 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 Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're here at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Jen Stroud is here. She's an HR evangelist and transformation consultant with ServiceNow, former ServiceNow customer. Jen, great to see you again. Welcome back. To be here, truly great. This is the second year of your being ServiceNow employee. You were a customer before. You actually helped get it all started into HR. So give us the update. What's new in terms of ServiceNow into HR? Yeah, it's so exciting because I think about when I was a customer, we were a customer before there was an actual product. So we built it all ourselves. Well, now we're with this, our latest release and future releases. We're providing that out-of-the-box content, making it really easy for our HR customers to implement quickly and leverage the out-of-the-box content so that they can be productive a lot quicker. What's going on with HR execs? I mean, HR is something we all can relate to, right? You have a change, you have a baby, whatever. You want to do some self-service. You want that core HR to be easy and then there's just a new pressure. There's a war going on for talent. What are the chief HR officers telling you in terms of what their main priorities are these days? Well, you just said it. It's a war for talent and I think Frank in his keynote today spoke about it. It's about the experience. For human resources, their chief asset are employees and so they are committed to providing their employees with that great experience. They spend a lot of money to recruit them, hire them, recruit them and bring them on board. They want to keep them on board and so much of that is involved in that employee's experience with the organization and how easy it is to get things done and be productive and be innovative in their jobs and not be managing a lot of administrative tasks throughout their day. So when I talk to HR professionals, I like, we love sports analogies and free agency has changed sports and you'll see some teams will go out and they'll spend a bunch of money on free agent talent. Others will try to spend money on developing from within and farm teams. Is there a right way, is there a right formula or does it just sort of depend on the organization? What are you seeing out there? I think in terms of talent, it doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter if you're gonna bring in contingent workers to do some of your work and then hire permanent employees. It all comes down to ensuring that that investment that you've made and those people is good and that you can get them to productivity as quick as possible. So in thinking about service now is contribution to this whole thing. People often say, you guys, are they work day? Are they competing with success factors? No is the answer, but where do you add value to that whole process? We love our partners with work day and SAP and success factors. We know that without them, we can't provide that overall complete service delivery solution. So we integrate with all of those HCM technologies and all HR technologies, including some of the ATSS-Tileo hire view to provide that overall complete service delivery, HR service delivery solution for our customers. Fill in those white spaces where the other technologies leave off. And in particular, that's really a lot about case management, knowledge management in particular. So Jen, I'm curious, Chip gives a little bit about millennials and all the millennials coming into the workforce. And we all know if we have teenagers, they're just not big fans of email to begin with, not that we ever were, but we're kind of forced into it as a step up from stuffing envelopes. How is them entering the workplace and the challenges of catering to them, vis-a-vis workflow versus other ways to get stuff done, helping, hurting, hindering people in HR to kind of accommodate this new way of getting things done? Yeah, well, whether you call it helping or hindering, I don't know either way, but it is what it is, right? They are the future of the workforce and they're really helping set the stage for how is it that we have to do business and interact with our employees. And you're right. They don't want to do email. They want it quick. They want it easy. They want that consumerized experience that they're used to in their personal lives. And short of that, they find it not quite up to par. And their millennials are much quicker to make a decision whether they're gonna stay or leave. And it's based on some little nuances within their experience whether they are gonna stay or not. So anything that a CHRO or a CEO or a CIO can do to create that great experience for employee, millennials included, it's gonna pay off. And we see that with so many of our customers that are creating that HR portal, that one place for all employees to go to get all of their needs taken care of. They take the guesswork out of it for employees and make it easier for them to get their work done. So how do you affect the user experience? Because I know in our personal situation, there's an HR portal and then I see the demos that Fred and company show and ours ain't that. So in theory, could you help with the user, when you talk about user experience, how deeply can you go into the UX and the UI specifically or you said you integrate with those other platforms? How does that all work? Yeah, well we really work with our customers to create the experience that they want to create for their employees. So it can be anything that the customer really wants. If they want a true consumerized experience that has everything in one portal, like an enterprise portal. So not just HR, but an enterprise portal that includes HR, IT facilities, it can be done. We can create links to other systems. It really, the great thing about ServiceNow is that we can help our customers create that experience that they know that they wanna create for their employees and model that within that portal experience. So we were talking before about, we love our partners. So to help us with, take an example of Workday, for instance, what's your swim lane and what's their swim lane? I mean, obviously their swim lane is doing all the HR function, all that HR functionality, but what's your swim lane? Yeah, so Workday is, it's just a fantastic HCM system. In my mind, it's the best of the breed out there, right? And they offer so much in terms of workflows for HR, self-service for employees. The area and the gap that where Workday leaves off in particular is in the area of case management and knowledge management. So with every customer that we have worked with that uses Workday, they're happy customers, but they're still heavily using email and spreadsheets to manage service delivery for their employees. And this is causing the HR teams to be mired and this email just churn all the time and employees don't have the visibility into their requests. So now with ServiceNow, we integrate with Workday and fill in that gap. So taking email now and spreadsheets out of the equation to provide that one service delivery solution. And the issue is that those systems are systems of record that a lot of them, database-based, obviously, even Workday, which is the own version of a database, versus designed as the way people work. That's right. And that's really the difference. It's absolutely, it's absolutely, it's really thinking about how employees get their work done, how they make their requests, how HR does that. Frank spoke about it today in his keynote the team did of the visual task boards. Absolutely, so many people out there are visual people and with the visual task boards you can drag and drop things into different groups to increase priority or to assign a case to somebody else. Those are things that really change how people get work done and improve productivity. Jen, go ahead. I was just going to say, part of your title is evangelist and I think it really says something that you were a customer and then chose to come over. And I'm just looking at your LinkedIn, your last company a long time. So what is it that, and they didn't even have HR products, right? So what is it that you saw in the vision and it's interesting, especially in the context of Fred building a platform, then putting an app on it and now it's kind of morphing back to more of the platform. Like what did you see, what made you so excited to kind of make this transition and spearhead this development into a brand new category of business? I can assure you I never dreamt I would be here speaking with you either last year or this year. This was not in my career vision at all, but back in 2012 I was tasked with leading an HR transformation for Teletech, the company that I worked for, and it was a massive change, a massive shift for the organization tasked with saving money and we selected service now and it was so successful and we truly flipped our whole model on end. We were spending north of 70% of our time in HR on administrative work. We weren't getting to employee engagement or talent development or any type of performance management project because we simply didn't have the time. Fast forward and when we're fully implemented now we have strategic business partners that that's what they're doing and that's what they're focusing on and that was powerful to me and I loved the experience so much I thought I gotta be a part of this and I wanna help other organizations realize how possible these transformations are. It's not just pie in the sky, it's not just a one off, this company did it, but we're so different. Guess what? HR is HR, truly, and we can help any organization transform their business and create exceptional employee experience and really improve and help take, here's what it comes down to as well when you ask about what CHRROs care about, they wanna move out of the back room into the board room, right? They don't wanna be just a cost center anymore, they wanna add value to the business and so ServiceNow is helping CHROs add value to their business and become top decision makers in their organizations. You're basically saying to take, helping people go from sort of keeping the HR lights on toward innovation, some of those things to say, performance management, et cetera and that whole experience. What are some of your favorite examples? Can you share with us? Or even just kind of the a-ha moment in your experience when somebody not in the leadership position just said, wow, suddenly you just giving me back all this time. Well, yeah, I mean we, I'll give you one example from my own that we talk about a lot with customers and it has to do with knowledge management, two weeks post-implementation, I got a call from my knowledge manager and she said, we have a problem and I said, what's going on? And she has a dashboard of knowledge searches that she turns on every day when she turned her desktop on and she said, well, we had a huge spike in people searching on resignation benefits in one of our locations today and I thought, well, that's a problem. Well, we did some research, we found out that a disgruntled employee was spreading rumors that we were going to lay everybody off and everybody was gonna lose their job. So within hours we were able to dispel those rumors, tell everybody it's not gonna happen. Prior to service now, we would have been in a very dire situation because people would have left and this was a site, one of our locations of 5,000 employees. If we'd lost all of those employees or even a percentage that could have hit our business dramatically but with service now and the ability to have that view into what's going on in our business, transformational and just amazing visibility that we didn't have before. Unpack, if you could double click that a little bit. So can you explain exactly how service now affected that outcome? It's simply by the tool being able to track the searches that our employees were doing and the reporting capabilities that are inherent in the platform. The knowledge manager would come on in her office and turn on her dashboard and she could easily see visually that there was a spike in one of our locations on this particular search and there was a red flag alerting us. Something is not quite right here. You need to look into this and so we were able to click on that and see what was going on. And without that service management capability and those analytics, you wouldn't have known until it was too late. We wouldn't have known until people were leaving. And you were saying, I started asking questions and what happened? Yeah, it would have been easily two weeks until we would probably have had the full picture of what was going on because people would gradually leave and then all of a sudden and then the flood gates would have opened. So yeah, and that's not atypical of the type of situations that customers deal with and that the success is that they're having. What about the relationship between IT and HR? And based on your experience, it would be interesting as to how that's evolved in situations where service now has been brought in. Sure, well, we see from company to company, it's different. I would say more often than not, it's not usually a great strong relationship. I think generally it's IT and HR kind of, in a push pull, HR not feeling like they're getting the love from IT. And I just, I always, when I'm out with customers, I'm like, IT truly can be your best friend. And I think developing a strong relationship with your IT partners and creating together that service management approach to HR service delivery is really gonna be their best foot forward. Excellent. All right, Gem, listen, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE, sharing the HR stories, and I'll give you the last word. Your impressions of a couple of days here now at Knowledge, what's the buzz like? What are you hearing from practitioners? It's just, I've already spoken with quite a few HR customers, a lot of, I mean just, and I'm not exaggerating when I say they're happy and they're excited about the future, unlike I've ever seen really before. Excited about the possibilities. We have our onboarding special interest group coming up tomorrow, over 250 people registered for that, which tells you there's a lot of interest in ensuring that onboarding is done the right way and they're gonna do it with service now. Got room for me in that session? Yeah, absolutely. All right, we'll leave it there. Gem, thanks very much for coming in. Great to see you again. Yeah, thank you very much. All right, keep it there. Everybody will be back to Knowledge, 16 from Las Vegas right after this word. This is theCUBE.