 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 15. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Bob White is here. He's the CIO, Ashley Furniture. Joined by Brian Golis, who's the director of IT. Ashley Furniture, the largest. Thank you. Glad to be here. Ashley Furniture, tell our audience those who may not be familiar with Ashley, what the company's all about. Sure. Well, as you said, we're the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world. We deliver more than 35 million pieces of furniture every single year to customers. We own our entire supply chain, meaning we design it, we store it, we ship it, and we deliver to our consumers completely. We have one of the top 100 private fleets in all of North America, 2200 trailers, almost 900 tractors. We're able to deliver within one week to 95% of our North American customers. We have the single largest upholstery facility under one roof in the world, more than 2 million square feet. We are North America's largest retailer, I think I said that. We have facilities worldwide. We primarily manufacture in the U.S. We have two facilities in Asia as well, one in Vietnam, and we actually, as we speak, we continue to grow organically through additional home stores worldwide. In December, for example, we just opened up a home store in Mongolia of all places. So we thought if you can open a home store in our Mongolia, you can open up anywhere. Antarctic is next, and you're the CIO. Correct. Brian, you, director of IT. So talk about what you spend your time doing. So my role at Ashley Furniture as director of IT of Enterprise Services, we are an extension of the CIO's office. So any goals or objectives that Bob has for the IT organization, we help implement and execute those. So anything that's core to IT, any policy, process, procedures, we own ITSM space. And so we're responsible for rolling out capabilities and disciplines like demand management, change management, things of that nature. So you're essentially the heart of the ITSM? We truly are. The voice of IT, I do report to Bob. You're reporting to the CFO, a CIO, how does that work? CEO, president and CEO of the company. Really, you know, that's increasingly rare these days, but it's refreshing to see a company like yours where the CEO wants to be directly involved in the IT operations of the company. So let me go back to the business. So what's changed in your business? I mean, you got a lot of moving parts, logistics, you got manufacturing, you're importing, you're exporting. What's changed in the last 10 years and how has that affected your technology, infrastructure and applications? A lot of challenges. So 10 years ago, for example, we were about a billion dollar company. Today we're a little over four billion. And we've expanded our global footprint significantly in that timeframe. And so as our customers, as we grow our customers overseas and internationally, we have to increase our footprint, manufacturing capability, our distribution capability. Along with that comes a lot of stress on the overall infrastructure. And so making sure we have a capability to deliver products and services to our consumers, locally or regionally is very important to us. So for example, we have multiple facilities in the US where we manufacture and we distribute out of that same overall facility and it's regional. So the Northeast, we have one in Pennsylvania. We have another one in Mississippi in North Carolina in California. And so when a customer orders something in our home store in California, for example, that product is made and or shipped out of that local facility. So we don't agree with the concept where you ship something across the entire country for that consumer because it takes too long to get to them. Number one, the transit costs are too high. So we believe regional is very important to us to be able to get the product to that consumer much more quickly. I love that. So at the time we order furniture, it takes forever to get it. It's expensive to ship it. So you're actually getting approximate to the customer. That's more expensive in theory, but it drives more business. Is that sort of the philosophy? Yes, it drives more business because we know that, for example, when I walk around the furniture store with my wife in the past, the minimum of an hour, trying to make up her mind what she wants. If you're watching this, I apologize, honey. But after the hour, you're ready to leave, right? Well, that's then when you have to sit down with the sales associate and then they plan out, well, we can get it for you in 12 weeks or 18 weeks or whatever that timeframe is. And that's the last thing a consumer wants to hear. They want that product within the week. Absolutely. And often in cases they want it same day or next day. And so being able to deliver that product to our consumers very quickly and agree on what that date is and commit to that date is extremely important to her. So there's a lot of business process behind that, a lot of service processes behind it. So Brian, why don't you just kind of describe sort of the service management infrastructure, if you will. Absolutely. So before I get into that, one thing I wanted to add to Bob's comments is, so as we've grown, right, we've also need to grown our IT staff internationally. And so we've spun up some IT shops in China and Asia and in India and from an IT perspective because we are now doing business and operating with external parties, third party agencies, it's extremely important that we become efficient in how we're operating with those agencies from an IT perspective. And so having demand management in place, having project management in place is extremely crucial and critical because it allows us to operate effectively and efficiently with those teams who make up 50% of our IT staff. And so they're making decisions in a decentralized manner, is that what I'm talking about? We try to, so again, since we extend the office of the CIO and those external parties report up into our CIO, we're not only supporting our US and our domestic teams, we're also supporting our international team. So if we can drive that standardization internally here domestically and within the US and we can get that success internationally, it helps us be successful. Now how long have you been a service now customer? Six months, a year, but we've been, our implementation has been up and running for six months. Okay, so this is good, we can do a good case study here. So you can help me with the before and after. So what was life like before and then how did it change? And I'm really interested in the business impact. Chaotic, there's a lot of inconsistency. So I think the biggest challenge for us and the reason why we knew we needed to move towards platform and technology and process singularity was the results of all of these processes, whether it was delivering a service or providing an end user with an iPhone or if it was delivering a large project, there was always inconsistency and lack of quality in what we were providing, right? And how frustrating is that to an end user when they can have someone in the organization order an iPhone and they get it within a week, another employee within the organization orders an iPhone and they have no idea where that request is at for several weeks at a time. So I think the inconsistency has really frustrated our business units and our business leaders. And so they've really been challenging us and we knew that we were going to have to change. Okay, so how did it come about that you brought in service now? Was it an easy decision? Was it a political decision? Was it a hard decision? Do you have a big business case? Let me try. Were you involved Bob? Yes, absolutely. I mean, of course you were involved but take us through the process. It was very easy. When we looked at the pain being caused to the rest of the organization and IT's inability to provide consistent services across the board. For example, a project management methodology. We had 14 different development teams doing their project management 14 different ways. And it was very difficult for our customers because in some cases it was the same stakeholders in the business that was sponsoring projects held by three or four different IT teams. And they had different methodology so we were all over the place. And for me it was about providing the transparency to the rest of the organization. Here's what we provide, here's the service. And not that we were doing a horrible job with project management and our deliverables, just that we weren't being transparent about what we were doing. We weren't exposing to the rest of the organization what it took to deliver. They would often just say, I want this project done by this date. And the team would say, okay, we'll do our best. And they didn't explain everything that it took behind the scenes within IT to spin up those resources, to make sure that that was a priority within that team so that we can communicate effectively out to the rest of the organization. That was missing. So I mean a lot of organizations they'll take project management as a good example. You'll have a project management system and the only person that really uses it is the project manager. And he or she sets up, I call it nag wear, for everybody else. And you get a bunch of emails saying, okay, you have to do this, this, this and this and this, and maybe you do them, maybe you don't. You miss the date, everything's red. And you don't really know what's going on. How, is that, first of all, is that an accurate description? And how did, if so, how did that change in your organization? You want to take that? Yeah, so I think prior to ServiceNow, we're going to be rolling out PM and PPM on ServiceNow this month. Prior to ServiceNow, we were using a solution called PlanView. Yeah, PlanView. And one of the challenges we had with PlanView was it was extremely heavy to use. And because we are a lean organization, and obviously you've heard we're very fast paced, we have to keep up with the business because we're looking at a lot of opportunity and growth. We needed to have solutions in place that allowed people within the IT organization, whether they're the project managers, resource managers also use the PM tooling as well. And I would even argue that project team members use the tool as well. They have to go in a lot of time and they have to interact with the system. And when you bog down a team that's trying to move fast and to be agile, you're really prohibiting them from adding the value to the business and to the IT organization. And so moving to ServiceNow has allowed us to become more lightweight. It's allowed us to become more agile. And we're really able to be flexible and to adapt to IT demand. So okay, so tell me again, where are you starting? You're starting with the change management, problem management, incident management. I'll give you the roadmap. So we started with ServiceDest with incident problem change demand, knowledge, configuration management. And then we rolled that out in December and January, January of this year. And then we wanted to focus on PM and PPM. So we're focusing on that now. We'll be rolling that out later this month. Okay, and then so you're using, are you, I mean, the strategy is a single CMDB, is that right? The strategy is a single source of truth, right? So all of our teams, so if we're trying to drive standardization into process, we also need to drive standardization into the data that's driving those processes, just for efficiency and whatnot. And so we want a single source of truth. And so we're not only looking at just replacing plan view, but all the other IT systems that we use to operate and to bring that all into a one stop shop, we call it. I wonder if I could Bob ask a CIO perspective on this. We talked to a lot of people, as you can imagine. And a lot of the vendor community and service now may do it as well, talks about the 70, 30, 70% of the spend goes on, you know, maintaining, keeping the lights on, 30% goes to innovation. I don't know where that number came from. You know, I used to be at IDC, I probably made it up one day. But everybody seems to agree. That's the case. Do you feel like having a better view of your business can allow you to move that needle? And what do you do with that extra resource? Does the company take it back and throw it to the bottom line? Do you have a gain sharing approach? Talk about that, mix a little bit. That's a great question. Yes, having that tool that enables us to be able to understand where we're spending our time and the value of being provided to the organization is extremely important. We have an internal process where we say we want to spend a minimum of 20% of our time on the really important projects that matter to the company. And 80% of the time, we spend in the whirlwind. In other words, we have day to day stuff. You have maintenance, you have things you have to pay attention to. But we challenge our team internally to make sure they spend 20% minimum of their time on really important goals for the company and initiative so we can take the company forward. And we do measure ourselves with regard to how much time we're spending on maintenance and just keeping the lights on, right? Versus those really important initiatives for the rest of the company. And so we feel it's very important that we have that process in place. And having something like ServiceNow provides that transparency. It exposes it to the rest of the organization to my peers where they can see everything that they're working on. So the vice president of manufacturing, or manufacturing, global manufacturing, is able to take a look at all the projects that IT's working on to support him and what they mean for him and how they will be game changers, the impact it'll have on his organization. And that's helped us a lot in terms of being able to provide that information to them almost real time. Well, if you have the visibility, you can go to your business leaders and say, okay, guys, I don't know what your IT budget is, but let's say it's a hundred million dollars. They go, here's how we're gonna spend that hundred million. This year we have to spend 80 million on stuff that's not going to help us grow the business. And here's how, and you can share that detail with them and say, okay, let's work together to figure out how we can shift that. Where do you want to make trade-offs? Because most of the application portfolio is probably not driving the type of value that it was originally intended to, because it's aging. But it's hard to make those decisions in a vacuum because if you pull the plug on an app, the business line says, oh, I'm using that app, one user, maybe a loud voice. So it sounds like you're expecting that dynamic to change, or maybe it has already. I mean, can you talk to that? It has begun, and it's even getting better with the new system of service now. Now the challenge has been for us to clearly articulate the amount of resources and effort it takes just to keep the lights on. Because the business has been demanding more and more from us in terms of providing those game-changing initiatives, the more strategic projects that helps them move the company forward. And it's having a system that shows here's what it takes just to keep the lights on, here's what it takes just to maintain what we have. And there's a lot of work behind that. And making that transparent to my peers and to my boss has been extremely helpful so that we can now say, this is what we need to keep going, but now in order to move these other things forward, these key strategic initiatives to get those on the plate, here's what we need in order to make that happen. And here's why, because if we can't have people spending time in both worlds, it's difficult for them. So we need people to focus on the truly important initiatives and people to focus on keeping the lights on. Oh, I've been around a while. So I've seen the pendulum swing. I actually think in a way, Shadow IT is helping the perception of the business because they'll go out and say, we need a mobile app, let's go outsource it, because IT's too slow. And they'll go have a developer develop a mobile app. They won't do exactly what they want, but they'll get a mobile app, they'll put it at the market, and then all of a sudden they'll have to make a zillion changes and they go, now what? Who's going to do that? Where do they go? They go, IT, hey, can you help? Now you guys have to absorb all those costs and that's why it's so expensive to keep the lights on. And this is a very small example of what you guys live with every day. But I wanted to ask you about Shadow IT and your organization. Given that your quasi-decentralized has it been a problem to date? And do you expect that bringing in service now will help? I wouldn't characterize as Shadow IT being a problem for us, I wouldn't. We're aware of who they are. We work very closely with them. There's things that we know the business needs and there's people out there that are technically minded and they are delivering some apps that are important to the business. And so we monitor it, we work with them. And we have been bringing those systems that were initially developed to help the business because they had to move fast. Because while we're keeping the lights on, they're off doing those things. We have begun to bring those systems into IT and standardize on the platform, on the architecture that we've adopted. And so that's a process that we've been able to make happen and been very successful with it. And those that we can't intake, we'll make sure that we assess and analyze those and make sure that they're not presenting any liability or risk to the organization, whether through security or whatnot. So we allow some things to exist, knowing that we have to. But like Bob mentioned, we do try to bring those in-house because then we can apply our standards or policy process and procedures. So the governance piece is something that you're involved in virtually throughout the organization. We try to, we try to, yes. Well, it's hard, right? Because the trade-off is risk versus value. And they're sometimes counterposed. And if you get a strong business leader, they just say, screw it, I'm going to do it. And I don't care. And then they maybe get in trouble and that's when you get the call. Well, you have to pick your battles, right? There's things where if they want to do some things and I think the risk is minimal to the organization, for example, security, and they want to go off and do something that I don't think has an impact on security or exposes our data unnecessarily, then go off and do that. But know that some point in the future, we're going to have the conversation, we'll bring it back in to Brian's point, standardize and make sure it's consistent with our internal processes. So obviously you're open to cloud. You're using service now. Absolutely. Cloud app, I'm sure there are others. But how about infrastructure as a service? So you're doing much in the cloud there, whether it's with Amazon or Azure or other hosting providers? We are. We are working very closely with Microsoft. For example, we have our big data analytics is in the cloud on the Azure cloud. We just went live with our first iteration of selling online for our home stores. That's also in the cloud. We've contracted with another company. So the goal is to have all of our home stores, for example, as we move forward with this new solution, we'll be accessing that system in the cloud and our own private cloud, if you will, versus today they have their own individual servers for every single home store we have, they have their own servers on-premise. So we're moving to a cloud-based solution so that we can be more nimble, make changes far more quickly. Everyone at the same time will have change occur. So we want to introduce that change all at once rather than today in our home store environment. We have 566 home stores, for example. We may have 50 different versions of our retail system that we have in place today out there trying to support all 50 versions, which is a big, big pain for us. And so moving to a single version of systems will allow us to do that by moving to the cloud. And that has scale implications for your business, right? Absolutely, yeah. But it was a challenge, so it took us years to convince the business leaders that this cloud isn't so scary as everybody is saying it is. The myths that were shared during the keynote, there is some truth to some of the myths, right? I mean, there's some things in there, but once you're able to demonstrate a single solution in the cloud and show, hey, it's not so bad, then we notice that the business leaders are, they're like, yeah, it's not so bad. That's interesting, because a lot of times organizations are the opposite. The IT guys are hanging on to the on-premises infrastructure and the business guys are hanging on. Well, right, so our infrastructure folks, I mean, they wanted to hold on because that's their bread and butter, that's their job, right? But we were really, I think going to the cloud has helped support them, right? Because if we were to place all that demand on infrastructure, they would have been overwhelmed. And they would have been overcapacitated. Plus, if you want to move that needle that whatever it is, 80, 20, or 730, 70, 30, you've got to get out of that sort of undifferentiated, heavy lifting business that doesn't add value. So people I think are starting to realize that. They think that we all touch consumer technology and we wouldn't want to run our business on Facebook, but we like it and it's easy. And so we say, okay, why can't we do that in the enterprise? It's things like the enterprise that's sort of catching up to the consumer piece. I wanted to ask you, Brian, before we go into Bob, the whole CIO role, as a service management practitioner at Knowledge, is this your first Knowledge? It is our first Knowledge. Oh, okay. We're rookies. Okay, that's great. So, well, what are your impressions? Let me just start there. Well, awesome. Absolutely amazing. It is an awesome conference. It really is. I mean, just to see the show. We do a lot. We're 60 a year and this is one of the best. I mean, the venue's great. I think the organization, the service now organization is just well managed. I think they're high performers and I think they're passionate. And I think they're so passionate that it's easy for someone like myself to be passionate as well. So when you come to an event like this, you get pumped up. And you don't just get pumped up because of something that doesn't have any elements or anything to it, but there's good stuff that's coming out of this conference and we've absolutely enjoyed ourselves. The networking opportunities have been phenomenal. We'd actually like to learn from people that have learned, right? They're good and the bad. And we were able to do that ourselves. We were able to come here and say, hey, here's some of the challenges we faced with our implementations. Here's some of the successes we had. Here's what we recommend. Here's what we don't recommend. So it's been a great conference. I'm getting the high sign, but I got a track I have to go to. So thank you. So you're learning a lot, obviously, is what I'm hearing. People are learning from us as well. That's what's good about it. And we've only been on the platform for six months. That's cool. Yeah, and I've noticed too, there's been a lot of other organizations that are kind of in the same boat we are. And when you can relate to other people and say you feel a bit more calm, but we are absolutely, absolutely certain that we've made the right choice of service now. Roll the CIO. Let's talk about that. We have so many interesting discussions on theCUBE about that. We do a conference every year with MIT, Chief Data Officer Conference. And one of the CIOs said on there, he said the CIO roll is dead. We went, what? You're a CIO. No, he's going to have to choose between Chief Data Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Creative Officer, Chief Operating Officer, CFO, CTO, blah, blah, blah. So I think that's one sort of end of the spectrum. Other end of the spectrum, and it's predominant here, is that the CIO roll is transforming as the organization transforms. A lot of it is around service management. So what's your take, Bob, on the roll of the CIO? Are you working yourself out of a job or are you creating a long-term innovation roadmap? I think I'd first like to say you definitely have to adapt. There's no question. What I was doing six years ago was much different than I was doing three years ago. Much different than what I'm doing today. And so it's all those things. So I think we have to be a little bit of everything. And it's not just the CIO. It's anybody in senior IT leadership really needs to look at themselves as somebody who can support the business and provide that direction, but also understand where the company wants to go and be prepared to understand the technology, understand the business, and put in place a great solution to support that. So yes, I think it includes chief digital officer, chief innovation officer, chief strategy officer, all those things. And so as I look to my role and especially now and going forward, it's really understanding what the business wants out of IT. It's understanding the direction the business wants to go in. It's that constant interaction with the rest of the organization. So when I sit down with my peers and have a discussion on where we're going with the warehouse management system, what do you expect out of IT in the next few years? Or it's sitting down with manufacturing, the manufacturing team understanding where do they go, where they want to go. They're very frustrated in terms of the fact that we have a monolithic ERP system and they want to introduce change. If we're going to continue to expand globally, as I said earlier in our conversation and be able to deliver product, no matter where she is in the world, by the way, our customer is a she, then we have to do it very effectively. We have to do it regionally. So we have to have a manufacturing capability that's very responsive. We don't have time right now based on the growth of our business to take three years and implement a brand new manufacturing ERP system. We don't have time. So what we need to do instead is listen to where they want to go and the challenges that the rest of the organization is having in this case, manufacturing and put in a solution that meets their needs, not one that IT feels would be best for them, but where do you see yourself going? How can we help implement incremental change so that you can continue to improve your part of the business? It's not about a traditional IT project taking three years to deliver, it's about being more agile. And being more agile to Brian and I means we need to be able to introduce change on a more frequent basis going forward so that the company can continue to do what it needs to do to achieve its growth. So is the CIO a business leader or a technology leader or a hybrid? Yes, everything. I think it's a little bit of everything, especially a hybrid. I was going to add too, if you don't mind. So when you look at IT, we're the technology pioneers, right? Everybody looks at us to deliver software and solutions and hardware. But I think something that I've observed over the last several years is we're also looked to be business thought leaders as well. We have to understand the business problem domain or else we can't serve them. And so that's why the roles of like business analysts or functionalists is so critical to our success because if you don't embed those types of people into the organization and into their processes and into their everyday activities, how can you provide a service to them? It doesn't make sense. So I think we're not only technology pioneers, but we're also business thought leaders as well. So I think it's hybrid. Correct. Excellent, gentlemen, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Great to have you. All right, keep right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We'll see you over live from Knowledge 15. We'll be right back.