 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, this is theCUBE at Knowledge 16. This is day one of our three day coverage. theCUBE goes out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We got a team down at SAP Sapphire today, but the A team is here. Well, half of the A team anyway. John Furrier, colleagues, extracting all the signal from Sapphire, but we're here talking to CIOs, talking to practitioners about service management, the next wave beyond IT service management. Gerald Papa, which is here, he's the Vice President of Information Technology at H&R Block in Canada. Gerald, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, I appreciate it, thanks guys. So, Knowledge keeps growing. I don't know if this is, how many events have you been to? Is this not your first, right? This is actually my first. It is the first. So what do you think? Well, it's fabulous. I appreciate ServiceNow being able to move it outside of tax season so I can attend. Ha ha ha. Ha ha, right. That's right, it used to be in April. It used to be in April, and there's a little thing going on right at the end of April is just completing this tax season. So it's fabulous for myself to be able to get down here and take a look and get caught up in what everyone else is doing and the excitement, yeah. So your role at H&R Block is you have a distributed business, obviously. Everywhere you go, H&R Block offices, you service those facilities, presumably, right? Absolutely. So talk a little bit about your role and want to get into the recent tax season. Yeah, so all of IT operations in Canada, so that's coast to coast. 900 stores at peak, as well as 400 franchise stores. So it's ensuring that the technology and the information systems and more importantly, the reaction to anything that can go wrong out there, that falls under the bailiwick of IT. So it's quite a monumental task. I actually, when I talk to some of my peers, I say that we're not actually in the tax business in IT. We're the merger and divestiture business. We go from 200 stores year round and ramp up to 900 stores in a three week period in January to get open for when people come and do their taxes in February. So extreme seasonality. You make the Thanksgiving to Christmas break look long. Yeah, absolutely. And Congress works like what, two days a week now. So the ink is drying at the beginning of the year in tax season. I don't know what it's like in Canada using a US analogy, but nonetheless, a lot of rules, compliance, things change, the code changes. You got to get all that out and there's this compressed timeframe. So how did this year go? Give us the insight. Well in Canada, it's a little bit different than in the US. So it's not as mandatory to file your taxes by the end of tax season, especially if you get a refund. And apparently this year, the Canadian tax filers decided to be a little less mandatory than normal in more than a three and a half percent drop in tax filers coming in and filing their taxes. And we certainly felt our share of that drop. On the IT front though, this is probably our most successful year in the history of block of being able to ramp up, get the offices going, deliver new solutions, new technologies. And so the tax filers were prepared. It's just unfortunate that tax filers decided to fire the government to not come in and do their taxes. So talk about the rollout this year. How'd you go from 200 to 900? Take us through that experience. So when I started four years ago in eight months and a few days, we didn't actually have a plan. It was almost like a pregnancy for women is that everyone wanted to forget the monumental task of getting through tax season. And we would stand up and try to figure out how to do it all over again. So two years ago, we embarked upon the establishment of a repeatable plan for this merger of getting from 200 to 900. And we actually mapped out the 23 different milestones or tax ready components needed to get our offices up and going. And we put all that into workflow and service now. A lot of it was manually checking off. Yeah, it's complete. It's done. That culminated in managing in that three week period, 64,000 tasks up on a service now heat map saying, hey, here we go. This store is complete. This store is complete. And we can observe day by day stores that are falling behind. So that head office and the rest of the organization, they're able to call out, reach out and get those stores back on track as opposed to finding out weeks later, if not months later, that the stores are not actually open for the business that we're looking for. And you're talking about IT systems, physical plants, tax advisor people. I mean, it's literally a carbon copy of a regular everyday store. Absolutely. You know, the 400 kiosk that you'll find in the Walmart and you'll find in the malls, those don't exist two days before. So it's the entire, the desks, the walls, the printers, the paper, the signage, the ink. Everything has to start from scratch. So the organization of all those things, from our perspective in IT, we started with, we have to get a plan to get us so we can get ahead of this and quit having calls in the middle of February, middle of March, middle of April, we still don't have everything up and running. And it actually has blossomed out into the rest of the organization of, well, IT's not the only thing that has to get all of this ready. So we actually have real estate, we have legal and finance, they're part of the milestones to get that monumental feat up and running. And when does it start? T minus April 30th. So we've finished our year-end last Thursday and we started Friday, getting ready for the next tax season. And when did you bring in service now? So that was, you get two cards to play when you start as in charge of IT, and that was one of them I played. And then the second one you never actually get to use. So fortunately I chose service now. So that was within eight months of my starting there. So it's been four years now that we've had service now in. And initially we brought it in for IT, to get better at IT. And then I realized, well, we have a monumental component of managing across the board. And as we started showing the business operations team, how we're managing tracking IT's delivery, they've jumped on board. So I'm sorry, you said four years ago you brought in? Four years ago, yes. Okay, so just when you come inside it with your tenure, how would you have done this without service now? Would you use Basecamp or like some projects? Yeah, with a whole bunch of project managers and picking Microsoft project or whatever other tool, and a whole bunch of what I would have assessed, a bunch of failures of missing, getting the information back from the field about what's working and what's not working. Because you just can't have 64,000 tasks managed in a three week period, knowing what has worked and what hasn't worked. And had you used it before? I mean, obviously probably not to the same scale, but in more of the broader application how did you really see the applicability to go beyond the IT management to this multifaceted, multi-headed monster? So this was the first foray of using ServiceNow to do something outside of IT service management, ITIL. I mean, ITIL version three expert, I went through all of that. I know that finding the right fit for purpose of all that theory in an organization is the component that IT needs to figure out how to do well. And ServiceNow, even though it wasn't startup four years ago, in my mind it was a startup compared to the remedies compared to the HPs of being flexible. It really is a workflow builder. It's not a service management suite. And that's what I instantly saw. And had some of my inter-core network, they were successfully using it elsewhere in those incredibly short time frames. Oh, we stood this up in a month, we stood that up in two months. And three months later, the business is now up and running versus the seven month, 12 month, 18 month implementation of any previous service management ERPs before. I'm a ITIL expert, but I've read some things about some of its limits in terms of just across the organization tends to be somewhat stove piped. Is that fair? And is this notion of Siam taking hold in your world? So, when you use ServiceNow or any tool for IT specific and you speak IT language in your IT geek and then you try to talk and branch that silo purpose built for IT out to the business, they look at you funny. You got horns going out of your head, go away, we don't want to talk to you. But when you leverage the people you have, the processes and fit them within a tool that actually delivers business results faster and then you invite them in. Hey, why don't you come in and use the same thing? You have the same challenges we had. Let's figure out how we can make this better and actually give the ownership up of the reporting and the escalation of 64,000 tasks for 900 offices to the business. As soon as that happened, they started championing it for themselves. Hey, we need to get real estate in here because we have contracts and we have leases and we have et cetera that need to be managed in the same framework. So we're out 84,000 tasks last year. So 64 to 84,000. And have you parlayed the success in the construction of the temporary HR block for April 30th into other applications inside the everyday supporting the regular business? So that's probably the most exciting thing about what we've been able to do is demonstrate how powerful of a business outcome just through that merger acquisition divestiture component. And we have changed the way that tax pros are supposed to behave by applying key performance metrics to our delivery platform. Our executive leadership team, we want to have tax pros deliver a client service approach to our tax filers and chose the academic grade. We need to greet our clients. We need to relate to them. We need to give them the experience that we want to every single time. We need to add value to whatever it is that they've come in. We need to make sure we thank them. In each of those, we have some KPIs and using service now we made available to 900 office leaders times two because you have a day shift and a night shift, the 55 district managers watching over those and the five regional directors, how each office is performing through the service now dashboard of those KPIs rolling up all the data from the different systems. And it structures and changes the way that they are able to manage the leaders and the tax pros in the office to change the behaviors we're looking for. And we've actually been able to increase NPS over the marriage of that great service delivery platform and utilizing service now as the means to demonstrate the effectiveness of it from 35 to 50 this year in the last two years. With a real time dashboard. With a real time dashboard. With a backward looking report that comes every so often. As opposed to finding out at the end of tax season whether tax filers fail to fire us or not through our retention reports which you don't get until. Well the other thing too is it's a real time dashboard that's not just a 10,000 foot view that's top down and bottom up view. That's what's always impressed me about this platform. How much custom development are you doing? I don't have a big IT team so we do not do custom development. Everything is just figuring out how to use the workflow builder to build it. Now I do have the luxury of having last year's hackathon winner in my team, so, right? He can make it sing. So you're doing that down the road? Yeah, he's been practicing all week to get ready for it. So you're not building custom apps but you are? We're building custom workflows using the way service now is designed to be. This is configuration, not customization. And how, I mean it varies but give us a sense of the bell curve. How challenging is it to build those custom workflows? It's unlike anything that I've ever had to leader experience. It is so simple, it is so easy. And probably the best part about it is after you've built the workflow and you realize, oh, we either missed an approval step, we missed somebody, you just go at it, change it, and in you go and you're up and working with the new improved process that doesn't change the way the business works. I want to ask you about security a little bit. As an IT professional practitioner, what's the security conversation like in your organization when you're having conversations with senior execs? Describe it. So we've, I hope not only execs are here watching. We've kind of taken approach of, and just due to some, the sheer magnitude of trying to get the technology debt caught up. Hope and pray we don't get on front page news. This is the first year that we've actually really taken a look at monitoring and being able to track security events. So it now is, we have religion. I've never let a crisis go and waste it, so we now have an opportunity and a challenge to go and improve security. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that with what's going on in service now, because of all the things that are going on with, we have 8,500 tax pros, and they're the biggest security risk. They're the ones that have clicked on a number of ransomware emails and zip files and open stuff up. And just the way that we interact with tax filers, they send us information that could be infected. And we're supposed to open that information to effectively work through. So we'd have a challenge to catch up with and protect ourselves and protect our tax filers from themselves. But when we pick platforms that are secure in their nature, that's one huge less thing that we have to worry about. And we can go after the communicate security awareness and training. Okay, so that's good. So the cloud helps in that regard, it's ironic, right? Because everybody talks about, I wanted on-prem, but I don't know about your security, but I guarantee that service now security is better than my security. Take that problem from me. But is it fair to say that you are, well, are you spending more time or attention on the response to incidents? Absolutely. We had a security team of one and we'll soon have a security team of two partnered up with a security partner and we'll actually be able to take the incidents that we find. And we've already had to respond to them and we found out really quickly that calling up the food chain to myself and then I have to call the CISO in Kansas City is not an effective answer response plan. But we're actually being able to start Q things up and with the soon to be finished implementation of the governance and compliance module within ServiceNow, we'll be able to track and do a post-tax season analysis on what is our security risk in our profile and what do we have to go after to be able to help. Tax filers understand and be aware of what's going on as well as what are the things that we need to tap first and implement to increase our security awareness. And you're treating it in your framework of service management as yet another security or service response. Absolutely and just like every other component in the organization, we need to get it into the Q management and then be able to track it later. We will forget what this tax season felt like so that next year when we have security events we can go back and take a look and say, okay, did we learn anything from what's going on? We tried some things over the off season and are they working or are they not working? Darrell, what's the last question? What's on your horizon, your service management roadmap? Show us a little leg if you will and tell us what's next. So our field office writing this dashboard, the 84,000 tasks that we managed to get up and running, now I need to take that real time. So after we get it up and running things break or we have really technically sound individuals out there that decide to rewire the office and we're not aware of what goes on. So we need to actually have a tax ready dashboard. Very interesting that Frank this morning at the keynote was talking about how we need to be able to monitor in real time and reprioritize. Because I do need to get the emails out of my inbox from my chief operating officer and from my president about this office is down, you have to get it back up and going. I would like him to look at the same info that I am of while I would prefer to get these 50 offices back up and running because we have some component in the distributed network down and be able to do that real time prioritization about what is important and be able to still service all of our clients. New way of working. Absolutely, yeah, it'll be, it's exciting and interesting and I think that it'll completely transform the way we're able to resolve and solve our tax filers issues. Del, great segment, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks guys. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Jeff will be back with our next guest right after this word. This is theCUBE.