Greg Irwin  0:18  

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for joining. My name is Greg Irwin, I've been co hosting here with Acorio for some time and BWG, we're we're a broad based tech discussion group. Doing this for almost a decade now. It's pretty incredible. But very happy to be here with Joshua Young, Jesse. Jesse, I'm going to mess up your last name. Nocon

Jesse Nocon  0:44  

I hope I got that right. Close enough. Nocon.

Greg Irwin  0:47  

Nocon, Nocon. Alright. Jesse. Thank you.

Jesse Nocon  0:50  

positives.

Greg Irwin  0:53  

Kaushik Nanavati. These guys are joining us from Acorio. And we've been running as many of you have joined these an ongoing series about tracking trends around the ServiceNow Community. The format here is pretty simple. It's a discussion group. I mean, you guys can join, anybody can join webinars to your heart's delight, our our slight different spin is interactive. So what we really like to do is go around the group, talk a little bit about what the what's going on in your environments, see if we can create some connections across others across the community. You know, answer some questions, and hopefully make sure we we provide a forum that's beneficial to you. The chat window works really well. So let's use it throughout, drop in your comments, questions, you know, you know, a sly comments, whatever, whenever you want you. The chat window is open for all of our discussion. It works really well in parallel. Let's go right to our CO hosts here. As we get started. Joshua, you're on my upper left, that means you're in the catbird seat, give a quick intro to the group.

Joshua Young  2:07  

Quick Intro of company or me?

Greg Irwin  2:09  

Oh, let's start with yourself.

Joshua Young  2:11  

All right. Hello, everyone, Joshua Young here. I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem since about 2007. So you'll probably see a few grey hairs pop out of my face here, while we're on this call. Been around for a while mostly in the actual customer side of things in your guy's shoes. So started with the largest implementation of ServiceNow in the world at the time, moved on to another organization to implement everything that existed on the ServiceNow platform and a few things that did not within a single year, and finally decided to take some of those skills out to the consulting world realizing that I can help more than just one organization not only learn well, from what we did well, but also learn from some of our mistakes and things we wish we didn't do when we were going through those. So just as important. I'm based here in Tampa, Florida. So we're happy to have Brady back. And if you're sad about that, love to chat about it in the chat window.

Greg Irwin  3:09  

Awesome, Joshua. Thank you. All right, Jesse. Let's do it. Quick Intro.

Jesse Nocon  3:15  

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jesse Nocon. I'm a platform architect here at NTT Data Acorio, I've been working in ServiceNow for around five years and actually come from an administration and operations as well as a programmatic background before that, focusing my areas of the platform that I focus on primarily around here, asset management, custom applications, ITSM, as well as IT operations management, but I've got a pretty good understanding of, of the platform as a whole, really excited to talk about some of the the outcomes that we've had with our clients since they moved up to the brand new version of ServiceNow. San Diego today. There's a lot of particularly awesome experience based features that are a part of that release, that folks are getting a lot of value out of and are really making the platform something that's enjoyable to use, which is, you know, can you know, it has been a common complaint in the past. So it's really excited to maybe if somebody wants to talk about that dive dive as deep as you want on that today.

Greg Irwin  4:21  

Awesome. Thanks, Jesse. All right. Kaushik. Let's close it off here. Give a quick intro and replace.

Kaushik Nanavati  4:27  

All right, so I've been in service management for, I don't know 30 years and I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem for about coming up to eight years now. I started off as a customer, but most of my career has been consulting and helping clients get the value out of your investments when when you when you make that investment towards the solutions, and I'm part of the advisory team here at Acorio. And what we do is we work with clients to understand what is it that the business is actually trying to get out of your investment? And then trying to tie it to Okay, if that's what you're trying to do? What are the things you should focus on? How do you prioritize those? And then once you start rolling those out, try to not do everything in one fell swoop because it will take forever. So how do you make sure that you you incrementally add value so that your sponsors your, you know, your the folks with will the money strings, skip seeing the value as you ask for more and more investment into that platform? And then how do you measure it and you show that value back to your sponsors, but also understand where you need to do cause corrections? When you find that, okay, well, I was expecting so and so outcome. And instead of this outcome I'm seeing, you know, okay, I encouraged this behavior, because I was measuring so and so. So trying to take those back. And using the feedback loop. This is what we have, you know, clients actually get out of the out of advisory. So I'm excited to work on all parts of the ServiceNow platform, even those that I know nothing about. Because in the end, it's about understanding what the client is trying to do, and then figuring out what value you're going to get for them. And so maybe nothing about might be a stretch, but not necessarily being the expert. And in terms of challenging Joshua and the whole Brady thing. So Tammy, Amy, I can see that we've got a lot of people here from the Boston area. I joined your site. That one I'm from the Boston area. So yeah, we'll we haven't got our our act figured out. I know you're the New England, folks. But hopefully this year,

Greg Irwin  6:45  

too many Boston errs here from my liking coming from New Jersey. I don't know I feel outnumbered. All right, so let's do this. We're gonna get into the we're gonna get into the details here. And I'm gonna ask Kaushik maybe to give that the real quick intro on Acorio. But I also want to set up the call, we're going to talk about hot topics around ServiceNow. But I want the group to direct us and make sure that this time is time well spent for you all. So do me a favor and jump into the chat. And I'm going to ask everybody, please, everybody, Trump in one thing that you most want to hear about, talk about in the forum. It could be CMDB. It could be cost. It could be HR, it could be employee hub, it could be Atlassian, it could be anything. Drop it in there. And let's make sure that we're covering things that you actually, you know, will benefit from in the conversation. And while we're doing that, all right, Kaushik, give us the real the quick elevator pitch. Who is everybody hearing from who's Acorio?

Joshua Young  7:51  

Oh, actually, I'll actually take this one, Greg. First, I want to say thank you to everyone for joining, we're very much looking forward to in an interactive conversation and hearing what you guys are interested in. And it's always nice to talk to folks in this kind of format. So we'll be excited to be quiet for a lot of this and listen to you guys. But for right now, just a little bit about who we are and why we're here. Acorio is specifically, historically, only a ServiceNow implementer. We've provided advisory services as well as implementation as well as things like managed services, whether we're managing out of your instance, or just providing additional support, like phone, a friend with our Acorio virtual assistants offerings. We absolutely have distinction across each of the unique practices. But as you heard Jesse mentioned previously, we are now a part of NTT DATA. So we're taking that boutique feel that hopefully folks who have been in the ServiceNow ecosystem for a while have heard of us the Acorio, we're taking that boutique feel global. And that's really what we're trying to do is make sure that we're aligning those real world business outcomes throughout your entire ServiceNow journey to align against those business session locations for whatever it is that you're trying to work on, which are some of the things that we'll talk about that you're entering and chat here today. So we're we operate across the entire platform, we have practice leads across all of those things, as well as different services, things like UI, and whatnot. But I have hundreds of implementations under our belts, not only as Acorio, but also individually as we've done as our you know, in new guys shoes as clients before we came into this world. So really excited to speak with you guys today. And if you have any questions about the company or any of us, we're definitely happy to talk about that at the conclusion of the roundtable today, but very interested to hear from everybody here and what you're what you're trying to figure out or how we can potentially help each other.

Greg Irwin  9:54  

By the way, so Joshua, thank you and we're not going to bury the lead. If there's an opportunity or challenge you've got, whether it's managed or strategy or what have you. That's what a quarry is here for. But let's, with that, let's move into the meat of the conversation. And Joshua, I'm gonna have you go first. Everyone hear from Eric Russell Catalino. Amy, John, good topics. We're going to cover this. But first, I'm going to ask Joshua to give us his Hi, Joshua, what's one thing that you're seeing a lot of this summer in terms of initiatives, challenges? Hey, we've got something we're working on. What what are you most actively working on with your customers? Yeah, great

Joshua Young  10:43  

question. And this changes every time we do this, but one thing that's usually a constant is HR service delivery. So I didn't see a tonne of that in the chat. But that is something that's happening a lot across the industry. And we're seeing that as one of our primary drivers across the entire platform, people were really looking to improve and build on top of retention strategies were reduce or minimize attrition. We've all heard about what's happened over the past year in terms of, you know, the the great, whatever, let's not, let's not say it, let it come come for us. There has been a focus on enhancing that employee experience to make sure that they're having a delightful experience, and they want to stay just like anytime we roll out any implementation. For anything that we're trying to work on, we need to make sure that that first impression is a good one, because we know those last, and then that then they don't change. Similarly, something that I am seeing in the chat a little bit and are probably number two item is around item or asset management or even more, more specifically getting into things around the CMDB. So not only how do we handle hardware asset or software, but also how do we ingest things through the item space and maybe HLA through logs to start populating as opposed to traditional methods of discovery, to populate those those kinds of things. So those are some really hot button items that are that are definitely coming up HR SD has been pretty consistent, but it is really coming back to the forefront. Again, I think with what we're seeing a lot of this summer in particular.

Greg Irwin  12:17  

Josh, I gotta ask you, the cynic in me says, retention is definitely important. And you want to make use of the system you've got, but how much of a real impact does it have on retention? Just putting in a better employee portal? Like, you know, I get it, I get it people who are remote need access to the assets of the business and access to applications and can find things. But does it actually result in a better experience and a measured better experience or measure? better retention?

Joshua Young  12:54  

Yeah, really great question, Greg. So tying some of that asset components to an employee experience is definitely something I want to talk about. And I'll have Jesse actually talk a little bit more about that. But overarching in terms of that experience, making sure someone gets their laptop on their first day of work, or better yet, before their first day, or making sure that it has all the software on it that they need. They have the access that they need prior to their first day. So they're not spending their first day playing catch up wondering where do they need to go to find certain things, making sure they understand how to find their paycheck ahead of their first day, making sure we've captured all their information so that we really have employees hitting the ground running, and they're having all of these things, all these questions that everyone cares about, no one's working for free, right, taken care of before they start work so that they understand the organization has their stuff together. They care about the employee, they know what they need to get done to get it done quickly, efficiently, and will ultimately make sure that they can start doing the job that they were hired to do, when it comes to more around some of the asset implications or aspects of maybe resolving issues that people are having. I'll turn it over to Jesse to talk a little bit more around some of the things we're seeing in our time ITM strategy across both hardware and the software space.

Jesse Nocon  14:08  

Yeah, and and the first thing I would do there is is ServiceNow is gearing the tool and we're experiencing a lot more of creating a real true holistic enterprise asset management solution that isn't just focused on it. And I would say the biggest difference I've seen in the last three to four years right compared to what we were doing with our partners three or four years ago, compared to what we're doing with our partners now is that the stakeholders for asset management are no longer being driven directly from it. We have a lot more buy in from security, a lot more buy in from procurement and part of the value of service now in the sand Pro Tool, the hand Pro Tool and the upcoming enterprise asset management tool is being able to set up a a system where that those different areas can be measured in those different areas can be tracked in the in the value in the costs associated with each of those areas of the asset management lifecycle, you know, can ultimately be reported on analyzed and used in a way to help create a more efficient enterprise. I will say that procurement is and I think this is really going to help address what Catalino and hopefully I pronounced that right. What Catalina was asking about some improvements upcoming in and I think the, what Sam does really well right now. And asset management as a whole does really well, right now is normalise and apply industry standards and life cycles to, you know, to the different software models out there to the different hardware models out there. And ServiceNow has worked very hard with vendors, you know, like Microsoft Oracle, to make sure that the standards and that the way they normalized are acceptable, and can be used for audit and other purchasing purposes around those. What they haven't done well is integrating the procurement, integrating the vetting of, of, of different vendors, the negotiation with vendors, the contracting with vendors, and also what hasn't done well is present a true marketplace for software, hardware and other assets for end users. And that's where the efforts coming into up in Tokyo and and in San Diego. So there's going to be ways to handle your procurement and handle all of those different aspects that I was talking about, right from vetting of vendors, security, profiling, negotiation of contracts, actual purchasing, making that something that can be incorporated into the software lifecycle. And then they've developed a completely new front end for the purchasing of software that fits into the employee center, called shopping hub, which is a true marketplace that incorporates self service actions and can even assign some to dues for those folks. To to relieve some of the burden that that our procurement procurement folks may have, especially if they're operating out of disparate systems, multiple systems or a lot of our folks that procurement teams are working out of spreadsheets.

Kaushik Nanavati  17:23  

I've been fortunate enough to have to work with some some organizations where the problems that you described are are prevalent, and that is everything from Do I have enough people? What are those people doing? Oh, and the new shiny object came out from ServiceNow. So let's all look at that new shiny object. And what what we found is that you can, you can start solving this puzzle by first defining your the way services are delivered within service management. So start about, you know, thinking about the business as your end customer, let's say. And then you've got application operations, then you got service management operations, you got a process team, and then you got the platform team, right. So the way service flows is from the platform team giving, you know the plat ServiceNow as a platform to the process team. So they are the process team is now a customer of the platform. And then the service management, the people who are actually delivering changes and incidents and what have you, they are customers of the process team and so on, so forth. So what we found is that each place in the service value chain has a certain role to play in the delivery. So for example, the process team is required to provide the right efficient process to the people in the operations team. And so to be able to deliver that there is a certain level of skill that's required. So you need some knowledge, let's say if it's ITIL, then ITIL processes have its APM than its understanding of how, you know being being an enterprise architect as an example. But along with those skills come certain behaviors. So if you are, let's say a process owner, then you need to exhibit the behavior of I'm able to resolve conflict. And oftentimes, what we see is they've got all the skills, they got the technical skills to be able to deliver on a lot of these things. But when it comes to behaviors, suddenly they they are lacking. And so what we've been able to do is work with these organizations and say, Alright, here's the gap between where you want these people to be and where they need to be. And sometimes this gap is jumpable. That means you can bridge that gap, in which case you say let's put a mentoring plan for these folks to actually get to that level. And in some places, it's a complete mismatch. So identifying those gaps, and then saying, here's, here's what we nearly need is one of the ways that we've been able to help these organizations actually overcome that and of course, going back to what you just said, What about getting the C level suite to even accept that this There's an issue, right? So this is where these conversations are not necessarily with the process owner or the manager of the process sooner, you want to have these conversations with the people who are actually going to deliver, who are expecting the results from this team, and then you go in front of them and say, you can or cannot get those results. And the final thing in the final piece of that loop is, are these people empowered, right? You give all these people, all these designations, whether it's process owner or platform owner, and then when they have to make a decision, guess what, there are eight people who, who jump right on top of that person's out and say, No, Thou shalt not do this. So empowering that end. And this is the ask, you have to make off the leadership team, when they are asking you for results. Right? And I don't know if it's, it's kind of I'm in a in this in a better position, oftentimes, then then my clients because I come in as a consultant, and I'm able to tell them, you will fail because you don't have these people and they listened to me. But somehow, when my client has told their leadership that they're not listening to the same message, and I don't know, this is an asymmetrical kind of power, I guess. them listening to external consultants versus versus you. That's the big

Joshua Young  21:17  

thing. And like Catia was talking about the, you know, empowering your folks to make decisions. Equally important is stopping folks from over customizing things they shouldn't be. So the key phrase that's always been around ever since I've been working on this platform is, hey, can ServiceNow didn't we go? Yes, but But why? What are you trying to achieve? Is there a better way to accomplish that without customizing something? Will you get that feature? If you just wait for an upgrade? Can you wait? If not, what's the short term fix look like? And how do we address the metrics and reporting impact of those kinds of decisions so that we're not left years down the line holding a bag from what somebody else built before we ever got there, wondering how it ever got this way. So a lot of that human element still comes into play even there for how those decisions get made. But we see it all the time. I know Kaushik sees a little less Greenfield in the advisory space, because they're usually bringing them in to say, help us fix this. But in the implementation side, Jesse and I see Greenfield all the time, people understand, you know what, maybe we've gone down the route of domain separation, and we never should have, because that was only ever meant for MSPs. And not enough people told us no strongly enough for, you know, we built this years, even two years ago. But we over customized everything without deciding to maybe pay for the licencing. Or just understand and shift our frame of mind for how we were doing things and focus instead on what metrics we need to be able to make decisions. How do we make the process simpler for our people, as opposed to adding additional steps so that we can say we have processed automating those components in a different way, a different frame of mind? We do see those green fields come up quite a bit. Actually, I'm a reimplementation side of things as well. Not all the time, but sometimes.

Greg Irwin  23:17  

How do you how do you continue to lifecycle management and keep the managed system? Does anyone have a process that works? It?

Jesse Nocon  23:27  

Yeah, so I can go ahead and take this one. If you like, Greg, you got to Jesse, you got the bottleneck. So back when I did my introduction, right, one of those new one of those areas that I talked about having a lot of excitement wasn't the new experiences, functionalities that's really started with Rome has been expanded upon in San Diego to both to hit both sides of of the experience are the two most common experiences that users have in ServiceNow. One being the end user into being the Service Desk agents, right. The actual folks fulfilling, fulfilling the incidents, requests and other services coming in. There are now built in metrics within the platform that can be used to help measure that is deeper than how many of these have been submitted over the last month. Right. So some of those KPIs, you know, can look like, you know, how many active users have been on your portal in the last day? How many sessions are they creating? How long are the durations and then what actually events are they generating out of it, right? And that way, you can kind of measure Alright, maybe this catalog item isn't being used, because instead of folks, because every time somebody goes to view that page, they're being redirected to a knowledge article instead. And the knowledge article is so good that it's preventing 90% of these from ever coming in. So with those kinds of being able to to measure not only where are people going in the platform, but what are the different funnels right do they Did it funnel them to create a case to funnel them to view a knowledge article? Did they just do a search and then leave? Right? Oh, yeah, I'm just kind of curious was this even available. And so then you can, you can help understand that. And then also on those kinds of search terms and other knowledge articles, right, maybe somebody has to go to fi you can see somebody is their experience, a common experience is searching for something, then going through knowledge base and going in, and then only after that they're getting to the catalog. So you can optimize or change some of the search terms and change the way that your users are interacting and experiencing, or interacting with the platform in order to drive them to those areas. And then the final part of that AMI is that, with that knowledge, you can come in and say, you know, hey, this is not a, you know, this is something that's not being utilized. So can we merge this process with another one? Or came maybe, you know, should we be thinking about deprecating this service, and, and creating a new service that can fulfill this, but also provide value to another area of the platform to drive or another area of your business to drive drive efficiencies, right? One of the biggest areas that we tend to work with on those kind of re implementations or moving from a highly customized environment to a greenfield that Joshua was talking about is often very highly customized and highly robust catalogs. And we often work to move from a catalog with hundreds of items down to a capture, start with a catalog with with, with even 10s, or maybe, you know, 20s, or 30s, and reduce it by an order of magnitude. Because oftentimes, there can be so much in a catalog that the value of having so many bespoke services goes down, because it's just too much for people to digest. And then I know, we heard you talk about citizen developers a little bit. And I know Joshua would love to tackle that, because we've had some some great experience with how to enable citizen developers. Yeah,

Joshua Young  27:09  

citizen developers are definitely not something you should be doing if you're getting feedback that you have too many items in your catalog. But it can be a wonderful, powerful tool for not only engagement and people who want to learn about the platform, but also people who have specialized needs. Amy, one of the things you're describing is the great lifecycle of the service catalog, just like the lifecycle of an organization, the pattern of centralization, and then immediately, thereafter, diversification, so you're probably describing a situation where with some of that frustration, people are looking to consolidate, I'm guessing some of those some of those things are definitely headed down the right path. Citizen developer, probably don't want to expose in your prod environment, but maybe in your sub prod environment, you might be able to get some good ideas, when focus on how to do some of those things, typically get the best results from the people who actually own some of those requests. Today, if they've got someone on the team, who maybe wants to take a step up and stab at thinking rationally about how to potentially consolidate some of those things, and what the simpler paths might look like, or building out a more complex service request, if it means a simpler experience, and fewer things to pick from, from the catalog, you can get a lot of good information that way, we've definitely seen that work for a lot of customers, but it really depends on your, your, your, your employees, and you know how you know them better than we do. So that can that can go both ways, but we've seen that definitely provide a lot of value in the past.

Jesse Nocon  28:49  

Especially right, the work that ServiceNow has done with their partners, and that the work they've done to be able to put the tools in the platform to be able to discover infrastructure, and you know, whether it's physical or cloud based infrastructure, you're to work with the bespoke needs of different groups, right? So you can really even set up like a true, you know, walled garden completely segregated environments now, you know, with with the proper gov governance and session place where the incidence is discovering those things, but it's doing in a way where it's actually never crossing or touching firewalls, and that there can be manual reviews and intervention of data.

Essentially, that classic frame set view of ServiceNow, where you have the menu on top and the static filter navigator on the left and the framing our cases, right, it's framing your incidents, it's framing your CMDB records, everything within the platform, the data, the structure behind that hasn't changed, but the presentation of it has been updated to be to follow to follow Modern UI UX principles. To be a lot more responsive. It's a lot faster. Start. And then with that they've been they've added this workspace functionality on which they've been developing for a number of years. But I think it's really hit its maturation in that these workspaces that can be created, whether out of box or, you know, configured bespoke for an organization to enable folks to be able to, to for automated actions and playbooks to be applied to data in a context specific fashion, meaning, for example, Russell's group there, they're wanting to monitor, you know, 1000, different workstations. I'm just given a, a generic example. And out of the 1000 of those, there's some risk profile that's been found on 10. So an action can be created, that that appears contextually within these workspaces where one of Russell's team can go and see. All right, right, the report says we have 10 At the risk. Now I can click this button, and it's going to take me through those 10, one by one. And I can checklist off and complete the manual assessment I have to do based off of the analytics, content specific playbook that we've created tied to the reporting. And all in one in one in one tap

Greg Irwin  31:13  

at the top of our hour. So we're going to wrap it up here with a closing comment from from the team at Acorio and again without hiding the lead. These guys have been gurus, We fortunately have the opportunity to work with lots of partners. And I'm proud to have the opportunity to work with Jesse and and and Joshua and Kaushik. And and of course, if they can be useful to you all, you let us know. Guys, give us a takeaway. Joshua, I'm coming back to you, you and I have done these the most over the years. What's what's one takeaway you got for our group here in this hour? Yeah,

Joshua Young  31:53  

if you're looking for reasons to relocate to a different geographic location, I can't help you. However, what I can do is just mentioned, hey, if anyone's like to continue these conversations, if you're curious about how we can help, but your particular organization and we're not already engaged, please reach out, let Greg know, reach out to either Kaushik. Jesse, or myself on LinkedIn. And let's keep the conversation going. At the end of the day, what everyone's been talking about on this call is the ServiceNow journey. It really is that lifecycle of consolidation and then decentralization, it's, it's what happens often, not just in a specific tool set, but specifically when we're talking about a strategic platform like ServiceNow. It's inevitable, right? And so helping you guys figure out the best practices for how to deal with those kinds of things, take advantage of the new functionality that's coming down the pipeline, as well as set you up for critical path dependency success, whether you're building out your CMDB whether you're getting into the world of SEC ops and building out soar and automating some of those components. We're here to help you with that. And very excited to continue the conversation with everybody here today. Thank you for the time.

Greg Irwin  33:03  

Awesome. By Kaushik Jesse, any closing comments for the group?

Kaushik Nanavati  33:08  

I'll just say this one thing, it's very easy to get overwhelmed by everything that ServiceNow has to offer. Make sure that you're you're using not technology, but what you're trying to accomplish as your anchor, and then drive based on that. I think you'll see more success that way than just running out for the next shiny thing. All right,

Jesse Nocon  33:30  

I'll just reinforce what Patrick had to say there and that the people on the process side are just as important as the

Greg Irwin  33:35  

tool side. Are Already folks. That's it, everybody. Thank you all for joining. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy your summer. And I look forward to speaking with everybody on a future session. That thanks a lot everybody.