 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to Knowledge 16, everybody. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. SiliconANGLE media, we've got the Wikibon research, we've got SiliconANGLE publications, we've got theCUBE, which is TV, we crank out crowd chats. This is our main venue, our main show. The fourth service now, Knowledge, hashtag no 16. Dan Hedstrom is here as the vice president of solution services at Cubic Transportation Systems. We've got an interesting field service use case to talk about here. Dan, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. Tell us about Cubic Transportation Systems. Sure, Cubic Transportation Systems, a division of Cubic Corporation, is a leading integrator of payment and information technology services to create intelligent travel solutions for transportation authorities and operators. If you have ever used public transportation in New York, London, Sydney, Chicago, probably best know us for automated fare collection, where we enable about 38 million rides a day. And your role there? Vice president systems solutions and services largely responsible for our commercial IT service delivery and service desk. Basically, we're the ones that operate and maintain these large back offices and front offices that enable these solutions. In addition, we also enable our service teams to have the tool sets required for them to meet strict KPIs and SLAs that we provide to our customers. So you service the business, right? The lines of business, if you will, right? That's correct. And so what are they beating up about? What do they want from you? What are the drivers in this day and age? Faster delivery, no downtime. If we have an impact that actually affects transportation on any given day, it affects millions of the patrons of our customers. We can't have that happen. We have to provide solutions that will help us become more efficient, better service our customers and just be faster at our delivery. Yeah, so you say faster delivery, less downtime. How have those expectations changed over the, I mean, everybody always wants that but they didn't expect it. But now they are expecting it, aren't they? They are. Look at your mobile phone. We use those on a daily basis. If that mobile phone doesn't have the connectivity to get to, in the case of transportation, that mobile phone can actually be your payment card. It can open a gate to get you through those lines. If all of those services behind that mobile phone working aren't available, there's chaos. I mean, it just, there is no opportunity for error and that requires us to have these more integrated tool sets and systems to help ensure that occurs. So you're telling us that this was your first knowledge event and you're relatively new to service now. It's a little over a year, right? So enough time to see an impact. So take us back to the point at which you sort of started investigating service now. What were you doing before and take us through the case study, if you would. Yeah, so historically, we had multiple solutions. So we initially went after service now like probably many of service now's customers on for IT service management. We had a key contract in London that we needed to go after ISO 20K certification. We use service now as our first foray into getting a more modern tool set for IT service management. Very quickly expanded that across the globe, encompassing all of our operations under a single tool set for IT service management. We quickly realized that we can take the principles of IT service management and apply that across every area that we deliver service to a customer. So we can take that incident management process and apply it to how we deliver services in the field as an example. And that took us down a new path where we're now starting to use service now for field services. So getting the ability, for instance, I think this was on the keynote the first day. That CMDB is no longer just a CMDB for back office infrastructure. We look at that CMDB and apply it from everything in the back office to everything that exists in the field. We have tens of thousands of devices in every installation around the globe and extending the power of that CMDB into the field, enabling our field services teams to know what the event is that's occurring at a given station, how to quickly get to that station and empowering them with the material to actually resolve the incident that exists there. It's very powerful. So the initial justification was it was part of a business opportunity for you guys. And you saw service now as a way to achieve that ISO certification. But having said that, it was saying a fool with the tool. So there had to be a lot of other processes around it. Talk about how that affected your organization and how that went into the whole planning for bringing service now. So we incorporate, we took our subject macro experts from around the globe, put them in a single room and we worked out consistent processes that we can apply across every program on a global basis. Very difficult to get to the position where everybody is stacking hands on what to do moving forward. But ultimately we saw the benefit of automatically enabling workflow for incident management, change management, work orders for the field and so forth. And understanding it's not a disparate process. It is a process that involves very varying parts of the organization. It was quite a change, but the results are significant. So was it an aha moment? Was it we won that deal? Is it, oh my gosh, I never knew that we could do it this way? Did it pull a bunch of processes out? What got you from, we're going to win this deal and we need this tool to get it too? Wow, this is something we can use on a much broader scale. Good question. So after we implement the IT service management functions of service now, we looked at our other tool sets that existed that helped enable our field services teams and there was really no difference between what we're using for field service delivery and for IT service management. We wanted a tool that was ITIL compliant. We knew we were going after ISO 20000 certification for the back office operations. We quickly realized that we wanted to take a industry-based certification that we can show our customers that we have excellence in service delivery. And so when you brought in service now, so it was part of, like you say, a business justification, but then you extended it to other parts of the organization. What kind of business results did you see in terms of the impact? It's more predictable service to our customers. So it helps us better align with the needs of our customers, but also gives us increased visibility and transparency in our service delivery to our customers. We are bound by very strict KPIs and SLAs and given the ability for our customers to see how we are doing at our service delivery is powerful both from our aspect as well as our customers. So yeah, I was just saying, I would imagine going from kind of a reactive mode to a predictive mode to a prescriptive mode when you can't have downtime on a big subway system, payment gateway is pretty significant. Yes, it is significant. And the SLA is predominantly downtime related. It's downtime, the amount of time it takes us to fix any given gate at a particular station. It's very complex. It could be something where in the afternoon time period, we know traveling is going to happen in this direction. So certain stations have a priority over the stations that would have had a priority in the morning. Automating this intelligence through things like event management and so forth are very powerful to make us more efficient to be able to quickly get a technician from point A to point B to resolve any type of incident that might occur. And on your global distribution, do you have all of your own technicians? Are you integrating with other third party technicians that you have under contract in some of these customer locations? Good questions, somewhat all of the above. We use third parties for certain areas of our service delivery. But one of the key things that we're doing is forcing all of the service delivery to happen within service now so that we can use things such as analytics to continually look at how we're delivering service and how we can improve. So talk about this notion of service management across the enterprise. Is that something that presumably you're buying into? I don't know if this concept of Siam has come up a lot at this conference. Service integration and management. Somebody told me it came out of Europe. I don't know if it did or not. ITIL, son of ITIL I guess. Talk about sort of how that fits into this cross enterprise service management. Well, right now we're going through the culture change. We're taking the ITIL concepts or the ITIL framework and we're applying it into areas that historically were not necessarily, historically ITIL was for IT service management. We're taking that and applying to other areas of our service. And we're realizing these principles. They're the same no matter what the area is. I think in one of the key notes they talked about these kind of three domains. There was ERP, there was CRM and there was service management kind of in the front. I don't look at that as any difference. It is just one domain of service delivery. Happens to rely upon manufacturing, field services, customer service and so forth, but it's all an integrated approach. You know it's funny, IT for years is that such a bad rap and we've all been there. But Frank puts that slide out of IT sort of being basically integrated with all of the businesses. It's a business, but the business line, the way a business line solves problems is all right, we need more investment, we'll go sell more and we'll reinvest that into the business. IT can't do that. Yet what you're describing is something I've known, we've known for decades is that the processes that IT uses to solve these really gnarly technical problems are actually really good and can apply across the organization. Are you seeing that culture shift? Yeah, I mean historically IT was a provider of assets. They were very asset focused, make sure this desktop worked, make sure an application ran on top of that desktop, very, very different focus now. We're a trusted partner to help with the business to help innovate. We have responsibilities to help with process improvement, bringing in technology, innovating with this technology to improve whether it's service delivery, becoming more efficient or doing simple things such as reducing downtime in applications, very different approach than what was just 10 years ago. Robert Gates yesterday, when he was speaking to CIOs, he had a great statement. He goes, look, imagine if you ran a huge corporation and you had 528 board members and every single one of them had a different agenda than the agenda of the company. And yeah, that's what it's like in the government. The reason I bring that up is because IT has one agenda. It doesn't have an individual agenda of a P&L manager or a service manager, whatever. It has the agenda of the organization's goal. So it makes sense that as IT permeates the organization that it can provide additional value. Are you seeing your ability to provide those best practices enhanced by tools like ServiceNow? Yes, definitely. If we look at, the way we're using ServiceNow is across all of our service delivery area, something that just didn't exist historically in our business. Integrating those functions of every business process into one consistent workflow makes us much more efficient. And that is an actual measurable efficiency that we can gain where we can reduce our costs. We can become more efficient. We can do more with less. So that's very powerful. I was just gonna say, shift gives a little bit just about these things. Is that I'm looking at your website and I see a lot of, pay with your phone. Talk about the change in expectation that these things have created for you. Both, A, you got to integrate with them and have apps and now you got a whole other network you got to worry about. But two, the expected behavior in terms of responsiveness, expected behavior in terms of turnaround versus having what I assume was kind of isolated standalone systems back in the day. Yeah, I mean, if we considered the phone as a PC 10 years ago, it would run in a point application. It can run in isolation. Today, that's not possible. That phone relies upon complex networks the ability to take credit card transactions, process those through a system. And in our terms, even open a gate or close a gate, whatever it happens to be. But it's a very integrated device. I mean, it has to be quick to respond. You have to be able to tap that on a gate and within milliseconds, that gate has to open with this complex transaction that occurs behind the scenes. ServiceNow allows us to do things such as with the CMDB, map that whole transaction, understand the process so that we can monitor the system kind of on a holistic basis of what is occurring in real time. If you had a Mulligan on the implementation of ServiceNow, if you could do something different, take another shot, what would it be? It's a good question. Where would you take that Mulligan? Yeah, good question. It's basically, so I would say our biggest win with ServiceNow is empowering our field service technicians with information they need to actually perform their duties. Given them a tablet that has real time information of your assets exist over here, here's the problem that you need to address and even presenting them through the knowledge base with information that can help them repair that problem. That's very powerful. Makes us much more efficient, makes our customers much happier because we can service them quicker. And so that's something you didn't do initially, is that right? We did it, we just didn't do it as efficiently as we do today. What do you mean? Making it all automated. It's all about, I think in the keynote this morning, they talked a lot about workflow. It's automating that workflow. If we know what CI is affected at any given station, we can present that technician with a document that says, okay, you have this type of event. Here's a document related to that CI that is telling them exactly what to do to resolve the incident. The keynote resonated with you this morning. It definitely did. Yeah, good. Daniel, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. I really appreciate your time and congratulations on the rollout. Did you get a cake? Well, we did get a cake, we got a few cakes. Great, awesome, thanks again for coming on. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. It's theCUBE, we'll be back right after this short break. A true breakthrough idea.