 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Rob McDonald is here, he's the head of enterprise products at Air New Zealand. Rob, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Oh, pleasure, thanks for having me. Yeah, so Air New Zealand, energy costs are down, that's good for the airline business, isn't it? Yeah, it's good for the barrel price of oil. Things are always like a tax cut to the consumer. We all go traveling. So tell us a little bit about the organization and your role. So Air New Zealand, headquartered out of Auckland in New Zealand, Asia Pacifica based, but we have routes that travel up to London as well. So Asia Pacifica is our core business. I'm part of the digital leadership team and the enterprise products are those products that a typical IT function would run, like a CAO would run. So we have a product organization which you've had in place for the last year and a half. One of the product managers looks after our customers, so for online booking, mobile app customer experience. One of my colleagues looks after the operational products. Another colleague looks after airpoints products that the Freak and Fly program and I look after everything else internally. So you've got HR products, you've got finance, help desk, incident management. We've got mobile, mobility offices, workspace and collaboration. So there's quite a bit in there. So what are the big drivers in your business that are affecting those things that you look after? Probably the primary one now is a new focus and a renewed focus on the internal customer. Since we started in this role, or started in this role a year and a half ago, I've been mandating and championing the cause of the internal customer. Typically it's about the revenue and the external customer, but for me it's about my internal customer. And I've got 12 and a half thousand Air New Zealanders that I consider my customers. And those guys are the ones that wake up in the morning and they look at their Apple Watch and check a message or they log in in the morning and that experience has to be correct. And it has to be right when they walk into the office and when they swipe into the badge or want to do something like get a payroll slip or something. So it's that experience is my primary driver. So we're looking at simplifying what we have. So fixing the pain points is probably my first thing. Remove all the pain points out of the way of my customers, my users. Make sure they can operate. Make the job the challenge, not the tools that they're using. Focusing on mobility. So focusing on the more mobile workforce that we have. I reckon about 60% of my user base is considered mobile. I.e. we've got crew and pilots that you wouldn't see in the head office from one day to the next. And a big push on cloud for obvious reasons and then, yeah, future workspace. So tell us about your service now journey. When did that start? So our service now journey started just over a year and a half ago. We had quite a frustrating environment where we had a bad reputation for digital services. People weren't too happy calling our help desk. The name of the product we have is called Assist. It's like an internally branded product. People called it cease and desist. The reputation was, we had a bad reputation. So one of our primary goals is to get that reputation back, ear in the back and really try and delight our customers. So we had gone through some product selection and service now came right out on top and was the product of choice for us to implement. So we were able to replace four platforms with service now. We had one platform that we were buying parts of the internet type of things to keep it going. So it was a bit of a shaky situation. Bad user experience. So they were implementing service now. We made sure that we took a, when we did the reorganization for digital, we stopped the project and changed it to be a business organizational change project, not an IT project. So it wasn't IT delivering a product to the business. It was a business choice and a business decision. So we changed, stopped the project. We introduced and implemented change management as part of the project. We brought in different skills in terms of agile ways of working and we changed the product structure as well to suit. We went live with an MVP last year. So we pushed out a redesigned platform January last year. It was about 70% ready. So again, it was a, another new feeling for Air New Zealand staff, having a product that wasn't perfect but just suited for going live. And we went live with the full suite for what we were doing in July last year, June-July last year. And it's been an awesome journey. So you made the decision to sweep the floor of these four other platforms. At the point at which you made that decision, you did a contract with ServiceNow. What happened? I mean, how long did it take you to get to that MVP? What did you have to do? I mean, the old saying is, God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. So you had to deal with that existing infrastructure. How did you go from that point to the MVP? How long did it take? So our approach was to, we were trying to de-risk or learn more about what the experience is going to be for our customers. So we went live, finally go live with Helsinki. So we're one of the first customers that go live in the Helsinki product. In the interim, we took the existing platform or we reskinned it with a brand new look and feel. And the brand new look and feel was around how we wanted our customers to experience service management, how we wanted them. So we followed them in terms of their role rather than just rolling out the product. So we reskinned the existing product and we reiterated and reiterated on what they wanted, changing the features on the screen and rolling that one out. So we knew that we had a really, really good product and on the day we went live, we just basically flipped the switch. Yeah, we didn't carry over any existing tickets, migrated hardly into data and basically started from scratch, just basically by flicking a switch. And the product we went live with on the service net platform, exactly like the one we reskinned in preparation the way we did when we did register. And how long did that take to get to MVP? MVP was about two months, we included design and then the remainder was about three months. Wow. And then what are some of the things you're measuring in terms of the customer satisfaction, obviously nobody's saying cease and desist anymore, but what are some of the things that you're measuring, the feedback you're getting from your internal customers? Yeah, people like the products, people like the platform, they like the fact that we can access it on a mobile phone, which was again a new thing for internal staff in New Zealanders. We, and alongside the digital changes, we were making some physical changes too. So we introduced a brand new help desk alongside, both at the airport and in the city offices. So again, people were getting a physical and a digital experience when we went live. And so they liked the product, they liked the simplicity. Our business partners enjoy the speed that they can get cataloged items up and get their teams more efficient and more effective. The ability to do pre-approved changes has driven a lot of efficiencies. I think we have over 75% of pre-approved changes. We had things like, I think, 26% of our calls to the help desk of our passive resets, so we're using this tool to help reduce those numbers. And we introduced a new MPS score as well for a digital happiness score for our internal customers. So we have it for external, so we've introduced that for internal. And we promote that on the front of our portal as well. So people can give us feedback in terms of whether they like it, whether they don't like. So it's fairly responsive in terms of how we react to what they want in the product. And you avoided custom mods, is that right? Or did you do some custom modification in the platform? Mainly configuration to get it where we wanted to go. And the look and feel in the portal was fairly custom but using code components available on the platform. Yeah, but so when you upgrade, you don't have to do the heavy wrestling with the modification. No, we think it would be an easy journey. And then how about like a single CMDB? Is that something that you guys have adopted? So CMDB we delayed until this year. We're actually starting it next month. Okay, and so what's the conversation like internally around CMDB? Is it, I mean, you got a lot of different parts of the organization and is it going to be a single CMDB for the entire organization or are there going to be multiple CMDBs? So it's a big scary topic. And the lady we're getting on, so we're talking about how we do it in an iterative approach and start small and build out. Primarily it will be the sort of core enterprise stack, looking at shared services stack. And then we need to look at, and it's been wonderful being here at Knowledge and learning how far people are pushing it in terms of their external customers. So I'm looking at operations. I'll be looking at IoT and figuring out how I can use that platform to be more effective. And having the CMDB will be a good starting block for that. You said IoT? Yep. So opportunities for us are around, so we're an airline, we have plans, we have power machines, we have engines on plane. So, and you would have heard GE being mentioned quite a bit here. So what's the opportunity with those products and how can we use service management for event management off those stacks? When we think about the digital workplace environment and the connected devices, how do we use service now in that environment and how do we use it effectively? So I think there's a great opportunity for us there. When you, can you take us back into the discussions internally when you had to sell the project internally to the management, who did you have to involve? What was the business case? I think the business case was primarily led by IT, by the old IT because it was our product. All the owners of the product resided in IT. So I think the sale around the cost of the platform, the duration of implementation, it wasn't too hard to sell because of the risk we were carrying on the legacy platforms. I think the opportunity, if you flip around the other side, it was an easier conversation to our customers to say, this is what you're getting. And they were quite keen and quite eager to get involved in the implementation. And what have you seen so far? I mean, it's still early days, but what kind of results have you seen? Can you share any metrics with us? I've given you some indications earlier on about pre-approved changes. We have a bit of all the fare on the exact numbers on our desk. We have so many parameters going on here in Zealand that it wouldn't be fair on anybody. Well, so just generally the business impact, how would you describe that? Very positive. So we use it in the GSS area, so group-shared services. So they're finding it far more effective to engage with their teams and allocating work and automating the workflow. And we have quite a queue, quite a backlog of other areas that want to get involved and automate and optimize. And where do you see this platform going? Do you see it driving into different parts of the business? We hear a lot about that at this conference. Is that something that you guys are looking at? Yeah, we've rolled out to a group through our ground service equipment team. So they use it for, for example, a ramp loader or someone on the tarmac notifying a vendor that's something wrong with a piece of equipment so that optimizes that flow. So we're saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, so that's quite an efficiency gain. So looking to push into, again, more HR and finance group-shared services, looking to optimize against our workday implementation in July, so make sure those two platforms work together very well and build a platform appropriately. Okay, so you'll bring in the HR piece, is that right? Yeah, we'll need to find that. I've been having lots of conversations the last two days around how those two behemoth products sit together, how you use them effectively, and that's where we need to get to. So how do you use a portal in the front end to make it easier for the customer or the user to do what they want without having them to think about which platform they need to go to? How about the show? I mean, you mentioned, you know, it's a great being here as a quasi newbie. Is this your first? This is my first one. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. Thank you so much. So you've sort of learned, folks, you've talked, what kinds of things are exciting in here? I like the sort of, the service now, people, amazing passion, including the guys back in Australia and New Zealand, a few of them are here. I can see the passion back there, and I can see it here, so it's quite collegial and it's amazing to see. I think the event's awesome, it's massive. The keynote was fantastic, really good. And just the energy with the vendors and the passion that people have for their customers and the business value they can get from this product. That's one of the key things I'm hearing from all the conversations. And it sounds like you're getting what's been talked about over and over, which is such the peer input in terms of helping you figure out where you're going to go next. Yeah, lots of people are here to learn, but also lots of people are here to share. And I'm seeing that time and time again, which is great. Excellent. Rob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. No, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Thanks. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 17. We're right back.