 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by John Lee. He is the managing director, enterprise innovation and product development at TMX Group. So thank you so much for coming on. Oh Norris, thanks for having me. I want to start up by asking you about digital transformation. That is a technological buzzword. What does it mean for the TMX Group? Well, it meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For the TMX Group, digital transformation really meant how do we pivot from being the traditional exchange to being more non-traditional. If you think about the advent of electronic trading as an example, that's just one of the forms of digital transformation that we did in, I think it was the mid to late 90s. But the funny thing is a lot of the infrastructure around it hasn't really moved with that. And so when you think about our issuer services and how we onboard it, it's still very paper-based. The business workflows are still very much the same as they were many, many years ago. And so it's really looking at technology as an enablement tool to see how we can actually go and reimagine those business flows. That's what digital transformation is to us. The other thing is, of course, how we reach our clients and our client base. Be reminiscent to say that in the past, our conversations with our clients were in person or faxes or handshakes, phone calls, and now they went to emails. Now it's really looking at what we're doing in the social media stream and how we actually interact with them on the digital stage, I guess. So you're not an IT guy. You're a product person. Innovation is at the center of what you do. If you think about the technology industry for decades, it's marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That's where innovation came from. Clearly that's changing. Where do you see innovation coming from? Oh yeah, so Moore's law is a perfect example. Yeah, I'm a business guy, but I have a strong technology background. So I have a bit of an identity crisis. I've been in technology and in business back and forth. But the interesting thing is if you think about Moore's law and just the sheer amount of computing power that's becoming cheaper and cheaper every two years, it's the fuel that's actually going in and developing a lot of this emerging technology. And even five years ago, I never would've thought that autonomous driving cars was something that I would see in my lifetime and here it is, like here and now. And so a lot of what we're doing is to reimagine how our digital transformation journey can be powered by the computing power that's available to us. And a lot of that has to do with data, presumably. Data and potentially machine intelligence. How do you look at those, the confluence of, sure, compute power, but data, machine intelligence, cloud, how does that cocktail create new products, new services? It's funny you mentioned that, but our strategy is really encompassed around several factors and one of the things was data. As an exchange, we have a lot of market data and a lot of data that, quite frankly, wasn't something that we could leverage. It wasn't used as an asset. It was used more as a regulatory holding. So things like putting them in big filing cabinets and in boxes, going back and, you know, you guys all know who you are. That's, you know, we still have a lot of that. And so it's really to figure out how do we look at data as an enterprise asset? How do we leverage that information to apply to our AI and machine learning agenda? And what are the tools like ServiceNow to actually help empower that and enable that? You're talking about the file cabinets and sort of the old antiquated systems. And then because so much of this digital transformation requires a huge cultural change, can you describe some of the challenges that you faced at TMX in terms of making sure that leaders and then also the rest of the organization really are committed to change? Well, you know, our CEO, Lou Eccleston, joined the firm, you know, a few years ago. And one of the things that was his main mandate was to transform and pivot the exchange. And so if you think about culture and culture change, that's a very, very difficult thing to do. And in a lot of cases, the culture change is actually more difficult than the technology deployment itself. It's that adoption, getting people to really shift and pivot the way they're doing things, maybe reevaluating some of the things that they've been doing for the last 10 to 15 years and then saying to themselves, well, maybe this isn't the best way to do it. And we find that that's actually one of the most difficult things to do. And so when we actually started on this journey, it was a top-down approach. And we just said, you know, we need to kind of look at a blank piece of paper. Yes, we've been around for 150 years. Yes, we have our operational processes that are very, very robust that kind of give us that integrity that we have today. But how have we leveraged the technology that's available? How have we leveraged the computing power that's available? And you find that there's this massive gap where we've not kept pace. And so when you think about that pivot, the only way to actually do that is to focus on the people, the leadership, to get the buy-in to say, yes, we do believe in this. We do believe in the innovation agenda. And just my sheer presence, like my role in function didn't exist two years ago at the Exchange. So that's a testament to say, yeah, we are really doubling down on this and we are going to start with the people as well. Where else are you doubling down? I mean, what are the big bets you guys are making? Well, I mean, if you think about a lot of the evolving or emerging technologies, blockchain and distributed ledger is one of the big ones, you know, what we're doing with AI and machine learning and just how we're actually servicing our client base with our analytics offerings, for example. These are things that are just, quite frankly, require certain ingredients. So data being one of them in a digitized format that you can leverage. The cloud and the adoption of cloud, that's something that we've embraced quite as recently as two to three years ago. And, you know, if you think about a lot of the disintermediating elements of what blockchain is, we're not shying away from that. We're taking a very, very close look to understand what the real values are to help reimagine what we do. So we were talking off camera, you're from Toronto, hotbed of crypto activity. Obviously this notion of a virtual value store is taking on, but there's so much innovation going on in the protocols, developing out a decentralized, you know, internet, if you will. Are you an optimist about the ability of a decentralized architecture like that to actually perform and do the type of work that needs to be done? Do you think it's going to be some other, you know, replacement maybe for blockchain? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I wouldn't say that I'm a hardcore evangelist saying that, you know, blockchain and Bitcoin is going to be the silver bullet to solve absolutely everything. I don't think that's 100% valid. But what I do believe in is in the technology and what it can actually do to transform industry. And the one thing that I do know is it's not for one organization to actually go and shepherd that. This is an ecosystem that we're actually looking at. It's a complete revolution. And in order for that to actually happen, there needs to be a massive collaboration between our industry peers, our customers, our competitors to really go and understand how the technology can be used. And, you know, anyone that truly looks at the benefits of what blockchain is, the sure way to fail is to do it all by yourself in a lab and simulate absolutely everything because you will not be able to realize the benefits if you do that. So what role does ServiceNow play in this sort of innovation engine that you're building out? So ServiceNow, you know, again, it's a journey. And I think, you know, John was just on and he was talking about where ServiceNow is as a tool set. It's funny that we wanted to converge and do a consolidation to reduce our costs. To simplify our infrastructure footprint. And in order to do that, we needed to reduce the amount of fragmented tools and application stacks that we had. And ServiceNow was one of the four service providers that we viewed as a strategic partner to help us on this journey. And, you know, when they started that journey, it didn't dawn on me to look at business workflow. I just said, well, ITSM, that's clearly something for, you know, if I want to go and procure an onboarding experience for a new employee, ServiceNow is the perfect tool to deal with that. But then you started to see how they're dipping their toes into artificial intelligence, looking at predictive analysis, looking at the data sets that they had. And that's when you started to realize, wait a minute, this can actually grow much beyond what technology is. You can actually look to see how this can actually go and transform businesses and business process flows. How can we actually use the tool to actually touch our client base? And these are things that we never even considered, you know, until, you know, frankly, knowledge 17 a year ago when I was here. Well, it is a journey, as you said. It is, it is. John, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a great conversation. Thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this.