Greg Irwin  0:18

Nice to meet everybody. I'm Greg Irwin, we're going to have more people joining us here, and that's great, you know, we keep it, we keep this pretty light. We've been hosting BWG. For those of you who know, some of those of you who don't, we were on these discussion groups, we do about 10, we'll probably up to 15 of them a day, on every topic, security, productivity suites, you know, doing more on digital digital enablement, and a great series here on productivity software, and a lot on our with Acorio and connection to ServiceNow. So I've gotten to know Grant real well over the years. And nice meeting, Eric Lewis, what I'd like to do is just rules of the road, and then we'll do some intros, and then we'll get into the conversation. First, what you should expect. We learn a lot in these forums, by telling stories, I like to go for the real stories, basically comes best from you all. So what I'd like to do, truly is to go around the group, and talk to people about what are your priorities? What are your biggest challenges around managing, evolving, improving your ServiceNow environments, really simple stuff, to share what you can obviously hold back anything confidential. But it's the most interesting stuff. I mean, you have Acorio can, if these guys are the Guru's of ServiceNow. And they can tell you lots of different stories, and we're gonna get some of that from Eric and Grant. But I just want to encourage people, if you're able to share an anecdote about what's happening in your world, it'll in aggregate, it's going to make this a really interesting session. We use this chat window throughout. So if you need to keep quiet or, or you don't want to interrupt the flow, please drop your comment into the chat, reply to others. This is as interactive the more interactive we go here, the better and more valuable it is chats a big part of it. Lastly, the group is amazing. So I want to basically help you all expand your personal networks. So one mission, one goal that I ask everybody is to make one new contact across this group doesn't have to be Acorio doesn't have to be BWG. But you're going to hear some really smart people really engage people in this session. And I want to encourage you to take advantage of it. You can go directly over LinkedIn, or find us here at BWG. We'll make an intro on your behalf. Alright, let's get started. Oh, sorry. One more thing, cameras. If you're able to turn on your camera, please do. It makes it you know, that much more engaging? If not, you have something in the background or kids running around. That's fine. Understood. All right. Let's get right into it. Hey, Grant, would you jump in and do do us a favor, introduce yourself. And please introduce Acorio.

Grant Pulver  3:22

I'll introduce myself really quick. But Eric's going to we did paper rock scissors earlier and he lost. So he gets to do the Acorio. Intro. So I'm Grant Pulver and part of our customer success organization along with Eric. Let Eric explain the advisory portion of it that he's a part of, but our organization really is sits between the customer and our delivery organization and ServiceNow and tries to help really just get things done at the end of the day. Right. So we we encompass the engagement management organization, which are our project managers, delivery managers, advisory that Eric will tell you about then we also have the customer success executives. And then the whole function of this group is to make sure you're successful throughout your journey with not only Acorio but also with ServiceNow help navigate some of those waters. And then in the end with the advisory Oregon with the success executives, help on your organizational journey as well. Platform agnostically

Greg Irwin  4:28

What about some, give us some basics, like how many employees you know, what, you know, are you are you a global firm? Are you you know, regional just you know, who's who is Acorio from from a very high level. Let me cover that one. Great. Yep, absolutely. Okay.

Eric Lewis  4:45

I'll introduce myself like Grant did, but Acorio is a pure play ServiceNow partner. We are part of the NTT DATA company. It's happened about about two years ago and basically liquidity, what we focus on is really helping our clients maximize the value of the ServiceNow platform. You know, we are in 2022, we were the workflow provider of the year for service. Now we have one other awards. So we've been around this industry for about about 10 years now, providing ServiceNow, focused organizations, mostly here in the US. But with that NTT merger, now our capability is global, because of what NTT had with them, we do things like looking at vertical solutions. You know, we spend a lot of times especially with our NTT partners, we're looking at vertical solutions, again, trying to maximize the value and really help our clients understand ServiceNow, North America, we're about about 200 consultants. We have several master certified consultants, we are one of the largest, continuing one of the largest number of certifications per employee across the the industry. So myself personally, I'm Eric Lewis, I am part of our advisory services. And as Grant said, you know, I spend a lot of time with our executive level clients, really focusing on helping them establish that strategy established the roadmaps, which we're here to talk about, really hate oversimplify it, but how do you maximize the value of this thing that you've purchased? How do you get the value out of it? How do you take and create that roadmap? How do you you know, make it a strategic solution? How do you, you know, enable it across the enterprise? And so I'm a Senior Principal and then organization.

Greg Irwin  6:44

Awesome. All right. Hey, guys, you the drill is we're going to tell some stories about how people are managing their environments, their roadmaps. And I'd like to ask you, maybe Eric, maybe you can start us off. Tell us a story that you're seeing with one of your customers. You don't have to tell us to pretty and tell us about the prettiest story. You know, you don't have to tell us the ugliest. But tell us we're fairly typically, what's one of your customers doing that, you know, interesting in terms of their navigation,

Eric Lewis  7:20

I'll give you my latest and greatest. It's actually I have a client that has been on the platform for 10 plus years. They have highly customized it. They had a new CEO, C CIOs start about two years ago. And she is part of the ServiceNow Community. She's part of the pack. And she has basically put the mandate down that she wants the platform to become a strategic objectives. And so Acorio has been called in from our advisory services perspective to evaluate their platform. And what that entails is we've looked at sort of the top, what is the strategy? What's the organizational alignment in that strategy, meaning that are all her directs on the same page? Are they different ideas, take a look at their processes their governance model, and take a look at basically, you know, how they're, they're doing their things. And then, you know, go back to the covers of the platform. And take a look at those customizations. Long story short, after about 24 weeks of, you know, meeting with people interviews, reviewing material, we are basically recommending a platform restart forum. And so now we're in the process of what does that look like creating a very extensive roadmap, because it's not just about bringing the technology up and running, it's about building all those things that will cause that technology to fail, you know, getting solid processes in place policy standards, setting up governing committees, operating models, which they don't have today. So real world story. And it's true. And it's actually something we see quite frequently in advisory services, as a lot of organizations need to unwind a lot of things that were done for a reason. But now they want to know, whether it's his digital transformation topic that becomes popular, has become popular, or it's some, you know, financial initiative that's very common, what we're seeing

Grant Pulver  9:23

Eric talk for a minute about how that pulled dichotomy of the multiple instances all customizations, all of that and some of the discussions that you've had at the cielo levels with the whole organizational structure and how to optimize that for the new environment as you're looking at simplifying workflows and simplifying processes

Eric Lewis  9:46

Yeah, so the really the way we started out was, it was very clear early on in the conversation that not all her direct reports were on the same page. Whether it was lack of understanding of the platform or you know their own One point solutions that they wanted to put in place, that became the first challenge. Really, then the next phase of, you know, working with them is really looking at their organizational structure to the point Grant brings up is that, you know, as an example, they had about five or six of the core functions managed across seven different organizations. And so they were losing their governance, they're losing their consistency. And so basically, really what we were doing is, you know, I hate to oversimplify it, but it is get everybody on the same page have a strategy. So we narrowed their strategy down to, what are you gonna use this platform for, we had four, four real bullet points that that started the conversation it was going to help with their workflow is going to govern their infrastructure, it was going to be their central source of data. And I forget what the fourth one is, but there were four basically, strategic directives that the platform would be used for. Then from those strategic directives, what we did then is we talked about, okay, what will your organization look like? You know, there's there's two directions, you can go with that you can go with your full stack kind of mentality where you put everything in one organization, or you can have a platform owner and the modules dispersed. And through conversation, they went with the latter.

Greg Irwin  11:22

Let me let me interrupt just for a moment, I want to stay on the story. But in parallel, I'd like everybody to take a moment, I drop into the chat, the one aspect of around ServiceNow that you most want to hear about from everybody on this call. It could be roadmap, it could be consolidation, it could be anything. But I'd like to hear from you all, then we have yours CSDM. I'm going to I'm going to tee that one up. But I'd like everybody to take a moment, please drop into the chat, the one thing you most want to hear about from others putting Acorio on this call. Eric, I'd like to stay on the story and ask you how do you they how are they going to measure success? What are their KPIs?

Eric Lewis  12:17

There's several of them, we actually developed. I wish I had a brochure and we're dissect this. That was actually one of the big things that we tried to do here, it's it's really easy to talk about all of this stuff, and, you know, throw a lot of, you know, fancy things out. But at the end of the day, that's, that's, that's where the rubber meets the road. And when we come back in six or nine months, we wanted to have some KPIs to measure where they were at. And we wanted to give them some things to look at. So they could course correct in between the advisory team coming back in, you know, in a in a future date to kind of help them readjust because you, you know, whatever roadmap you put in place is not going to be the same and in a certain timeframe. So yeah, we did establish KPIs. Some of them were around performance of individual groups, some of them were platform usage. There are some satisfaction, you know, they were real big on customer satisfaction in user satisfaction. So there there were about 12 KPIs all together. It sounds like a lot. But they were focused on individual areas.

Grant Pulver  13:34

You know, the subject that we're talking about is roadmaps. Right. And this is a core component of that. We talked on our team about vertical and horizontal expansion. And in this case, it's kind of vertical, right? We want to improve from the single app and start to mature it all the way up to the CMMI. Five and automation and an optimization pieces. Part of your roadmap. As you're going through this Operation Center, it's okay to consolidate but don't take barrack. Don't let the bureaucracy take control of everything. And it's really important that you start looking at that channel optimization. Just because something's in a single place doesn't make it optimized. All we want to do it allows you to start to recognize where your tickets how your tickets are coming in, are they coming in to do the venue that you want them to? You know, easy what single self help stuff should go into knowledge or level zero? quickie answer, password resets should be level zero, easy answers and you know, chat and stuff like that priority ones, phone calls, start looking at how you're optimizing that and that as part of your roadmap. You know, looking at the technology, look at the people and look at the process and have that journey to get to that optimized location for each of those issues.

Eric Lewis  14:56

That was the conversation that we had with client that I was was profile LNG is, you know, they're they're big, the conversation and we were kind of laying the pieces out is that centralized model actually became more resource intensive, then, you know, kind of what we ended up with was really a hybrid, we had the core functionality of the platform in one organization. And then you know, the, as an example, I TBM was owned by their PMO, and so on. And so we looked at the model, you know, the big things to Grant's point where you got that communication piece, the politics and all of that, really, there was that did come into play and what we were looking at, but we did have those conversations, and what really manifested itself was a much bigger organization centrally than utilizing some of the resources that they had spread out throughout their org

Grant Pulver  15:51

I think what's interesting is I'm seeing like it, most ITs have went through and either succeeded or paused, I won't say failed, paused a couple times through this over the last 10 years, and it's starting to come back again. But for the last three or four years, it's really been HR and Global Business Services organizations that have been going through that journey of starting to combine organizations and bring them into a single operations type center, to be able to optimize and take advantage of some of the lower cost locations, and things like that to be able to move through.

Greg Irwin  16:41

Anyone have experience, good, bad, ugly, with Cloud provisioning, governance off service now. Don't come across that very much, at least running these forums, I'll tell you, I gotta go gotta go to the Guru's Eric, Eric, and Grant, do you guys see,

Grant Pulver  16:59

we've done a couple of projects around it more so in the Amazon space than anywhere else, one of the important things is to purchase the discovery along with it right, so that you're not only just provisioning, but you're also able to manage and then take advantage of some of the self healing. If I can set you up Joe, with some people to have some conversations with customers outside, you know, not a sales pitch, but just to help expand your network a little bit. That's a big part of what Greg talks about in yours, using us as not only an opportunity to talk to us, but expanding your network through that. And I can help get us some names of some platform owners or sis admins that run that type of function. Yeah,

Eric Lewis  17:45

thank you. I was just going to add a again, I personally haven't seen it. But I also work with our industry solutions and our German counterparts, it's starting to become very big over there. And they're starting to do, I don't want to call them customizations to the service or custom ICOMOS custom maps to help with the provisioning of AWS and some local cloud providers over there. But it's just it's kind of in its infant phases, but I think we can, like Grant was saying, get you in commercial with some of those people.

Greg Irwin  18:20

Has anyone had success, saying the start time of year contracts, post implementation, not post contract?

Grant Pulver  18:30

That's hard, you know, like any salesperson of any sort, right? At the end of months, or at the end of quarters or end of fiscal year, pressure gets ratcheted up. And there's discounts that are applied to help meet numbers. And so I've worked with a couple customers, and we've sat down and really did the math. By purchase today at x price, how long will it take me to implement and or if I wait to purchase, is it going to be worth it at the end of the day to wait to purchase and the math usually works out where if you take advantage of this concept, the other quarters are and of yours, that does give you some tangible savings. It's just not the amount that it would be if you were able to implement it tomorrow. I think there's two really two cases there's there's the proactive purchase of it of having a roadmap in place understanding when you can take advantage of the application understanding how long it's going to take you to configure it, or to have somebody configure it for you, and then really what your expected savings or business values are to write because you have to help justify the license purchase from a value proposition to be able to do that. And having those times online with your purchase is important. But at the same time, somebody walks up and offers you a free car and you're only 15 years old take the free car You think it's important? You know, you had to learn the hard way. Unfortunately, I wish we went to talk two months before you made the purchase. Because as they include those in the licensing, the larger licensing deals now, or even make it part of the fees. Make sure that you write in, you know, there's an early discussion on roadmaps of when things will be available, when you're going to turn them on. And then as part of your negotiation, you can talk about what months, give or take a quarter maybe that you're going to start paying for those. But yeah, that happens. And I mean, that's, that's the hard part, even, you know, Eric's way smarter than I am. And I try my hardest to keep up. But it's hard for us to wrestle. I mean, there's so much changing, we just had a conversation with a customer a couple of weeks ago that were given conflicting information, it was because something totally changed in San Diego, that we had no idea about. And, you know, just keeping up with that super important. I think once you get that baseline, I do think having help not only from just a facilitation and a knowledge standpoint, but just to have a second set of eyes on something to move it through. You saw it internally is pretty important out of the gate. I think anybody can manage a roadmap after it's set up. But having a true understanding of what the platform looks like. And then having the business side participate from what business needs there are, to get that first one set up is really is really the hard part.

Eric Lewis  21:40

When you talk roadmaps, and this is one of the things that I spend a lot of time with our clients because they I see them falling into, I don't want to call it a trap or a mistake. I think it's a it's something I learned over time I, I I have grey hair, but I keep it short. So you can't tell them how big I am. I've been doing this for 32 years. And I always tell people, you those roadmaps become so product focused in organizations look at them, and they lose sight of the critical things that are that that are go to success in a roadmap and you lose sight of the org roadmap, your business has changed in probably every six months, how often are your processes and things around you changing? People don't think of that stuff in in they look at these products and they they get frustrated that they're, they should be going to something else that shouldn't be expanding. I always tell people there there's five, four things depending on how you want to look at it that your roadmap should always include when we do them for you, we actually create swim lanes. And we lay these out. The first one, is your your strategy, your policies that are guiding you do they influence your platform, the org structure, what is changed around you that could impact how the platform is used, or how the platform operates. processes in your governance models are just as critical. And then I think that's that's all of them. Yeah. And then the last one is obviously the platform itself. And then I for some of my clients lately that have read really organizational challenges, I haven't OCM roadmap, because they forget about communicating to people and keeping those things up. So I, you know, I just want to add that it's real easy to get lost in that product, that product thing and forget about all the other things that will, you know, hinder that product from the product roadmap from becoming successful. So I spend majority of my career working for Fortune 100 financial institutions. And the whole agile conversation is very interesting because of the audit and regulatory, you know, tracking that you have to do obviously ITSM especially around change management. You know, it's it's just a very interesting dichotomy. And I don't there's not a right answer. I haven't found the right answer and in all my experience because you know, a couple of things that I've seen with this conversation first off is agile means something different to every organization that we talked to. It no matter how standard it is what people want to do, it is drastically different with every organization. I think the other thing that I can really tell you is really level set yourself because what I find with those organizations that I'm talking to their maturity in their eyes are in two different places, meaning they want to adopt all of these things, but they aren't mature. know if they're at the beginning phases of something and they're trying to either select a product or service now doesn't do something or Jira, or I don't have this into maturity doesn't match up with where they are in their journey. I see a lot of people lose time and energy over that, that specific function. And then, you know, from from what we do see, we see a lot of organizations really that are doing the push from ServiceNow, the push and pull from ServiceNow to JIRA. But again, everyone is so drastically different because you talked to one organization asking what agile means to them? And that's the first question we always ask, you get a different answer every time.

Greg Irwin  25:41

Or have you been able to establish clear processes and roles and roles responsibilities that basically intermix JIRA and ServiceNow?

Eric Lewis  25:57

Well, we've been able to establish them, but they're not. They're not what I would call consistent across every organization because again, it's that that concept of when you say agile, what does it mean to that organization?

Greg Irwin  26:11

But I think it's fine, that it's different for various companies, as long as you're able to establish, yeah, we're able to assemble a company. So you know, right, the process starts here. And this is a point at which it transitions. This is way which transitions back and basically, you know, define, still define the process across the two systems. Yeah, absolutely. Then in that case, yeah.

Grant Pulver  26:39

When you're looking at that whole ownership model, and things in different places, and as you're looking at how to move things around into a more easier and manageable environment, always look at those from the customer view, right? Don't look at it from an IT view of level one, noc, whatever that is, look at from your customers view, because it's really, really important, as you're starting to put that roadmap together, that you're looking at it from the customer's view, because the customer doesn't give a crap who resolves their issue, right? They want to have some communication, acknowledgement and a resolution. And when we start talking about how to move that through the whole cluster of tools, and movements between those, the customer doesn't care, they don't care if it's solved an email or and a spreadsheet, or it's all about their communication and their transparency, so they know that you're working on it, and then ultimately, that it gets resolved. So the reason I say that is, as you're looking at your roadmap, you're using different tools to resolve and moving things around, then going from the customer standpoint, and start to bring those data points into a single point where they can see, you know, maybe the JIRA is bringing it back or the chair was bringing it back into the ServiceNow tables. But at least your customers got a single view of what's going on with their tickets.

Eric Lewis  28:12

And Grant hears me say these all the time, because I really have to educate all of our clients on you know, top top 10 or top six top 10 Selling David Letterman, top six reasons for failure across the platform. First and foremost, no strategy. Second, organizational alignment. Third, no governance of the platform. Fourth, process challenges whether they're documented followed not followed roles, responsibilities, use your imagination, lack of platform maintenance is fifth, and then inability to evolve. So you know, to, to Lee's point, just making the comment about we've done some customizations. Every organization that I've consulted with I've had 50 clients since I've been in Acorio 50 plus. And there are, at least every one of them has blocked themselves out of some functionality, because they have done a customization and they haven't kept the bigger picture in mind. So glad you're getting in front of it Lee, because that is absolutely the right thing to do. Especially, you know, with CSDM. I know there was a comment earlier, I see so many people that especially the people that have been there for 10 plus years that created tables, because they had foresight, but now it's part of the the application, and they've never made that transition from those customizations to out of the box. get ahead of that now, every one of you that should be something on your roadmap, get away from your customizations, because they will start to impact you, you know, Tokyo and beyond.

Grant Pulver  29:45

So, yeah. I mean, we're all here for a shameless plug, right? There's a amazing speech that was given at both knowledge events multiple times. About I'm kidding. It was my There is the slideways out there on ServiceNow his website, where you can go listen to it, and look at the slide where I'm future proofing your roadmap. So what that means is where you need to start, what you need to think about some tips and tricks in the middle on how to gain adoption and move through. We talk a little bit about helping to get funding by using security and risk management as a initiatives that are covered in our roadmap. And then ultimately, kind of the five takeaways to, to think about as you're digging in.

Greg Irwin  30:33

Folks, that that was an excellent session, we're at the the new top of the hour, and it was quick. And it was good stories, although of course, we scratched the surface. So I'm going to remind you, the goal here is to drive community and to learn. So take me up on my offer and suggestion to make one new connection across the group. Again, go directly or come to us here. And we'll be happy to help help you find each others. And I know, we have at least one action. For for Joe, around cloud, cloud governance and provisioning. Um, Eric, and grant guys, thank you so much. Would you any closing comments here for the group?

Grant Pulver  31:23

Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, I agree of, we've probably done 12 of these together, Greg, and this was by far the, the easiest to get through and the quickest because of the content, the conversation that was there. But as you're putting these roadmaps together, you know, it's in my slide where but bring in people to help you bring in some of your detractors, bring in some of your promoters, don't just focus on your promoters, bringing their detractors and help them and let them help build the roadmap, and how build where you're going and what you're doing. Because then they have a sense of ownership too. And that helps them with adoption and helps get their adoption, or get their excitement out there to the people that would come to that normally, to to poopoo on some solution to bring people in early and often. Eric will talk to you for about 10 more hours on governance if you want to. And that's part of it. But bring those people in and let them have a say and don't develop in isolation.

Eric Lewis  32:26

Only thing I will add is I put it earlier in the chat. I think when you're developing your roadmaps, you need to consider the other things that influenced the platform. It's not just the platform itself. If you focus on the technology alone, you're you're always going to be sadly disappointed in your roadmaps gonna go awry. There are things that influence that technology, and you need to include those in your roadmap and factor them in, they may not be swimlanes they may not be Gantt rows, or however you want to look at it. But you do need to factor them in. So I will talk to you about governance for 10 hours if you would like

Grant Pulver  33:06

me if you guys could talk to him about it.

Greg Irwin  33:09

I'm gonna pass on that now. That's that's time for us to wrap. Alright, everybody. Thank you all. Eric and Grant. Thank you and everybody. Look forward to speaking with you on the next one. We do these on a regular basis. If if you want to expand it to others on your team, we welcome Thanks. Thanks, everybody.