 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 theCUBE. This is day two for theCUBE at Knowledge. Our fourth year here, theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We find the people that really know what they're talking about. April Carter is a practitioner. She's a senior IT operations manager at cars.com. You want a car, go check out cars.com. April, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. So take us inside. Well, first of all, talk about cars.com. I mean, very competitive industry you're in, right? It's very competitive, lots of merging markets. You're transforming things, you're disrupting and you're banging heads with, everybody else is trying to do that, but what's happening in the business? What are the real pressures that they're putting on IT? Coming up with those new services really and really delivering quickly. So we're very much at angel shops and we're doing continuous integration and continuous delivery is the big things for us right now. The need for speed. All right, so take us inside the world of IT service management, your world. What's it like? So basically our transformation was you think of us as the dot com so you think that we're ahead of the game, but when I got to cars, they were very paper and spreadsheet driven. Email is still even still very key to what we do. You're rolling your eyes when you say that. We can relate. It annoys me. So, you know, ServiceNow has really helped us to really start that process and really rethink the services we deliver to our employees. So everybody thinks of that external face to cars.com and that's what we focus on so much and we forget that internal face. So making things easier for our employees. Okay, so maybe start with the journey of ServiceNow. You brought ServiceNow into the organization. Yep, three years ago. You had had experience in prior lives? Not with ServiceNow, but with other ITSM vendors and they have always been very painful. So when we did our bake off on what product that we were going to use, you know, when they came in, they weren't, we weren't really considering them a contender. How long ago was this? Sorry, I didn't know. Three years. But when they came in and they did their demo, they, you know, we were in the system and we were like, this is a little too good to be true. And then they say, we could be implemented in three months, we're like. Yeah, right. Right, that never happens. But it all came to fruition and we were implemented with, you know, incident problem change, the basics, you know, knowledge, an employee self-service portal with probably 30 or so orderable IT items. And it was a big deal for us and a huge success. And how long did it take? Three months. Three months. Then you got a cake. We did get a cake. Everybody gets a cake. Everybody gets a cake. They don't miss that. You must have that in ServiceNow. So they don't miss that request. That's the last process. Okay, so what was, so the cars before was really paper-based, spreadsheet-based, email-based. What was the business impact? The business impact is really trying to drive our business partners in HR and even in the development space to really try to rethink the way they interact internally. So HR, we implemented an onboarding automation. So we went from multiple forms that we had to fill out as hiring managers down to one. So that was a big deal for us. Plus we were manually creating user accounts. We were manually provisioning hardware and access. We went through the entire process, about six months after we implemented ServiceNow to really try to grab ahold of that process and make it easier. Because we were delivering our new employees, all of their things on time that first day because that's our goal. But it was extremely painful for the service desk and those folks that do that provisioning. So we wanted to make it easier for them. And we were able to. Okay, so you brought in HR as well? Recruiting, but yeah. The HR piece is a little bit more difficult. So we left that piece out. So when you said onboarding, you meant onboarding? So from a recruiting, so as a hiring manager, you basically submit the form to hire somebody and then all the way through to provisioning all their access. And that integrates or interfaces in some way, shape or form with your HR system? It doesn't today. It integrates with the recruiting system. Right, okay, which is separate from the HR system. Okay, and how does that integration occur? So basically what we did was we stood up a form within our catalog. So as a hiring manager, I can fill out all the information I need from the position that I'm filling through their salary requirements and all that kind of stuff. Plus all of their access to the need, once that person is hired, all of that's in that form. I can also save that form as I need it in the future because I'm never gonna remember what each person needs. So I can save that form as well. But then what ServiceNow does is sends all that data over to Silk Road and actually implements all that data for the recruiter so they don't have to manually enter it. Because they were manually entering it before. How do you find stuff in this giant content repository? Is this great search? It's just, we have great search capabilities. Yeah. Yeah, so that's simple. Yeah. Because I can never find anything in my laptop. I'm very organized. So it's one of those things that the CMS that we have, the portal that we have implemented now. The design when we were implementing, because it was three months, we didn't really, we were thinking about everything. It was a very broad scope when we were implementing. So we didn't really think too heavily on the design of the portal and I think that the organization of the portal is what probably annoys me the most at this point because people have to navigate through so much. So with the news, I'm very excited about the new CMS that they're pulling in Helsinki, which will actually help us to actual redesign that portal and get it so it's not so deep. So as you say, it was very hierarchical before. Yes. And so now you're able to develop with Helsinki a flatter structure. Exactly. And it's much more easy to manage because right now it's kind of hard to manage, especially if you don't have the technical skill set to do so because it's not easy. It's more like nested folders versus labels. Exactly. Love labels. So talk some more about the kinds of things that you want to do with the platform. So there's a couple of things where we really want to push HR. So HR is very paper based. They love their paper actually. So we implemented a product and they love it. Exactly. Fred was talking about the mail room with all the paper, the green paper, the blue paper. I love paper too. We even implemented a HR status change form that is a very, very large process. So any time you want to change an employee's status, whether it's giving them a raise or changing their location that they're based, we fill out this paper form. So we automated that and put it into service now. It goes through approval processes. So it's even auditable now or at least much easier to audit it. And at the end of the design process with the HR folks, they're like, well, as long as I can print it out at the end, I'll be fine. That's not really the point. Upload it to every note. The other really thing that we're really excited about is actually so with the continuous delivery, continuous integration that we're doing on the development side is we're opening up a lot of APIs that our developers can use to automate a lot of their processes. So we want to automate our release cycles. Right now, everything's somewhat manual when we're doing release. There's still people at the keyboard. It's not wholly manual, but we want to get to that point where they just click on something in JIRA and it initiates the Jenkins. Jenkins creates changes. And it automates it all for them, but it's still completely auditable from our perspective. If you had to create a benefits pie and you had to allocate a portion of the value, let's say, that's received by sort of IT versus outside of IT, what would that pie look like? I would say the biggest benefit is that employees. So my goal is to make the employees' lives easier. I mean, and that's the way I evangelize the product. It's really, what can I do to make your life easier? What can I do to take some process? It's very heavy and make it lighter for you. That's the biggest benefit. The other thing is the ease of development on the tool. So we don't want to go out and buy something every time a developer decides he wants to do something else. So the ease of development, so we can build small apps. We have a library app, so they can check out Kindle books. They can check out Kindle, even logins within the tool. They're just little apps. We're not going to go somewhere to buy that, but we need to be able to do that. So we can do that easily within the tool. And it's funny, in making the employees' job easier, there's this nice second-order effect where your phone doesn't ring. Exactly! That's my whole goal. Or I get less email. Don't tell them that little secret. We're just doing it for you. April, can you talk about building these lightweight apps? Describe the skill set of the people who are building these apps. Are they hard-core developers? Are they low-code developers, both? I think it's a mix of both. So we have some hard-core developers that JavaScript pretty much 24-7. And then we have the admins who I code within the tool myself, but I'm definitely not a developer. But it makes it easy enough for me to be able to do those little snippets of code that I need to make a form easier for somebody, to make it prettier, to make it behave the way it does. So you've never been a developer. You've never written code. No, but I still do it in service now. Never worked in a computer science major? No. OK, but so you said no. I'm not a biology major, really. OK, so you're smart, but so I want to get to that a little bit. So you are able to build apps or at least improve apps? Absolutely. And I think there's multiple ways to do it. Obviously, research, the internet can tell me how to do a lot of stuff. The community has been very helpful. There's also Share, where you can find little apps that will help you along your way as well. So they make it very easy to actually build out your core product. Did you have to go through training to get to that point, or was it just sort of autodidactic? Actually, knowledge has been most of my training. We didn't training at the beginning when we implemented. But I haven't taken a lick of training since. And you mentioned JIRA. These stories make me think of JIRA. It sounds like we're using kind of best practice in the hard core software development part of the house, and now bringing that over into the less hard core software development side of the house, but still very similar types of techniques and processes. Absolutely, yep. That's great. So bumper sticker on Knowledge 16 for you. When the trucks are pulling away from the Mandalay Bay, from April Carter's standpoint, what's it going to say? So the one thing, there's a couple of things, I guess. I always find vendors at the show. So I found we're implementing MOOCsoft right now. It's an event management tool. And we're literally going through the process as we're here at the conference. But it's an event management tool that I can tie into service now. I can manage my critical incidents through being the OC, critical incidents, or my bread and butter. I have to make sure that those go off well, and that we reduce that time. And I always find products here that I'm like, oh, I want to look into that. We found one downstairs just yesterday that is going to help us hopefully manage our mobile communications. So all the cell phones and tablets and everything that we have in our org is. And then dealing with the external vendors like Verizon and AT&T have been fun. Very painful. Maybe not quite fun. Yeah, so I always find something good here, and I learn a lot of new things. So it's always been very helpful. And how many years have you been coming? This will be my fourth. Your fourth, all right. Same as us. Ours, too. April, awesome having you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. You know, theCUBE newbie did a great job. I'm a newbie. Awesome. Now you're a CUBE alum. Now you're an alum. Excellent. All right, thank you. Thank you. OK, keep right here. Everybody will be back with our next guest is the CUBE. We're live from Knowledge 16 in Las Vegas. Right back.