 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org, I'm here with Jeff Frick, my co-host for the week. We've been going wall-to-wall coverage. This is day two for us at Knowledge. We're here at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. ServiceNow's big user conference. We've been going toe-to-toe with all the execs, with all the end customers, and a lot of excitement here, big event this evening. We'll be back tomorrow for half day of coverage with more practitioners, more partners, more execs, later on today with Mike Scarpelli coming on, he's the CFO of ServiceNow, very interested in seeing that segment. But right now, we're with Mitch Kenfield, who's with KPMG, he's a managing director at the consultancy, Mitch, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so big event for ServiceNow, obviously. You guys do a lot of these events. Talk about what you do at KPMG, and we'll get into the ServiceNow angle. Sure, so I'm a managing director in our CIO advisory practice, and what that means is, we are all about the business of IT, so if you think of the CIO as a CEO of a technology business, we bring capabilities to help them do that more effectively, more professionally, and as I mentioned, truly run it as a business, as opposed to a second, you know, kind of afterthought organization, and so that's where our group comes from. So what is CIO's telling you these days? I mean, we went through the period of this IT matter, we cut costs, we cut time to the bone. You helped them navigate through that period of time, and now we're sort of, it feels like anyway, Mitch, we're entering this new phase of innovation. You got cloud really hitting on all strides and cylinders, you got big data coming in, you got all the innovations from the hyperscale world starting to seep into the enterprise, and it just feels like there's a renewed energy within IT. Is that sort of an accurate description, and what are you seeing in your customer base? I would definitely agree, I think there's, it's a combination of that renewed energy from a, and energy from a services perspective, what can we do different, how can we enable our businesses different, what can we provide, how do these things like cloud and mobile and all that, how do they help us do a better job to our customers, but on the vice versa, that same cost controls and doing things smarter and having a more financially diligent, you know, maybe methodology toward it is not going away. So it's a balance of that, which goes back to that concept of it's a business now, and how do I make sure I'm nimble and innovative, and at the same time I'm effective and I'm providing quality in those lives. That cost effectiveness and cost kind of, it's almost the new, it's the new DNA of IT, isn't it? It's kind of here to stay, but that doesn't mean innovation is dead. Why not? Because the businesses are moving too fast, right? So IT has to be able to keep up. And so, and it's two things, I think our clients, their business-facing organizations are expecting innovation, expecting new ideas from IT, expecting them to bring capabilities to the table that help them. They're not expecting them to be order takers anymore. You know, they're at the table on a part of the business. And so that level of innovation and that level of agility that it requires is not going away. And then on the vice versa, we still have to keep the lights on and have everything running effectively and do a good job of just providing the day-to-day service. So I think at the end of the day, the job of the CIO has initially changed, but the pace of it and the complexity of it, I think, are continually increasing. Yeah, Mitch, I want to follow up on that because it seems like too, the pace of innovation just continues to accelerate and the amount of new things that are coming down the pipe, both in terms of technology, but also priorities just keeps accelerating. You know, how are you advising them? And more importantly, if you're sitting in that CIO chair, how are you prioritizing these things? And how are you deciding which ones to do, when and how? And then you don't want to jump into something that's going to be irrelevant in years or months or potentially shorter time than that. Absolutely, and it's a great question. I would say, I think, traditionally, technology organizations haven't been good at an ongoing innovation. If you think of kind of a research and development capability that a business would have, technology organizations haven't been good at that. They've been good at kind of periodic innovation and then I go back to kind of keeping the lights on, if you will, and then I have some fun, so I think about new things and then I go back to over here. And so to your point, it has to be a part of the DNA of the organization. It has to be a capability in the technology organization that's always looking at R&D investments. Where should we spend our capital that can enable the business? And then on the other side of it, I have to have processes and capabilities that enable me to run that in the way that I can pull back and change my mind. The day is not where I can start huge investments and go down multi-year paths to realize I might start something and things change and pull back here and go back over there. And that's again, that's something that is difficult for many IT organizations to do, but we're seeing a lot more of that in our clients or maybe a little bit ahead of the pack. And then what about two, just from the people side, the people that are trained in the technologies of today, which as those things keep changing so, so quickly, now you've got to retrain the old dogs or find some puppies out there that you can bring on. I imagine it's a very competitive environment. We saw downstairs all these ServiceNow guys who were doing ServiceNow at their company said, hey, this is a pretty cool thing. I know it pretty well. I'm going to jump outside and hang my shingle. I'm an empowered businessman now and they're doing their own thing. So I would imagine the competition for resources has got to be difficult. It's very difficult. We have, when we communicate with our clients around the concept of the business of technology, there are two things that we talk about that address that. And one of them is obviously the talent and resource management capability and really viewing as a CIO, viewing the collective talent of your organization as an asset and how do I protect it and grow it and so on. And then another term we use with them is something called the ecosystem, which generically means that the capabilities and the tools I have to deliver service to my business are varied. And in some cases, those are my own resources. In many cases, as we know, those are resources from external parties, sorcerers, some of them are here, some of them are offshore, all those kind of things. But collectively, I look at that as an ecosystem that as a CIO I'm responsible for and I have to have a proactive approach to deal with things as you're talking about. And we're seeing drastic shifts in where that talent is. We're seeing some clients that are struggling with kind of the specific aging workforce and retirement ages. We're seeing clients struggling with the different cultures of millenniums that are coming in, millennials that are coming in to the workforce and just how they think different and they truly operate differently. And so there's lots, they don't do email, they don't, they truly don't. I mean, I've had clients, I have one client in Florida that literally said we're done with email because people won't be using it, right? And it's just, so you have to, that kind of management of that system that ecosystem of capabilities is so important. And again, it goes back to the job is not necessarily changed but the job's getting more difficult. Yeah, but I guess what helps and what we've seen in the last five guests that we've had, Dave, is the enthusiastic response to be a business guy, not just a technical guy with the people that we've had here in theCUBE. And I would imagine for giving people an opportunity to grow professionally inside an organization, to have that carrot with a tool such as this. Like I said, yeah, everyone just jacked up to use the tool. They're so excited to use the tool. Whoever gets excited to use the tool, they're happy to go to training, they're happy to use the tool because they're going to transform their business. But more importantly, they get a professional opportunity to have serious impact and do something really productive. That's got to help. It does. And I think that the thing that we, KPMG, are very excited about from a ServiceNow perspective is that it gives you an environment to really automate and connect to business processes. And if you think of the business of IT, it helps you deal with that more effectively. But then the same capabilities from a platform help you offer ideas to the business about making their world easier, right? And so there's always going to be roles in the technology organization for technical resources and resources that do that kind of work. But there's more and more roles for resources that have that business capability that are truly consultants within their organization that can go sit in front of a peer from a business unit, from an operational group and have a back and forth conversation where they're bringing ideas to the table about, hey, here's some things we could do that would help you. Even five, definitely 10 and more years ago, it was more of a, let me tell you what I want technology organization and a technology organization would then say, okay, well here's what I have to do. And so we're seeing that change and I think that's that excitement and the people in a technology organization from the CIO all the way to folks that just start in their career, they want to be valuable and they want to have those conversations and be a resource and a valuable resource to the end of business and I think we're at that point now. So KPMG, you guys are thought leaders, but you don't per se get paid for being thought leaders, get paid for actually taking thought and turning into strategy and action. So I want to relate that to what's happening at knowledge and service now in particular. So you've got this great platform and it goes in and solves some problems. You guys have a much wider scope than incident management and change management and problem solving, et cetera. Can you talk about that a little bit? What is your scope? How do you differentiate? What role does service now play in that? But I'm interested in your broader scope of services and what's happening these days. So in KPMG, obviously a large global farm, we have groups that focus on audit services or traditional, what our brand is. We have groups that focus on tax services and then we have a group that focuses on advisory or consultative type services. And within that advisory group, we have a practice that we call CIO advisory, as I mentioned before, it's really all focused on enabling the business of IT. So how do we make the IT function more effective, more efficient, provide better services, provide the right services, which is not always an easy question. And if you looked at that as a business unit, how would we go into that business unit and make it better to be generic? And within that, we see service now as a key part of our toolkit to do that because part of what that means is looking at a technology organization and making sure that they have repeatable practices. And that sounds simplistic, but in many of our clients, they don't. In many of our clients, it's based on so-and-so does this really well, so we always pull them in in that case. And so we often get involved to help them, let's understand what those repeatable practices can be. Let's make sure they're doing the right things. And then let's look at ways, and this is where our connection with service now comes in, let's look at ways where we can automate those, we can have them be more effective, we can simplify them, we can have meaningful intelligence and dashboards and reports so that if I'm in charge of that business unit, if I'm the CIO, I can actually see what's going on. In many cases, what we find in our IT organizations, our clients, is that they're an extremely hard-working organization and an organization that is used to just doing whatever it takes. But many times, they're not elevated, there's not that force through the trees kind of conversation where they say, okay, here's why we're doing this. And this is the right thing to do. And this information helps to make a better decision. And so our services are all around helping them determine the best things to do, how to do those, and then we bring capabilities to actually implement and make those changes. And so that includes things, the configuration of tools like ServiceNow, that includes process work, that includes a lot of work in what we call organizational change because in any organization, changing the way it works, and the people impact of that is difficult. And I might be biased, but I would say in the IT organizations, I think that's even more difficult, just getting folks to do things a little bit different, and so that's where our support to our clients comes in. How about industry domain expertise? I mean, obviously you got expertise in pharmaceutical and financial services and so forth. What's the intersection between your CIO advisory practice in your industries? How does that all work? So it's like this, is a great way to say it. So we go to market by industry. So we firmly believe that the industry specifics are kind of, what's that business book, good to great. I mean, that's what takes us from providing good services to great services. And so that industry specifics is what we go to market with. And so we have folks that are in our group that focus on those specific industries. And then we have folks that understand that the 80% that's common is pretty important too, and so we connect that together. So on a typical effort for us, a typical delivery effort will bring people that understand the very specific nature and challenges and constraints, if you will, or opportunities of that industry with folks that work in that same area from over and over again. A good example is we're doing work in some healthcare organizations, and we have folks, we're doing a large ServiceNow implementation, that they're all about the configuration of ServiceNow and those core IT processes that are pretty common across any industry. But the key distinctions around a healthcare industry, things like medical records and ICD-10s and regulations and things there, is that if you don't understand those and bring those to bear, you're going to take five steps forward and a few steps back, and so we tie those together from the beginning. Excellent. All right, Mitch, well listen, thanks very much for coming by theCUBE. We really appreciate your sharing your insights. Good luck with your practice, and maybe we'll see you next year. I appreciate it, thanks for your time. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back. Jim Pitts is coming up. He's the head of Cloud Automation at ServiceNow. So we're going to dig into the automation topic, and then we're coming back with Mike Scarpelli, who's the CFO of ServiceNow, and then we're going to wrap. So keep it right there. We're right back. We're live at Knowledge here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE.