 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17, brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is day two of ServiceNow Knowledge, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Bart Murphy is here. He's the CTO of York Risk Services, and he's the CIO and CTO of CareWorks. Cube alum, Bart, good to see you again. Great to see you guys. So we were talking off camera, Mark came over. We were talking about CIO decisions. You participated in that last year as well. What have you been doing at the conference? What are you seeing that's interesting? Well, I've been attending the sessions, and you just mentioned the CIO decisions. That was my day yesterday. Great opportunity to get great speakers. We mentioned a few of them that spoke yesterday, but also there were some customer roundtables allowed you to collaborate with your peers over a few areas and sort of discuss what's working for them, what's not, what their roadmap looks like, how they're selling that to the board, those type of things. It was a very productive day. So since we last talked, what have you been working on? We had a great discussion last year on security. I'm sure things have changed there. They keep evolving. What kind of things you've been working on? What are some of the initiatives that are new? Yeah, so last year we did talk about that and my desire, I was somewhat excited when I started to see the new play in the SecOps with ServiceNow. So we've now gone live with SecOps. We're continuing to mature our security posture as a company. And I think that's, when you look at a roadmap or you're looking at things, what we want to see is continual capability maturity in our security space. One, we need to be there as an organization, we're a services organization. We also want to just make sure that we're continuing to get better and automate. And so we saw SecOps as a real opportunity for that. So we've now gone live, we've deployed that, we did it and integrated that with certain tools that we have, Taneum, LogRhythm, Symantec, some of our scanning tools. And what that's allowing us to do is now look at a wide range of log information, parse through that in order to automate certain types of workflows and cases. So whether it be as simple as finding an endpoint that let's say has an outdated Symantec update and having that automatically update or create a case because it can't push the automation, those type of things we're trying to do now to try to raise the level of our security and start weeding through all the noise that's out there that's provided with all the tools that we have. How did you find the integration? Well, we did the integration ourselves and we found the integration compared to some other products that we've done in the past to be much smoother. I think this is a later product that they've built into their platform. I think they've taken it into account implementation. Some of the integrations were out of the box like the Taneum, others, we built those integrations. So, and we also, you know, I think I may have mentioned this, I sure don't know if did. When I looked at my incident security response plan and the way I developed that, I developed it very closely to what was coming out of the box with ServiceNow. I wanted to make sure that our policies, procedures, process for that really just met out of the box functionality so we didn't have to do a lot of customization and configuration there and we could focus on the technical integrations that really provide some of the power of the automation with the CMDB. Speaking of sort of custom work, you can talk about M&A. You mentioned you'd get a mulligan coming. Talk about that a little bit, kind of unwinding some of the custom mods. Yeah, so we have multiple instances of ServiceNow and over the last year we've been building our newest instance with Yorker Services Group. That's our total company. And I'm in the process now of taking what we built for CareWorks. We have been a customer since 2010 and really learning what we did well there and what we didn't do well. And in addition to the fact that a lot of customization that we did on that platform is no longer really required. That's how much the platform's matured with ServiceNow. Which one was it? Which release do you remember? Oh gosh, Berlin, probably. Or early on if I'm accurate from the very beginning. And GRC was an example where we did a lot of customization because that product just is a lightened day, nightened day compared from where it is today. So now we get a new opportunity to really look at our processes, say is this something that we really need to keep the customization or can we leverage the platform better? And by the way, even if we do have to do customization, can we do it a better way? So it is a little bit of a mulligan. From that standpoint we get that sort of fresh start on a platform that we understand even better now and we're doing it at a larger scale. So we're trying to really look at those automation opportunities so that we can gain the efficiencies that we need. So I wonder if you could talk about the sort of business impact that you've seen over the years. You've been a long time ServiceNow customer and it just feels like this whole ecosystem is on the steep part of the S-curve now. Maybe describe the sort of business impact and how whatever terms make sense. Well I think partly supporting consolidated shared services whether it's in IT or other areas of the business and even finding areas of the business that aren't doing a good job of tracking their work today. And it still exists in I think every organization. I was mentioning another area that we're looking at that we'll most likely deploy this year or early next year. I would assume this year is the HR case management. And that's an area very similar to IT, very similar to other areas that we've built use cases within ServiceNow where things are done primarily through email and it's very inefficient. They don't have very good metrics to understand how much support they're providing the organization. They're pressured just as I am from an SGNA perspective to do more with less. And the only way we're going to continue to be able to do more with less is to provide some level of automation and stay consistent with it. So when I started looking at ServiceNow, yes we're probably on that S-curve too. We've done some really good work on the automation side. But now with the platform, with what they're doing with some of the analytics, what they're, you know, I know they're going to do with machine learning, what we can do with some of the predictive stuff. How can we take a security instance, for example, and have it remediate itself and then inform us on what it did? Those are the type of things that I think is going to bring us way sharp up on that curve. I mean, we've done a good job. We're very technical. We've done a good job automating. I'm not, but for what we can do, I think over the next three to four years with this platform and the automation is going to be, it's going to be a game changer for us and we're going to need that because, you know, our SG&A can't grow at the same rate. You know, you want to have that margin improvement and this is one of the areas that we can use a platform to do that. It's interesting. You're always, always a lot of talk about automation when we're here and be able to automate processes and make them easier. But you mentioned before we went on there, you just mentioned it again, that the desire to get measurement on a process as the primary driving factor, because you just can't measure that, which is in email and all these disparate systems. And now you can actually use the motivation of measurement so then you can get improvement as the primary driver to implement it. Yeah, I mean, one of our core values to be a data-driven decision-making company and you can't improve what you can't measure. And there's still to this day, a lot of these processes that we take for granted, you know, SecOps, HR, Operation Service Center, Claim Setup, we think we're doing a good job managing it and understanding the productivity of it, but we don't have really good tools in place or they're very disparate. So if we can get that into one CMDB, we can start to leverage automation. Once we start to measure it, we truly can start to see that business value because we can see those measurements go down. So whether we're using out-of-the-box performance analytics now, you know, we started originally in performance analytics with Subur Product. On the New York one, again, that's another benefit, we just turn it on, right? And there's already really good, rich data that it's giving us to stay, you know, and we can compare that against our previous performance, whether it's incidence, closing rate, you know, all these type of things out-of-the-box. So I can start to show improvement. It's not to say that we don't have areas to prove we do. There are things outside of ServiceNow that we need to do to improve our overall capability. So whether you're talking leveraging orchestration within ServiceNow, but then I need a deployment tool to actually go and do that work. So that's where Taneum comes in play. So there's other strategies we're deploying to say, where can we get the full lifecycle of that automation? And that's where engineering discipline and bringing that to your supply chain of activities is key. The other thing that you mentioned that kind of flipped it on its head is you talked about your instance response plan and trying to make it pretty much as out-of-the-box with ServiceNow as possible. Was that because you just kind of went with the custom or now, you know, are they delivering more best practices in the way that configuration comes out-of-the-box that you don't really have to think about? Absolutely. You can resume best practices because that's how it's pre-configured out-of-the-box. Yeah, and I don't think they tout that and I understand why. But, you know, they're getting feedback from a ton of customers on how to build a process in the most efficient way. I don't think they're doing it in a vanilla way. I think they're doing it in an efficient, robust way. So I think they are at that point where, you know, there's a lot of things that come out-of-the-box that people really need to pay attention to. Like, you know, I understand that we may have done it this way, but this way is more than sufficient. And if it means that I don't have to customize and I can make my upgrades even easier than they are today, because they aren't that painful at all on the service now front, then, you know, why not? And then we can benefit from their maturity on the platform, because they're going to continue to add in releases and add in functionality, just like we saw over the last two days. Back to the sort of S-curve, I mean, it sounds like you're in a position now to get real operating leverage. I'm just like Metcalfe's Law, you know, the first one, maybe you get, you know, some benefit, but the nth one, boy, that's when it really kicks in. I hope so. That's what I'm, I mean, I think right now we spent a lot of time and energy getting onto one platform, right? Whether it's from all the acquisitions, whether it's from an older instance to a newer instance. I think once we get the critical mass on that platform, yes, the automation stuff will make a marketable difference. It's making difference now. We've done some great things for our business, but I think once we get everybody on one platform and we get that true understanding of how we want to do some of our enterprise processes and we have some other uplift in our other areas and systems, you know, Tainium's a new product that we have, you know, we're looking potentially at HRIS. There's other things that play that will play in that ecosystem. And as we mature those and really understand what our in-game's going to be, I think that's where we have that power. One of the speakers at the CIO Decisions this week was author Daniel Pink. We had him on theCUBE, about selling as human. When you run a business case, and you talked about the HR moving into HR, do you go, you know, sell? Do you make the business case? Or are they coming to you? Is it push-pull? How does it work? A little bit of both. You know, as a CTO and as any executive, you know, I listened to Daniel as well and I'm a big firm believer that we're all in sales. I mean, all of us are part of some type of revenue-generating company, okay? And if we don't take that to heart and we just think that we're some cog in a wheel and somebody else's problem, shame on you. No company's going to grow without a full company of great salespeople. And there are the other advocates for their brand. You know, they understand the mission. They understand what they're doing for the mission. So from a sales perspective, certainly I'm going around trying to tell people about the capability of ServiceNow. And one thing, you know, saw the CEO speak yesterday too. And one thing that struck me that I think a lot of people need to do is he's spent a lot of time over the last, I think it's 49 days, trying to understand the vernacular of IT. You know, he's a CEO at some large companies, they all had IT. Now he's at an IT company. And so he's trying to really understand, you know, the speak and some of the capabilities that you have to understand, he's got a better appreciation of it. It's my job really to be able to do that type of evangelism within our company to say, hey, here are the platforms we have and here's some of the capabilities and at least start the conversation. I will tell you that other times I have people come to me because they've either heard from someone else that they're using it at their company and their HR team loves it or what's it about. But I need to go around and say, hey, I see you guys doing this and we have a platform that's totally made for that. You know, it's why it was built. Can we have it, let's have a demo or let's start looking at how you think that would improve your guys' productivity. Because you're stretched, you know, for resources. Time stretch for resources and just come at it from a common problem statement perspective. And then we build the business case from there. I see. So we heard a lot of the announcements this morning, Jakarta, you know, another release. What do you, and so there's a lot of things they did in their performance improvements and UI improvements and things like that bringing in intelligent automation. A lot of really good, cool things in there. What's, and from your mind on there, to do list. What kinds of things, I mean, are they doing the types of things that you wanted to do or is there something big that could really make a difference to your business? Yeah, I mean, I wish I was like the service now product visionary. But I'm not, I got to commend them. I think they're doing some pretty darn good things. When you start to look at SecOps and its play into GRC and the way that you can really start to automate some of your controls, which are a huge component of, I'm not going to say waste within your organization, but they take a lot of time and they bring value, don't get me wrong, but they are bringing, they're not bringing in revenue, they're a lot of compliance and they're good practices. So the more we can automate some of those, they're high value, but you want your team working on other innovation type of stuff, I think the better. I mean, they start looking at what they're doing with the data now. I mean, everybody's becoming a data company, everybody's talking about machine learning, everybody's talking about AI. I think that is the next place that they got to get to. If they can start to generate again, some of that low value work, whether it's automating an entire incident end to end. I mean, there's insurance companies out there that are doing that, right? Trying to automate a claim end to end. So I think the more they can look at their domain and determine ways to automate an entire workflow, which they are well on their path, they've been doing that from a workflow automation perspective for years. Now taking in the AI to do it, I think they're going to be in a good position, a better position than I am in if I was to develop that myself. So I think that will help me scale from a user support perspective and just workflow in general service management perspective. So you might not be the product guru going forward, but the thing you know probably better than a lot of people out of the 15,000 is how to get people to adopt the platform. So I wonder if you can share some of your tips and tricks to fellow practitioners to take events to people to don't pick up the phone. Put it in the platform. Well yeah, it's evangelism. I mean you got to get out and educate people on what the platform's about. And I think as a procurer of the platform and service now is not a cheap solution and nor should it be. So I think you need to go and justify, I'm getting this platform, it's up to me to make sure that we're going to leverage those dollars as much as possible. So anything I buy I want to make sure we're leveraging it as much as we can within the organization. I'm also affirmably, I understand that reality hits and it's not going to happen overnight. So how do you build a backlog and start really working through that? So we do an agile process, we're doing releases every two weeks. We're trying to, I may take an opportunity in IT but then the next one I want to do is going to be in the business. Or it's going to be with security or it's going to be with HR. Trying to get wins across the spectrum instead of trying to take big projects. Big projects take time. There's a lot of little things that I can do to whet their appetite, onboarding, offboarding, transfers. HR started to get familiar with service now and what it could do just in that space. That whet their appetite then to have a more serious discussion about case management, which we're still having. So I think trying to figure out how you can handle a backlog of smaller hit items to get wins will allow you to get a little bit more credibility if you start looking at a more wholesale change to their entire business. Which this would be a wholesale change to their business. You have kind of this dual role of CTO and CIO over the last several years. So much has changed in information technology, cloud, infrastructures, code, now you're seeing containers explode, the whole sassification of the, you know, softwares eating the world. Obviously service management is playing a big part there. Now AI, the whole big data meme. How has the CIO role evolved and changed and how has that affected you, particularly the CIO piece. And you know, the CTO piece as well, I guess. But technology's always there. The CTO has got to be following that. But the CIO role seems to be changing quite dramatically. I think each organization's a little different. The way I look at it is, you know, and some organizations, and maybe it's just me, some people see a CIO as an operational guy or girl and some of them see their CTO as going out looking at a new technology. The way I, and why I sort of have the title of the CTO is I never want to have a build and run type of organization. I don't want to have a marginalized CIO that's basically just keeping the lights running, maybe keeping enterprise systems up. We need to be innovative as an entire team and those assets that we build, we need to be able, the same people need to support them because man, they build much better assets if they have to support them, let me tell you. So I think the role is changing whether you know, use the term CTO, CIO, you know, who is that person that's going to help ensure that you're not only looking at new platforms, but not, I don't want to just spend all my time looking at new platforms or looking at new innovations and certainly want to be aware of the trends. What's the right time to look at that for your organization? You know, some would say you always need to be on top of all that and I don't need to be on top of every AI vendor or you know, data analytics company. What I need to understand is within the context of our organization, our financial structure, where we are as a maturity as an organization, what are the tools right now that can really make a major lift? And sometimes those aren't the most recent platforms, sometimes they aren't the gold standard platforms, sometimes they're just grunting hard work. So I think the role, I hope the role evolves into where somebody takes ownership of all of that and it's not carved up. Now, I think they're, and even in our organization, there's a place we have a chief innovation officer who is staying on top of some of the front end stuff, dealing with our industry. And that's a fine model as well. But I don't like breaking up between operations and development work and innovation. I like to make sure that those are all in sync. I think that's where you don't get a lot of rogue IT, a lot of shadow IT, because ultimately somebody's got to support it and we want to make sure that that support cost is as lean as possible. That's a great answer and steeped in accountability, Bart. Always great having you on theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you guys. It's a pleasure to see you. All right, good to see you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE live from Knowledge 17. We'll be right back.