 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we're live here in the Mandalay Bay. This is ServiceNow Knowledge 15. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is our third ServiceNow Knowledge event. The first one was over at the Aria and then last year in Moscone, we're here in the Mandalay Bay this year. Watching the evolution of ServiceNow and the transformation of organizations, Rob Pickering is here. He's the CIO of AAA, AAA Allied. Rob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Pleasure, happy to be here. So AAA, everybody knows AAA, right? Car breaks down, you call AAA. You can call us to tow your car and you can also call us to make your travel arrangements, do insurance. Yeah, you got all kinds of new services going on. I whip out my AAA card all the time when I'm taking the family on vacation. I get these killer discounts. I went in the office the other day, got some Euro in advance. Got a good rate on them, got to get them in advance, got a good rate on them though. But so talk about your business. A lot of people don't know these other ancillary businesses but what's happening in your business generally and specifically how are you guys expanding your reach? Well, AAA Allied Group is one of the federation of AAA clubs. We're the 12th largest AAA club in the United States. There are about 44 clubs total. We service the state of Kansas, the eastern half of Connecticut, Southwest Ohio, a little bit of Kentucky, a little bit of Indiana, a little bit of West Virginia. So we're pretty spread out. I personally, from an IT staff standpoint, have folks working in four different states. So we rely on a whole bunch of various tools to keep us connected. The AAA brand that everyone knows is evolving over time. We're trying to improve our reach and our knowledge and you mentioned discounts. Discounts is one of the things that, that's the only thing I talk about when I'm talking about AAA because it's something that people really don't know a lot about. Well, I only recently started taking advantage of it and they're substantial. It's not like a couple of points. I mean, it's really significant. And there's several hundred. So the AAA mobile app is the best way of finding those. It'll pinpoint you and tell you who's giving you discounts in the area. So I want to talk about mobile but how long you been the CIO? I've been a AAA Allied Group for 10 years. Okay, so how have things changed in the last 10 years? I mean, a lot's changed, right? A lot has changed. We really didn't have cloud back then. That's true. It wasn't really a factor and there was no such thing as social media, at least to speak of. So our IT organization has gone through a bunch of transitions in the 10 years that I've been there. When I started, folks were answering, everyone in the IT department was answering phone calls. So we were one giant help desk doing anything anybody asked us to do. We built a lot of structure around that and started evolving the processes and the tools. We went through three different ITSM platforms before we landed on service now and we've only been on service now now for about a year. So three different platforms before service now? Before service now. What wasn't working? So the first platform we were on, not to be named, didn't have any kind of email integration, didn't have any kind of a customer portal. So it was really a weak environment to roll out to a disperse organization like ours. Yes, so we hear this a lot, whether it's you didn't have some kind of capability or things weren't integrated or it just didn't do the stuff that you wanted it to do. So, okay, so that was sort of the first one or two or three, what happened next? So we then moved to another platform that kind of served our needs at the time, solved a few of the initial problems that we had, but it was not ITIL compliant. And we wanted to move towards a more ITIL compliant environment. We ended up on another platform. What was the driver for that, Rob? It was a quality initiative? It's really quality process, anything in IT, the only way to scale it is to make it more efficient. So we're never gonna have enough people, we're never gonna have enough resource, we're never gonna have enough money. So we tend to invest in tools and we use those tools to improve our efficiency. And so every iteration of the tool improved our efficiency a little bit and we eventually ended up on one that we think we're gonna stick with for a while. But they became disposable, right? Absolutely, right, so they can be expensive as well if you're not focused on looking at what your goals are and having the platform delivered. So let's go back to the early days of when you brought in service now, the impetus was you wanted to get more out of your ITSM your system, so take us back to what that was like. What did you have to do to bring it in? Was it politically charged? Did your CFO wanna get you in a stranglehold? It's funny, I worked for the CFO. We actually initially implemented service now because we wanted a project management tool. We were in the market for a new project management portfolio management tool. We evaluated a bunch of them and we very quickly figured out that we were gonna have people working in two different systems. There was gonna be one group in the project tool. There was gonna be that same group working in the ITSM platform and we wouldn't have any single record of all of their work, all their efforts, their resources, no common process, logic, et cetera. So we started looking at service now and we actually ended up purchasing a platform specifically to roll out project. Okay, so that's interesting. We were talking earlier, one of our guests about project, that's obviously a place where people start, not necessarily always the starting point, but a reasonable one. Small guys like us, we might use Basecamp, but you're managing a lot more complex projects. Okay, so you brought in project and then what happened next? So after we brought in project, we knew when we made the decision that we were gonna be ousting our prior ITSM platform. That was the whole reason why we did service. So once we rolled out project, we actually had it live in January of 2014 and then we began our ITSM implementation near the end of February, beginning of March and we went live on the ITSM platform 90 days later and rolled out incident problem change, service catalog, CMS. And using a single CMDB. Using a single CMDB for everything, one tool for everyone working on projects, working on the ITSM platform. Okay, so what happened? What was the business result? The business results have been astounding, frankly. Astounding. Astounding. We didn't anticipate what would happen and that was that as we were improving our processes, we all became evangelists inside the organization. So the whole IT team loved the platform, they loved the tool, they loved the visibility, how it worked. It was kind of like finding a nirvana at some level and then they started talking about it to all of their customers, the people that they're talking to on the phone, the tickets they're working, about what it was doing for our group and those same business organizations started saying, well, how could we take advantage of that? Is that something that we can do? Can you put us in that platform? How can we use it? And we immediately said, well, that's exactly what we want to do. So like what kind of groups like HR? HR, accounting, our facilities organization, we call them office services. Our ERS business operations group, they're the actual kind of mini IT organization that supports all the road service operations. Several others, marketing is another one as well. So any sort of request oriented service organization? Any request approver type of, request approver, fulfiller type flow. And in many cases it's replacing things that we had put in place as stop gaps for those organizations like a SharePoint list or a SharePoint workflow, something small that they had to create in the past. Spreadsheets. Spreadsheets that weren't working on. Email. The big ones, email, right? All of the other business organizations, they never got to mature from a process standpoint the way IT did. If you think about IT in the past, we started on the phone, then we moved to some sort of a ticketing system that wasn't connected to anything. Then we moved to a ticketing system connected to email and then eventually we had a customer portal where you could put stuff in and we went through this maturity cycle. The other business lines went straight from walk over to their desk or pick up a phone to email. And once they hit email, they stayed there and all of their request approver, fulfiller stuff was happening in email. And that's essentially how we sell the tool internally. Do you have stuff that you're using email for? If you do, that's a broken process. Let us help you fix it. So how has it affected the flow of emails in your organization? The hope is it's reducing them significantly and we're seeing that over time as people move. It's a cultural shift. Everybody loves email. So as people move from their email process to an automated process or a service now request fulfiller process, suddenly they aren't relying on email. Email's not where their work is. Their work is in the system, the tool. So you must have seen a behavioral shift. I mean, most workers when they come in in the morning, the first thing they do is fire up their email. Yeah. Is that still the case? Or are they firing up service now? If they're in IT, they're firing up service now. Absolutely, that is the, you walk around our office and work with any of our folks, that's the screen they have up. They have their service now screen up and we're slowly seeing that happen in the other business lines as well that we've moved. Now we haven't moved them all and we're continuing to work on moving more and more of them into the tool itself but it's successful. I was struck by Frank's keynote this morning when he wanted an iPhone 6. Did you see that? That's exactly it. And he got, he emailed the CIO, the CIO emailed back a link. The link to the portal. And that's what we do as well. And that's what you would have done. That's exactly what we would have done. This is where you get the service. Leave me alone. I'm busy. This is where you can do it. This is how you interact. And what's more important is if anybody working in a larger organization knows that one of the challenges is figuring out where do I go to request whatever it is? Do I go to our intranet? Do I go to our customer portal? Do I email someone? Do I call someone? How do I find it? And now those answers are always go to the customer portal which is our service now CMI. So the customer's portal is the service now is a front end to virtually all the services within your organization is the vision anyway. So if I want to do something in HR like I know in our situation we have to go to two or three or four different portals to find out or I have to go to my house. Sometimes I have to go directly to my healthcare provider or I don't know. I don't know where to go. And over time we're moving everything into that one customer portal so that you can communicate with your employees and say, hey, this is how you interact with our organization. Whether it's a personal request, I need to change my W2 form or I want to sign up for a health club or I need some sort of an HR form or it's a business request. Hey, I need to update that graphical sign at that office. That's a lot of stuff though. So how do I find it? Is it a search paradigm? It's a dynamic search. So in our portal you plug in a search criteria and you'll get two search results. The left hand side will be all the knowledge base articles that we've created around that topic and on the right hand side it's all the service catalog. How does a service get spun up? Do you worry at all about the analog to VM sprawl, the service sprawl? How do you manage all that? We manage it a couple of ways. We've got a request process that utilizes service now's demand management to evaluate whether or not it's something that should be put out on the portal. Sort of a curation process. We also enable our business lines directly. So we use service now's service creator application to create full blown applications that we then deliver to our business lines and it allows them to manage all of those request forms themselves. They can create them, they can publish them, they can edit them, they can modify them and they don't have to work with IT to do any of that. What are the curation parameters that you use? Some of the curation parameters in demand are the capital cost, the labor cost, the risk, the return on investment, et cetera. So you run a business case. So you're essentially doing many business cases on every request that's coming in but you've streamlined that process through demand management to deliver an artifact at the end, whether it be a project or a new development story or another request form. And service creator is app creator, those are one and the same? I think those are two different products. App creator is for full blown, kind of create now applications and service creator is for onboarding a new service specifically for a business line to manage. Are you at the point where you're considering app creator? Absolutely, and so we're evaluating the different, each tool's got a use case and so as business lines want to onboard, we evaluate their technical expertise, how much they want to invest from a licensing standpoint and then determine what the best use case is for them whether it's service creator or a create now app or even a commercial service now application that we can purchase. I remember when we first heard about app creator, Jeff Frick and I were doing theCUBE and we were saying, that's pass. And at first people say, well, not really, but it is. It really is, right? I mean it's sort of headlong into that platform as a service but it requires different skill sets or it minimizes the skill sets that are required. So how, if at all, are you changing your development skill set profile? So one of the issues that we had with our former ITSN platform was that we created a bottleneck and that bottleneck was in our ability to execute the development process. So as our internal folks needed changes to the applications, that would come into one of two developers and they very quickly got overwhelmed. So when we implemented service now we took a different approach. I had 10 of my 32 IT staff admin trained in the service now platform and then we took those 10 folks and made them responsible for various aspects of the system and from that came six certified administrators that they did on their own that make up a development group and we actually used ServiceNow's SDLC scrum tool to manage our service now development going forward. Interesting, and so how does the ServiceNow app creator sort of roadmap fit into whatever it is, whatever you're developing in Ruby, Java, Python? Yeah, ultimately it simplifies it because the development platform becomes ServiceNow so you're not doing Ruby, you're not doing Python or Perl or PHP or any of that. They need a JavaScript skill set and they can start developing apps in ServiceNow. The app creator minimizes the time really to turn up those applications because you've got templates built for small, medium and large applications that have different feature sets. So again, it's an evaluation for what folks need. Does it take pressure off? I mean, everybody complains about how hard it is to find good developers. Does it change that equation? Yeah, it's made folks in our organization that I would not have initially thought we're going to take to developing and being developers and turn them into ServiceNow developers. So what's the skill set you now look for? So you're obviously looking at somebody's resume, all right, whatever, let's say you're developing in Perl or whatever, Java, okay, that's what I need. What do you look for now? A desire to be able to create is literally the best. If they're passionate about it, they've got a desire to learn it and understand it. We can start them on stuff that doesn't require any coding, kind of our zero coders, no coders that Frank talked about this morning and then move them through that process until they're all the way in the lower left corner as core system developers in JavaScript. Okay, so that is your goal, is to get them to the point where everybody in one team can, okay, so it's really up to them. It's up to them and they can stop along that path wherever they want and there's always something that they're going to be able to do to contribute. When you think about the portfolio of skill sets, do you try to have a mix, a diversified portfolio? Sure. Yeah, absolutely, because everybody's going to have a different interest level as well. How about mobile, Rob? What's the rage? You guys got a mobile app? What are you guys doing in the whole mobile space? So, yeah, we're a little bit young in the mobile space in our implementation. ServiceNow implements automatically on tablets, so everything that we're doing is available on a tablet interface. To move it to a smart phone interface requires a little bit of effort and we're starting to undergo some of that efforts because those same business lines, some of the advantages they see is all their folks have a smart phone and they want to be able to check their incidents, respond to them, deal with approvals, et cetera, on a mobile app. How about gotchas? Things that you would maybe do differently now, knowing what you know, maybe advice that you give to some of your peers in terms of if you're thinking about bringing in ServiceNow, do A, B, and C, and D. This is what I would have done differently if I had to do it all over again. If I was going to do it all over again, I'd like to say I would have done it sooner because I'd love to go back in time. Don't go through for a second or third iterations. Don't go through all the different iterations that we did. Throw out, yeah, okay. But beyond that, I was really happy with the way that we kind of built the development environment. We did not focus on full-time developers. We focused on people with a desire to develop and spread that effort out among a large group of people. That's enabled us to move forward very quickly. Something that I'd probably do different. I would probably bite off less at once. We bit off a bunch of the platform over a six-month timeframe and implemented, which today would be the whole PPM suite, the whole ITSA suite, performance analytics, event management, demand management, just an enormous effort, and that was a lot. So I would tell anybody who's looking at the platform today, if you have an ITSM platform, look at Express. I was real impressed with what they talked about especially the fact that the path from Express to a full-blown service now is clicking a button. So that was impressive. That was not something I knew about. So I would say look at that. And then number two, start small. Find something that is going to solve a problem, one application module, whatever it is, implement it, get it working, and then figure out what your next step is. Did you make a cake? We didn't get a launch cake. We did not get a go live cake. I saw all those cakes on the keynote and the guy sitting next to me, one of my folks, was like, hey, we didn't get a go live cake. So that's all right. We did our own celebration. That's awesome. Rob, thanks very much. We got to leave it there. I really appreciate you coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Service Now Knowledge. Hashtag no14, go to the crowd chat, crowdchat.net slash no14. No, sorry, no15. What am I talking about? It's 2015, folks. All right, everything I said, global replace 15. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE.