 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back everyone to day two of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. You still have my voice. You still have it, yes. Okay, we'll see how you do tomorrow, but you're still going strong. But I'm really excited about this panel. We have Farrell Howe. She is a GM in IT, service management, asset management, business management. Have I forgotten one? No, I've got it all at ServiceNow. It's this week. Exactly, at ServiceNow. You run the biggest business for ServiceNow. Thanks for joining us, Farrell. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So I want to talk about employee experience, which is really, it's just the cornerstone of this conference, but really ServiceNow's purpose. Why has it become so increasingly important in IT today? Okay, well, in IT, really, you saw it today in CJ's keynote, the era of great experiences here. And in IT, we've been really, really great at managing productivity and managing cost and making sure we were running efficiently. And we still do that and do it really well. But now we have to also make sure not just our customers have a great experience, but our employees do too. And companies that do that well have the competitive advantage. It's absolutely required that we're able to do that now. And so, ServiceNow's paving the way for great experiences on our platform for customers and employees. And we're excited to be leading the next era of great experience. So I don't want to minimize the accomplishments that ServiceNow has made because they're phenomenal. All right, I'm happy for you not to minimize them. But I want to say this, you have thrived. I mean, when Fred Lutty developed the platform, you thrived in a sea of mediocrity. And you drove a ship through that sea and just mopped up a lot of business. Awesome, congratulations. And in this world we live in, it's like, now it's becoming table stakes. If you guys have pointed out our home lives, we live with these consumer interfaces. We expect that now. So as a leader of ServiceNow as a largest business, how do you continue to push the innovation lever? We expect now so much more. How do you continue to differentiate because your competition has woken up, the world was waking up? How do you stay ahead? Well, you saw earlier today CJ Talk again and you'll continue to see this theme from us. It is all about the platform. We are a platform company. And when we build and innovate, acquire and then innovate, it is all within the platform. And that is our competitive advantage. So then every application that is in existence today or that we build in the future can take advantage of that innovation natively. It's all integrated and seamless. And there's nobody else out there who is able to do that and to deliver those experiences. And so that is going to continue to be our strategy moving forward. So let's double click on that a little bit. Maybe get some examples. So I mean, clearly there's a big emphasis on UX and design. I think you guys have made some investments in design firms, right? There's machine intelligence, I'll call it, AI. You're infusing AI throughout the platform. Those are just two examples. Maybe talk about those and give us some others if there are them. Sure. Well, you know, in the IT keynote that I'm going to have this afternoon, it's all about the era of great experiences and taking the roles that are in IT. It will be about the Fuffillr, the Requestor, the Planner and the Operator in IT and how we've taken to the road and gone and done user research out with our customers and we're building great experiences in the platform for those roles. No longer is it going to stand for you to just use your best judgment and go and build product and hope everybody will come. You've got to get out there, side by side with your customers, truly understand the work that they're doing and then build that back into the product and iterate again and again and again. And so, you know, that's the direction we're going from a design standpoint to build those experiences. So let's unpack this, this era of great experiences, something that's simple, easy, intuitive. But what are we really talking about here? How do you define a great experience? Yeah, well let's take it from something that we can relate to. We're all requesters of services one way or another, right? And me as an employee, I need services from IT in order to do my job. The thing is that the channels that we have today are not enough. Phone and email aren't going to cut it and a lot of times, if I'm on the carpool line waiting to pick up my daughter and her friends from school, I, you know, and I'm trying to check in on the ticket status for a laptop that I need immediately and I happen to think of it right then. I'm not going to call IT. I'm not in front of a laptop. I need more channels on more devices, anytime, anywhere at my convenience, not someone else's. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. We can't, it can't just be good enough anymore. It has to be prolific. I'm interested in how you're using an applying machine intelligence. It seems like you're trying to anticipate my needs, put things in front of me that I might, shorten my search time or might be relevant that I hadn't even thought of. Is that the right way to be thinking about how are you using machine intelligence? And second part of the question is, what are you finding that machines can do better than humans and how do they complement each other? I know a long question. I love this question. That's okay, I love it. Okay, so our initial approach to agent, to machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, all of that is to, you heard CJ say it today, you'll hear micro moments or moments that matter. And we're looking to inject intelligence right there, right there. Those are very, very practical use cases. They're not a panacea. They are not the answer, but they are an answer in a moment that critically matters. And so a perfect example of how that would play out would be my example previously of checking in on my laptop. The virtual agent that we're bringing to the market in our London release is all conversation based. And so I can very quickly see what topics that agent can handle. And I can immediately engage on what that looks like and get the confidence that I need back and forth engaging with the virtual agent in my convenience, wherever I am, whether I'm at work or I'm at home. And so that is a moment that matters for me because it eliminates the mental overhead for me to keep track of the administration of just trying to do my job every day. Now, take the flip side of that, the person who's on the other side of that virtual agent or would have been had that virtual agent not be there. They are not having to answer those kinds of questions. Is my laptop coming? Please just assure me. They're not answering those questions. And so maybe that's not necessarily deflecting an incident, it could be. But it's also reducing the administration that's happening when, and so it's cutting down the time it takes to resolve incidents. And it's reducing friction and frustration between fulfillers and requesters of service. And so that's how we're looking at it in those moments that matter. And then as technology evolves and gets stronger, there may be bigger and larger use cases. And the machine versus human thing, I hate to say it that way, but things the machines are doing, you're seeing categorization obviously as one at scale. Other things that you, I mean, how do you see that evolving? What are the things that increasingly machines are going to do that humans can't do as well? Well, I would say a use case besides maybe the virtual agent and those conversation based topics, which really are just guided flows for conversation. Another thing might be being able to, if there's just so much data that would take me a while or I would need a business analyst to maybe go and look for insights, that's something that machines can do. And that's not replacing humans, that's scaling our ability to act. And so that I think is the next foray to really move into. And we'll start poking in different areas of insights as well in the moments that matter for work getting done in the enterprise as well. Because that is what we're really trying to do is help people get their work done quicker and more easily. And when we talk about employee experience, it's simply that. Please, just let me get my work done. And let me have some choice. I'm going to have a personal tool chain. Don't force me to use service now. Please don't force me to use your messaging client, our Kinect chat. If I want to use Microsoft Teams or Slack, let me do that and let me keep that UI. So when we talk about employee experience, it's a very broad arena there and it's a great partnership between IT and all the other lines of business to deliver what employee experience is going to look like. And you know, Rebecca, we talked about this yesterday. John Donahoe took on the machine replacing humans and very transparent. The example I would use is search. When I was at IDC, we had a big library, had like three or four librarians. They're not there anymore. But nobody is saying, oh wow, search. Search is a machine. It made our lives better. It created new opportunities. I think that's a good example, a small one, but one where I'm an optimist, even though things are getting more complex. Me too. I'm absolutely an optimist on that. And so for example, with our virtual agent, go do a search on LinkedIn and you will find, for conversation designer, there are new jobs being created to be able to support this kind of technology. You know, jobs are evolving, not going away. So speaking of jobs, you have been a very successful leader in a high growth organization. I think on your Twitter it says, I'm on a rocket ship ride of a lifetime. I am. So I'm here to tell you. So I'd love to hear what your advice is for other leaders who are trying to affect transformational change in their IT organizations. All right. You know, I think whether it's personal change for yourself, you're trying to evolve or you need to evolve your organization, the first thing you need to do is check your assumptions. You know, the older we get and the more, you know, we're barraged by noise. We think we know. Make sure that you're really clear on and have some self-reflection, but also go and check that with people around you and get some clarity around, all right, is this really the reality? What's our reality that we're trying to transform? And when you're talking about transformation, it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It can happen overnight and that's called disruption. But transformation that you are initiating, give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You got to know that this is a marathon and you cannot be doing it at a sprint pace. You will burn out. So keep your eye on the horizon on what you're trying to accomplish and just get started. Don't sit there and wait and try to have the perfect plan. You're going to tack your way through it. It's going to change anyway. Just get started. The rapid iteration we were hearing about is absolutely DevOps and personal digital transformation. You got it. I also want to talk to you about women. I mean, there is a dearth of women leaders in technology. You are one of them. What are you doing personally to promote diversity and inclusion at ServiceNow and then what is the company doing? And finally, what should the tech industry be doing to face this challenge head on? Yeah, you know, my take on it is it's all about belonging and I got that word from Pat Waters. So diversity, inclusion and belonging, that's something that she's championing and we are so fortunate to have her as our Chief Talent Officer. Prior to having that word, I was just really focused on connection. Really engaging just with people and trying to understand where they're coming from and really making sure that you're practicing active listening. That has been the key for my success, I will say throughout my career, is just being able to constantly reflect back what I'm hearing. One, to make sure I didn't put any filters on it, obviously, and then two, people want to feel heard. And so whenever I get into the conversation around women in tech, yes there are some very real facts, fact-based, data-based challenges ahead of us, but where I choose to put my focus is a much broader conversation that includes everyone. And really just focusing a lot more on connection and belonging overall makes a huge difference. What you're saying is really resonating because that's what we keep hearing is happening. What perpetuates the old boys club is that, oh, I know this guy because we went to college together or some other kind of biases that you hold that it's just, oh, he's like me, I want to promote him and bring him along and there are fewer women in positions of power who they can bring up the people that they see or like them. So I think that's another problem too, is that you have to, yeah, that goes back to a really great HR practice, which is you cannot just reach deep into your network every time you get in trouble. Rely on a great HR standard practice that says no. You know, we need to go out there and there's great talent out there that you just didn't even think of. So when you're going back to, we talked about transformation earlier in this conversation, check your self-awareness. Be clear about, wait a minute, do I really know right now what I need? I'm not sure. Let me broaden my perspective here and HR has been a great partner to be able to do that. So that's a great point because gender and race and sexual preference are part of that diversity and certainly other factors. But like a financial advisor, when the portfolio gets overbalanced in one area, he or she has to rebalance that portfolio and again, it sounds formulaic, but I think, Farrell, your point is, what you're looking for is to open up that network to a wider audience and not just a good old boys network. That's the key. You know, I have a little bit of a bias here. You know, my background, I'm an English major and I'm running a large business for service now and we need more English. We need to open the diversity up to English to liberal arts background. I don't want kids these days to think that if they pick one path, they're stuck in that path and they're locked into certain jobs, it's not true. You can, you just need, it's the way that you think, it's having critical thinking skills. Now listen, you're not going to go put me on the platform, although I probably could. Go in and start coding. You're not going to rely on me to do that right away. I could learn it. But allowing us to, allowing yourself to start to believe that, hey, wait a minute, the labels that I've grown up with and put on people, maybe I can remove a couple. And I love it when I'm surprised and are able to bring an employee onto my team that I'm like, yeah, doesn't necessarily make sense on paper, but look at you, you're amazing. Well, one of the things that supports that is digital. For years, if you were in the financial services business or the manufacturing business or the automotive business, you were there for life. But if you have digital skills, you can traverse now much more easily. So kids today have just phenomenal opportunities. I know, I know, it's great. I think it's so cool. And I love making, I love opening up tech a bit more to make it more accessible, that more appealing, that there are so many different roads to come in. And it's important that we get people who think differently, creative people, people who are good strong communicators, who can bring clarity to a situation. We need all of that. And that to me is the first step for diversity. And because that's the stuff that robots aren't very good at, is the empathy, the creativity, that kind of broad thinking. That's right, yeah. Awesome, way to bring it home. Yeah, right. We've come full circle. Yes. Farrell, thanks so much for coming on the program. What a fun and enlightening conversation. Oh my gosh, super fun. I really appreciate it. And you're speaking today at 1.30, good luck with that. Yes, and by the way, we have a diversity inclusion and belonging lunch with Pat Waters and CJ Desai, which will be at, I think, 12.30 as well. Great plug, excellent. Thank you so much again. Okay, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18, hashtag No18 just after this.