 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, this is Dave Vellante and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We're here live at Moscone West. We're covering Knowledge 14, the ServiceNow conference, we'll be here all week. And ServiceNow, as we talked about at our open, is a company that's really transforming information technology departments, transforming organizations, really focusing on the value side of the equation. All too often within IT, we talk about cost cutting and doing more with less, which is still vitally important, but it's not directly necessarily adding value to the business. That's really what ServiceNow is insanely focused on with a new platform that is catching fire. We're here with Brian Kenfield, who's project manager at Einstein NOAA Restaurant Group who is a customer of ServiceNow, and Jason Wohan who is the president of the Cloud Sherpas ServiceNow business unit, partner of ServiceNow and an organization that really facilitates the movement to the Cloud. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to see you. Thank you. So Brian, I wonder if we could start a little bit with Einstein NOAA and tell us about that organization, what you guys do and what your role is there. Sure, so we're the largest bagel bakery nationally. We have 850 locations approximately. The majority of our corporate locations is around 460, and that's where we mainly targeted for our rollout of ServiceNow. What is it about the bagels in New York City? I mean, it's something about the bagels in New York City. Even in the subway, they seem to taste that much better. Is it the water or what's the deal? You know, they say it's the water, right? But it does have its classic taste out there. Regionally, we also have a very broad following out here in San Francisco as well, with NOAA's New York Bagels having that theme, and it's a great product and I really enjoy working for the company. Now, what's your role there? So I'm a manager of enterprise projects and IT quality assurance, been with the company for 13 years, been handling and managing the majority of all of the major implementations from a software and hardware perspective. I've also been kind of on the front side of implementations to the stores, installations, that sort of thing as well. So I've had my hand in every kind of aspect of the business and continuing on with ServiceNow and Cloud Service. So you're responsible for implementation, so you're not the PMO or are you the PMO? We are the PMO, we're developing that currently right now. Oh, okay, I want to come back to that and try to understand how ServiceNow might fit into that a little bit. Sure. Now Jason, let's talk about Cloud Service. I love your business. You guys, I think focus on three areas. Salesforce, Google Apps and obviously ServiceNow, right? Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. And you run the ServiceNow business unit. Hot part of the company, I'm sure. Maybe talk a little bit about Cloud Service generally and specifically the ServiceNow business. Sure, so Cloud Service is a GSI in the cloud. We're focused, as you mentioned, on Salesforce ServiceNow and of course Google. We're one of the top five largest integrators in the world from a Salesforce perspective, Platinum on three continents. Largest Google Enterprise integrator in the world, Google's partner of the year, 2011, 2012, and also just announced 2013. The ServiceNow practice, which I'm responsible for, we were the first partner in the U.S. with ServiceNow back in 2007. We were the first partner to achieve ServiceNow's preferred partner status, and we're one of two partners to have achieved master services status as well. And you should win a contest for best name. Okay, so now Brian, take us back to, so pre-ServiceNow, how long ago did you bring in ServiceNow? It's been a little over a year. Okay, so relatively new. Relatively new. So take us back to a year ago, prior to doing the POC or whatever it was, describe your environment at that time. Sure, so we had a legacy system that was an incident tracking system that was 15 years old, was not a flexible database. The architecture was old, it wasn't flexible. We weren't getting the results that we needed out of it from a reporting perspective, really understanding our SLAs, understanding our needs as a company to make sure that we're addressing those high priority needs that have to have attention right away as well as measuring the concerns of our end users. So maybe interrupt, when you say it's not flexible, it just, it didn't evolve with your business. That's right, that's right. We were locked into the functionality of the database which takes a lot of time to make changes. It really becomes kind of a snail where, so to speak, where you put in a request and you have to wait for that request to happen where when we moved and transitioned to ServiceNow, the dynamics of the database and the dynamics of the application allow you to do things on the fly, which is something that we were not exposed to as an organization. Okay, so what kinds of things, what was the main driver to bring in ServiceNow? Was it to sort of break that cement freeze that you were in? Yeah. And, but there had to be more than that, right? Yeah, absolutely. So what we really were trying to accomplish is how can we be more efficient? What can we do better? And how can we make the experience better for our end users? So what we did is we would go through and what we evaluated as a business is we looked at all the manual process. What are our pain points? You know, we talk about email, we talk about fax, we talk about phone calls, all of the things taking away from our managers that are at the stores that should be paying attention to our customers, focusing on this experience of the guest and not administering all of the information in the back office. So what they would have to do before ServiceNow is they would have to go and call our support desk, give them the information. If there was any conversation back and forth, there was always follow-ups, there was email back and forth, and it was always thought of as, am I really getting the attention I need? And so with ServiceNow and the self-service platform, we were able to transform that and move that into a focus where the general manager has the power, they're empowered to put in their information, they send that off, and then with the automated aspects of ServiceNow, we were able to follow up that information and give them what they needed as far as tracking where they were at, what their concerns were, and making sure that when we were done with resolving the issue, we could go back to the store and confirm with them via ServiceNow, saying are you happy with the result and they were able to close that issue out. But Jason, talk about the role Cloud Sherpa's played in all this. So we really were their system integrator. We completed their initial implementation of ServiceNow with Brian and the team. We were there to really take their requirements and help them rationalize that into the Cloud Platform of ServiceNow, make sure that we're working with them to not only take this as an opportunity for them to move towards better or more common practices, but also take this as an opportunity to streamline, to automate, and really to leverage the power of the Platform of ServiceNow. Okay, so you guys have expertise in this. You've helped dozens, if not hundreds of customers. Where do you start in a project like this? You always start at the beginning, right? So, with Brian, the beginning really was making sure that we had a good understanding of their requirements, that we were aligning well to their particular business deeds, their particular objectives, and helping them understand that your initial implementation of ServiceNow is not intended to be your last implementation, which is really what they experience with heat. You implemented it once and that was the tool that you had for the next 15 years. ServiceNow is really meant to be more flexible than that. It's meant to help and expand, pass just the boundaries of IT and create transparency in the stores and from a key performance indicator's perspective, SLAs and really help not only empower the business users but also the IT people that are supporting that and bringing that forward. So, where we typically start is really understanding requirements, really understanding objectives, making sure that we're aligning to that, and then making sure that we put the projects in such a context that there's a series of improvements being made successively. And so, is that really where you sort of started to see the value? You started to attack the project portfolio? Well, I think really what ended up happening was we started attacking it from an incident standpoint. How can we be better there? But then, as we started having further conversations with Cloud Sherpas, we really understood the global effect or enterprise effect that we would have with the application. How it would enable other departments within our support center, as well as being able to support our end users in the stores. So we took our primary users that are in the support center, our risk department, our HR department, our real estate department, our payroll department. We're able to take a lot of the manual processes that everyone, literally stapling things to tickets and filing them away. We were able to take those electronic forms, put them into service now, and now we have a smooth workflow process that addresses the request, finishes the request and processes the request in a timely manner. So were you involved up front? Yes. So it was really incidents around the projects that you were deploying and working through the deployment. And then, I presume you, then once it became a system, you obviously kept that practice up. Now, are you also utilizing service now at this point for project prioritization and business case analysis? One of the main reasons why we're out here at Knowledge for that reason is that we want to expand our PMO role, expand the enterprise presence and understanding how we can make the entire organization efficient. That's by measuring what we're doing with the projects, are the projects a priority in being able to have the visibility to our C-level so that they understand what is out there for them and help them make decisions that are good for the business. Now it's only been a year, but what kind of impact have you been able to discern? Has it been meaningful? A little bit, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, huge? Yeah, they're just, from an impact and a visibility standpoint, what we've been able to do is we've been able to take away the confusion and communication where everybody was going back and forth saying are we really accountable for what we're doing? Are we able to resolve issues? That discussion has gone away because of the way that we've set up in service now with notifications and being able to close that communication with the end user that's requesting. That's been a huge change from a philosophy that we were, how we were dealing from an IT perspective. The other thing that we're doing is, I think that we're taking the opportunity now with the new platform is to revisit new old policies, procedures, making sure that we are being efficient. Is this a time to change what we're doing and really allowing our departments to be innovative and set the pace for what we're gonna do in the future? Are you, everybody talks about this consumer-like experience. Is that something that you're trying to get to or are you beginning to achieve that? Yeah, I think everyone's going in that direction. I mean, if you're not heading in that direction, you probably are gonna be lost in the dust, but we are targeting that. Right now we were just trying to make a transition so that we start expanding the capabilities of service now and being part of the PMO and understanding what projects are impactful for our business is going to be a key indicator for us as we move along. Jason, I wonder if you could talk about, from your perspective, I talk to a lot of practitioners and they always say, people process technology. Technology's the easy part. It's people in process, but it seems different in this world of IT service management. It seems like you've actually got to have a technology that can provide a single version of a data model that is flexible. It seems like the technology is fundamental. Is that true? Am I overstating that? Can you achieve this type of success independent of technology? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. At the end of the day, I think it's really about, first, you have to have the opportunity and the opportunities with creating a single source of record in tools like ServiceNow are what really gives you the opportunity to get force multiples out of your people, your process, and your technology. And one of the biggest things that, and I think some of the biggest opportunities we saw at Einstein, for example, was just the opportunity to simplify. Many, many manual processes. Well, once you get that information into a single source of record with workflow automation on top of that, of course it becomes very simple to ask some very simple questions. How can we streamline this process? How can we create more transparency for your end users? How can we empower them with information and make the process in the stores such that they ask for something once and they can keep a status of what's going on over time and minimizing the back and forth of information. The single source of record is paramount and foundational to that. What are the big mistakes that you see people making when you get involved in a project and you go, uh-oh, and you advise your customer, don't do that because it's going to be problematic, but they maybe do it anyway and you talk internally and you say, this is going to be a problem. And you sort of get some, you know, a little friction going with the client. What are the mistakes that people make that you would advise them not to repeat? Clarity of requirements, utilizing the intellectual capital of the people that have come before you. We've done over a thousand ServiceNow projects. We've seen a lot of customer use cases, a lot of requirements examples. They're industry best in common reference points. And the reason ServiceNow is configured the way it is out of the box is by intention. It's not by accident. It's really taken the time to understand what those different aspects of ServiceNow or the configuration of the ServiceNow are. And then to use that as a foundation going forward versus how do I get this tool to look like my old method of doing something actually uses an opportunity of all going forward. Anything you would do differently or advice you'd give to your peers in terms of things to avoid or things to emphasize? You know, to Jason's point, we want to make sure that you really understand the direction of the organization, what you want to do as far as executing that plan when you're taking on a new application such as ServiceNow. I think the other advice that I can give is keep an open mind to understand what the capabilities of the application are before you really start setting in stone what you want to do. But also, it was a great experience for us from an IT perspective. You know, back in the years past, it's been, you know, IT tells you to do this, you have to follow those directions. In this case, it was more of a collaborative effort with our own organization to really start getting that momentum and understanding what the business needs were. Once you get that going, the departments that you're working with understand the value of the application itself as well and makes your job that much easier. How about this notion of ServiceNow as a platform for application development? I was struck last night walking through the exhibit hall where the app creator was announced last year at Knowledge and I just saw the list of applications and it was just mind-boggling. But at the same time you got developers, they know Java or Python or Roku or whatever it is they're using. How much traction do you see that capability gaining in your organization and how do you see it permeating? Well, I really think that it's something that we really haven't tapped into yet. But to your point, it's something that allows that flexibility and that dynamic to be able to do what you want as an organization, what you want to do to be able to customize it and make sure that you're addressing the needs specifically for what your organization needs. Do you think the hardcore, you know, just pick on Java programmers or what, even the Node.js guys, right? Would say, wow, this is interesting. I want to sort of glom onto this, try this, it's going to make me more productive, maybe allow me to train more people or do you see them being a little bit resistant to that approach? I think you're always going to have that resistance because they don't understand the full potential. Now once they do understand the full potential and the capabilities of the software, capabilities of the scripting behind the scenes, I think that they would really, it's more in their best interest to understand that so that they can move with the application because once they see how flexible it is and what they can do with it and their creativity, you know, programmers today, they're very creative, it's very dynamic and it's on demand and if they realize that potential, it's definitely something that's in their best interest. So I know, I get a little ahead of myself when I start talking about the apps that you'll be developing, but so what is next on your roadmap? Sort of near term, mid term, what's on your to-do list with service now? Sure, so as we saw in the keynote today, they've been talking about IT service management, but it's really becoming more of an enterprise service management. We're trying to attack those, still those manual processes that we're dealing with from an organizational standpoint. One of the key things that we're working on today is contract vendor management. So having our legal team being able to automate that workflow so that we can request as an organization what vendors we want to deal with, but there's an approval process behind that. There's none, again, eliminating that back and forth communication and it's all in one place, one source, that they can approve that everything stays in the application. They can follow the path of that request, follow the path of the contract and the ease of use is really where we're trying to get to there. So that's one of our biggest projects that we have on tap right now. All right, we'll leave it right there. Brian and Jason, thanks very much for coming on. I love the story, getting payback well inside of the year. I always like to see those projects. All right, thanks again, guys. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're live from Moscone West. Oh, no, Moscone South, right back.