Knowledge22 Recap Discussion

May 19, 2022 1:30 PM2:30 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeway

In the current recessionary environment, organizations have to deal with many issues, including inflation, remote and hybrid shifts, and skilled labor shortages. How can ServiceNow help alleviate some of these pain points?

New and exciting features within ServiceNow’s platform are meeting customers where they work and how they work. With citizen developer programs, robotic process automation, and a new employee center, users find it easier than ever to build out the platform, leverage capabilities, and improve the employee experience. 

In this virtual event, Greg Irwin is joined by Carleen Carter, Certified Master Architect and Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio, and David Wiesenthal, Presales Platform Architect at Acorio. Together, they discuss the key takeaways from the Knowledge 2022 expo, the benefits and improvements within the ServiceNow platform, and how the platform’s upgrades are empowering organizations and employees.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Carleen Carter and David Wiesenthal share their key takeaways from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2022 expo
  • How is ServiceNow helping employees adjust to hybrid and remote work environments?
  • The exciting features within the new employee center
  • What is the citizen developer program, and how does it improve the user experience?
  • Best practices for upgrading your ServiceNow platform
  • Delving into robotic process automation in ServiceNow
  • How Jira Service Management compares to ServiceNow
  • Carleen and David’s efforts to support organizations during the labor shortage
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Event Partners

Acorio

Acorio, an NTT DATA Company, is the largest, 100% ServiceNow exclusive consultancy.

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Guest Speakers

Greg Irwin LinkedIn

Co-Founder, Co-CEO at BWG Strategy LLC

BWG Strategy is a research platform that provides market intelligence through Event Services, Business Development initiatives, and Market Research services. BWG hosts over 1,800 interactive executive strategy sessions (conference calls and in-person forums) annually that allow senior industry professionals across all sectors to debate fundamental business topics with peers, build brand awareness, gather market intelligence, network with customers/suppliers/partners, and pursue business development opportunities.

Carleen Carter

Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio

Carleen Carter is a Certified Master Architect and Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio, a ServiceNow exclusive consultancy. Carleen began her career in customer service and success, learning about IT and the problems customers face on a day-to-day basis. Armed with this experience, she flourished as a developer, consultant, and trainer utilizing the ServiceNow Platform before joining the team at Acorio.

David Wiesenthal

David Wiesenthal

Platform Architect at Acorio

David Wiesenthal is a Presales Platform Architect at Acorio. He has extensive experience educating, inspiring, and guiding prospective customers on the ins and outs of ServiceNow. Before joining Acorio, David gained experience delivering effective ITBM frameworks through enterprise ServiceNow and MicroFocus PPM application deployments, consulting, program management, global team management, and application software development. 

Event Moderator

Greg Irwin LinkedIn

Co-Founder, Co-CEO at BWG Strategy LLC

BWG Strategy is a research platform that provides market intelligence through Event Services, Business Development initiatives, and Market Research services. BWG hosts over 1,800 interactive executive strategy sessions (conference calls and in-person forums) annually that allow senior industry professionals across all sectors to debate fundamental business topics with peers, build brand awareness, gather market intelligence, network with customers/suppliers/partners, and pursue business development opportunities.

Carleen Carter

Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio

Carleen Carter is a Certified Master Architect and Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio, a ServiceNow exclusive consultancy. Carleen began her career in customer service and success, learning about IT and the problems customers face on a day-to-day basis. Armed with this experience, she flourished as a developer, consultant, and trainer utilizing the ServiceNow Platform before joining the team at Acorio.

David Wiesenthal

David Wiesenthal

Platform Architect at Acorio

David Wiesenthal is a Presales Platform Architect at Acorio. He has extensive experience educating, inspiring, and guiding prospective customers on the ins and outs of ServiceNow. Before joining Acorio, David gained experience delivering effective ITBM frameworks through enterprise ServiceNow and MicroFocus PPM application deployments, consulting, program management, global team management, and application software development. 

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Discussion Transcription

Greg Irwin  0:18  

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for joining us. I'm Greg over at BWG. Greg Irwin I'm one of the partners, and I've been moderating these tech forums for are going on 10 years now, we've been doing a really fun series with Acorio around all things ServiceNow. And we're on to our latest chapter partnered here with David Wiesenthal and Carleen Carter. And we're going to be the three kind of ringleaders, but the format that we run here is interactive. What that means is, I might call on you, and ask you what you think or to tell a story. And it's always better actually, if you do it proactively. Because honestly, it's just a little bit more fun to hear about what other people are more interesting, sometimes more impactful to hear about what each other's stories are. So I'm going to lean into that as best I can. Not everyone can talk in order one is in a spot where they can share. But even if it's like a small anecdote, and you don't have like the Grand answer, I promise, it's like, that's the good stuff. So I'm gonna look forward a little bit. Also, I ask it on all of my calls, please use this as an opportunity to connect with others in the community. The ServiceNow community is just awesome, in terms of like, you know, connecting and friendship and finding projects. So personally and professionally, this is the group, you can come through me or Acorio. But LinkedIn is pretty good, too. And so send out an invite you probably get a response, make make a new contact through this forum place. Video, it's amazing. It helps with engagement. If you can turn it on, please do. If you can, no harm, no foul. Alright, let's let's get right into it. Carleen and Dave, I'm gonna ask you both to introduce yourselves and give the quick, the quick overview on who Acorio is an what Acorio do. I'll go first.

 

Carleen Carter  2:29  

I'm Carleen Carter, and I'm the Director of Technology Initiatives at Acorio. I'm also one of our ServiceNow certified master architects. And just to give you a brief overview of Acorio, we deliver real world business outcomes and we promise better experiences with the power of ServiceNow platform. We want to be a leader in digital transformation. And as part of a the NTT DATA company. We United global team of innovators backed by the power of one of the top 10 service providers in the world. And we were recently named ServiceNow 2022 Customer workflow partner of the year. So we're very proud of that. Awesome, thanks

 

Greg Irwin  3:11  

Carleen. And we're Carleen. Personally we're Where do you live? You know,

 

Carleen Carter  3:16  

is that nobody be okay, pay attention to the woman behind the curtain. I am currently located in just outside of Fort Worth, Texas. I grew up in San Diego. And that's how I got involved in the ServiceNow ecosystem. I actually used to work at ServiceNow directly, and then ventured out into the partner world, but I have been working with ServiceNow since 2009, so about 14 years.

 

Greg Irwin  3:43  

Excellent. Excellent. Thanks for Thank you, this

 

Carleen Carter  3:47  

community, the ServiceNow Community is awesome. I have met some so, so many awesome people throughout my ServiceNow career. You're here.

 

Greg Irwin  3:56  

Alright. Dave, get in, get in. And please give a little intro personally and what you do, and of course you

 

David Wiesenthal  4:05  

Yeah, Thanks, Greg. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is David Wiesenthal. I'm a pre sales platform architect with Acorio. So what I do is I work with the sales team, and we turn business objectives, business goals into ServiceNow solutions. So I'm responsible for the technical portion of our proposals. And from there I we take that and we pass that on to our supremely talented delivery organization to execute the projects. Personally about me, I've been on the platform since 2016. Which still lots of I feel like I'm kind of a newbie within ServiceNow just how deep, how deep the ecosystem goes. But I've been with Acorio for three years now and I am based out of Austin, Texas.

 

Greg Irwin  4:56  

Do me a favor Dave, tell us something not on your resume. Not really. Add to Acorio not related to ServiceNow.

 

David Wiesenthal  5:04  

Something about me? Yeah, something about you. Cool. Okay, um, something about me I have a cousin that won a Nobel Prize for physics. So the underachiever of the family.

 

Greg Irwin  5:17  

That's a That's unbelievable. Wow. That's a big one. All right. Hey, sorry. It's always good. Just to hear something a little outside of the basic pace. We've got broth. I agree. That sounds awesome. So the topic here is to talk about Knowledge 22. So that's going to be our soundtrack, our main guidepost. But I think you know, we're humans here. And we want to make sure that this is something that is impactful for everybody. So I have an ask, in this chat window, please drop into it. One thing specific that you'd like to hear about, it could be about a module, it could be about a function, it could be about a theme, but give us something so that we can basically I can basically, make sure that we we guide this to something that's useful for everybody. Bruce, nice, thank you very much, everybody following Bruce and just drop something in there. And we'll do our best to make sure we're hitting something that you really do care on. For me, I'll tell you mine. It's looking at the stock market and inflation and recession and Ukraine and it's endless. It's really wild. So I have a question. I want to know, what people are thinking about with regards to ServiceNow roadmaps in a recessionary environment? How are people shifting priorities? So that's mine. If I were able to talk and type I would put it in there. I'm going to start our conversation on our theme, which is Knowledge 22. So Carleen, would you start us off there as people add their comments in. And tell us a little bit about your key takeaways from Knowledge 22.

 

Carleen Carter  7:07  

So first, I want to for those of you who might not have been able to go to New York, or the Hague last week. ServiceNow is doing knowledge a little bit differently this year. They're doing it across four locations. Last week was New York, and also the Hague in the Netherlands. And then next week will be Las Vegas and Sydney in Australia. So it's, it's different in that we're not all in one place. The the invitee list is much smaller in New York actually was this is going to be the smallest from an attendance perspective of all four of those. And we're also we will also be at Vegas next week, if you're going to be there. So with that said, there are many repeat sessions that are going across all of the different locations. But there's different things that are happening at each location as well. So one of the different things is that the the sessions that customers are leading, and partners like us are leading as well, aren't in breakout rooms anymore. They're all part of the expo floor and actually stages across, across around the expo floor. So that's something that's kind of interesting. To me, sometimes there's competing speakers. But most of the time, you're able to quickly get to the functions or the the events that you wanted to get to the labs are on, we're on another floor in New York. And so they were in their own quiet area, which was nice.

 

Greg Irwin  8:42  

Got it what? Tell us some of your takeaways. All right.

 

Carleen Carter  8:46  

So I think I started talking a little bit about this jumping the gun, the could the citizen developer programs are really starting to take off lower lower cost to build and maintain than some full stack custom applications for some of the things that that customers are using them for. And as I mentioned there, you can now actually hand a business user catalog builder or App Engine studio or one of these new pieces of of a functionality and not be worried about them accidentally doing something like changing the display value of the task table. Nobody can find their tickets anymore, because the the numbers are not there. Which has happened before. I've been burned by that one. And so it's a lot safer. And also with San Diego, there is an automated component to the deployment of those applications too. So it requires less development and administrative resources to support those in the long term. On the other side, I do see the Indus History, focus is exploding. I've been working on some projects recently that are using the manufacturing and operational technology, industry solutions. And I'm not I do not have a manufacturing background whatsoever. But it is so interesting to me because it has so many parallels with it, in that you have things that you would put into the CMDB things that you might use in event management. But they're not, they're not necessarily following the same schemas or the same terminology. So I think that the takeaway there is that businesses want the holistic view, they want to know where they can appropriately conserve budget. And they won't be able to really do that well until they can see everything. And in order to see everything, you have to have it all in one place. And so I think that's where some of these industry solutions are really coming into play.

 

Greg Irwin  11:03  

Carleen, you're probably supporting some clients with some projects, what are the most describe a typical project or two that you're working on currently with a customer?

 

Carleen Carter  11:14  

Mainly, I focus on architectural guidance and making sure customers avoid technical debt. So I kind of float in and out of different projects to help advise in that way. But I mean, I've I tend to stay away from HR, although we have quite a bit of HR going on. My specialties are ITSM, which is still going strong, everybody's got to be able to report incidents and make requests, but also customer service management and the integration of those plus the industry trends. So those are the ones the ones that we're working with more often are much more program level digital transformation, to just really bring everybody into this century

 

Greg Irwin  12:01  

aren't Carleen Thank you, David, same question for you. What were your key highlights from Knowledge 22?

 

David Wiesenthal  12:08  

Well, Carleen stole my thunder a little bit with the industry solutions. So that was something that is really exciting. We're starting to see solutions. Now for financial services, manufacturing is correlated mentioned Telecom, healthcare. So really meeting, meeting our customers where they work and how they work and going beyond IT Service Management. Something else another key takeaway I found really interesting was adjusting to this new normal of work and the hybrid workplace, and then solutions that are being put out there to manage the workplace experience. You know, the expectation that employees are going to be working from home and from the office, how we're going to manage the office is not going to look the same as as it had back in 2019 2020. How do we manage these workspaces? How do we manage cleanliness? How do we manage visitor interactions? And, you know, seeing, seeing how the workplace experience has evolved? These past couple past couple releases has been really interesting.

 

Greg Irwin  13:18  

So that's, that's a biggie. Can you maybe tell a bit of a story on, you know, something specific around, you know, how a client is leveraging ServiceNow to help the kind of new the new hybrid? Workplace that would be facet? Yeah, certainly

 

David Wiesenthal  13:39  

I a lot of this starts with the employee experience. And so we are seeing a lot of attraction, excuse me a lot of traction in our HR, HR space with really enhancing and providing that consumer like experience to accessing services, whether it's HR, whether it's IoT, we're really trying to break down the barriers between the two, and improve those interactions. Part of that's going to be driving self service with robust knowledge along the way. Things like chatbots really, finding ways to free up the agents and enable employees to solve their own problems in a way that our UX practice likes to say we don't strive to be memorable. We strive to be forgettable. You want to be able to go in, ask a question about your benefits. Maybe you don't want to interact with somebody, maybe you only have five minutes, you're able to do that through a chatbot through a knowledge search. You don't even have to know what how knowledge is set up. You could do just a natural language search to find what you're looking for and leverage some of those AI capabilities. Building on top of that, once that's in place, something new that's rolling out is the employee center and that's bringing together, bringing together the separate portals previously that were disparate on ServiceNow, whether it's always typically started with an IT portal, and a separate HR portal. Now with employee center, this is really built from the ground up to support not only IT and HR, but some of those industry specific or shared service functions, legal services, financial services really bring that together in a scalable way to build that in a low code fashion, folks,

 

Greg Irwin  15:40  

I'm good at asking questions, but I don't want to crowd people out. So if you're hearing something you want to dig deeper, jump right in. This is an open line. You can unmute yourselves and jump right in. I'm gonna keep going. But I'll ask you to use some sharp elbows because I keep going. Dave, I'd love to hear about employee center, and specifically how big a lift? Is it for an organization to roll out employees? Yeah,

 

David Wiesenthal  16:08  

that's a that's a great, great question. So just you know, for some context with employee centre, this is new with Rome. And in essence, it is the previously called employee service centre. But with some of the some of the enhancements that were made, this has been much more of a less of a bespoke effort to configure a lot of the building blocks are in place, low code type effort to set up that taxonomy and build out the portal with with various pieces along the way. So really pulling that together. Previously old world we would it would be a phased approach, you have your it, it portal, then you might go to HR, then once these groups are together, then we talk about pulling these portals together, it would be not a customization. But it would be it would be some sophisticated configuration that would be involved. A lot of face to face time. This has changed in that now we are offering as we pull out that second portal as somebody who's moving on to employee center, pay our effort to set up an HR portal is the same as bringing these portals together. So that time to value has really increased with with employee center. And I can see how that's really going to be the face

 

Greg Irwin  17:36  

of ServiceNow going forward. All right, excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Oh, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna broaden actually, let's kick off a couple questions that have come in or topics that have come in, I want to go to the citizen developer and putting in some guardrails. So, citizen developer sounds great, but it also sounds scary for somebody who has to manage those applications and and put compliance governance, you know, security, and, and then support potentially support that thing, you know, a year later. All right.

 

Carleen Carter  18:16  

So I am so there with you, because when citizen developer first started floating around ServiceNow ecosystem, I thought, no, please, please protect my five don't please. I don't want anybody else in there. Yeah, I know, I had the same the same reaction that I'm sure a lot of product owners and maybe even system administrators and developers have. But my, my lab that I led at New York last week was actually about specifically that and making utilising catalogue builder, which is an interface that can't remember what the old one was. Why can I not remember that one, the it's a more graphical interface and drag and drop and way to build catalog items. That is much more intuitive than having to click through all the related lists and all the variables and all of that kind of stuff. So it's a guided walk through, you start out with your basic components and you add your questions and then it's getting you everything that you need. And at the end, you end up with a complete catalog item. And System administrators can also set up catalog builder templates, which can control what fields those business users can can fill out so if you don't want them to mess around with you are you want to enforce that there is always a specific variable set on the catalog item. So always a specific set of questions in the same format every time you can add that to the template. And then the business user doesn't have to replicate that information, it's already there for them. And it's providing a better experience in the long run, because it's always the same every time somebody goes to any catalog item. Same with App Engine studio, it's a completely guided walkthrough. And end to end, you start with a template. And again, administrators can create templates for how they want applications to be controlled with and constructed within their environment. So you give you give these business users starter places, with a bunch of things that are pre built, or as soon as soon as I click the button, it pre builds them for them, and then they enhance it. And they really only had then have to focus on what makes my app different. What I don't have to focus on putting this field here in this form here and worrying about whether I have a number and whether that's going to auto number, that stuff's already built into the template. And so they don't have to worry about all of those basic setup things. And again, it's about experience because even though there may only be a specific group of fulfills on that app, the people who are the end users of that app are probably using multiple apps across the platform. And the more consistency that you can provide for them, the better off the experience will be, you know, across the platform for them, the more often they will use self service as well.

 

Greg Irwin  21:22  

So I guess I'll jump to doesn't work. Guys, it does the citizen developers finding enough flexibility that they can create useful applications, but at the same time, giving enough control to the to the administrators that you're not creating a problem?

 

Carleen Carter  21:43  

Yeah, now, App Engine studio and catalog builder, they're not for, I'm gonna go build the most complex application in on the planet, right, you still have access to all of the normal methods of creating catalog items and applications in order to do that. But for the audience of people that you would hand those those features to, it's perfect for them. And now, whether or not everybody's taking advantage of it, and they're all doing really well, some of this is still really new with San Diego, and we're still, you know, getting a lot of customers to catch up to San Diego. So it will have we'll have to tell with some time. But I can say, I have been waiting for these, these built features for a long time. And after reviewing it, and seeing it, I got so excited that I didn't even have to put it into my lab, but I put them into my lab so that you can so that the people that were in my lab would be able to see it. And even if they didn't use it themselves, they would know that it was there so that they could expand their ability to deliver services, because that's also what it's about, you have a limited number of developers, you have a limited number of true system administrators. And what should they be focusing on, they shouldn't be focusing on things like activating and deactivating users, they should be focusing on the more complex and more strategic things. And they can then hand off these other things to to the business users that can then control control their own areas.

 

The upgrade from either Quebec or Rome to San Diego, for us internally was actually pretty, pretty simple. But we also don't, we try to stay within the rails on not, you know, following best practices and not doing DOM manipulation and things like that. You do not have to activate the Polaris UI, if you're upgrading right away, that can give you an opportunity to do the upgrade, make sure everything works, and then maybe turn on San Diego or the Polaris UI at a little bit of a later date. I wouldn't wait too long, though. Also, sometimes it's just easier to bite both of those at the same time, and have to only do one round of testing, which is which is probably where I would land. Um, I have seen most of the developers are embracing the change. I think that there are areas typically places like within the HR that are a little bit more hesitant, not that they won't like it, but I know that we had to work around one hrs open enrollment, we didn't want to do that right in the middle of open enrollment. So you want to make sure that you're as with any upgrade, you're doing that at the right time. So this is part of the magic that I'm very, very excited about in San Diego. There is deployment workbench. So once an app is ready, once a business user who's developing it says that It's ready, they submit it for review, the system takes an inventory and prints out kind of an overview of the changes that they've made and the things that they've done. And so you can quickly skim through that to see, oh, maybe I need to look a little bit deeper into this or, okay, you know, this person has done a few apps, I'm okay with what they've done. And then you can schedule it to be automatically pushed to production, because it's not using update sets, it's actually using your GitHub integration. And so it, it can be immediately deployed, or it can be scheduled to be deployed all through this deployment workbench. So I'm very, very excited about that, because you still need to review, you still need to double check everything, but it's a lot less lift than it had been in the past, because there's a limited amount of things that they can do in App Engine studio. So you don't have to inspect every single line of code or everything that they've done.

 

David Wiesenthal  26:02  

And Carleen, if I could add something there, just taking a step back from the technical, you know, I think also having a strong governance process in place as well, even before you start coding, but you know, with your demand intake process, making sure that whatever you're putting in is going to align with the platform best practices, this aligns with your strategy. And thinking about just because it could go into service now, you know, should it making sure that this is going to align with your objectives

 

Carleen Carter  26:33  

along the way. I'm gonna totally don't have enough time to delve into robotic process automation. But I'll give that the the two liner. It. It's a new new thing within service within ServiceNow in San Diego. And it allows you to automate a lot of repetitive processes like data entry, and even in systems that don't have an API. So it can recognize visual buttons on an application.

 

Greg Irwin  27:08  

So RPA is it's not new. There are some really robust platforms like UiPath, and automation anywhere. There's even some RPA now and well, in ServiceNow. Question is, how mature is the RPA function in ServiceNow, so that you could comfortable a term to your, you know, your CIO and your process team and say, it's here, you should take a real look at it. versus, you know, finding out that you're missing an orchestrator and, you know, some of the things that you would want in a, you know, in a professional enterprise class rpa,

 

Carleen Carter  27:49  

it's, it's pretty close. So I haven't used robotic RPA very much. But I would say that the interface is not all there, it still looks like it might have been developed in like Visual Studio or something like that. But that's because ServiceNow got this feature set through an acquisition. And so they haven't redesigned the UI to match the rest of it yet, but they wanted to be able to get that functionality out there. Because I think it's really powerful. And it really enhances the suite of applications that's already there. So if your eyes can take a little bit of legacy, look for a little while, the functionality is is there.

 

Greg Irwin  28:33  

Dave? Let me turn to you to start it. What do you say when someone says why aren't we doing this in JIRA?

 

David Wiesenthal  28:41  

I would say that, you know, when it comes to you could talk about the future said and, you know, it all comes down to business value and the maturity of the platform. When it comes to asset management, especially Software Asset Management, those hard business benefits are easily calculable by some of the licensing costs, they you'll save some of the audit costs, then you get into process optimization as well. When it comes to asset management, I think this also feeds into the narrative of the better together and having ServiceNow act as that system of work and being able to easily integrate with integration hub across various platforms across the system. You know, one on one is asset management more, but you know, take a look, if you take a look at things holistically, take a look at service management and the costs of fragmenting these processes across different platforms. Just just both in maintenance and TCO, but efficiency as well. So, you know, those those are what I see it as the benefits that could challenge

 

Greg Irwin  29:54  

those costs. Do you know anybody any any sizable organization that's running In their asset management, on J, JIRA Service Management.

 

David Wiesenthal  30:05  

I personally haven't come across that we do see Jira, we see customers using JIRA beyond just, you know, project team management. Along the way with with some of these tools and getting into it's more along the lines of what we're seeing is integrations, integrations with JIRA, which is more common. Yep.

 

Greg Irwin  30:31  

Carleen. What? How does it How does the conversation play out? And well, you know, what organizations? Is Jira, good, good, good enough for?

 

Carleen Carter  30:41  

Um, yeah, I mean, I think if you think about it, if you if you're just looking at it, that ServiceNow and JIRA, or ticket management systems, then yeah, the cost doesn't doesn't make sense. But as David mentioned, that the feature set and the functionality and the insights, you know, it's one thing to put all of your data in one place, but the insights that ServiceNow is able to provide are just leaps and bounds over, you know, something like JIRA Service Management. I'm a former asset manager, and I've worked in, you know, I, you used to use an Access database, which all the insights were my own, like, I had to make them all up, right, I just didn't, the data was there, I had to go. But ServiceNow has the capability now to do. You know, not only some of those cost analysis on retroactive data, but also to do some predictive analysis too. And I saw a message in the chat about AI and machine learning. One of the things that I'm very, very excited about is the self healing piece of the machine learning. So if you have events coming in, and ServiceNow can understand that, oh, well, in order to fix this event, we have to reboot this server. And we're going to go ahead and do that. Now. You can control whether it just does it on its own, or it needs approval to do that. But it can then orchestrate that. And so those elements, those additional enhanced features are just not not something that that Atlassian really is offering at the at the same scale and robustness at this point. You know, I with being with ServiceNow, it was ServiceNow. For so long, I'm obviously biased towards ServiceNow. But even within ServiceNow, like what to, to implement, we always take like a crawl, walk, run, fly approach, and maybe the crawl for you is not within ServiceNow but that you could eventually, you know, you could eventually get there. Because your right to use an asset management example, you are not going to be able to mention or to measure total cost of ownership across your enterprise of a device until you actually know how many devices you have. And so the first level there is let me just figuring out what my inventory is step, step, step, step. Okay, now I can measure how much did this cost me when I first purchased it? How much does it cost me to maintain how much you know, the utopia that I call the tote the TCO? So I think that that's, that's where you're there. And, you know, we're all we're all sad that you can't necessarily take advantage of ServiceNow. But the don't don't stop trying.

 

Greg Irwin  33:40  

And we're leaning and talking about recession. But the real issue right now is labor is skilled labor shortage. That's the real factor that I think every organization is dealing with. And I probably don't even have to tell this group. So I while while I'm putting extra importance in the discussion on recession, I think the real issue is how do we get the work done, and retain our staff and continue to you know, hit our hit our deliverables, because that's when in my focus groups that I run that's thinner, more painful, not not fear of cost, not not fear or concerns around costs. So actually, along those lines, Dave, Dave and Carleen what are what have you been doing to help support organizations tight on staff?

 

Carleen Carter  34:38  

Well, I'm working on like I said, I'm working in a little bit with the manufacturing. And we are expanding out to like the manufacturing floor and doing some really cool stuff with AI based cameras. And like watching a conveyor belt, and all detect Denalis before, before something actually breaks down, so we can do proactive maintenance on it before before it stops the production line and they lose a bunch of money. And I don't know, necessarily if they had somebody sitting there watching the conveyor belt before, but you can imagine, in some of those applications, being able to predict those things will reduce costs overall. And allow them to, you know, have their folks not spending time putting together putting back the dominoes, that all fell, rather than maybe, you know, stacking some new

 

Greg Irwin  35:38  

dominoes somewhere. That's pretty good one. Awesome. Thank you Carleen. Dave, what about you helping, so helping address skilled labor shortage? Yeah, I've

 

David Wiesenthal  35:49  

seen a lot of a lot of traction, I touched on this previously, but in the HR service, delivery, delivery space, and really improving that employee satisfaction. Those moments that matter, I see this a lot. And we've talked about self resolution. Enabling enabling employees really helping walk through, you know, improving the onboarding experience improving some of the experiences when it comes to life changes within HR, and really, some of the some of the softer benefits when it comes to retaining employees.

 

Greg Irwin  36:31  

You seen, so if you were to measure it in terms of, you know, churn and and ads and, you know, the the metrics that HR cares most about meantime to fill, and engagement engine rates? Is there is there evidence that this, you know, moves the needle on the KPIs?

 

David Wiesenthal  36:55  

I haven't taken a hard look at the numbers. But you know, just based on the interest that we're getting, and the pipeline that this is, has really become an area of focus,

 

Greg Irwin  37:07  

yeah, are great stuff. Hey, folks, we're gonna wrap up here in just a minute to remember to connect across the group. We do a soft sell here, but I don't want to I don't want to miss the point. We're doing this with Acorio. To get their name out. We're doing this to demonstrate that they are the smees. And they truly are the essence, they've covered all modules, all releases, and if you are calling would benefit from a deep dive with them. That's what they want to do. So we're going to reach out. And if there's an opportunity for a further conversation, wonderful. If not, we know no harm no foul, we welcome you to every one of these sessions that we do. And for the next one forwarded along to to a friend, because again, we're we've truly want to build the community. Before before we wrap here, Dave and then Carleen to wrap us up any closing comments for the group?

 

Carleen Carter  38:06  

I was gonna let you go first since I introduced

 

David Wiesenthal  38:09  

I'll go first, I want to thank everybody for your time today. If you're involved with knowledge, you're going to knowledge. One of our sessions was five strategies for future proofing your ServiceNow roadmap. So we got a lot, you know, got a lot of engagement with that in New York. And we'll be giving that session again.

 

Carleen Carter  38:27  

It's actually going to be two times that's how much engagement I think we're gonna get in Las Vegas, too. So

 

David Wiesenthal  38:33  

yeah, so it did touch on some of these points that we talked about today. We'll be able to share a link with that as well once it's released. Excellent.

 

Greg Irwin  38:41  

Thanks, Dave. Carleen.

 

Carleen Carter  38:44  

Yeah, again, thank you so much, and and great discussion. Thank you all for not being afraid and jumping on and talking about your roadmaps. It's always so interesting to hear what different folks and even though even the the person and I forgot your name, the person who spoke up who's not able to get into ServiceNow right now that's still a very valid perspective. And we want to hear about those those things as well. So thank you so much for for participating today.

 

Greg Irwin  39:14  

Are you doing some events here in Vegas that if people are out there, we should let them know about? We are all right.

 

Carleen Carter  39:22  

I will put the link in the chat to the I can find it faster.

 

Greg Irwin  39:33  

To do that, but you calling we don't need to raise we're gonna include it in a thank you note out to everybody. Perfect as a follow up, and hopefully we can all meet out in Vegas. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thanks and have a great day. Bye. Thanks, everyone.

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BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
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