 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Hi everybody, welcome back to Knowledge 17. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Jeff Frick, at our fifth Knowledge. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Seneca Lauka Series, the business process lead at Dow Chemical, relatively new ServiceNow customer. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Yes, thanks for having me. So as you said, this is your second Knowledge. It is. And how do you like Orlando? I like it, I like it. I'm here in Venetian for next year and so I'm a Vegas guy, so I'll be happy to get back there. But Orlando's nice. Where's home for you? Originally from New Jersey, worked in Philadelphia for 15 years and relocated to Midland, Michigan where Dow Chemical's headquartered. Fantastic, that's great, great country, Michigan. Absolutely. So, take us through your role, start there. Sure. What do you do at Dow Chemical? So I'm a business process lead for enterprise service management. We could go down the ITSM route or we can go down the BSM route and we said, why pick one? Enterprise systems management used to be the name, we actually elevated it up, enterprise service management with the IToperability focus on the end. Okay, and you said you went live with ServiceNow June last year? June 11th last year, we started with incident problem change config. We did change management, I'm sorry, a month later and then we did service request catalog rolled out for the whole rest of the year. How long did it take you from sort of, when you said, all right, we're doing this, start the project to actually get, you know, MVP out. Yeah, the cake. Get to the cake. And MVP's a really important thing, minimum viable product. It was a hard lesson for us to learn. Quickly we realized that we're not going to be able to do everything we want to do in a first shot. So we did focus very heavily on MVP. ServiceNow was good enough to make sure that they bred that into us, the importance of that. And so we started in October with workshops. We spent probably the first four or five months before we wrote one single line of code or configured one thing in ServiceNow. You know, a lot of that work was as is process, document it, understand it, uplift it, figure out what we want that to be processed to look like and then figure out how the tool is going to deliver against that. And did you do part, some of that, I mean, much of that came as part of the business case and then you just refined it, is that right? The business case was really more on the value side. We didn't get into the specifics around process. We had a high level idea of what we want to do strategically, right? Yeah. Our guiding principles were really industry best practice. We like to think we're special, but really, the industry should know. Out of the box, ServiceNow whenever possible. And to be honest, the out of the box ServiceNow should reflect industry best practice fairly well. And so that was kind of the coming in position for us. We deviated only when absolutely necessary and we really tried to stick to vanilla. So you minimized custom mods? We really tried to do that, yes. There's times where we had to deviate, of course, but we really wanted to look to see if ServiceNow had an answer and if we could tweak what was already there then great. There's only a handful of opportunities where we had to build something net net. And was that related to your ERP or when did you have to build those custom mods? So in places where we might have a concept that was to bring legacy capability from a previous system. We knew we weren't going to cut and run from the old to the new. We had to kind of pull along some of the capabilities of that platform. So the way you guys do category subcategory, we did through classification. And so we had to customize a couple of tables to bring classifications over to bridge that gap. I see. Okay. And then, so then you go live. Now, was it a CMDB, single CMDB across the organization? So we have HP technology where we had large investment. We wanted to keep that for discovery purposes and it enabled us to build one big tunnel between our CMDB and ServiceNow. So it made the integration go very easily. So we really did two key integrations, a CMDB integration and an LDAP one to get our people data. Once that was done, we were on our feet. We were stood up and we were ready to start delivering process. And then a service catalog? Service catalog was an interesting one because we had it spread out in a bunch of places. We had web forms where somebody had customized a small little web form that I was actually making calls into our ticketing system to create service requests. We also had request center, which was brought in to try and solve that world of service request management, but it only did it for service request. And we realized ServiceNow is going to do it end to end. Seneca, when you think about your investments, I like to look at them as you get investments to run the business, some to grow the business and some to transform the business. And you're really sort of an IT transform expert. How do you allocate that? Are those mutually exclusive? Do they sort of blend into each other? And how much of your investment is transformation? And what does that all mean? Yeah, so it's tough because you've got guys that are on the run side and I actually spent the large majority of my career on the run side. So I know what it feels like to be accountable for everything in production, regardless of how it got there. And so I kind of oscillate back and forth. If the hair's on fire and these guys are going to be dead by the time the project transforms next year's capability, there's no point in us waiting. We can't wait. So we're bouncing in and out of transformation and dealing with making sure operability can happen effectively efficiently and that these guys are around next year and alive and well so that we can deliver that transformational capability. You talked about MVP being kind of a new concept. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit further. Is that not a kind of a processor methodology that you guys have done in the past or was that a learning curve? It was a little bit of a learning curve. So typically, we delivered the biggest SAP implementation in the history of the world. A billion dollars, 800 SAP systems and it took us seven years. So we didn't think a lot about MVP. We wanted perfection and so we made sure that we got it and it cost us dearly. But in the end, the results were good. In this case, we had to move fast, right? We weren't going to be able to do it all. We knew the capabilities that you see throughout this room are incredible. We want to get to them, but we've got to get on to the platform first. And so we really did hone in on trying to find what is the minimum product that we need to get people moved over to the platform and we'll increment from there. So it was a little bit of a learning for us. It was a little bit of a culture change. We kind of found that sweet swap between Agile and Waterfall, which I think we called it Wadgile or... Yeah, Wadgile would be good to name. Well, all right. I mean, your implementation coincided with the sort of DevOps craze and Agile, but there's a place for Waterfall, right? Sometimes you do need that perfection. Other times you need to break stuff and iterate. But so that's interesting. You said you came up with sort of a hybrid. Sometimes hybrids are scary. So how did you sort of come to that point and how's it working for you? Yeah, so what we did is we front-ended a lot of the requirements. We spent, like I said, several months just sitting and doing requirements. And then we transitioned into two-week sprints. And we pulled out of the backlog the requirements that we had captured in those months previous. So that was kind of how we blended the two together. We're more Waterfall shop, but we were delivering a system of records. And so in systems of record, we strongly believe that Agile can be dangerous. It's not necessarily the place to start. And so we started with Waterfall and we kind of ended with Agile. All right, okay. And so what so far have been the business impacts? Can you share that with us? Absolutely. So first things first, we're getting consistency throughout our processes. So many times geographical differences or even within a geography at a sub-activity level, people were doing things differently. So the first thing we had to do was standardize process. That gives us the ability to measure across the world how that process has been executed, whereas before we couldn't do that one for one. We couldn't compare these things one for one. And so now we have that vision, now we have that visibility and we were a performance analytics customer from day one. So we started capturing data to baseline to benchmark from go live until today. And we've got incredible data to go back then and do the Continuous Service Improvement. How much of the consistency in process was forced in your pre-deployment activities where you kind of find, all right, we got to sit down actually document just to put it into the system versus now that you've got this tool in place that you see the opportunity to continue to go after new processes. It varied depending upon area. So change management was actually not a bad process from a global perspective. And the flip side is is we actually implemented some case management capability for our business functions. Their processes were extremely deviated across geographies, across activities. And so it depends. But bottom line is is that before we talk about implementing on this platform, we got to talk standardization. Good news is this incident problem change wasn't as much work. On the business process side, it was a lot more. How are you predominantly measured? Is it getting stuff done? Are there other sort of KPIs that you focus on? Is there one that you try to optimize? These days we're actually operating a little bit of a dangerous place because we're going through so much mergers and acquisition activity that our success is can we integrate a company in less than a year while we go on to do the biggest chemical merger in the history of the world? Typically we would be kind of looking at metrics and KPIs down at the process level. Right now we're looking at can I actually bring these companies together? And not kill each other. And not kill each other. That's right. That's not to say we're not doing the latter as well. But I think we have to start with can we get the big activities done so that we can figure out how to do the process improvement. How about the show for you here? What's it been like? What are you learning? Yeah. Are you sharing? DX Continuum I think is going to be the theme that I'm going to leave here thinking, wow these guys did the right thing with that purchase. So you know the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the data leaks that we're going to be able to take all this data that we have and pump it out to you guys and you're going to turn around and tell us an interesting story. You're going to tell me the questions that I would never even think to ask because you're going to be able to see into that data in ways that we never even dream possible. So that's the big one for me. I've heard some rumors of some other things coming but I shouldn't know about those and so I'm not going to say anything at this point but right now it's about the machine learning, the artificial intelligence. So how, what other in the company size of Dow must be doing some interesting things with big data and Hadoop and AI and how does what you're doing or does what you're doing with service now relate to those sort of other activities? Is there sort of a data platform strategy? It's an interesting question. It's something that we're actually struggling with a little bit to figure out what that strategy is going to be. I don't think the larger organization expected so many opportunities to use analytics and to use machine learning against data sets that otherwise were this is operation stuff for the most part, right? We're starting to get into the business side a little bit but really we were focused on running the business from an operations perspective and so all of a sudden now we're getting attention that we wouldn't have had otherwise from the big players. You know the SAP Business Warehouse Business Intelligence guys, they've got 120 people delivering their reporting service. I got a guy half time that's helping me with my PA reports and we've got to figure out a way to either join our strategies together or at least meet in the middle because there's data that we probably want to share from each other. Do you have a chief data officer? We do not that I'm aware of actually but I think it is, it's a very powerful role but in our SAP world they kind of act as that de facto person within our organization but they're not very interested in what we're doing yet but they are starting to get the attention of us. It's interesting because we talk a lot about IoT now will bridge you know kind of the IT and the ops folks and it sounds like you're having that experience really specifically built around some of the processes that you're delivering the service now to bring those two worlds together. Yeah so while I mentioned machine learning artificial intelligence that's actually right there second on my list. The thing I came here last year and raised my hand and said I need the most is I need the ability to bring massive amounts of data onto this platform. Raw performance data, network data, server data, utilization data and user data. I want to be able to bring it into this platform so that I can use it to correlate events and incidents and problems. And so the things that you guys are doing for IoT to bring massive data sets in are actually going to solve my problem but I don't think it was necessarily what you were trying to solve but I'm very happy for that. So by the way we're independent media so we're like third party guys. It's these guys service now. So we just sort of unpack, analyze. What about if you had to do it again would you do differently? Obviously you would have and you did embrace the MVP, other things. Yeah so we took a very dangerous route in that we didn't have a team built, we didn't have a competency built. We took a system integrator and we went off and we went hog wild and we implemented it quickly while we built the team, while we built the governance, while we built the competency center. If I could do it again I'd have that team ready, staffed, well trained up front so that we could learn as we went a little bit more, be a little more autonomous and self-sufficient. Were you one of the 100 customers that John Donahoe met with in 45 days? I was not actually. And if you weren't then what would you tell him in terms of the piece that he said what could we do better? Yeah, what would you? Yeah so the question came up yesterday around releases, you know should we do more, should we do less, I mean we're actually struggling a little bit to keep up with the two releases per year. So the biggest thing that I see is not making it a wholesale upgrade. If I could take parts and pieces from what the new capabilities that are coming without having to go through the full upgrade cycle, you know I think that would be huge for me. So that we don't have to spend a couple of months or we're hoping to get that down to one month but this is our first one in production. So we're going to spend three months getting this upgrade right. We're hoping to get it down to you know a couple of weeks to a month. But if I can take pieces and parts of the capability that's being delivered and not have to take it wholesale that would be it. Yeah so that's interesting because multi-instance is nice, you don't have to go on the SAS players schedule but you want to keep current. You know for a lot of reasons maybe with certain parts of the upgrade. Yeah. Okay that doesn't sound trivial. Yeah it's not. Although I know they're thinking about it. So it's come up, I've heard a couple of people at least mention that it's something that they have to think about. They may not actually go that direction but at least that they're thinking about it that tells them that they're exploring other avenues to deliver capability. What's in the future for you guys? Where do you want to take this thing? So our next big thing is going to be event management. So we've got 45 different tools that are doing monitoring from purchase tools to somebody's script that's sitting on the mainframe that sends us an event when some exception happens. And so we've built with a custom IT process automation tool our event management framework and it's integrated to ServiceNow. But at the heart of it is some old technology, decade old technology that was my first entry into IT process automation. And so as the person who built it I'm going to be the one that ultimately unplugged it and hands it over to ServiceNow. So for us that's the next step for what we're going to do. Awesome. Well listen, Senator, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Love the knowledge, rapid fire. Perfect for theCUBE, so thank you. Great, wonderful. Thank you guys. All right, pleasure. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17 in Orlando. We'll be right back.