 ServiceNow Knowledge 4T is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're here live at Moscone South and we're covering wall-to-wall this Knowledge Conference Service Now, transforming IT from a cost center into a value producer. Services is the tip of the spear, service-oriented businesses. We're seeing this notion of a single CMDB, a single data model as a very powerful concept and one that the majority of companies don't have today, but the ones that are moving in that direction are definitely transforming in a way that is pretty meaningful. Brad Pavel is here. He's the Vice President of Internal Customer Technologies at Maritz, a customer of ServiceNow. Brad, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you, it's good to be here. So you are speaking at this event, right? Absolutely. What's your topic? IT evolution, so taking IT to the next level. Okay, so before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your company, your role, what you've been doing since we last talked. Sure, absolutely. Well, we're actually going through a huge cultural shift inside of Maritz right now and it's all about the people, right? IT needs to realize that we're really a service-based organization now and so that's really hard for people to grasp, right? We talk about IT changing all the time and when IT people hear that, they think moving from one technology to a new technology, this time it's completely different, it's all about the people. So we're asking the IT people to change and be more like salespeople to really sell the services that IT's offering and that's difficult for them so I'm really driving that inside of Maritz culture from an organization perspective to really get out in front of it and solve real people needs. We talk about business needs, it's really people needs that we need to solve and so that's what I've been up to over the last year. So what are some of the secrets? Because that keeps coming up over and over that IT's going to change and like I said, it's people and probably a lot of them are getting out of their comfort zones. Oh, absolutely. Are they receptive? How receptive are they really? I think you have some people that are receptive, some people that aren't, but they have to get out of their comfort, right? To be able to do this and what it really takes is you got to step back and look at the bigger picture, right? This is kind of where tools come in. IT has always been this kind of working on requests, working on instance, tracking it in that way. Those metrics are really are useless to our customers because we are trying to prove our existence by numbers. They don't care, right? They care you solving my problems, right? So we have to transition them out and that's where you bring tools in because what you're able to do is automate those activities, right? And anytime that you're freeing up from them, that's when you take them out and move them into the business, actually sitting with the business to understand and listen to what they're saying so that they can solve those business needs. So that's what you have to do and it is very uncomfortable for IT. I always think about the old Saturday night life skit. I don't know if you guys remember it, but it had the IT people and they'd call, right? And they'd say, here, can you solve this? And you'd say, click here, do this, do this. And they'd be like, move. And then they'd jump out of the way and he'd slam on the keyboard and fix it, right? That's the old IT. That's the old siloed IT. We don't have that anymore. Now we need to listen, become that sales, become brokers of services and it's interesting you talk about, you know, IT of salespeople, we had one of the guests on Mark the Heller actually who said, generally IT people are not great salespeople. They undersell. Now, part of the issue is as a salesperson, you want a hot product. You got a hot product that you're really proud of, then it's easier to sell. So I guess the question is, how has your product evolved in the last, you know, in years and what have been the drivers? So the product, how you need to evolve, you know, when you start talking about tools is ease of use. That is gonna be the number one selling for your customers of IT above anything else. So if I can give the customer a solution like they get it at home, you know, if they have a problem, they Google it, they look it up, they fix it themselves. So you need to really take that to the next level and sell that. Where you bring the IT people in to get them engaged is they know the backend technology in order to make that happen. And so they get excited about that and then what you need to do is put people in front of them to really sell that to the business. I'm talking marketing slicks, I'm talking everything. That's where you need to do. Really, so you guys are doing collateral? Yeah, well you have to be able to sell your IT services. I mean, that's what it's all about. We are transitioning to a service-based culture 100%. And you know, you brought up a good point. There are a lot of people that just can't make that transition. It doesn't mean that we don't need them anymore. What it does mean though is you need to really focus their efforts in a certain area and then put that customer facing sales-oriented people out in front of the customers. So what was the contribution of service now to this transformation? Was it a little small piece of it? Was it the other end of the spectrum? The reason why was it the key enabler? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, well when you look at it, and this is coming back to from a tools discussion, is what you want to do is you want to be able to free up that IT's time, right? In order to do that, you need to automate. In order to automate, you need tools to automate, which is the orchestration pieces and things like that of service now. So that is actually an enabler for us to free up the time to get in front of the businesses to be able to sell our services. So that was a really big step in the right direction. The other thing is, ticketing systems of the past were just really used to track things, right? That's not the case anymore. You don't just track things with IT ticketing systems. Now what you want to do is actually use it to sell your service. Okay, so you have to build your catalog, you have to build all of those services in such a way that's easy to use like an Amazon, things like that, so that you can really sell those services and that's where the tools come in. So it's actually twofold. It frees up your IT people's time in order for them to get in front of the business and then you need to use it to sell and get out of IT. Get into facilities management, get into HR management. All of those different things are huge and really it's like an upsell for IT. Well Brad, that's really interesting because the research that we've done at Wikibon, so you started with problem management and change management like most service now customers, but the research that we've done at Wikibon, when we ask people about moving, transforming to IT as a service and doing service catalogs and what the biggest challenge is, what they tell us is that the hardest part is aligning with the business, figuring out what the business needs, aligning with those business needs, developing those service catalogs in a way that resonates with the business. If I heard you correctly you're saying you started with problem and change management and all the sort of blocking and tackling and then that freed up resources for you guys to actually go and talk to the wallets of your organization. That's right, you have to automate those activities that you do day in and day out from an incident change perspective and that frees up your staff to actually go sit with the business and listen and learn and that's a skill set that you have to teach your IT people but it's an important skill set because if you can put the IT workforce actually with the business, they'll hear the problems that they're facing and start to work through that with them and that's a win-win for everybody. So I got to ask you, was culturally, how did you achieve this transformation? Was it a situation where the IT staff was sort of clamoring for this? Did you have to drag them kicking and screaming? Change is often times not easy. Sometimes it's welcome but often times it's not. So how were you able to affect that change from a cultural standpoint? You know, that's a very good question and it wasn't easy, I'll be honest with you. It's a very difficult transition because you're changing people. You know, it's not tool, it's not anything like that. So what you do is you find those things that motivate those, right? The real geeks of IT, what do they want to do? They want to automate, they want to build those back-end systems so drive them towards that, okay? So that gets them motivated in starting from the cultural shift and besides that, you know, they want to be innovative. They really do. If you talk to any IT guy, they want to be innovative. They want to make a difference. It's just guiding them along that path and it takes a lot of work to change a culture like that but it's so important and without it, your IT organizations just aren't going to make it. You know, you have those people like your database administrators, your system administrators that are set and siloed in their ways. That's just the old IT, you know. They need to go to cloud providers maybe in work because, you know, they're still doing that type of activity but your corporate business now is going to be service providers and that's how you need to make them change and understand that. So a couple of questions to follow. So one is how are the business people receiving this new, you know, almost a pairing it sounds like with IT folks? And then two, from the IT perspective, what do they think about Amazon? What do they think about Shadow IT? You know, are they pissed about it? Are they happy to have something to combat it? Are they, you know, we just can't compete. They're working at a different speed than we are. You know, this is one of the things I always talk about in my presentations at Merits is we don't, IT in the future doesn't compete, we compliment and that's where you need to do. So if you're putting a lot of your servers in the cloud and in Amazon or Azure, build a portal and make it easy for your customers to do it. So you're complimenting those services. That's where IT needs to go is more of a complimenting factor. And the business, are they liking it? Absolutely, cause we're solving real business problems. They actually are getting there faster than IT, right? Think about it when you go home, you fix your own issues, you go to the store, it's easy, it's quick, right? You are driving the customers of IT are driving this cultural shift. IT needs to catch up and get going in this direction. Excellent, so let me give one more if I know we're getting the light on time. But I remember one of the highlights of Knowledge 13 was the Brad Vegas movie where I think you hit every single venue up and down the strip from the airport to the Grand Canyon. So I'm curious, have they taken you out for the streets of San Francisco? They have not taken me out for the streets of San Francisco but that was quite a life changing event. I tell you, we hit every stop in Vegas. You name it, we were there. And luckily they cut, they didn't show the whole video, they cut sections out that maybe it was a little too risky in Vegas. We got to find that video, we'll put it up on our playlist because it's certainly a must see TV. Absolutely. The crews are out in San Francisco, a lot less interesting. Yes. Well. You never know, right? Well, necessarily. Yeah, Lombard Street. All right Brad, listen, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. Absolutely, anytime. Great to see you again. Thank you so much. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Moscone. We're here at Service Now, Knowledge. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE.