 Hi, I'm Peter Burris, Chief Research Officer at Wikibon and welcome to another CUBE conversation. Today we're speaking with Chris Bady, who's the CIO of ServiceNow. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Now Chris, ServiceNow is on a tear. And I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about ServiceNow or what it was, but it's important to set the context because the job of the CIO at ServiceNow is strongly influenced by the demands being placed in your function. Tell us a little bit about ServiceNow. So ServiceNow, we are a rapidly growing company growing at about 40% per year or approximately 6,000 employees. And we're a B2B software company. So we transform the way work gets done, drive efficiency and productivity of employees. And we have cloud services for IT, for security, for customer service and HR, as well as an incredibly powerful platform where people innovate and develop custom applications to drive efficiency within the organizations. Now ServiceNow is an example of a company that's very much helping to transform the industry. Now at Wikibon, we like to talk about it, define digital businesses, a business that treats its data as a strategic asset, certainly more than its competitors. How does ServiceNow look at data, at the assets surrounding it, including software? And how does ServiceNow think about digital transformation itself, as a company that is, in many respects, natively digital? So the way we think about digital transformation, you mentioned data as an asset. It's incredibly important. Where we see enterprises struggling is not having the right data. So I think in order to treat data as an asset, you need to start with digitizing your processes so you get the data. I can't count how many times I've been in a room with a bunch of smart data scientists. We want to use data to go solve something. The first step is getting the data, and that's often where it falls down. It starts with digitizing every single process within the enterprise so you can capture all that data. Now we are a digital company, we're a cloud-first company, but we have the privilege of having a lot of data that we capture in our cloud operations, and we absolutely leverage that data to help our customers in their journey. Approximately a year ago, we came out with something called ServiceNow Benchmarks, which allows our customers to benchmark their performance for key processes, key performance indicators, against their cohort of industries and companies their size, all in an effort to help them improve. And increasingly, we're bringing machine learning into that so that we can be more prescriptive to help our customers get the business outcomes that they're trying to achieve. So you're not only doing a better job of instrumenting processes, digitizing processes, capturing the data through all the different technologies that are available, but you're also finding new streams of value out of that data. Absolutely, and I think that's the key, whether it's an internal use case, external meaning to your partners or your customers, how are you leveraging data to build intelligence into every process and every decision? And I think a couple of years ago, people would talk about machine learning and AI as if it were science fiction. It's here and now in the enterprise. And I think companies that are able to take advantage of, to use your words, data as an asset, and build machine learning capabilities and build recommendations and to help people make better decisions. And in the future, automate those decisions are going to start to outpace their competitors. So let's talk a little bit about some of the things that an IT organization has to do. If it's going to support the transformation, but let's start by the current state. You've been an IT for a while. What does ServiceNow's IT organization do as a consequence of its role that most IT organizations in your experience don't do? Sure, so we do all the same things every IT organization does. Keep the core infrastructure running that supports all of our internal operations. We do at ServiceNow, keep cloud operations separate from the CIO organizations, and that division is on purpose. But we manage all the internal operations, drive all the outcomes with that. One of the things we're doing is leveraging data as an asset and really trying to drive velocity through every single process. How do we increase the speed of our business operations, but not enough to be faster? How do we be more effective? And that gets back to that. How do we build intelligence into every decision and every KPI that people look at? Recommendations associated with that. And last but certainly not least, how do we create great experiences for our employees? And this is not just, hey, we have beautiful screens to look at. I believe that the right experiences drive the right behavioral and economic outcomes. We had a very simple example of, as a software company, it's very important for us to file patents. But we had a clunky, cumbersome process to do so. And by digitizing the process, getting the right data, re-imagining it to be a great experience, we saw an 82% increase in the number of patent applications filed without any top-down management edicts. So just a small use case, but just an example that the right experience can drive the right outcomes you're looking for. So I want to impact this a little bit if I may. This issue of speed and flexibility. And especially the role that automation's going to play. Because as you were talking, it suddenly dawned on me in many respects what we're talking about is almost agile automation. Automation that nonetheless has the plasticity associated with it so that you can change it in a way that will naturally reconfigure to ensure that you get the speed, but you also get the intelligence and the surety that you're doing the right things. Talk about how that tension between speed and doing things right gets resolved in the organization. Sure, I mean, at service now, at the pace that we're growing, we can't afford to be slow and perfect. So culturally, what we've built into the organization is at least within IT, fast and almost right beats slow and perfect 10 times out of 10. So that's really what we try to instill in our people, which is it's better to take a risk, move fast and learn as we automate and with the right balance of flexibility as we move forward because we just can't simply afford to sit back and wait for the perfect solution. And a lot of that builds right back into that analytics construct. So once we automate something, how do we judge the effectiveness of that automation? So we heavily do process mining on each one of our business processes to look at effectiveness of the automation we just put in. Great term, process mining, explain a little bit. Process mining to me is taking a digitized process because you can't process mine something that's manual. Once it's digitized, taking all the signals that that digitized process throws off, so you can look at the quality, you can look at the cycle time, the effectiveness of people interacting with that process. And then leveraging all of those analytics, putting data science on top of it to come out with recommendations for how it could be better. How is your executive team responding to some of the changes that are being driven by IT? Because it sounds like IT it serves now is empirical, it's opportunistic, it's highly iterative, it has to be if it's going to do these agile process mining types of things. Is the business in sync, are you oscillating at the same frequencies? Are you moving faster than the business, slower than the business? How do you keep that balanced? I think I'm privileged to be part of an incredible executive leadership team at ServiceNow. And being a digital first company, this is a natural part of the vocabulary. And I contrast that with past companies which were more supply chain oriented companies, where the CIO would have had to put on a much more change management, have to convince people that this is the way things are going. At ServiceNow, I think it's a shared mindset of automation and experiences and driving machine learning is absolutely the way companies are going to separate themselves from the competition. So it is a lot of can't move fast enough. As technology, especially data gets embedded or information gets embedded more deeply into business activities and more deeply into business culture and decision making pathways. A lot more people are going to lay claim to that data, ownership of that data, management of that data. We've heard a number of different titles emerge over the course of the last number of years like the Chief Digital Officer. How do you foresee or envision the role of the CIO, the role of the CDO working together? I have a personal opinion on this, which may not be what industry says, but my view is that if a company has a Chief Digital Officer, they either have a CIO who's not stepping up to the plate with the transformation that that company needs to drive or they do have a CIO who's capable of doing it, they just don't know it. Because I don't view the jobs as all that different and I think the right CIOs need to step up and lead the transformation. Because if not the CIO, then who? Yeah, exactly. So your observation is that CIOs either need to step up and do this or find another job where somebody's willing to operate at a slower speed with less strategic orientation towards data. Absolutely. How does a CIO get themselves heard without annoying everybody? Art versus science, but I would say it starts with job number one of the CIO, which is what the job was, call it 20 years ago, which is making sure the core infrastructure of the company worked. And unless that's working and it is good shape, it's almost as if the CIO doesn't have that permission to step up and do all the transformation stuff. So get that part of the house in order. And then I think it's a bit of just, you got to take responsibility for more than just the standard IT stuff. Taking responsibility for business outcomes. How do you drive lead velocity? How do you drive sales rep productivity? How do I make my financial clothes more efficient? So really partnering with the other stakeholders around the company to say, what business outcomes do we need to drive to achieve our strategic objectives and owning them? So I've worked with other CIOs and senior leadership teams at large companies who said, for example, that they actually started taking advantage of opportunities to meet directly with customers, see what customers are talking about, see how their technologies are impacting customer experience. I would presume that you and your team are out in the field at least some of the time, better understanding how your portfolio is improving the effectiveness and the efficiency of service now in front of customers. Are you doing those types of things? Absolutely. And I actually used to be a customer of service now. I've been a customer of service now for over a decade before I joined the company. So it's great to be here. And internally we do act as customer zero. So we have a very healthy relationship with our product teams where we want to give them that candid, constructive feedback, everything the products are doing great. And here's ideas perhaps on where we could do a little bit better. And in my role, I also have the privilege of talking with a lot of our customers, peer CIOs who are all trying to go through the same digital transformation journey and exchanging ideas on how our platform can help do that. So the CIO and the IT organization has historically purchased things and has therefore set up some adversarial relations, largely managed and administered by procurement and procurement processes, get 5% out of this contract. When we start thinking about CIO, service now's relationship with customers, you're not providing a product, you're actually providing the outcome. And as a digital first company or as a cloud first company, I would presume that you also are working with suppliers that are providing those outcomes for you. That is difficult to establish that rapport with a procurement mindset. You need more of a strategic vendor mindset. Would you agree and what do you think that means if you do? I would absolutely agree and with that strategic vendor mindset come shared outcomes. And you've heard our CEO, John Dono, talk about this in terms of an increased focus that we have on customer success. We know that our customer success is our success and really with the mindset of we need to be a valued partner, a trusted advisor and have shared responsibility to help our customer base achieve the outcomes which form the investment thesis for them, looking at service now. And we look at it the same way internally with our strategic partners because as these services get embedded in the way we do business, it can't be a transactional relationship. This has got to be a long-term partnership where we're driving innovation and driving business outcomes. As your business thinks about where it's going to go, how are they factoring the role that your organization plays? The asset that your organization represents? The strategic capabilities of your organization in their strategic plans? Are you sitting on the strategy committee? Are you talking to the board periodically? What role are you playing in the overall portfolio of the company as it thinks about where it's going to be? Sure, I would say all of the above. And as CIO, and I'll genericize it a bit so it's not just service now, but I think that as organizations are moving forward, automation and scale and machine learning are going to be increasingly important aspects of a business. How fast can you move? How much scale do you have? How smart is your business? What are your experiences with your customer and how are you leveraging all the analytics that those experiences create? So I think CIOs have to be part of those conversations and I do have the privilege of being part of those at service now. So Chris, great answers. I've asked all the questions. Is there one last point you want to make? Just that I think now more than ever, it's an incredibly fun time to be a CIO. I agree. Incredibly challenging for sure. The plethora of innovation out there. And I think that the technologies have evolved from white papers and ideas to it's here and now. So I think as a CIO, it's never been more fun, more challenging, more responsibility on us to deliver outcomes for the enterprise. But that's what makes it fun. If you step up. If you step up. Once again, Chris Bady, thank you very much. Service now, CIO, really appreciate you being here on theCUBE and telling us a little bit about how you're performing while you're helping the company transform. Thank you. This has been Peter Burris, Chief Research Officer of Wikibon. Thank you very much for listening in on our CUBE conversation.