system. Some of the stuff comes with out-of-box and depending on what your requirements are, maybe you don't want to skirt around that. You want to use that because, you know, when things change on the service now front, you don't want your stuff to break. So a good service now developer will take into account the existing out-of-box functionality, things that you can figure, and then you would code and help support that so that when you do changes and upgrades to that, then your stuff wouldn't break. So it's just about being conscious about what's best practice, supporting the out-of-box functions when it's appropriate, and versus a regular developer. Well, you might not have a system that you're working with, you're just creating your own application. So that's the general difference between those two. Well, you must be excited about something else which you've seen at the show this year. Very excited about Geneva. The instances and, yeah, so talk about what you've seen that's got you charged up. It's very nice and I see that it has presence, that that's a good idea about having chat and the ability to do that. And what I really like is the more support behind the mobile feature, because in today, we have the mobile feature, but what we need may not be fully supported yet, but I see in Geneva, they're making a big push into the mobile app space, and I think that's when mobile apps are going to start taking off for service now when we get to Geneva. And a real-time piece with Angular. That's kind of cool. Yeah, that definitely is a plus, yes. Okay, all right, Nicole, so let's talk about N-Van. Well, to you guys, I want you to weigh in on this. So let's take a hypothetical situation in healthcare. You guys got relatively new to healthcare, so you come in with a fresh perspective. Describe a typical healthcare situation, maybe using a variety of tools and a lot of stovepipes and a lot of inefficiencies. Describe that situation and how you get from there to where you want to be and what is that state and how do you get there? So one of the things that we're focusing on right now is standardized processes. So in IT, we're battling kind of the firefighting or the being the very reactive. So if we can get everybody to fall into place with a standard process, that'll allow us to have a very similar experience from the hospital with IT. So if a doctor calls in, they'll have a very similar experience each and every time as opposed to it being somewhat varied or they have their hookup, their IT hookup, if you will, right? The other kind of interesting piece is we do a lot of rounding. So we go to the hospital and we try to find out what's better. And in doing that, I noticed that we have a lot of paper sheets where we file, you know, if a piece of equipment's broken or they need help with something at the hospital, they're actually filling out a piece of paper. There's a form for that. There's a form, a piece of paper form. You know, there's an app for that. Well, in healthcare, there's a form for that. There's a form. Or a stack of paper. And you know our field service reps. You can print it if you want. That's right, you can scan it. So our field services reps then go through every morning and they collect these pieces of paper and then they dispatch out some additional people to go fix these things or replace the items. You know, what I'd like to see is a mobile device there. And it's just right there for them to be able to do that. I think those are some prime opportunities that are kind of the low-hanging fruit for us from an IT perspective. But I also think that there's some great things that we could do outside of IT on this platform. You know, supply chain, managing some of the needle sticks. You know, if you take a use case like that, that's a huge challenge in healthcare today. And when you have a practitioner who sticks themselves with the needle, they have to go and fill out a form. They have to go to occupational health. They have to go and do all of these different things. There's just that process behind that. You know, it'd be nice for them to be able to log it from their mobile device that they had this issue. They would get some sort of task or some sort of notification that says, hey, now your next step in this process is to go do this. It gets checked off that way. And you can confirm that that practitioner followed the appropriate steps. And then what really excites me is the opportunity to do analysis behind that. So is it the nurse who's working the 18-hour shift that always gets the needle sticks? And those are higher? Is it the night shift? Is it this specific area that's having an issue? You know, you can start compiling some of that data and doing a lot of the reporting out of service now on how could we be better? I would think it's awfully challenging to do some of that analysis if it's on spreadsheets and paper and things like that. Now, doctors aren't known for being the most aggressive users of technology, at least historically. Maybe that's unfair. Has that changed? Yeah, I think I disagree with that because I think you're seeing significant advances in health care today. And I think they're looking for technology. You know, I ran into a physician the other day and he's been working at the hospital for 50-plus years and he says, oh, you're from IT? And I said, I am. And he says, when are we gonna get better technology? And I thought that was really interesting because I think it shows that they're really wanting more from us. You're telling them that's why I'm here? I'm here to help. So, Van, what are some of the applications that you're working on developing or getting adopted? Work on just about everything, out-of-box, like incident, problem, change, CMDB, service catalog, discovery. And then most recently, I developed, and me and my team developed a social media management app. And so, you know, it can help control Twitter feeds and stuff like that. So, and then there's, we also have custom apps that might sort of support an existing medical system. And so, we review the process for that and then we custom built out that request system. So, a request for an enhancement might come in and there'd be a workflow behind that, but it's not an incident, a change, or a service catalog requests. Doctors tweet? We're getting there. Corporate tweets. Corporate tweets. I guess it could be. So, what is the social media management app do? That's interesting. Basically, it would prevent accidental, inappropriate tweets or controversial tweets for an organization. And you would store the credentials in ServiceNow. And so, none of your social media team would actually need to know the credentials. And so, you'd give them the ability to post to the social media app, but they would have to go through ServiceNow. They'd have to submit a suggestion for a post and it would go through a workflow and a review. And there would be someone that would have the final say and the final edit on that post and they could polish it up and make it look good. And then they would say, post it now. And then it would go out from ServiceNow and actually post it on the Twitter feed. And this way, you can prevent, if there are people who are leaving and coming, you don't have to keep changing the password. You can just give them access to ServiceNow. You can just take it away. So, it is also much secure and it prevents people from accidentally posting something. So I think that's a real concern in today's industry about accidentally posting something. So how's that work? So, I have my ServiceNow credentials and then I have access controls to this app. Yeah, you would get access to ServiceNow. You'd open up a record producer and you'd submit a suggestion for a post. So let's say I worked in department XYZ and I say, you know, our company should really talk about this out there. And so I would submit this post suggestion. It would go through a workflow behind the scenes and it would get reviewed. And if they feel that, you know what, we really should be talking about this. Then they'll review it. They'll maybe work with a couple of people to polish it up and then they'll post it. And the person who suggested it doesn't need to know the credentials but they got their post out there. And so that's the Power of ServiceNow. You don't have to give the credentials out. So is that how it works? Is it pretty much anybody can make a suggestion? Anyone can make a suggestion. So it's sort of a user-generated content idea within the organization. Yeah, you'd get everyone to participate. Maybe it's just not the social media team anymore. You'd get feedback from the entire organization about what they feel should be out there that's relevant to their area and maybe you didn't know that that should be something you're talking about. And so you'd get that feedback. You'd get to review it and maybe you don't want to post it out or maybe you do. And if you do, you can get some work notes and discussions on the suggested post and when you're ready, you can post it out through ServiceNow to the app. Now, would you, for instance, take that app and put it in the store in theory? Would you do that? Yeah, it would be on share. Well, I mean, for others to... Yeah, yeah, okay. Have you done that or are you planning on doing that? I'm planning to do that, yeah. Are you gonna charge for it? No. No, okay, no. That's cool, great. I mean, I love free apps but I mean, a lot of people want to put stuff in the store so they can make money, right? Your motivation is the money that you're already in. Share knowledge and just help people. I mean, it's not a complicated program or anything like that but it's a good idea. Yeah, but it's done. Yeah, it's done. So why recreate it? Now, what's the general philosophy with sort of developing applications now that the store is here and there's this whole ecosystem? Make or buy, build or buy, what's the philosophy here? I guess it depends on whether you have a big team. If you have a team of 20X developers then you could build it yourself exactly to your specifications and if your team is small and your relatively small company maybe it's worth it to just buy the app. I think there's also an advantage to making it because then you can support it. You know exactly what's behind it. I think if people are gonna download off of Share and put applications on the platform they need to thoroughly understand how that application was built so that they can understand all the business roles and the logic that comes in. From a management perspective I think that's really, really important to vet out how those apps are been configured. We can talk about services. So a lot of large service organizations here, systems integrators, folks that are pretty astute on best practice within ServiceNow and IT service management. In your experiences, past experience, current experience, are you using service providers? How are you using them? What would you recommend in that regard? Because a lot of people are like, oh wow, that's a lot of money but we're talking about the family jewels here too so you have to be careful. So what would you recommend there and what's your experience been? So when I was at the telecommunications organization we used a lot of different partners and what we found is that each partner brings a different strength and that really allowed us to leverage one partner who's really nailed asset management for example, that's one that we want to partner with asset management but maybe not on HR case management. Another partner could be really good at governance, risk and compliance and bring a really strong suite there. That's what we want to partner with. I'm kind of finding a little bit of a shift now. I prefer to use ServiceNow professional services. It's the one back to pat, one throat to choke kind of thing. But they also are able to tap into a huge consulting practice. So if I'm leading an implementation in healthcare I can partner with them and say I want people that have healthcare experience and when I was at telecommunications I said hey, I need somebody that has telecommunications experience. They brought their A game to the telecommunications space. So it's really important because I think while everybody does incident management there are specific use cases for these different industries and things that are the Igotias and they've been through those things and they can bring that knowledge and I think that that's worth the money that they charge is bringing the while I was at this healthcare provider and they did it this way and this is what they found. Don't do that. We've gotten a lot of help on our recent project in that area. Just don't do this, do it this way. Specific to our guidelines for our industry. We're running out of time here but Van a couple final questions Van. From your perspective, coming from help desk now in the application development role. What's the one action item you would give to your peers? What should they be focused on to be successful? As a developer, I think they would need to focus more on the business and be more listening and gathering requirements because I think there might be a developer role in a business systems analyst role and that's not important but it would help the developer if they had a general understanding of the business and the flow of that. So I think if they could extend just beyond being a developer fully, if they could understand the business in the process that would definitely help them question and think about whether what they're building even though it's based off their requirements is really the best way to do it because they have the understanding of the business process too. So Nicole, you're nodding profusely. Okay, but Van took that one. What's the piece of advice you would give your peers? Be your own internal sales rep. So as we're asking the development community to fill in that gap of the business analyst and understanding the business and coming up with creative solutions from a solution owner or a platform owner perspective, it's be the champion. HR's not going to know the capabilities of the platform unless you're out in front of them coming up with these solutions and showing the capabilities behind it. So be the champion because it can only benefit your organization for everybody to be using the same technology. You know, it's interesting. IT people traditionally, you wouldn't consider them the most sales-oriented or marketing-oriented people in the planet but you walk around this conference and you call it user-to-word champion. It's a good word, but internal champion, internal sales people. You see a lot more of that at events like this generally but specifically knowledge. And so that's a skill set that's new, IT, isn't it? It's good. Yeah, and I think the platform allows that, right? We're not spending a lot of time coding and being very complicated. Our role is really making their processes less complicated so that we can automate in the tool faster, right? So if I can push back on the business and say, hey, why are you doing it that way? This is a better way to do it. I'm also simplifying our lives from a development perspective and I can go to market quicker as opposed to having to build all this custom functionality to support some crazy business requirement, right? So I think that's why you see a lot more champions at this conference because that's the skill set that's really important to make sure you don't mess up your platform. Excellent. All right, we'll leave it there. Cole, Van, thanks very much for coming. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. This is Knowledge 15. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with our next guest right after this.