 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Hi, we're back to the Mandalay Bay here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is our third knowledge conference. This is Knowledge 15, hashtag no 15. We've seen the evolution of ServiceNow, the expansion of ServiceNow's business from almost a pure IT service management into lines of business in particular. We're going to talk about the HR function in some depth. I'm here with Mark Schenck and David Kostar. Mark is the managing director and David is head of the People and Change Practice at KPMG. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. So Mark, let me start with you. What is different? Everybody's talking, IT service management and extending into new parts of the organization. What's different about what KPMG brings to the table? Sure, I think, you know, what I'm seeing KPMG do that I don't see out in the market is, you know, we bring a breadth of services to bear as a large organization that, you know, has a broad set of capability. We can take professional process consulting and combine that with a digital design and delivery capability and also combine with an enterprise service implementation like ServiceNow. So, okay, so Mark, you're a design expert and David, you're an HR process expert. So how do those two worlds come together? Yeah, so what's really nice is it's two disciplines that have to work together. So when we think about innovative design, it's all about the new hire experience. When we think about the new hire experience, it's all about having effective and efficient HR processes so that it spills into the ultimate HR customer, which is the employee themselves. So having an engaging solution and engaging experience directly drives into the valuable what HR is trying to bring to an organization and really only can be accomplished through the innovative design that we have through digital. So, we've heard a lot of talk at this conference about onboarding. Yeah. You're not ignoring the rest of the life cycle. Are you? And I wonder if you could talk about that. I mean, why the focus on onboarding, obviously because there's so much pain and it's so important. Yeah. But what about the rest of the life cycle? Well, why onboarding I think is an important question to address and then the rest of the life cycle definitely will hit. Why onboarding is it's the one universal challenge that spans across every business, spans across every sector, spans across every level, right? Yet it's often the most fragmented and disconnected process that exists across an enterprise. So when you think about the HR component, you could have multiple systems of record for HR that tie into onboarding. Your applicant tracking system, your background check vendor, your I-9 provider. Then you go over to IT and you have all of the provisioning and then you have security and you have facilities and you have location and the list goes on, right? So the reason we believe onboarding is the perfect entry point is it is the one area that we have heard time in again, not just from our customers as we've been doing service now work with them, but also from ourselves. So as we are acquiring companies, as we are bringing in new employees, a consistent theme is onboarding hurts. We need to do it better. It's very expensive and the experience that our new irons have is inferior and that inferiority is costing us money. Right off the bat. Right off the bat. And the research backs it up. Employees decide, over 80% of employees decide within the first six months whether or not they're going to stay for multiple years. You know, I mean, there's a lot of research out there that says you only get that one chance to make a first impression. And so your ability to retain competitive talent is, you know, you can't lose that opportunity. I'm always intrigued when large companies that have been around for a while put so much emphasis on design in the UX and it's relatively new. That's a relatively new trend. So how did you come to be at KPMG? I got acquired. But so again, you know, you see companies going up. I mean, Infor buys your hook and loop and KPMG acquiring your company. Very interesting trends going on. What do you make of it? Well, it's, you know, so obviously the kind of digital mobile space as a whole has really grown as smartphone adoption and tablets and everything have taken over the market in the last seven years or so. And so part of it is just a reflection of the reality of the prevalence of these devices and then we need to bring a skill set to the table. But you know, really it's just, it's the idea that it's the glue between so many of the, from KPMG's perspective, so many of the services that they would offer to their clients. Digital is the part that binds so many of these things together. Because, you know, we are that one consistent element of, you know, whether it's HR or whether it's enterprise-shared services or whether, you know, it's actual, you know, doing work for the C-suite or, you know, any of these things, digital is a part of all of that and allows you to kind of join those opportunities together to be able to deliver more value for your client. So it's interesting, there's a lot of talk, obviously. You're talking CIO, CEOs, everybody's trying to figure out, okay, how can I digitize my business? A digital good is replicable. You get the software economies of scale. Piece of fruit to eat, it's gone. You know, we can't share it, right? I eat it, David can't have a bite. So, but people talk about that primarily for the external facing portions of the business. You guys are digitizing essentially in this example, an HR process. So what's driving that? Where are we in that journey? Is there more attention being paid to the external or is there more attention being paid to the internal? Are they sort of going in sync? What do you guys think about that? There's a huge opportunity in the market to bring a consumer-grade experience to your internal employees and companies are starting to recognize the value of that approach. Onboarding is a multi-multi-million dollar problem for any big company. If you can cut four or five days on time to productivity then you've saved tens of millions of dollars. If you can increase retention, you're eliminating the cost of the soft and hard costs of 40 to $100,000 to actually replace that employee. And so these problems are big and it's not so much about pretty pictures. It's not so much about just making something that looks cool. Visual aesthetic is just the standard in the industry now. You have to make stuff that looks good but it's really about designing for people and designing for the journey that the employee is on. And if you're going to have, if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers. So that employee journey crosses over with a customer journey. Well, it's interesting Mark, you say that. You set off camera that visual designs of table stakes. But there's a lot of crappy looking software out there. I mean, maybe that's going to change over the next decade. I presume it has to, particularly with mobile. Yeah, Dave, I think the driver behind a lot of that crappy software that you refer to is it's compliance driven, right? So why did applicant tracking systems come into creation? Because compliance and regulation increased in the need for a more digital format of tracking steps within a process to ensure that fair hiring practices were done for all higher types was able to be reported upon, right? That is the driver. So when you asked about what else in the talent spectrum, we really believe onboard is the tip of the spear. And driving that experience is critical, but it's also making sure that it's not being built for compliance purposes. Compliance is very much a part of it, but it's having the experience that builds together some bridges between those different silos that onboarding encompasses. So you're talking about building the mission being productivity improvements for the organization and delivering business value and business outcomes. Absolutely. Not just ticking boxes on compliance. Anybody can have task management. In fact, there's hundreds of task management capabilities that are in the marketplace today. It's more than task management. It's building that engagement. It's streamlining the workflows. It's crossing the bridges between the various disciplines within the organization. I mean, most people look at employee onboarding as, you know, here's 70 tasks. We do this for customers. They say, okay, here are the 71 tasks that have to happen for an employee to be onboarded. And then you look at the solution we actually built around it, maybe a third of our screen real estate is on those tasks. Two thirds of the screen real estate is on what someone might view as extraneous information, but what we're seeing is opportunities to add a lot of value as, you know, giving them more context, getting them more connected into their organization, getting them to know the people on their teams, getting them, you know, more information about their organization that they just joined or opportunities within that organization to join whether it's charities or different kind of groups that are happening inside. Those are the things that are going to increase your productivity, your engagement, your retention, the tasks are tasks and anybody can help you get down a bullet list of tasks and check those boxes, but those by themselves are not gonna move the needle on the metrics that you're going to. So kind of a, did you know on the... It accelerates the acculturation that typically happens organically over a period of 30 to 60 to 90 days. It starts that acculturation process before you arrive. Well, and you guys have a lot of, maybe have a reputation for knowledge management and knowledge transfer, so you must have data on this. So how did you use that data to sort of design this new process, new system, new set of apps? So a lot of the data is based on what we're finding in the marketplace. Mark alluded to it earlier. The business case is easy when you really strip away all of the noise. The fact that you have a greater likelihood of engagement increasing by 20% for new hires who have an effective onboarding experience. So think of the impacts of an increase in engagement of your new hire population, of being more than 20%, that's significant. Mark used the stat of over 80% within the first six months to determine whether or not they're going to stay. Well, think of the impact if those people decide to leave, even if half of them decide to leave, forget about the impact to the customer base that those new hires are interacting with or the workload that has to be offset and picked up by other peers that the new hire who's left is no longer doing, but it goes beyond that, right? It goes directly into your traditional HR metrics, cost of hiring, cost of attrition, right? And some of those hard costs that go into it. We really believe that that coupled with the time to productivity piece, coupled with the increased efficiency within the back office workflows that are struggling within the onboarding process itself, provide both direct and indirect costs that make it an easy business case. So what specifically are we talking about here? Products or services that you're going to market with? Is it apps? Is it new services? Is it a combination? It's a service, right? So we bring a lot of actual property to the table, whether it's data that we have in the HR spaces or as all of the services we provide, but also we bring a code base around this product that is there and can sit inside a service now and be delivered. But at the end of the day, it's a process where we come in and we say, okay, let's figure out your target operating model. That's probably going to use 80% of the code base that we have because everybody's target operating model is going to be a little bit different. Let's customize the last 20% and integrate and deliver on service now. It's really bringing the breadth of the firm, right? So it's having the benefit of our people and change practice, our digital practice, our engineering practice to build those integrations. It's the breadth of the firm and it's a turnkey solution that you get in return. And we've been talking about HR, Mark, but are you specializing in HR or is that your starting point? Are you doing sort of other things within KPMG? Yeah, no, I mean we're, so this model, I think, where you take an enterprise platform, the digital piece of intellectual property and an industry specific consultant is something that we're going to the market with broadly. And really in as many sectors as KPMG themselves are facing. So we're moving in financial services for the CFO suite and around products for there. We're moving into enterprise service management. We're going into, as I was saying earlier, about the glue, we're taking this offering to a lot of different places and it allows for a lot of further opportunity to build enterprise solutions. And David, you said that on-boarding is the tip of the spear that you mentioned before. What's that roadmap look like? You got a good business plan ahead of you. Can you talk about that a little bit? No. Well, how about the, I want to just, no, so in terms of customer, yeah, in all seriousness, we really believe there's a huge opportunity within the marketplace. On-boarding represents an often neglected component that is critical in the higher to retire spectrum. We believe that the opportunity ahead of us is limitless. Where our clients take us, leveraging what we've started with on-board, we have some anticipations. But I would tell you, if you think about the talent management spectrum, more short-term, we see this as being that top layer that sits atop the talent ecosystem. So even post day 90, when you are into the organization at that point, you've completed your on-boarding activities, many clients are telling us that other things, such as off-boarding, right? Such as contract or management or temporary workers, contingent labor, there's a lot of opportunities to where we're not replacing those systems of record, but we're that intelligent skin that really rests atop those systems of record. And as an employee or as a service provider, as a contractor to that organization, I always have one place to go to access. Those disparate, often not interconnected systems such as my performance management system or my LMS or my time entry system, right? So all of those things that you have to do as a resource to the organization, this gives you that landing spot or that launching pad into it. So that's a destination that's going to be visited much more frequently than the individual bespoke destinations, right? So what does that mean from a user experience standpoint? Well, I mean, I guess that's the nice thing about what we do. Your fundamental approaches to design are broadly applicable, right? Which is why we can be in so many different spaces. I was just talking about all the different places we're going to market. And so as David comes to me and says, hey, we should take the platform here next and there's this great opportunity. And then from us at the core, we do what we do, right? Which is we go out, we look at the user experience fundamentals, the journey that people are going on, the persona analysis, the empathy maps, and that informs our design process, which informs our development process. And we can move through and just keep doing it. So your approach is very much collaborative. And you're not doing one-offs. I mean, you could. But you're thinking about repeatability. You're thinking about sort of a, building here, for lack of a better word, your own platform internally, right? Yeah. The world is becoming a platform-centric world. Everything is a service. Everything is a service. API economy. So what's your, how do you guys, what's the lingua franca internally to KPMG and with your customers around that capability? I mean, do you call it a platform? Do you have your own platform? That's your IP? It really is a solution. It is our IP. But it's a solution that is built to reside in each client's cloud environment. So in this case, a client service now instance is where our source code, which we delivered to the client, will reside. We see this as changing the rules of the game that the SaaS providers in the talent space have dictated over the last 15 to 20 years of now-old, older technology. And we really believe it is a solution. It's not a tool. It's not an app. It's a solution that helps transformation and helps business effectiveness. Well, human capital management, that whole market space is changing quite dramatically. I mean, I guess it started with the Oracle acquisition of PeopleSoft. Larry Ellison used to denigrate people that wrote checks, not code. Then he wrote a big check for PeopleSoft and it started this, right? You mentioned Tileo, success factors, and then all of a sudden service now comes into the equation. People are like, are they competing with Workday? We were meant to mention Workday. They're sort of disruptors. So that whole space has been really changing quite dramatically. It's the talk of the town. UX, UI is a big part of that conversation. Where do you see that all going? Yeah, it's a great point. So it's funny, service now uses Workday internally. Probably vice versa. Yeah, and probably vice versa. We can do a lot of things with these different platforms, but I think at the end of the day, we're not trying to go out and be a software company. We're keeping G's not, we're not going to go out and try and compete in that way. So we have a solution to improve business metrics. I mean, that's really what KPMG does when we solve business problems. So we have a solution that's going to add value through improving these following metrics. Happens to look great. That's a benefit. But at the end of the day, and so can we bring a set of those solutions that can move metrics all across the organization? Absolutely, and that's what we're going to build. Well, and I understand KPMG, you guys are technology agnostic as well you should be. Trust them, we've got to trust them. We're advisors. Yeah, absolutely. Some mutual fund that you get a big commission on, no. I mean, so, but the market is changing, the technology underpinning human capital management is changing dramatically and you guys are having to respond to that. So I guess the last question is, where do you see this all going, David? What's the future look like of HR and human capital management or whatever sort of term you want to use? Well, you know, within the HR environment is obviously a mass centralization of activities, right? So global business services, shared services, it's really driving the economies of scale throughout the organization itself. Where we see this going is where our clients are going to take us. What we know is there is a tremendous opportunity to help organizations, help our clients continue to refine their business practices, to continue to streamline those business practices if we can help them do that and provide them a pretty significant technology solution to supplement those improved business practices. That's where we're wanting to take and that's where we want to let them take us. All right, we'll leave it there. David, Mark, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for your time. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 15 at the Mandalay Bay. We'll be right back.