 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org, I'm here with Jeff Frick. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. theCUBE, we go into events like this, we're at Knowledge Service Now's user conference, we try to extract the signal from the noise, we bring you, we love sports analogies here, we like to bring you the best athletes, tech athletes, we call them. So Carolyn Hollingsworth is here. She's, I know Carolyn, you're a fan of football but we're going to call you a tech athlete. So Carolyn's with Lenox International, she's an IT practitioner there. Carolyn, thanks a lot for taking some time and coming on theCUBE. So tell us a little bit about Lenox, about the organization and what's your role there. Lenox is a global manufacturer of furnace and air conditioning equipment. We're based in Dallas, Texas. And we have sales of about $5 billion a year. And I'm the senior manager of service operations. Okay, so this conference is amazing, this first knowledge conference I've been to, I presume you've been to others or is this your first? This is actually my fourth conference. Okay, so you were here at the beginning. So pretty close. They had a few before that. But so it's evolved over the years, I'm told. Oh yes, it seems like year over year it doubles. Yeah, so it's gotten bigger and more diverse or in terms of just the content or is it still sort of focused on leveraging the platform? No, it's gotten more diverse. I mean, they've added Discovery and this new orchestration, which is Runbook, that's new this year. They're always adding new modules. So and then too, now they're really pushing platform. That's the custom applications you can build outside of IT. So they tell us it's really easy to write applications. Can you write applications on the platform? Oh yes. Really, okay, are you a programmer by trade or? I programmed in a past life. But I really don't program today, but I can go in and build screens within service now and do reporting, it's very easy. So I was a programmer past life too and not a very good one, which is why I'm now hosting theCUBE. But I have an idea for an app, so I'm dying to get my hands on the platform so I can play around with it. Well, they just came out with a brand new app that they say that anybody can sit down and write an application. App creator, right? Yeah, so I will test that anybody claims. They actually have a hackathon going on, I believe tomorrow. Yeah, we actually covered that earlier today. We were in there filming it. That hackathon is underway. They're working till midnight. I made sure that they had pizza and caffeine and sugar on the arm. I think they're going to have a little bonus Vegas entertainment visiting at some point in time. So tell us more about how you're using service. I'm really interested in the sort of before and after. So if you could describe life before ServiceNow came in, what was that like and how did it change? And we'll get into the implementation a little bit. Well, before ServiceNow, we did have an application for the help desk to take tickets, but that's about all we did. Nothing else within IT really had a system like ServiceNow. Well, after we brought ServiceNow in, it's a complete package. They keep, you know, they say, ERP for IT? Well, it truly is. You can do ticketing. We're doing change, change management, discovery of all of our assets. We've built our own applications for access management. Even departments outside of IT are coming to us now and saying, hey, we see what you've done with ServiceNow. We have something we think that maybe we could use it for. So we've built applications for HR. We're building an application for our R&D department to track the various incidents and changes that goes on with the large test cells for HVAC equipment, marketing. We have some small retailers that has pieces and parts for our HVAC equipment around the United States. We've built an app for them to bring in new equipment and it has to go through a workflow and be approved by like a district manager, pricing changes, sales programs all have to be approved. Well, we've built an app for them that runs on ServiceNow also. So prior to ServiceNow, you had the collection of spreadsheets. I've seen the spreadsheets. I mean, it's an asset spreadsheet and the spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets and that describes your environment? Oh yes, definitely. And somebody owned the spreadsheet. This is probably, yeah, this is before Google Docs, right? So it was, I got it, you take it, you take it. So you had all this sort of simultaneous versions going on. Or email, email was always a big way to pass around tasks to various people. Can you take care of this? Can you do that? Now, you very well may have had project management systems, right? Actually, we had a homegrown project management system. So a lot of customers, right? Homegrown or Microsoft projects or whatever, 37 signals. I mean, there are many out there. So how did ServiceNow sort of change things? In other words, what can you do now that you couldn't do then? We have one system where everything is. So there's no, you know, before someone would say this is the way it is and another one might be tracking the same assets or the licenses. And we had two answers. Now we have one system that is the record. They're gold, we called our golden record. So everything is in ServiceNow. It's connected to each other. If you think of ERP for manufacturing, it's, you know, everything is connected to each other. Right, so it's- They beat each other. You used to have to add one plus the other, divide by two and say, okay, that's the truth. Right, right. So Carolyn, can you talk a little bit about mobile and how mobile's impacting your business? We keep hearing about it. We keep hearing about it. I think of the Linux guy out in the truck, checking in on the HVAC outside the house and the commercials. Actually, they are actually building computer controls into our units now. They've, I guess, announced a couple of them, but it's going to be able to call home when it has a problem. And it's just starting, but I mean, they're actually taking this mobile idea to our products and we're doing some POCs where our sales force is getting iPads and they're going to be doing some apps within salesforce.com. We can talk about that one, but- It's okay. We can talk about that. Yeah. And here, busy lady, you got to manage a lot of different IT systems and puzzles, so that makes sense. We're starting to delve into mobile. We're looking at possibly replacing all of our laptops with either notebooks or tablets. So we have a lot of PLCs going on right now, just trying to put a strategy together as to what our mobile's going to be. But it's coming towards us all different ways. Were there challenges in terms of, so you're bringing service now, you've got the single system, but they call it the gold. Golden record. Golden record. It's right at the golden table. Were there challenges in getting rid of stuff, we have a wiki bomb called GRS, getting rid of stuff, getting rid of, for instance, legacy systems that had sort of embedded themselves into the organization. And how did that go? How did that all come about? Well, let me tell you first how service now got into our organization. We had this older system and we'd had it for 10 years. And I mean, it was meeting our needs, we thought. I mean, we didn't really have any problems with it. We weren't looking for a new system. And I remember this is five years ago. I got an email out of the blue with a little embedded commercial or demo for service now. And it was, I mean, just sort of mind-boggling what they were saying they could do and how it was all packaged in one package. And basically, I said, you know, I want that. Just from that, just from that video. And what was the use case that they outlined that grabbed you so effectively? It's just that everything, you know, is their ERP system for IT. Everything was there, it's connected. We had the system we had, all we had was ticketing. If you wanted problem, you had to buy another module. If you wanted change, you had to buy another module. Everything you wanted was more money. This was one package, one subscription price. And you know, you got it all. But it took me a year to convince my peers and our VP that we should be looking at this. Now, why did it take so long? What was the kind of friction? What was the discussion like? Well, it was like, why do we, you know, the use case? Why do you need a new tool? You know, this one seems to be, you know, taking care of it. It's not broke. Right, why fix it. Why fix it? And Linux is a very conservative company and we have in the past run a lot of old software as probably a lot of companies do. If there's not a real need there, you know, they don't go out and look at changing. In retrospect, it was broke. Right, when you compare it to what you're doing now. So how did it affect your business? I mean, did you get more competitive? Are you able to, you know, attract better people? Or are you able to cut costs? How we posed it after, you know, I got some dumbbells going and everybody, you know, interested in looking at this. We convinced our VP that we should go global with this. Because before, Linux was very structured that each locality, because we're global, had their own IT systems and their own IT support groups. So while they reported in dotted line into Dallas, the headquarters, everybody sort of did their own thing. So we came up with this program where we were going to do standard global processes with ITO. And so that's where we started and then we were going to use ServiceNow as the tool of choice. So we started down that path and it did make a big difference to the business because now most of our IT processes are the same across the globe. And we're asking everybody to do things the same way, go to ServiceNow and just work that way. So you stuck with it for a year and a half. I mean, you don't seem like the type of person who's going to start pounding the table and intimidating people. That doesn't seem to be your style. So, but at the same time, you kept at it. So it was a year and a half before you were able to convince people. So how did you go about that cell process? I'm really intrigued by this. Give advice to the other people that are at your position that are watching this show. They're saying, Carol, help me. I need you to convince my senior guys to make the sleep in fact they're here today. 30% of the attendees. Well, ITIL was really becoming big at the time and there was a lot of news going on about ITIL and we do listen to Gardner and Forrester and people like that. So ITIL was getting big and I think it just came at the right time with our VP to say, well, maybe this is something we should look into and we got all the senior management together and basically he said, everybody's got to put their thumbs on the table that we're doing this or we're not going to do it and everybody came to the table and said, yes, it sounds like a good thing to do. So what are you most proud of, the accomplishments that you've made, both professionally and personally, as it relates to this initiative? I think that our support and operations groups are working the most efficiently, that the most efficient that they can and I think that we're responding to our customers' needs a lot faster. We're not hearing all the complaints that we heard before that, hey, this has been broke, when are you going to fix it? We're even trying to become more proactive. We've brought in some monitoring tools that we didn't have before to help us along those lines. So just to be more customer centric and sort of instead of saying no to the customer and say, okay, we can do it now. So all this, I mean, you're using the lines. So all the stuff we hear about from going no to now, that's not just to you, that's not just marketing, you're actually living that. Is that a fair statement? I mean, like I said, we started putting out our own applications and now we have all these customers who wouldn't normally come to support and ask to have an application built. They'd go to our project side of the house but they're coming to us. We're working with safety and HR and R and D and I could double or triple my staff just to keep up with the requests we're getting from outside of IT. And you're able to do that so the business is then helping you fund that. Yes, yes. That's got to feel great. It's so easy to make an application. I mean, the other ERP system we use is SAP and to get a system up in SAP is big dollars, six, eight, nine, 10, 12 months. And we literally built the application for our retail stores in two weeks. So I mean, I've been around IT a long time and I've just seen the finger pointing and what are you spending our money on? It sounds like you've flipped or in the process of sort of flipping that mentality. Is that, am I overstating that or? No, I think that's a good statement. That's got to feel great. I mean, good, congratulations. All right, Carla, well, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story, the story of Lennox, your personal story and really congratulations on all the great progress. Oh, thank you, it was a pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. 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