Greg Irwin  0:18  

We've been hosting this ServiceNow series with Acorio going on a couple of years. And it's been outstanding. You all know, my forum, or if you don't, it's an interactive session, we don't bring in a presentation, we basically drive a conversation, talk a little bit about, you know, what the real priorities are for ServiceNow and service desk platforms at at your companies, and learn and hear kind of the inside baseball, of you know, what's working, what's not working, what's worth it, what's not worth it, and kind of create that sense of community. So I always want to perpetuate that. And I'll remind you, please use this group for networking. I can't tell you how many people have found jobs projects, or just good ideas through the forum. And I'll ask you, as we go around, I'm going to ask people to get involved. And I'm going to ask you kind of offline, find one new connection across this group, you can go directly, you can come through BWG and say, Hey, I'd like to meet Eddie, or I'd like to meet Chuck. Okay, well, we'll make those intro requests for you. But I've made that effort. And I promise, it'll drive benefits way beyond this hour that we spend together. Logistics, if you're able to turn on your camera, please do it makes it richer, makes it a little closer. If not, you're out and about you have noisy background, no problem, we understand that's the way it works. We're going to use the chat window throughout this call. So I'm going to be encouraging you all and I really will ask genuinely, if you're taking the time to join this call. The call this video chat will be better if you use if you're active in the chat. You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to have all the questions, but activity makes a difference. So I'm going to encourage that throughout. And you know what, we're going to have some fun today. We're right on the end of right on the edge of, you know, Easter, let's, let's do spin the wheel. So what that means is what everybody's naming a wheel and at the end of the call, spin it and winners get again at $250 gift card. A little a little happy, happy Easter, be eligible for that, Greg, you are not correct. No, unfortunately not. So stick around, and maybe you'll take away a gift card from this. Alright, let's get right into this. I am going to ask Jesse and Grant introduce themselves to introduce Acorio. And then we're going to get into it. Guys, grab the mic and give an intro.

Grant Pulver  3:11  

Jesse, go ahead. Yeah.

Jesse Nocon  3:13  

Thanks, Grant. Thanks, Greg, everybody, thank you for your time today. Thank you for joining us where we're really excited to talk right about San Diego about the platform about the issues that you're seeing. As Greg said, my name is Jesse Nocon. I'm a solution architect here at Acorio. I originally, my first venture into the ServiceNow space was actually on the developer side, worked as a technical consultant. So my background is technical. I have worked in lots of areas of the platform, but spent the most amount of time in ITSM IT Asset Management and working in developing custom applications. For the past two and a half years of Acorio. I've been more on our solutioning and strategic planning side working with our customers to help drive as much value out of the platform that they can and to ensure that they're utilizing the platform in a way that that's best for their enterprise. A little bit about Acorio before I handed off to Michelle and Grant for for introductions. We are a pure ServiceNow consultancy. It's all we do. It's all we focus on. And we are an elite ServiceNow partner looking to move towards that global elite status shortly. We have organized our business to match the structure and setup of ServiceNow. So we have dedicated practices across each of the major ServiceNow applications ITSM I Tom, HR CSM, so on and so forth. And we're really excited to chat with you today.

Michelle Bautista  4:46  

Grant. Go ahead, Michelle. Thanks, Grant. I'm Michelle Bautista. I'm a platform architect here at Acorio also on the pre sales team with Jesse my back Round, I spent 20 years in the higher ed space before coming into Acorio have worked at the help desk side. And work with a lot of our government and higher ed clients. My specialty areas of focus right now are in the item space. Also looking into a lot of the newer non it areas of ServiceNow platform like procurement services, as well as enterprise asset management, that is currently that will be general access by Tokyo. So I'm really excited about San Diego and kind of where ServiceNow is heading to, especially in the different non it areas. And really seeing ServiceNow growing as that true enterprise workflow platform. In addition to what Jesse said, we were awarded this year from ServiceNow as the top workflow partner, and amongst their partners, so we our expertise is really about how do we align your business needs, and leverage with functionality in ServiceNow, as a tool across your platform in organization. Happy to be here. Thanks, Michelle.

Grant Pulver  6:32  

And I want to give the 32 second intro so that Greg can get out I know he's chiming. But I lead our customer success organization that includes executive sponsors, it includes our advisory organisation, and includes our engagement management group. So we're kind of all in around customer success, to make sure that you're not only having success with your inner workings with Acorio. But also, we have great deep relationships with ServiceNow. And and maintain that partnership to help get things done on that side of things need to change, participate in some of the product model liens and movies be able to do that.

Greg Irwin  7:13  

Excellent. Excellent.

Hey, guys, let’s, yeah, let's let's jump in, let's so Acorio were, we actually have a pick of the partners to work with around the area, we pick Acorio, because they're not the biggest, but they really truly might be the best in terms of ServiceNow in the ServiceNow ecosystem. So let's use them as a resource. And let's get at the stories. So what I'm going to ask here is, San Diego is kind of the baseline for the conversation. But it's super important that we get your input on the things that you're that you really care about. So the way I'm going to try and draw that out is to ask everybody to drop your app to drop a comment into the chat and answer this one question. What's, what's the number one strategic goal that you've got? For ServiceNow in your environment, it could be get current on San Diego, it could be get more value out of the platform. It could be drive automation, it could be anything but I want to hear, the more specific, the better, because that'll give us something to really dig into. And I'm going to ask everybody to take a shot on that. And Grant and Jesse and Michelle, I'm going to ask you guys to start us off with an answer to that question. If it's around San Diego, wonderful. I know a lot of people here want to hear about San Diego, if it's broader. Great. So Grant, Jesse. Michelle, one of you take a give us a story. You know, I love stories. Give us a story about one of your clients, and what they're trying to do to drive strategic value out of the platform. 

Grant Pulver  9:03  

So one of the things that my team is heavily involved, right, Jesse and Michelle, are help guiding your journey as you're figuring out once we know what you want to do, right? Helping figure out what all the cogs that need to be in place for that my team sits with a lot of the executives helping either. So I've kind of coined a phrase in the last four weeks or so is we're helping with horizontal and vertical movements and the platform. And when I say vertical movements around you have a have an application ITSM HR, whatever that is. So we're helping on that maturity curve. And one of the things that we really work on is, and you'll hear me say in any conversation that we have is incremental progress, beats delayed perfection. So what we want to do is understand what business values we want to move forward. And we want to pick out those high value low complexity things and keep moving down that quadrant. And so hoping for those things. And then there's our vertical movements or horizontal movements when we want to start looking at where does it make sense to extend this workflow outside of where you are right now. So you're using that for it, are you using it for HR, wouldn't it help in an organization where you have a Global Business Services, and your HR is getting killed in the August through November timeframe with open enrollment, and you could do some backfill as it were your finance group that's in there, and they're getting killed on a month, end of quarter, and then you can start sharing resources from a workflow standpoint. So one of the things that I'm super excited about with one of our customers going on right now is they're going through, they're getting divested from a very large customer. So what we're doing is looking at their entire organization, and how to set up that organization and how to be effective and how the platform is the foundation or enabler for how we want to work in the group. So what we're doing is we're looking at location strategy, we're looking at what groups are involved, we're looking at who's going to use the platform we're looking at, and users that are going to use it or customers, and then we're kind of putting that together. It's not the conversation isn't around ServiceNow, right, it's around the business, and what you need, what they need to be successful. And I was just talking with the CIO, earlier today. And I asked her, you know, what are the two questions that when you get caught in the hallway by one of the board members, or the CEO that you get asked, instantly. And, you know, then we talked about the platform and how the platform can fill some of those needs, and how we can make her successful on our team successful in the board's eyes. And, you know, one of the things we've been talking about through the whole thing is, I like to talk about the CEO model. So it's customers, employees and owners, customers, meaning who's asking for the service, the employees who's doing the service, and then there's the owner. So we want to make the shareholders make it a viable option and a viable event for them to purchase and invest in it. Because there's got to be a return on that. And all three of those are equally as important, depending on where you are in your journey. But we've really sat down and, and really talked about the wisdom or the what's in it for me for all of those areas, to make sure that we're aligning with what their business goals are.

Greg Irwin  12:22  

What's so what are the KPIs there Grant? Like I get it, I get that story. In fact, I heard the chat. Thank you all, for dropping those in I see, I see tones of what you're saying here. I'm getting value out of the platform that had it. How do you measure so that if she has to answer to the CEO and say we did this and we got that? And

Grant Pulver  12:47  

that's exactly and that's, that's the driving? That's the opening discussion, right, is, when you're at your success point, what is important to you. So what we've been talking about is, what are those important events that we need to solve for, for us to say it's successful, and they've got three, they've need to exit out from their temporary service agreements with their divesting company, that they're paying hundreds of 1000s of dollars a month for, they need to be able to understand where their assets are, from a security and a support standpoint. And they need to be able to, to log and track issues 100% and manage their change management process through that. So our measurements are a they have their fully functional platform and organization set up to an extent so that they can get out of that temporary service agreement. They need to be able to run court reports to satisfy audit requirements from a security standpoint, on their assets to be able to do that. And then they need to have a rigorous change management process in place. 

Greg Irwin  14:04  

Excellent. Hey, Grant, great stuff. That's those are the stories we're looking for. And I'm, I'm like multitasking here. And trying to read the thread and and drive the conversation. So now I'm back here. Alright, let's talk a bit about San Diego. I know, I know, a lot of you all are dialing in because you want to hear that there was a great question. I think it was John. John Flanagan York. Thank you for the question. Jesse. I'm gonna direct it to you. The question is, how do you get value out of San Diego? What have you seen in terms of the some of the projects that you're kicking off on San Diego and the tangible results from that?.

Jesse Nocon  14:50  

Absolutely. So, to start that answer, I'm going to kind of take a quick step back and contextualize the difference between the Rome release and the San Diego release because I think it's really important to understand how Rome looked up to update the platform so we can get a better understanding of the intention behind the updates of San Diego. So in Rome, we saw some major, it updates across that kind of entire gambit of that IT products and applications from change management incident to vendor manager, workspace cloud, walk up experience and making the employee center not only available to HR clients, but available to it and across the platform. San Diego is a similar upgrade to ServiceNow. But instead of being it focused, it's really focused on personas that aren't it but are so critical to enterprises and are critical to providing services to your employees. So whether that's an HR group, a customer service group, a Legal Group, creating a workspace for procurement in the system, there are a lot more persona based work workspaces and experiences. And with San Diego, what what we're recommending for our partners and our clients, is to really take a look at those individual new personas that are now enabled in the platform. And see if there's value and see if there's gaps in your business on how those groups are operating and see if you can bring in more than just I into the platform. 

Greg Irwin  16:31  

Alright, so I have a I’m sure most of the folks responsible for their ServiceNow platforms have to basically map out an upgrade path. And who was it, Kathy? more work than we can possibly get done? All right. So every everyone's not going to necessarily stay on each release each year? Who should be moving to San Diego. Let's go. Let's go backwards. Madrid. Let's go backwards. At what point do you say you got to get off that you have to go with? You have to get to San Diego because, you know, hey, these couple of features might be real difference makers for you. And it's worth getting current.

Grant Pulver  17:12  

Well, one thing to keep in mind, Greg is being a cloud app, you don't have a choice with ServiceNow. And that's part of the rub. Right is there's two ways to approach it. You stay current for support reasons, or you stay current for enhancements and functionality. 

Greg Irwin  17:29  

Hmm, right. Right. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. So I still have the question of, do you see all of your what's the pace you're seeing of your clients of upgrading upgrading to San Diego? Michelle you want to take that?

Michelle Bautista  17:42  

Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot now. You know, Jesse talked about how employee center and portal is now kind of a platform level interface. A lot of our clients that are really trying to amp up that engagement around the portal and mobile, they absolutely want to get into San Diego and and make that jump now. A lot of our clients who are now looking into a lot of the non it areas beyond HR, I think the success of HR showed that ServiceNow can be beneficial to areas that aren't traditionally served by a workflow system. For example, I have a client, they moved from Zendesk, everything was in Zendesk and they moved into ServiceNow. They started in ITSM. And this year, we're talking about HR and finance and procurement services. And their procurement services group has a huge end to end procurement vision that doesn't stop at procurement services. They want everybody who's involved in their end to end process, including legal including contract management, anybody who would have a hand in saying whether you're buying any kind of assets, software, whatnot, as part of this one stop workflow. And so what we're doing for them, there's a couple of different approaches that they could have gone. One approach is to simply let's start with the procurement service module, set up case management. Let's figure it out as we go. But their procurement group and spend a lot of time understanding what they want to see is their overall vision. And in line with that, what we're going to do for them is spend time to translate their target vision, and what does that mean on the platform? And so what groups should come on? When should they come on? They had all these integration point systems. Let's take a look at those and see like, Should we keep them? Should we move them to ServiceNow? Are there other ways to do this? So giving them have a really strong roadmap for the next two years in terms of how they release on the platform.

Greg Irwin  20:06  

Tell us about it. I’ve seen two or three examples in the chat. We've talked about a lot of consolidating onto ServiceNow. Any any words of advice on these transitions as people are consolidating the right ways? Or, you know, things to think about? Or maybe a success or, you know, a screw up in terms of transitioning things onto the platform? So we can learn here? Does anyone have a story they could share?

Michelle Bautista  20:33  

I certainly do. Because I've been on this two year journey with this client coming off Zendesk over and over and over again. From any system into ServiceNow, ServiceNow, thinks differently. And it it places information in different spaces. And so part of transitioning from, say something like Zendesk where maybe you have multiple groups that have Zendesk instances that don't talk to each other, right, what does that new world look like. And when we walk clients through that, first we start with, let's show you in depth, how ServiceNow works, and then talk to you about how your, what you currently want to be able to do or currently do on the platform that you're on. Oftentimes, what we find is that if you've been on Zendesk, we're footprints for a long time, there's choices that you made, simply due to the constraints of Zendesk or footprints or, or that system that will no longer be there for ServiceNow. And so we want to make sure that we're not translating those pieces over. Because they're not necessary anymore, that that problem goes away simply by being on ServiceNow. And that we want you to start thinking in different ways of where do we put this information, a very common thing that we see is say, for example, everything is an incident where everything is crammed into this one form, from their other instance, and the ability to unpack that and place it in different spaces, where it can be properly addressed, and properly measured as serve as a clear service. So the difference between, say, an incident or a request, when there's smashed into one form, it's very difficult to actually measure what's going on in terms of service providing for something that's very public facing such as the CSM, we also want to take a look at two other things in terms of how do we want to release, as well as what do we want the organizational change management to be. So oftentimes, with a very public facing thing, when we might start off with is the back end. So moving the internal workflow first, leaving the way the public is interacting with you the same, so there isn't a big change there. But improving how the service happens on the backend. And even though the client might not see a visceral change yet, for ServiceNow, they will feel a service change because it's going to become easier for your people to provide the answers that are necessary because of knowledge base, because of the way ServiceNow connects all your information together. And then when your internal service folks are, are comfortable, and are working well in that system, then we bring in that engagement factor with the portal. And really, you know, up your ability to resolve, you know, tier zero and things like that. And so we might look at how we might scale into a very public facing setup for you.

Grant Pulver  24:12  

I think, just to summarise that one of the areas that I see people successful is challenge status quo. Don't try to move your current processes from one platform to another. I feel that very passionate about that if you're going from Zendesk or any application, or even if you're going for multiple ServiceNow instances or another one challenge status quo and simplify workflow are 100%. You know, I was telling Greg, I turned 50 Next week, so I'm pretty old. And I've been around for a while. When we first started doing these workflow type activities, it seems like the more complicated it was, the more value we had for it. So the more people that had to have prove it, the better off the workflow must have been. And the more people that had to work on it, the more value it had. And that's not the case. Let your people manage their business. But also make sure you have the right controls in place for regulations or audits and things like that, when challenged status quo, don't just try to move from what they're doing today into service. Now, reinvent yourself, take the opportunity to reinvent yourself as a business. Looking at it from the business standpoint, and from the customer standpoint. So ease of transaction, transparency, ease of workflow, and use less bureaucracy are all important drivers, as you're going through there. And that also go make incremental progress. Don't try to bring all eight organizations, or whatever that is all in at once. Start slow, accelerate, and move one at a time or two at a time to be able to get progress in there. Those are some of the things that I see a lot of companies hampering themselves with is there's huge ramifications. So in their mind, so they'll sit and think about something for a year, and how to get everybody in at once instead of trying to get some value out quickly. And starting that process.

Greg Irwin  26:18  

What's going to make a difference. Is it customer service? Is it automating workflow for IT are some divisions, you know, what areas do you think would make some, you know, would have that kind of high level impact to the business.

Grant Pulver  26:32  

It's been interesting in the last couple of releases, John, it's a sales tactic by those sneaky ServiceNow people that add new functionality to each release. But it's been a there's two things to evaluate as you're going through, right? What is the new functionality that you're not taking, that you're utilising like the new facilities happen, things like that, that you might start looking at? Does that make sense for the business, but then there's also kind of goes back to that horizontal, horizontal and vertical payment that we're talking about a little bit ago is start looking at where your value points are, and what you're really getting value out of the application for, and then look for the functionality in there to see if there's changes that you could take advantage of. You know, APM is a good example, right? As it started out as a technical solution and an add on to TBM. But there's so much business value to it that now, it it's really becoming a CFO type application more so than a CIO application that originally was intended for. And what's amazing to me is the changes that have happened. So that's an example. Asset Management is another one that was rolled out as an IT tool to be able to manage assets in the environment. Now, the CISOs are more invested in in asset management than the asset management teams, and organizations because of how the world has changed. Because how the applications have changed. And because how the businesses have changed. I don't I rarely do I get in a conversation with a CFO. Now as an entry point for an asset management conversation. versus two years ago, that was 100% of the entry was through the finance organization for Asset Management. Now it's around security, knowing what assets you have where what levels of patching and risk there are to them. It's probably about 75 of asset management's are driven by seaso suites now.

Michelle Bautista  28:51  

I think what's also interesting, you know, we're talking about the leap to San Diego. But what's been happening in the ServiceNow space is that they're rolling out smaller functionality releases through store apps, and so outside of the full release, so for example, enterprise asset management, which will bring in kind of new CI classes around the manufacturing and healthcare space and the other industry verticals, while enterprise asset management is not coming out, general axis until Tokyo, the class structure for those assets will come out in the store app in June, even before enterprise asset management is even available. That's going to come out. Another thing that's going to come out is for example, they they ServiceNow just bought map wise to to bring in the technology around on floor mapping, and along with that is asset for mapping, which is a game changer on the, in the manufacturing space, not only am I going to be able to know what room and asset is, I'm going to know exactly where that room that asset is going to be, which is a game changer for like, say, retail security cameras, right, I need to know which camera we're looking at. So you're gonna start seeing a lot of very significant but pointed updates coming. And so really, then the version upgrade will be about can I get the the base module that I need in and then looking for those very pointed upgrades in the store app coming on board. Employee Relations, typically was in HR is now a store app as well. So functionality is coming in very rapidly all the time now. 

Grant Pulver  31:10  

I feel like that should be when we talk about crawl, walk, run or starting with minimal viable product or whatever that is. I do feel like there's some credence to not having automation and starting and then but once you're ready to start to move, the bar integration is 100% at the top of your list on what should be done talking about AI bots, and data analysis and all this automation and bring that data together. So it's real time. And then one source all through it is huge.

Jesse Nocon  31:50  

I think that I can maybe provide a little bit of a story here on how somebody one of one of our partners that we're working with is using ServiceNow to tackle an issue that's really bespoke, and really unique to their business. And so we're working with a large financial firm. And as a part of their working with their brokers and investors and clients, they have to do really robust conflict of interest vetting processes. And currently that's being done kind of in multiple systems. And it's hard to track in ensure with ADD test stations and timestamps and confidence that, you know, when an evaluation has occurred, that it's done properly being enforced throughout their business. And so we're working with them to create a centralized information hub that lives within ServiceNow. And it's a completely non IT group, it's a a more of a risk and operations focus group that that we'll be creating that will have a place for these conflict of interest cases to come into the platform have automation and integrations with third party systems to ensure that the data coming in doesn't have to be updated in a manual fashion. And they're confident that it can be a source of truth. And then, upon completion of this, right this, this organization is going to be able to move forward a lot more confidently. And especially then if an audit comes back at them, and they have to show and prove that they've added around the conflict of interest. And so I think that can be really applicable. Right? Even if there isn't something from a customer service directly or an HR or one of those areas where ServiceNow is defined application. There's ways to leverage the platform to solve you know, those unique businesses, those unique problems that come up in each business.

Grant Pulver  33:47  

What we've talked about really is aligning to the business goals, right? I feel like a lot of customers are letting somebody come to him and say, I need a tool to do X. Not necessarily looking at the CEOs or the CIOs or the COOs or CFOs goals for the year or goals are and aligning those activities to that. It's more of a hey, it'd be cool to be able to do app rationalization because we have 16 scheduling tools that should be aligned to we want to eliminate or standardize across the platform any enterprise on one or two tools that provide certain functionality or x functionality because of lower cost, better continuity between teams ability to share work, you know, there's all those business values behind it that do that. And one of the things that I work with my team on a lot is really we're I'm not a salesperson. So a lot of our entry is when we're in a sales motion, we have to understand one of two things either we're selling to the decision maker, or we're preparing somebody to go sell to the decision maker Her Yep. And the reason I bring that up as important is, you're that person that we would help prepare to go sell the value. Yeah, internally, right. And that's part of a lot of our presentations. And Michelle and Jesse have heard me push back on some of our presentations for this, too, is understanding who that is. And there's got to be a different set of detail for you to go sell to your organization than there would be if we were trying to convince you to do something.

Greg Irwin  35:28  

We're at the hour. So I'm going to turn into Grant, and Michelle and Jesse for closing comment. My closing comment is thank you. And please use this group as a resource, please remember, the goal of make one new contact across this group, go through LinkedIn or go through BWG. And look, according to these guys, we truly view them as the best resource around ServiceNow. So you know, you have questions or comments, you've got to have more coming out of this hour, you know, and, you know, use them as a resource to bounce those ideas off. I know, they've been a tremendous resource across our community. Yeah, Grant.

Grant Pulver  36:09  

Just add to that, Greg, is, hopefully you guys have recognized we kind of nerd out on these things, right. But one of the things I love about our company is, Michelle, and Jesse and I were all practitioners and customers at one point. And so we kind of look at it, we have a different approach than a lot of companies because of that. And we really look at it from that business side and the value side and the end customer side. And it's, we'd love to have more conversations, because like I said, these are the conversations that we really love. And all three of us are raising our hands every time we get a message from Greg about these, for that reasons, just because I hate doing presentations, but I'll do these 10 hours a day, every day, just because of the interactions that are there. And we and the fact that we can nerd out for a little bit and have some fun, talking about what the possibilities are and what we can do.

Greg Irwin  37:02  

But thank you all for joining everyone. Have a great long weekend. We keep these going on a regular basis. I hope to see you back at our next one and spread the word. If you have somebody in your organization you think would benefit from this kind of a group. Pass it along. We'd love to have them. Thank you all everyone. Have a great day.