Greg Irwin 0:18

My name is Greg over at BWG. And I'm thrilled to be here with Joshua Young and Grant Pulver over at Acorio. These guys are the Guru's around ServiceNow. And we're basically co hosting here to drive our interactive discussion group to talk about what different companies are doing with their ServiceNow platforms. And the whole idea here is, you know, pushing along core business drivers, and basically letting it partner closely with the business to basically achieve the results. So let me turn over to Joshua, first, Grant second, for your intros, and we'll get into our session here. Great, thank you, Greg.

Joshua Young 1:05

Hopefully, everyone can hear me. Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Joshua Young, I am a platform architect here at Acorio been working in the ServiceNow ecosystem since about 2007. So I was just doing an RFP earlier this week, and realize that they just changed their name to ServiceNow in 2006. So it really has been a long time. Very happy to be here with you all. Today, I started out on the client side of things. Organizations like General Electric Nielsen, and just joined the consulting side of the field maybe about four years ago, trying to help folks with lessons learned from large and small scale organizations, not only what to do, but also what to avoid. So excited to talk to you guys today.

Grant Pulver 1:46

Grant Pulver, Vice President of our clients success organization, so my team and myself work with our customers, to not only work on the Acorio, whether we're getting successful in Korea, but also helping our customers with the adoption of the platform and the expansion and the strategy that goes behind it. So we work a lot with the business side that we'll talk a little bit about, but we also work a lot with it, and help broker some of those conversations

Greg Irwin 2:15

as well. Grant, you know, you know, we have too much here in terms of presentations or pitches, but it just explained to the group who Acorio is.

Grant Pulver 2:26

So Acorio is the largest pure play. And I'll say this with an asterisk, because I'll come back to it, the largest pure play ServiceNow partner. And what we do is, the way we're aligned is we aligned by verticals, with HR with CSM with IP, and we have all our practices. And then we have a group that comes together that Joshua sets across the organizations and helps in a pre sales architecture. Those my group works across those with our customers and has an understanding of all the area's at a higher level. And then we also have our specialists in each of those areas that would come in and work with the groups to really understand their business and bring that business understanding along with the technical platform knowledge with it. So Joshua alluded a little bit in my favorite commercial for Acorio. We're all practitioners that are, for the most part, we've sat on the side of the customer, we've tried to implement this many times, in large companies as customers on our own. We've worked with customers or with vendors to do that. And now, what I love is, we've all come into the consulting world and bring some of that empathy. towards our approach, I got a

Greg Irwin 3:48

Grant we've put in our headline for this one is aligning around around business drivers. So I'd like you to you know, we set up this format around stories. And I'm gonna ask you in Joshua to start us off with a story. And I'm going to ask everybody to get your typing fingers ready here.

Maybe you can ask the same question in the chat, I want to use the chat as our fully, you know, our active side, back channel, if you will. So I'd like you to add your own answers to the question of, you know, what are the top projects that you're seeing people prioritize here, this is about prioritization. There's more, there's more requests than there are resources. So where are you seeing time and attention from your clients currently? And I'd like the group to kind of answer here as well, in terms of where are the priorities, but Grant and Joshua, would you guys take take a first shot at answering that one?

Grant Pulver  4:48

Yeah, I'll take the first stab at it, Joshua. So one of the things that I'm really seeing and it started about a year and a half ago and now the COVID came through and then Couple of security issues came out in a world. I'm really starting to see funding for the start from the business driver back. And so companies are starting to understand what do we want to do? And and how does this enable or what do we need to enable our transformation to either a shared service or global business services or combining it orgs, or reacting to our customers or user experience, all of those business drivers are starting to be the first conversation instead of the last, or middle. We just worked with one company, that was pretty interesting, because they had went through a three year transformation in a large company and then spun off,

Greg Irwin 5:50

I'm gonna put a mute on your line there, we're just getting a little like a

Grant Pulver 5:53

and then they spun off, and their whole business driver was just to go forward with a minimal viable product, to get their key areas up and running and Global Business Services. So HR, finance, etc, it prior to their PMO. So their goal was, we had one year to do all of that their entire organization and bring them into ServiceNow versus and went through a three year transformation for just their it organ or old company. So we really worked with them a lot on their lessons learned. And we got to roadmap everything, and put everything in a structured approach approach with parallel work streams and program level governance and stuff like that. And I ended up, we ended up getting it done, I'll say we missed our deadline, because we did it in 12 months and 10 days was where we were. But we were able to set up their company for their support of their customers, meaning their internal and their external customers in 12 months, and their business driver was it can't take three years, they had a millions of dollars of fines and fees from their own company if they didn't do it. So all of this played in and that helped us to drive the team and helped us to rally the team and help us to keep things standard to be able to meet that 12 month deadline.

Greg Irwin 7:17

Super Grant. Thank you, Joshua, what do you what are you seeing here? Yeah,

Joshua Young  7:23

that's a great one. One of the things that I always come back to when I think about trends in the ecosystem is, and we were actually talking about this, as people were joining the session, not only a get back to basics or a get right, or start leveraging best practices, again, either reimplementation of ServiceNow, but also more prevalently, I would say a migration from an existing tool, whether that's homegrown, whether that's a remedy or something else like that, right. And the reality is that when we start talking about aligning to objectives, really, from an organizational standpoint, a lot of what we're hearing from leadership is, hey, we need to improve our mttr it's not great, our C SATs aren't great, these metrics have kind of fallen off. And what they end up in, intrinsically trying to do before we get engaged is effectively recreate the exact system they just came off of. And what they don't realize is they're destined for, as you can imagine the same fate. So you have to think differently about how you're going about these kinds of initiatives. If you're really trying to attack certain KPIs aligned to an organizational objective, whether that be increasing your time to resolve things, reducing or minimizing risk in your organization, building out new capabilities, so that you can take advantage of some existing or disparate tool sets that you have in your environment. A focus on best practices doesn't just mean doing it the way I want to do it, it really means lessons learned from across the ecosystem, not only in ServiceNow, but across industries, different industry verticals, and how we can apply those lessons learned for an implementation that's going to set you up for success long term, not just how do I meet short term needs. And so that's what I think we're seeing a lot of is this shift back to, hey, we want best practices. But it's also a realization, a rationalization that has to occur, and an acceptance that sometimes those best practices are not exactly the way that folks have been doing business for the last few years.

Grant Pulver  9:25

Josh, are you seeing one thing that I've seen? That's pretty interesting, I'm thinking to have on the pre sales motion to is there's the are metrics that we've been working with for 20 years, right Meantime, to resolve average time to respond, you know, total handle time, all of them. What I'm seeing from a business standpoint, is we're at a point where the leverage is starting to go over to the business side. So what does mean time to resolve mean to the business What are the organizations that we really want to focus on reduce mean time to resolve and some might be in prioritization, one interesting thing that I've been working with a cup two customers on, that's been really fun as in their customer service organization. So there's support of their customers, their external customers, is switching them from a cost center in their support center, switching them from a cost center mentality to a revenue generating mentality. So we're putting metrics in place. So we know about how their organization affects renewals, their organization affects Net Promoter scores and customer set. And being able to correlate that into revenue and how that revenue impact happens. Have you been seeing that in the pre sales motions?

Joshua Young  10:45

That's a really good point grant, the short answer is yes, for the folks who get it. So the reality is, a lot of the times when we start having those kinds of conversations, where we first have to level set is kind of getting folks out of the mindset of it being a back office component, and having a seat at the table where it does become more strategic for the organization. Whether that be aligning to products and services aligning to market capitalization strategies are really what we're seeing a lot of is aligning to experience. So just like what you were mentioning, not only from an end customer side, but also internally for product teams and development, what kind of metrics are going to drive them to be able to innovate faster, and produce products faster out into the environment, or retain existing customers and generate new business throughout the organization? So short answer is yes, we're seeing that quite a bit. It definitely becomes a higher level conversation when we need to go down that path, so that we can make sure that when we're aligning to those objectives and outcomes, we don't just get our blinders on and move down the path of let's implement technology for technology's sake. It's how do we really improve people's processes? How do we improve the way in which people work?

Grant Pulver  11:56

I think my favorite answer when somebody asks me about best practices is, I always answer with a question of how much money do you have? because anybody can be perfect with the right amount, amount of budget in the right amount of money, in a move that through but really understanding that stuff. And putting the right focus in the right areas to really drive those business values and those business decisions is really important, is sometimes nobody cares about mean time to resolve. It's more about communications and transparency. But sometimes they do and there's got to be a business reason behind it. You can overstep everything and resolve everything in an hour. But does that make sense for your business? Sorry, Greg, I basically had a passion point for Josh and I

Greg Irwin 12:47

know it's all good Grant. That's all good. Let's do this. Let's bring a couple others into the mix and talk a little bit about some of the stories of particularly around prioritization. And I'm going to ask people, if you're in a spot where you can turn on your camera when you're talking. That's better, it just shows the human side. If not, you're multitasking or you know, you got a dance party going on behind yet. That's That's good, too. Alright, so Steve, Steve, we got you right up here on the upper right of my Hollywood Squares. Nice to meet you. Tell us a little bit about how you're prioritizing the work on your on your ServiceNow platform?

Steve 13:29

Yeah, it's it's a challenge, actually. Because coming out and COVID, I think there's so many possibilities that we see with ServiceNow. However, one of the biggest challenges I have is that we're also at the tail end of an implementation of Microsoft 365. And so there's a lot of question about where does teams fit versus ServiceNow. So there's a recognition in the business and the customer base that we need improvement in a lot of process areas. And we have quite a, we're in a lot of different areas, we do the standard ITSM stuff, we do discovery, we do portfolio and project management, we do HR stuff. So we're we've got a conglomeration of different modules and capabilities there. But the question becomes with Microsoft 365, right. And that is a foundational system for us, as expressed by our senior management moving forward to elaborations communications. So I don't I don't want to derail the conversation here. But I'm curious if anybody else has that particular challenge in their environment and how they're dealing with it.

Greg Irwin 14:35

Let me let me ask you, Steve, because you're, I get what you're saying. There's always that decision of where should we do it? Who's got the ball? You know, is it better to have it integrated with the ITSM where you have your database of assets, or put it where your CRM is where you have all your customer records? You know, just for example. So I'll ask you all Ask you without looking for the stumbling blocks? And I'm sure there are some are there's some low hanging fruit items that you can say, look, we have some problems that keep me up, and we're trying to figure out but putting those to the side, my business has a goal of x. And we are able to help move towards x by doing, you know, a certain initiative on on the platform. Sure, I

Steve 15:25

think that's probably asset management, we lost control of that pretty much with COVID. Because we were scrambling to provide where we're not a shop that where everybody works remotely, everybody is on site. And that was a big pivot for us. And so we lost control of that. So how do we bring that in back under control, golf hardware and software for that matter, because quite a few people took assets home, to be able to work from home. Yeah.

Grant Pulver  15:55

From a security standpoint, to I'm seeing a lot because of that, too, is it's just so I love asset management. It's a big focus right now. But I love asset management, because there's no proven business value to it, you're physically not writing checks for stuff anymore. So they're not playing with soft dollars. But there's also a security component to that's driving most of the asset management. And a lot of comes with the solar winds exposure that I talked about a little while ago, that changed that reinvented a lot of the seaso has nightmares in the world, securities driving probably 75 80% of the commencement discussions we're having right now. Greg was talking a little bit about the stuff that provides big value, is that what I'm in your situation, I really try to put things in a quadrant. And on one side, I have low to high complexity. And then on the bottom, I go low to high or high to low value. And what you really want to do and you can take your 10 things that are keeping you up at night, and you put them on there. And now you can see what's my low, low complexity and high value items. And that starts your pecking order to sit there and try to take on all 10 at once, while you have initiatives like oh 365 and all those going is nearly impossible. And what's going to happen is you're going to be three years down the road. And everybody's going to look at each other and say we're three quarters done on everything. But if you can put those in that low complexity, high value area and start focusing on the task at hand and what those packing points are, you'll be much more successful. My team, I have my patent that my team got me a little while ago, because it says get crap done on it. Because that's my mantra is just get shit done. Pick out some small tasks that are those high value ones and low complexity that you can start rattling off and started getting value from immediately.

Greg Irwin 17:57

Grant I love that I love the idea of like, hey, let's just get some wins. You know, we can always find stuff to to stumble upon. But if we can identify those high value low complexity issues, I love that paradigm. Hey, Grant out of out of 100 companies that you talk to, how many do you think kind of can go through that systematic portfolio planning and project planning process? Not can Are they all can

Grant Pulver  18:27

Kansa different answer that are our I think with the last year and a half that we've went through, probably 85%. And we've proven it out in our surveys, whether they're effective at it and whether they're following it's a different story. But about 85 to 90% of companies right now have a roadmap have a plan. And their number one high value low complexity thing has been creating that strategic roadmap of where they want to go with that plan.

The first the first part on the list is Greg is to make the plan for the plan.

Greg Irwin 19:04

Yeah. Plus you get to cross it off really quick.

Grant Pulver 19:06

Yeah, exactly.

Greg Irwin 19:08

All right. Let's go to Robert . Hey, Robert, great to speak with you. Thanks for joining, uh, give your intro on. And I'd love to hear your answer on your priorities.

Robert 19:20

is an aluminum manufacturer, we have about 10,000 PCs, and about 13,000 employees. We have a ServiceNow as asset management. Like you, Steve, we also use teams, we use SharePoint, our asset management really appears to be focused on the Active Directory. Microsoft side ServiceNow is for process. This is fulfillment processes. Master Data Management if we have new customers to add, if we have new materials or variants, we use ServiceNow to fulfill that adding new people Getting them provision. Once again. ServiceNow is that process platform? My biggest frustration is ServiceNow is seen as an IT tool. And we've got, we're buying a new tool a week, it seems where the functionality overlap between what we already have, but we want to buy. It's frustrating, because it just means that we have even more applications to manage. But ServiceNow for us is very much the service management and not the asset management piece.

Greg Irwin 20:35

Got it? Robert, what's, what's the number one targeted delivery? For the ServiceNow platform team this year? Maybe it's an enhancement. Maybe it's a net new but what's what's that team working on?

Robert 20:48

Of course, very busy with every time ServiceNow has a new upgrade. People come to them for IT organization, people come to them to set up new processes. Our Global's team has migrated to Azure. Every time a new server is set up every time we want to add storage, we want to talk to a managed service provider ServiceNow is managing that fulfillment process. It certainly beats email about that. Yeah. But I wish there were more external it users the ServiceNow instead of buying something else. Right, right.

Greg Irwin 21:33

Grant, we again, we talked about it a little bit earlier, balancing new services versus getting back to get back to the core, what do you see in terms of the mix? How much activity needs to be spent? on getting back to a good version, a clean version or back to a basic, you know, implementation of ServiceNow versus work that, you know, deploying asset management, Sam, or, or HR? Yeah, what kind of mix do you see there? And

Grant Pulver  22:07

what's what's interesting, and then I want Joshua to chime in on this for sure, since he's the one that helps go. But what I, what I is amazing to me right now is I'm seeing more and more companies, three of my largest customers right now have went back to a Greenfield and started over well, it absolutely the trend right now, especially in the m&a world that we're in, is companies will have three or four instances for each of their organization. So some will have nine to 12 instances running in their organization. And they've been just continually adding duct tape and duct tape and duct tape until the point where somebody says, Why don't we just start this over. And I feel like especially in an asset management world, because data is so important. And that data is the driver for 90% of it. And then the process to maintain that data is there. And what I tell people is, sometimes just by changing a dumpster, the garbage doesn't stink any less, right? So when you keep just changing your process, but keeping all that data together, and that you end up doing that. So a big, especially in what I'm seeing in fortune 100, fortune 250 is a lot of Greenfield initiatives, where they're kind of starting over and starting to rethink about a lot of those processes and those workflows. I know Joshua has been involved in a couple pursuits with me if you want to talk about that for a sec.

Joshua Young 23:40

Yeah, thanks, Grant. I think one of the interesting things is when we look into organizational lifecycle, right, there's periods of over complex over manufactured complexity, diversification, and then there's cycles of simplification. And so what I think we're seeing right now is a result of everyone wanting to simplify a little bit, getting back to best practices. That's the main business driver, right is we know what we currently have the disparate tools or the current process are not working for us. And so we need to get back to basics. We need to go Greenfield. And I think the interesting point around that is being able to not only recognize that there might be an easier way to do things, but also that you can follow best practices and not everything needs to be so unique. So there's a real strong option that I'm seeing from a lot of leadership right now around making sure that they're able to have conversations with their peers in the industry, and be able to talk the same language in order to do that. A lot of folks are going back to Greenfield so that they can do that. So they're not over customized in their own in their own world in their own environment. They're not renaming things that don't need to be renamed for no reason. One of my favorite customers I ever had had a naming con contest for ServiceNow and the name wasn't ServiceNow. So whenever they went, and they had a drink with a vendor or they went to a conference. And they talked about the internal workflow tools that they were using. They were talking about something with a completely different name, but they were talking about ServiceNow. And so when we get back to that kind of Greenfield aspect, I think what we're doing is we're seeing a lot of simplification of process. We're seeing a lot of focus around leveraging ServiceNow actually, to Robert's point as a centralization of not only Enterprise Service Management, but an aggregation of data from multiple tool sets that hopefully results in a simplification of that toolset landscape internal to an organization.

Greg Irwin 25:38

Can I ask is it worth the transition? Meaning, if I go back to Greenfield, is that going to meaningfully reduce the amount of ongoing work that I'm going to have to do to stay current or to bring in new modules? I think what's

Grant Pulver 25:55

around Canet as we just had a comment. It was Robert talking about upgrades, or it may have been Steve. But going back to Greenfield I hear probably ad nauseum 10 times a day, and it drives me nuts when I hear out of box. But that's what it does, is by going back to out of box or sticking to a strictly configuration type model, not customizing the application. it'll pay for itself with your upgrade cycles and being able to upgrade twice a year. The other thing that it does is if you have your organization set up correctly with discovery type tools, is it refreshes your data and makes your data much more accurate to where you can focus on the right things at the right time.

Greg Irwin 26:44

Steve, let me go back to Steve here for a minute state. In terms of the work you're doing on on asset management, how are you? How are you addressing the asset management challenges?

Joshua Young  26:57

I think Steven may have just stepped away. Oh, sorry. .

Steve 27:01

No. Yeah. And I unfortunately, I need to drop here in about one minute. So okay. And I'm going to defer that and politician. That's right. All right,

Greg Irwin 27:12

Steve, you've got it. I'm going to keep going around here. Let's Let's go. And, Steve, thanks so much for joining in. Let's let's bring Leandro into the session. Leandro, are you in a spot we're able to share a story with our group? He? Yes. Okay. Please, quick intro first, excuse me, a quick introduction.

Leandro 27:37

So my name is Leandro I'm Brazilian, North Carolina for almost two years. So I just took over the product ownership for ServiceNow a few months ago. So I'm still a newbie here. So I'm still learning a lot. Before that I was the Application Manager for North American South America. So I, I had the experience working with ServiceNow from the consumer side, a nap was called arthroscopies, a switch company by which the headquarters is divided between a Stockholm and where. So we use for it we use only for ITSM or use all the components for for it. But also as a ticketing system for several other areas in the company was increasing the adoption was very good. They are really buying the idea to have a package for this purpose. And we have about 35,000 employees worldwide. And we implemented office 365, shortly before the pandemic. So would you help us to go through that, and also to focus on ServiceNow in parallel because we could riff without so much pressure. And we invest a lot of energy in the last few years to improve the user experience in Windows resolution time and the number of tickets. So do we shift your life wherever we whenever we can. So last year we implemented asset management. It was a good experience and also the boat canoe. We are finishing now the implementation of it BM and our focus is that we are creating a lot of service requests to move tickets to request so again to release the search desk and analysts and specifically now we are trying to implement to integrate better the system with the vendors systems. So being ServiceNow or fresh desk solution manager so we are looking for better ways to integrate with them to have more transparency and also keeping KPIs on the community. Got it got mean, you've got a lot going on.

Greg Irwin 30:04

Pick one for us in terms of an ROI, something that is steep as Grant described, we have relatively low complexity relatively high value.

Leandro 30:16

And we are focused now to speed up these integration efforts, because the experiences we had in the past took a lot of time to do integration. So you can between ServiceNow and ServiceNow. So, we are looking for different ways to accomplish that, where we are not using integration Szczerbiak. So we are comparing integration hub with one i o for instance. So we are discussing actively this matter of integration.

Grant Pulver  30:45

Can you talk for a second about you hit another key area that I see a lot of customers focusing on? That's the user experience. So what do you guys do in there? And how are you measuring success on it? Are you doing channel metrics and optimization doing any automation?

Leandro 31:03

Yes, what we are investing is in the bot, implementing bots supported by teams. Creating a lot of search requests, as I mentioned, to automatize some of the workflows and take no user like to talk to service desk, we have to be clear. So the most The more you move them to a self service they enjoy. And also some automations, we did a lot of automations in terms of user management, connecting to success factor from SAP. So we are creating a accounts automatically creating tickets to proceed with the creating tasks to proceed with the onboarding, without intervention, not forgetting about important aspects. So these aspects that we are investing for two years, to improve the user experience of Wi Fi t in general, not with ServiceNow. Specifically. That's great.

Greg Irwin 32:07

Leandro, what's been one of the real challenges that you've had to deal with in terms of getting the value or adoption of the of the platform.

Leandro 32:19

I believe the focus is a challenge because you want to do a lot of different things. And it's difficult because you have to cope with the nature of the challenge. Again, integration is something that traumatize the Alito, the teams because it took a long time. So we now we are discussing the need to integrate if new partners, and everybody is afraid that we will delay the implementation of the new managed services. And you know, that's growing these adoption of different partners. So it's something that we need to do better.

Greg Irwin 32:55

Very good. Leandro. Thank you so much for for sharing your stories and joining here. Please stay active. And folks, you can either jump in with your own questions or drop them into the chat. Let's, let's go over to Uncle Uncle Stevie. Uncle Stevie's barbecue sauce. Steve, thank Thanks for joining. Please give. Give a full intro here to the group.

Steve 33:17

You have no problem. Hi, Greg. So Steve on I've been on ServiceNow platform since the Berlin release. I don't even remember when that one was out. But that was with a company I was with called Owens, Illinois. They pulled me over to First Solar, which is America's largest solar manufacturing company. based out of perrysburg, Ohio just announced a nother $1.8 million or million square feet production facility going into perrysburg Ohio so constantly expanding the solar footprint and helping save the planet one panel at a time. Then the other side gig we've got here is Uncle Stevie's barbecue sauce is getting to be known worldwide national nationally and everything as well. Our challenges, we've got it for solar right now. They're resetting the company to be just a solar panel manufacturing company. So no longer going to be installing, maintaining and monitoring as the energy gets pushed up to the grid, which is allowing us to focus on a whole lot of r&d. But with that comes, hey, we need to reset and look at what we need in the company. So we're going through an MVP stage right now whether shucking different kinds of applications, so slimming down our portfolio management, so SAP is going out the door, Oracle's coming in that focus has a lot of people, you know, involved with it, you know, are ganking out SAP to bring in something else. So from a ServiceNow side of things, we're, we're pretty slow on what we're doing, which is kind of nice. Our implementation of First Solar was in 2019, with the help of the Acorio folks didn't really get to work with Grant got to know him afterwards. But they did it. They did a really good job for that. We tried to stay as much, you know, out of the box as you can with ServiceNow, obviously, you know, that bugs me when people say out of the box, because you'll never run servers. Now true out of the box, you got to do tweaks and turn on required fields and things like that. From an upgrade stance, trying to remember, I think we go through about 112 skipped records each time. So we are pretty, pretty much out of the box for that kind of stuff. we've utilized ATF. So I don't know if I've heard Josh or Grant promote that. That is a phenomenal tool inside ServiceNow, we have a full regression suite that goes across incident problem, change config, logging across the whole system. We don't do any human testing, when it comes time to upgrade, we just kick off the ATF and go look at the results of that. Take it from there. So our upgrade times are really pretty quick. Actually, the screen over here sitting running for patch six right now as I'm doing other things in the dev environment. So highly recommend ATF if anybody has questions always reach out to me on that. jumped on board of that when I was with Oh II and really sped up the time because I hated doing manual testing over there. One more thing. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, I,

Greg Irwin 36:15

well, I'm gonna jump in with this, the the asset management, the ROI of the of a group that hasn't yet deployed it. What's been your experience in terms of, you know, being able to demonstrate and quantify the ROI of running Asset Management on ServiceNow.

Steve 36:35

And that's where our challenges that's where I was just going to go lead into Greg was, that is our biggest challenge. Right now, we implemented asset management is one of the first pieces, knowing that the ROI is really huge of knowing where your asset is, and when you need to retire it, whether it's software or hardware. It was a challenge coming into first dollar because they don't track that kind of stuff. They didn't even have a spreadsheet to know what they had going in. And it's still a challenge today to today, because the teams are like, I don't care about it unless it's online. Right from your server, guys, your network, guys, they don't care what they have in the closet. They just care about what's online, can I keep it online? Can I keep panels running? We're starting to hit that point now where in the chat, I mentioned that, you know, we're looking at security response things, hey, this servers being attacked by this or doing something nefarious, we need to take it down. The security team has the power to do it. But they need to understand what the heck this thing is connected to. At first all or they say that's asset management, which we all know is the blend of config management using discovery or service mapping to know what's attached to that. But they did a not really an audit, but a review from one of the audit teams from PwC. And that was a place we got dinged pretty hard was not knowing where our assets are. At any given point in time, no lifecycle on them, we just run them for Yeah, you know, put a finger in the air, how many years and if they keep going, Hey, they're good. There's no no spend, that you can actually point a finger at and say, Hey, or this month, we're doing this many types of things. And then we pull that data about knowing who the heck what this thing is connected to, you know, is the next big thing.

Grant Pulver 38:17

As technologists, we often don't care unless something breaks there for three years, but from I would imagine if we had conversations with the CFO, that's taken a depreciation on each of those assets every month.

Steve 38:33

They write them off in the beginning. So that's the other challenge. They're not depreciated. They just buy a PC and it's just written off capital.

Greg Irwin 38:42

Different model. See a one last one here on aligning with the business. I've heard your story platform, but tell me you're going through serious business transformation. I got to think the next several years for you are going to be just incredible with this infrastructure bill rolling out how do you align your work and your priorities business.

Steve 39:10

So right now, we don't have agile running in our production, just not something that we're paying for at this point. So we ended up just creating a simple form, you know, people can put in an enhancement request to the ServiceNow side of things. We do have a small team that can get together and we can prioritize some of those things. Some of them we know you know, those bottom dollar things, hey, somebody needs to update a line in a signature type of thing. But the ones that are making an impact out for the business like they can see automations coming in for things, those get the higher bump on things. So we did our onboarding process in ServiceNow. Married it and HR because they were previously two completely disjointed processes. They were still going and getting laptop approvals for a new hire as if it was a replacement or an upgrade for an existing person. So we really had to go back to the drawing board and get the teams together to say, let's think differently, you already have a higher euro, assuming that the laptops involved with that. So we got some of that red tape out of the way. And then mapped out the entire process with the teams because we've got, you know, those different types of workers, whether they're a manufacturing floor worker, somebody sitting in an office, or somebody out in a remote office anywhere, and really built out a massive onboarding for that thing. That's going out in an executive summary. This month, the executives are going to be able to first time really see how ServiceNow can empower the rest of the business to do better. Taking, you know, 15 or 20, automated steps, and it's turned into really, HR fills out a form HR confirms with the ready to start, everything else is automated behind it. Right? Right, though, priorities are really around what what we can do to help automate things. The team is constantly looking at things within that process to automate. So we do keep revising the onboarding for that thing, we just got another one last week for, you know, figuring out what they can do if the user needs an office in a box type of thing. So teams are all highly under the automation of things. Great thing about First Solar 20 year old company, so tech is at everybody's mind. And all the panels are made on an automated line. Everything's robotic out there. So that's kind of how first of all are things completely different from where I came from, which was 100 year old manufacturing company, they make glass the same way they did when it was invented on the bottle machine. The machines changed, but the tech and behind it really hasn't yet. So,

Greg Irwin 41:33

right. Well, Steve, thank you for the story. And by the way, so we've got about 15 minutes left, let's finish strong. All right, so we can do a couple of things, you can kind of start multitasking and thinking about your next meeting. We've got a great group here. Let's let's focus in and drive a good conversation. And you know, after the call, I'm going to send around the list of attendees. So now we're standing of Korea or BWG, I recommend this group Connect across each other. Also, Uncle Stevie's barbecue sauce, are you what sent send me a response to that, and we're gonna set we're going to send everybody some, some barbecue sauce. So just send an address to that RSVP. And you can try out any of these. Any of these barbecue flavors that we got here. We may reserve the right just to pick some options for people. So apologies there. Steve. Steve, thanks so much. Thanks. Alright, let's keep going. Hey, Craig . Nice. Nice to see you. Are you in a spot where you can share a story over at sunlife?

Craig 42:41

Sure, actively rolling out bots everywhere. We're doing a lot of self healing. we're enabling the platform further out on the risk profile, rolling out Asset Management Pro, where you're revamping our whole facilities space, we're also looking to integrate fully into our whole security suite, and ramp up to the highest level of security within ServiceNow. So we've got a lot of sticks in the fire, right?

Greg Irwin 43:15

Oh, my goodness, what is our sorry, when you say, security? I don't know what that means. That could mean security provisions within ServiceNow. It could mean security functions for the business. You're

Craig 43:29

talking about security modules within ServiceNow. So ability, vulnerability response, the full dashboard for operations for security, it's all running in ServiceNow.

Grant Pulver 43:40

Did you start with incident, security incident response? Are you just doing the all sock ops package at once?

Craig 43:49

Did the first entry level enterprise sec ops package? And then you know, as ServiceNow? Does, they expanded it and said you need to ante up to get some more features and functions. So yeah, right now trying to get the latest feature and function packs, but forward. The biggest thing on my on my plate right now, honestly, is asset management in Oracle for discovery and normalization. It's a complete disaster. When you have you know, companies or desires and you have products like Siebel kicking around or you know, versions of WebLogic that are you know, 15 plus years old, a lot of the discovery methods just aren't working, you have to go either to file level or you have to do a manual import transformation of that data. So that's what we're trying to figure out right now. And so we've brought in PwC to help us with that. But we're finding that there really is a space in the market for people to actually push forward from you know, a vendor perspective. In this segment, because I've seen it now that PwC says to do this, and ServiceNow says, No, you shouldn't do that you should do this. And then PwC talks to ServiceNow. And then service down says, oh, maybe you should do that, because we understand the requirements a little more. So I think there's a huge opportunity for people right now, especially in financials and insurance for people to pick up this kind of work, I know that Scotiabank is rolling out. Asset Management. civc is rolling out asset management, we're in the midst of rolling it out as well. So I think people really need to get a handle on what they have out there and what they're paying for. I think that's the biggest thing, right? Because you've got such huge economies of scale.

Grant Pulver 45:50

My background is JP Morgan and AIG before coming. So a financial vertical, well aware of it has kept me up at night, up at night in the past, for sure. I think like, you know, use AIG as an example, we had 27 companies. Underneath as an AIG was the umbrella and asset management was a process it was at a project. And that's what's really interesting. I do love the one of the things I love about Acorio is that we're so focused on ServiceNow and 100%, focused on serving up ServiceNow is we really aligned well upfront with ServiceNow. And we work with their product teams, to help align with what we've learned in the business and stuff like that. So like, I meet with their director of product for their asset management product once a week, and talk and we give some of those lessons learned. But yeah, I totally feel your pain. That's how we went through. And it's a journey. There is no destination for asset management, or CMDB. It's a constant journey for sure. To get there, but what I would say make sure that is Cognos, and you push with you, whatever partner you're working with, is have value points. So don't look at this as a two year project, look at it as for six month projects, or three, eight month projects, or six, four month projects, hopefully. So you are getting value and start to slice up. Again, go back to those high value low complexity items of from a software standpoint, focus on your Oh 365 your highest cost licenses. From a hardware standpoint, what do you what are you working on? That's end of life and causing you pain? Is it laptops and or workstations in Asia that is causing you 400 hours every quarter to forecast out? End of Life stuff like that, and, and really make them those small projects and most four month projects? So you're getting value? Yes, sir.

Craig 48:07

I agree. You know, and leadership is asking when we're going to get to 100% understanding of our attestation and our e teittleman. And I said never said that pipe dream would cost us a billion dollars.

Grant Pulver 48:21

But again, I go back to anybody can do anything with the right amount of money, right? Yeah. And I often see companies spending a million dollars extra to save $200,000 for those exact reasons.

Craig 48:35

Yeah. So I basically said that we're going to put some, you know, lines in the sand. And when we get to those lines in the sand, we'll draw new lines and see if we could constantly become better, right? So and we're running it as a program to right, so we're taking an agile approach. We're doing it internally, we want to make sure that what we build out today will stand the test of time and will also be valuable so that when new challenges arise, we can face

Grant Pulver 49:05

I firmly believe, especially in asset management, but in all areas of life even is better than yesterday is your measurement of success. So if you start at 25% feeling, that's your accuracy level of your licenses, your licensing and your hardware, tomorrow be at 3035 the next day. And that's don't focus on 100%. Don't focus on 95% because you'll end up stalling out at 90% and then never get there. So always I used to even for service management type things that's what was always the competitions with my team was it wasn't against each other because they do different things it was against themselves. So what was it last month and have you improved this month?

Craig 49:52

Yeah. And then the other piece that we're trying to do as well is actually the integration into the whole ITSM suite as well. Right? So not only do we understand risk profiles from, you know, the APM that we're trying to roll out. next quarter, we'll have the risk profiles from our, our risk and governance perspective, that's in platform, right. And then we'll have security as well for risks for cis. But now, we also want to adjust other sources of data so that our CMDB is in single, single home right now off of discovery. So we've added SCCM in there, we're going to start to do jamf, as well. Actually, Jeff's already done. bad example. But we're going to start to look at IBM sweets, right like quick fix, start to look at some AWS features and functions that we could do from a tooling perspective there, we also want to start to look at how we integrate like our Ansible platform into creating these placeholders that then go get scanned and give out the fully vetted solution. And then when we get to nirvana, who then I always say this is minor vana is when we start raising changes, right? Or we're doing self healing, that these changes, or these incidents cause discovery to run after the fact. So we actually have a clear understanding of what was there before and what was there after. So that's, that's what we're trying to get right now. automation, automation, automation.

Grant Pulver 51:28

And I think that's everybody's right is to have an understanding. And once you get that, what happened, what was there today? What, where are you are tomorrow, and what happened the next day. And then that's when your automated automation and your self healing and your can, you can start configuring that to that here in fire marshal a mode instead of firefighting mode at that point. And that's really the value of the platform is that whole circular motion?

Craig 51:57

Yeah. And then, you know, the joining of all those different data fields. So now we don't have to push data in from multiple sources into a data lake to actually mine all that great stuff, we can actually just use, you know, performance analytics, because we have so many of these modules running core components of our IT business.

Greg Irwin 52:18

Craig, thank you very much. You know, it's funny integration is come up now, probably three or four times in this conversation of trying to normalize and get your arms around, integrating ServiceNow with with other tools. I know, Steve mentioned it right at the outset, in terms of the Microsoft stack, and Leandro has been working on it. And Craig, you've basically described it as your project. So that's a big topic that I think we need to push on and put a spotlight on in terms of how people are tackling.

Grant Pulver 52:50

I think that falls into the automation standpoint, Greg, and maybe that's our next topic is different, different ways to automate and move through that process. Good one, Grant.

Greg Irwin 53:03

Got it. Let's, we got five minutes, I'm going to invite in Joel and Simon overall to sciences for a last story for the group. And then we'll we'll wish everyone well, and and get back to our day jobs here. But Simon, do you want to give a quick intro just on Alta sciences and some of your focus on ServiceNow?

Simon 53:27

Sure, um, but you do understand we actually don't use ServiceNow. Even better, so

Greg Irwin 53:34

better? What's the problem? What brings you here? what's the what's the problem that that you're trying to solve?

Simon 53:40

We're looking at where are you in the market for in ITSM. And we're looking for what is available? And we were interested in what people had to say about ServiceNow. How are they using it? What sort of their impetus was for going with ServiceNow? That sort of thing. So

Greg Irwin 53:56

it's been interesting, super excited, well, Simon, like this group can be a resource for you and tell you the good, the bad. Is there one question I can post to the group? Typically, it's our How about this. There's a little tool in, in zoom called reactions, where you can raise a hand the thumbs up all of that, for this group, who here would endorse ServiceNow for a mid to large company in terms of generated generating a positive ROI? It's something that's moving the business forward. I'd like just to see the sign of hands. And then Simon, if you have a specific question, be happy to log that to the group for a for a final final thought.

Simon 54:40

Sure, at the moment, I do not have a specific question, you know, so it was no, it was one of the things we're looking at. It seems very interesting. Obviously, one of the the factors we're looking at too, is nighttime. And that is something we would like, again, the debate is whether we get that integrated or not integrated and that's always an ongoing question is where does the best fit I don't seem to have a good answer for that still. So I have a question for Simon. What other tools? Are you looking at? All sorts. I mean, there's managed engine there solar winds, there's fresh desks, and there's 1000s of them. It's a matter of which one seems to fit us best in which one sort of does the workflows we need and adapt to sort of our business reality?

Grant Pulver 55:26

I will say, and obviously, I'm biased, and I will have my smart aleck answer. There's a reason ServiceNow owns about 85% of the market space. And there are 1000s of tools out there. But I would encourage you to look at the big picture in the long run for your movements and how that entire workflow works. Because it does make work work better.

Simon 55:48

Yep, then that's what we need is something that fits with us and that, you know, so we can adapt to and that can adapt to us both ways. Yeah,

Steve 55:59

Simon, I would add in there that ServiceNow has kind of two workflow engines right now going on, they've got a huge, powerful traditional workflow that's, you know, connect the dotted line from one set to another, as well as flow. And we've embraced both of those at ServiceNow, our big onboarding, one went through the big spaghetti as I call them flow. But the other one, we're just using the simple flow designer, and we've built a lot of just common flows that fit business models, hey, you need to order this manager needs to approve needs to go to this group. So we've kind of compartmentalize a lot of our workflows into these buckets of common processes. And definitely recommend that we have our service desk, creating forms attaching it to the already built workflow on a daily basis. Go ahead and stretch it out after on the back end, pays off, where you can shift left a lot of that responsibility over to the service desk to design the form, put the nice looking, you know, user interface stuff out there, let the geeks on the back end make this stuff work, like cool.

Joshua Young  57:00

I was just gonna add on to that, Steve, that's great point flow designer is definitely forward thinking. And what I imagine a lot of folks on this call are hearing a lot of right now, which is low code, no code solutions, to phrase this popping up more and more and more, I think in our daily lives. And that's, that's a way that ServiceNow can help you do that without having to go in and customize things, basically giving you a configurable, configurable platform that allows you to build out process and workflow with approval tasks, and a bunch of other things very, very easily. But I know we're just about at time. So I will

Steve 57:32

pile in one more thing on the flow thing. We just started using it today, as a matter of fact, to send out our daily operations notes. We update a knowledge article inside of flow, say, Hey, we're done. We publish upon that publish trigger, it goes off and sends out that message across the world.

Greg Irwin 57:49

Well, Simon, you'll have access to the list of attendees, you can follow up with anyone, however, and maybe you'll have some barbecue sauce to doing that follow up. You know what? The last is the best incentive yet? Harry, I saw your hand Did you?

Harry 58:09

Question? Can you hear me? Okay, I'm in the same boat as Simon I in my previous life, I've used ServiceNow for a very long time company to company to company. But my current company right now we're not utilizing ServiceNow we're at some other. We were on top desk, basically. So we're trying to get ServiceNow. And along with Simon, we are looking at other alternatives. Jeff, my boss, who invited me to this, actually, we want to get ServiceNow. But just the pricing of it. So we're currently working with ServiceNow vendor to try to get ServiceNow on here. So So I mean, if you're looking for a resource or ITSM tool ServiceNow definitely is the platform, just throwing that out there.

Greg Irwin 58:55

And Harry, same thing. We could do some follow up here, help with use cases or see how other people have put together that business case or, you know, approach to negotiation with ServiceNow.

Harry 59:07

Us and but in reality, I'm really here for the uncle Stevie's barbecue sauce.

Greg Irwin 59:16

All right. Hey, Joshua, and Grant. Thank you guys. Great, great session. Any any closing comments for the group?

Grant Pulver 59:23

No, I appreciate your guys's time. I think what was ironic to me is we hit on all of the big areas that I'm seeing right now between asset management, user experience automation, which is integrations and AI and stuff like that. So I love doing these because I feel like a validates all of our thought processes, things we've been working on.

Greg Irwin 59:46

Agree, Agree. Thank you so much Grant,Joshua, any any closing words of wisdom?

Joshua Young  59:52

Let's keep the conversation going. I think one of the common themes that we talked about today is continuous improvement. And as long as we continue to share our knowledge and expertise with each other, we'll be able to build great things. So excited to continue the conversation with everybody here. All right, brilliant.

Greg Irwin 1:00:07

I look forward to the follow up. Thanks, everybody and have a great day.