ServiceNow: Discovering the release of San Diego

Mar 29, 2022 1:30 PM2:30 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeaways

If you’re familiar with the latest industry solutions software, you may have heard of ServiceNow. ServiceNow’s cloud-based platform aims to automate IT business management. Recently, ServiceNow has rolled out its newest platform release, San Diego. But, do you know what it does or how to use it effectively yet?

This update has expanded upon existing tools and works to solve modern pain points. One of its main developments lies in the employee center, which fosters agent-based discovery, more meaningful workstreams, and area-specific solutions. What other elements of the San Diego release can help your business run smoothly?

In this virtual event, Greg Irwin is joined by Grant Pulver, Vice President of Client Success Executives at Acorio, Jesse Nocon, Solutions Architect at Acorio, and Kristin Elliott, Client Success Executive at Acorio. They share the details on ServiceNow’s new San Diego release, the features that solve modern pain points, and how the platform is producing powerful ROI.

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

 

  • Why the Acorio team is excited about ServiceNow’s San Diego release
  • How ServiceNow’s agent workspace is expanding
  • Where should new clients begin: Rome or San Diego?
  • Improvements in release management
  • Why automation is crucial for the big-picture issues like inflation and labor shortages
  • Producing powerful ROI through ServiceNow
  • The Acorio team breaks down the benefits of instance consolidation
  • How has the DevOps module improved through the San Diego release?
  • Taking advantage of Greenfield implementation
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Event Partners

Acorio

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

Connect with Acorio

Guest Speakers

Grant Pulver

VP of Client Success at Acorio

Grant Pulver is the Vice President of Client Success Executives at Acorio, a ServiceNow exclusive consultancy. He’s been in the technology space for over 25 years, specializing in ITSM, CSM, GBS, and customer experience. Before Acorio, Grant held leadership positions at Fruition Partners, AIG, and Celgene.

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.

Jesse Nocon

Solution Architect

Jesse Nocon is a Solutions Architect at Acorio. He joined the company in 2017 as an Associate Consultant before moving up the ranks. Jesse enjoys developing meaningful technologies and services, and he’s committed to opening previously inaccessible opportunities. Jesse is also the Head Rugby Coach for Cambridge Public Schools.

Kristin Elliott

Client Success Executive at Acorio

Kristin Elliott is a Client Success Executive at Acorio. In this role, she employs her vast experience on the ServiceNow platform to help the company’s most strategic customers achieve their business outcomes. Before joining the team at Acorio, Kristin was a Senior Business and Technology Delivery Manager for Accenture, where she specialized in ServiceNow project delivery.

Event Moderator

Grant Pulver

VP of Client Success at Acorio

Grant Pulver is the Vice President of Client Success Executives at Acorio, a ServiceNow exclusive consultancy. He’s been in the technology space for over 25 years, specializing in ITSM, CSM, GBS, and customer experience. Before Acorio, Grant held leadership positions at Fruition Partners, AIG, and Celgene.

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.

Jesse Nocon

Solution Architect

Jesse Nocon is a Solutions Architect at Acorio. He joined the company in 2017 as an Associate Consultant before moving up the ranks. Jesse enjoys developing meaningful technologies and services, and he’s committed to opening previously inaccessible opportunities. Jesse is also the Head Rugby Coach for Cambridge Public Schools.

Kristin Elliott

Client Success Executive at Acorio

Kristin Elliott is a Client Success Executive at Acorio. In this role, she employs her vast experience on the ServiceNow platform to help the company’s most strategic customers achieve their business outcomes. Before joining the team at Acorio, Kristin was a Senior Business and Technology Delivery Manager for Accenture, where she specialized in ServiceNow project delivery.

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Discussion Transcription

Greg Irwin  0:18  

I'm Greg Irwin. I'm one of the partners at BWG and we've been fortunate to be running a series with Acorio about all things ServiceNow. Today, we're, you know, we've headlined this the San Diego release, talk a little bit about what's in it, you know, what's exciting, let's, you know, what's, what's important to know about it. But then also, if you've been on any of my calls, you know, I, I'm very big on just group discussion, and learning from each other stories, and really hoping to learn the good, the bad, the ugly from just different organizations and their ServiceNow teams. So, you know, drive the conversation, now we use the chat window throughout. So I will encourage you every which way I can I get your comments in there so that we know where to focus, believe me, me and the team from Acorio, we can go lots of different threads here, want to make sure we're hitting the points that matter to you. And then lastly, kind of one of my, you know, we started this whole business around the idea of driving community. And I'm going to remind everybody here, make a personal goal for yourself, you got one hour, make one new connection across this group, you can go directly over LinkedIn, you can say, Hey, I'd like to meet Catalino, whatever it is, come back to us here we'll help people connect. And I promised that some of the best value that we can we can offer is just bringing the community together, people find jobs, people find, you know, Project help people come up with good ideas and resources throughout. So please take advantage of that. Alright, without further ado, Jesse, Grant and Kristin are joining from Acorio Grant, why don't you start us off, give the the little elevator pitch on Acorio. And a little bit on yourself.

Grant Pulver  2:18  

Oh, let Kristin introduce Acorio in a sec. But Jesse, and I'll introduce ourselves, and then she can introduce herself and then give that elevator pitch. She's much better speaker than I am. Grant over I lead our customer engagement and manage and success team. So what we do is we kind of work at the executive level on our team and manage the programs. But also, as importantly, become strategic partners in help with the direction on platform expansion, platform maturity, try to help companies move upwards and sideways across the platform from a success standpoint. And then also, you know, a lot of our time is spent proving the value of the system we hear a lot of customers talking about, we've invested a million dollars in ServiceNow, or we've invested 500,000, whatever that is, and then they get pressure from the board on where that value is and how to prove it. So we'll work with a lot of our customers on what metrics to use and how to use them and how to correlate them into business success. And one of the biggest things that we really try to work with is understanding what your business goals are and how your business works so that we can help push those metrics in that direction and make sure that the platform is set in alignment with those business objectives. awesome to see

Greg Irwin  3:33  

our perfect way to get started, Jesse, and get at

Jesse Nocon  3:37  

it. Yeah, thank you, Grant. Thank you, Greg. everybody, my name is Jesse, no economist solution architect here at Acorio. I've been with Acorio for about five years, and actually spent the first two and a half years on our delivery side as a technical consultant. So from a technical perspective, I'm very familiar with the intricacies of ServiceNow and how it works. And I'm here today to speak in to that expertise, as well. For the last two and a half years, I've been more on our strategic side as a solution architect. And what that really means is on a day to day basis, I get to talk with folks like you help figure out the issues that you're having either as a business or with the platform, and put together solutions to help drive value and ensure that, you know, our partners and our clients are configuring a scalable, maintainable and usable service now invaluable ServiceNow experience so so we're really excited to talk about San Diego and you know, any of the hot issues that you may be facing today.

Greg Irwin  4:35  

Kristin, you please.

Kristin Elliott  4:42  

Thank you, Kristin Elliott. I am also a client success executive here at Acorio. I spent the first I'd say four years of my work here at Acorio on doing engagement management and I also managed our project management office or engagement management office. And so this CSV rolls a little bit newer for me. But I have been partnering with our clients for seven years, not just at Acorio, but with two other prior ServiceNow partners have been working on the platform. And so I also have my SIS admin certification that I maintained. But please don't expect that I'm going to be like your top technical resource here. But I have, I have seven years of working with clients and understanding what their outcomes and goals are and helping them get there. So happy to be here to just talk about, you know, process and, you know, just making those dreams a reality. So, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Greg Irwin  5:42  

Alright, let's get into it. I'm going to ask us to get started with the chat window. Do me a favor everybody. Whatever keyboard computer you're on, right, the group in the chat, the number one question or issue or project. Now, it could be really tactical, or it could be really strategic, but it'll help the group and the one thing I'm going to offer is, this is going to be kind of the baseline for what we're going to be talking about what you're working on, and maybe something you'd like to hear about through through our session, we're going to start off on San Diego, and talk about what what you should know about San Diego. And I'm going to try and moderate it to kind of put it into as business practical terms as we can. And then I think you all know, for those who've been on these, ask questions. This is an open line. You know, if I'm asking all the all the questions, then that's, there's something wrong with us. We can work on that. Alright, let's go over to grant Jesse Kristin, who wants to take a lead here and talk about one, what's it what's in San Diego,

Jesse Nocon  6:56  

so San Diego, the way that I'm really kind of looking at it and thinking about it and the way that we're handling internally here, but is that San Diego from a new version standpoint, isn't necessarily about introducing a ton of brand new applications and feature sets what the value and what what I think making San Diego really exciting release is that they're maturing a lot of the areas of the platform that they have started putting work into in previous releases, and then really enhancing and finding those areas where people are having pain points currently in the platform and solving them, even if they're little tiny ones. So I can give a few examples of those start order guides, right? There's new functionality with order guides where you can actually manage the sequence. So if you're have been working with order guides, and you find it clunky, and you don't have choices, right, that kind of pain point has been been really been a leaved. Another really good example, is with surveys. So there's new functionality built into the platform on on how to configure manage surveys with a more modern UI, that that ngoi that aligns more to that kind of agent workspace like functionality. And then an areas where they've introduced new big features and functionality like the employee center, and like shopping hub for procurement, an agent based discovery. There are upgraded features functionality, data points out of box KPIs metrics. So again, to kind of sum that up San Diego isn't necessarily right, there's a necessarily a big tentpole new feature that's coming. But we think that from a breadth of the platform perspective, right, the pain points that people are having are looking to be relieved. And what it was new functionality in Rome is really becoming mature functionality that we think everybody should look to implement. It's kind of out of the beta phase.

Grant Pulver  8:53  

Jesse real quick, you know, I know that it wasn't cord it started before San Diego. But one of the things that I see a lot of executives really interested in is the agent workspace. So for the last, I don't know, four or five years, really the end user experience has been at the forefront of everything ServiceNow right. And that's important for your customer satisfaction more so than your worker satisfaction. So really in the last two releases, and it moved a little bit further in San Diego was the agent workspace and making things easier for your employees to be more effective. Can you talk a little bit about agent workspace and how that expanded?

Jesse Nocon  9:33  

Absolutely. So the way that agent workspace is expanding in Rome, San Diego and in the future is that Workspaces are really becoming tailored to kind of product or area specific needs. So a few releases ago when agent workspace came out right it was that new, more modern way for agents to interact with the platform. But if you are an ITSM or strategic portfolio management or HR to kind of look and felt the same, what ServiceNow was looking to do, and what we're partnering with our clients to configure is really getting bespoke needs. So tools that CSM agents would need specifically for them available in their workspace, tools that HR folks would need available in their workspace, an operator workspace for your folks who need to query your CMDB. And handle it a vendor manager workspace for the folks that are evaluating vendors and putting contracts together in ServiceNow is going to continue to look to make those more bespoke and out of box more meaningful to the individual work streams in the in the work that your agents are doing.

Grant Pulver  10:39  

So to summarise, everybody's not working out of the same ListView. Right, exactly,

Jesse Nocon  10:43  

exactly. Or even as simple as when you open up the form. Right, we need to see some key information when we're opening up an incident, right, urgency, and priority and who the caller is an assignment group. But that can be different for HR, right, we may need some more tailored user information. And we may want the knowledge articles that are being suggested to be coming from, you know, different sources and things like that. So being able to kind of granularly set up a workspace to support the agents that are working into it and making sure that the information and the not only information but the setup, the actual view and organization of the data is important to

Greg Irwin  11:20  

them as well. We've got by the way, big shout out to the group. Thank you all for as we're going here dropping some good, good comments and questions I'd like to hit on, we can come back to San Diego here for a minute. But I think it’s a pretty bait. Pretty good basic question. Somebody who's coming new onto a module? Should they be doing it? It's ITSM. Specifically, should they be going on to Rome? Or should they be going straight to San Diego because of maturity? Or we're improvements? I would you how would you think about that? Sorry, for Jesse.

Jesse Nocon  11:59  

Oh, perfect. So my recommendation for brand new instances, right there's there's nothing configure it configured it is to start at the newest release that ServiceNow has put out. And especially if you're looking to God in July, right, San Diego came out last week, by July, there would even be a few patches and a little more competence in the stability of the release. And the reason that we recommend that is so that as you're building that first iteration, and typically, you know, first iteration is built directly in that production instance, you're able to take advantage of any of those new features and functionality and that new maturity that we spoke about, you know, if for some reason, or maybe you've been using the platform, or there's a merger and acquisition or something that's driving the kind of continued use of a platform that already exists, our recommendation would be to take a look at what's working in there. And that's something that a partner like us can can support you on. And, you know, if there are a lot of good things working, maybe it's good to start in that room and mature it but if really, a lot of the things aren't working for you, you may even want to consider z booting the instance and starting from

Grant Pulver  13:07  

fresh. See, they asked about rapid seven integration too. And that was what I was gonna jump in for that question is, that's one of the huge improvements that continues to get made by ServiceNow is around integration, hub and ease of integrations, to be able to do that. And I think there's a lot of reasons to go straight to San Diego from the agent workspace from the employee service center. improvements. And then that integration hub has been huge with a lot of our customers as well. And then, you know, from an executive standpoint, the dashboards that keep moving the bar from a continuous improvement standpoint have been amazing. To be able to go I would totally suggest go if possible to go straight to San Diego, especially in a new instance.

Greg Irwin  13:54  

Excellent, folks, it's not just a one way road. If you see a question from somebody else on the board that you've had some experience with, pretty simple. Just write and share your own two cents. In terms of some of the questions that others others have. It's great to hear about. Maybe if you don't even have a specific answer or recommendation, some of your own experience. I think it'll help just enrich, enrich the session for everybody. So please feel just as comfortable respond, responding as you're, you know, sharing your questions and comments. A good question also here in terms of see who it's from on release management. Curious about any improvements here unreleased management side. So, for five we'll start with the Acorio team, Jesse Grant, Kristin, any improvements or any recent improvements and release management.

Jesse Nocon  14:59  

I'm not I'm actually not familiar with anything, particularly in Release Management from a process or a metric and KPI standpoint. But from that experience standpoint, right, the new employee Center offers more ways for people to be able to have a clearer view into KPIs into status of releases that are in flight as part of the progress and then again, that agent workspace would allow for a better experience of navigating through the process of

Grant Pulver  15:28  

release. One of the customers we're working with right now is in education as well, they have a managed services and an application. And that's one of the things that we've been playing with, with them to come up with the right solution. From a business standpoint, and it really goes across everything. That's an you know, HR will be open enrollment, you know, there's all different dirt in HR, the onboarding during when the interns come on in the summer, you know, there's all of these areas, and it really comes down, one of the most important things that you can do from a business standpoint is have your risks identified. So you don't stop the business as you're moving through there, right, there's areas that don't affect that you want to be agile and keep moving and moving through. But then there are those risk areas that you can impact your operations in the fall, or even in January, when coming back for the second semester is a big area, all right. And then in May, June, when this school year is over is a big time for them. As the campus is changing. And then classes are becoming more now everything's remote for the most part. But as you know, the summer courses were coming where it was much less enrollment, and their management styles would change and move through that. So I think really identifying the risks on all of those services is really, really important to allow you to be agile, as you're moving through those times.

You're in an awesome position, I would encourage you to kind of baseline your some CSAT, splash ease of use metrics right now. So that you have those as a trend going forward. Right? When you switch over to employee service center, I've found that 90% of it's amazing, right and great. And but there are some caveats there. Now, I encourage you to start baselining and understanding what the user experience looks like right now. And then you can it'll help you pivot, if needed. For things like that knowledge base results or the catalog results. It will just it brings that stuff to the forefront and allows you to pivot really quickly, versus waiting to start to get that feedback and see that feedback. Inherently.

Greg Irwin  17:55  

Yeah, and then, oh, sorry, guys,

Kristin Elliott  17:58  

go ahead. Just just gonna say, Oh, you're describing that experience of that kind of binary decision making processes like is this an incident versus a request and then having to comb through, you know, a catalog and select the right thing? That's kind of an age old problem that I've seen since I've been working with the platform. And in the past, we just tried to use OCM to, you know, teach people how to think in that way. There's this really cool feat, I guess it would be considered a feature of Jesse, no help, you can help me with the technical side of this explanation. But it's called universal request. And when I learned about it, I just like this guy opened up in the heavens started singing because it really takes the guesswork out of having to select, you know, the type of object that you're going to submit your ticket to. So just so you can explain it a little bit more.

Jesse Nocon  18:59  

Yeah. So one of the things mentioned, right, is that in that previous kind of classic portal, and what Kristin was elaborating on right is that you were limited to the one catalog and you were limited to one knowledge. And it was really hard to present a taxonomy on the agent side, right on the business side, that was valuable, and you could get your metrics and reporting, but also present a taxonomy on the user experience side that was manageable and navigatable. An employee center really looks to solve that issue by actually separating those taxonomies and allowing you to organize your catalogs as you need on the business side for agents to work and stakeholders to get their metrics and report and make informed decisions on and then a taxonomy for our end users. And what the how that's organized is around what we call topics. And so you're able to create topic pages, whether they're HR related legal, IT hardware asset, Software Asset doesn't matter where the services is coming from as a part of your enterprise, you're able to create Topic Page Just for each of those in the new employee center, and then drive your knowledge drive your catalog from a universal experience leveraging those topic pages. One thing real quickly before we continue on with that part of the conversation, one of the things that I heard from Dan is that he's on that employee service center, and what's kind of curious about what the difference between ESC is, and the new employee center. It's really just a maturation. So employee service center was originally introduced a few releases ago. And it was really limited to folks who are leveraging HR functionality. And if you're leveraging HR functionality, you could create this nice universal portal that stretched across your enterprise, as of Rome, and then especially with San Diego, that's been expanded across the platform as a whole. So that limited that functionality that was previously limited to HR was really successful, and people really liked it. And users were having a great experience. So it expanded across. So you should not have a tonne of extra configuration, moving from an ESD to an EC. But from a you know, getting those additional catalogs on and working the taxonomy for areas outside of HR, there's there's absolutely going to be some

Kristin Elliott  21:11  

effort there. I think that the ServiceNow architecture design approach is really good for a lot number of different industries. But I also know that a lot of us we're going through kind of like a hybrid work situation over the pandemic, and so on. And so I'm curious if anybody on the call wants to talk about like, workforce shortages and like how you can enable your teams, you know, that or maybe not like hands on keyboard in front of a desktop computer, I have a little story about a customer that I worked with kind of a success story that I can share with everyone. If that's of interest.

Greg Irwin  21:55  

Let's, let's go right at it, Kristin, we like I do these a lot. I'm probably doing three of these a day. And the overriding question to me, we're all living in the ServiceNow world. But obviously, there's a lot of big things happening in the broader macro environment. I think inflation is a real concern, Labor shortage, real concern? And the question across whether we're talking ServiceNow I just did a whole session on RPA and automation, etc, etc. Is potluck? How can you apply our competencies to basically match the bigger picture of what's going on? So I think workforce shortage and automation is huge in terms of alright, what can we bring forward so that you're, you know, in tune? Absolutely.

Kristin Elliott  22:52  

So I won't spend too much time on the anecdote, but it is helpful for context. I was working with a manufacturing global manufacturing company, very recently, they were deploying the vaccination status, health and safety status safe workplace suite. And we are on a very tight deadline. We completed the work in six weeks, with a very small kind of nimble team. And why this is important for the client was that we had, you know, governmental mandates and deadlines that we were working against. And this particular client, and 70% of their workforce are contractors. And they don't have laptops, they don't sit in front of a computer all day, they come into the factories onto the skin, the sites, they work, they're very highly skilled folks here. And so they're boots on the ground getting the work done. And in yet at the same time, this particular client had, I would say, relatively the same percentage of like it used to for an HR team members, as any company would have. This particular company has 200,000 employees globally. And so even though the percentage like the ratio to the IT support folks to the the employees was about the same for other companies, you could see why this would be a problem in terms of getting your workforce back back on site very quickly. And the the automation that is available in ServiceNow. And both, you know, the the work that we did in on their mobile app, and we did now mobile, and it allowed for us to reach out to this massive workforce via phone, have them register and be able to show up on site without a lot of extra kind of intensive administrative support. So it's things like that, that, you know, I think, as we go forward, capital On the automation in the workflows in the sort of easy lift from an administrative standpoint that ServiceNow is really including and contemplating and what they're releasing, and is going to be really helpful for your teams. And I like

Greg Irwin  25:17  

I like the headline numbers. He, in six weeks you stood up a vaccine app that was available through now mobile, hitting 200,000 employees with no meaningful increase in the admin resource. Well,

Kristin Elliott  25:34  

let me clarify. Okay, they have 200,000 employees globally, we rolled this out to 10,000 employees in the US in six weeks. And so the that, thank you for asking that question. Because the, the point that I didn't make here is that those admins, because of the ease of use in the flexibility in in the application itself, and what knowledge transfer that we provided to them, they are teed up to roll this out across the rest of their world very easily in an in a, you know, scaled manner. without overloading their their systems. So yeah, it was a it was a really exciting experience. We've done a few of those, this, this past couple years. So

Greg Irwin  26:21  

I gotta tell you, I think the fast turn on these apps is one of the more attractive aspects of the platform. You know, the priorities shift so quickly, by the time you know, if you have a long lead time, by the time you get it released, it's not as relevant anymore.

Kristin Elliott  26:41  

Absolutely. And even within, you know, a six week period, we like any project, but even so one, like rapid development like this, you're gonna have big surprises that come up and to be able to pivot and still deliver on that timeframe on budget is incredible. So very exciting, right?

Greg Irwin  27:00  

We've spent more time than I like to admit on talking about price, the price and overall TCO of ServiceNow. But I think it's really hard and important to measure the productivity game, because I think more more, more than few will will be able to demonstrate, you know, a really powerful return on investment, even though it's an expensive platform.

Grant Pulver  27:24  

I think that's one of the things that I've had to work with a lot of executives, especially at the sea level, right is there's working with a customer right now where they get about 800,000 emails a month. But they don't know how to quantify that into workload, because there's replies to all there's replies, I think, as you're starting to look at that that business case, you can make those assumptions up front. But also until you get an understanding of your workload, it's hard to understand what those savings are, right. And one of the big things that I've seen that, especially at the border see levels, is it helps them justify their costs. And it helps them understand what's going on in the company and an organization's and then you can start correlating that to real business numbers around software costs around vendor, customer retention costs, customer attrition, and start to look at that on top of just the number of tickets that are coming in and the workload, but you can really understand your cost. But you can also start to make that transition in some of those groups from a cost center to a profit center, and start to improve the value of your customer service organisation, to your customer retention to your customer renewals by looking at that full circle through there. But really, that's the biggest thing out of the gate that I've seen is you make your assumptions on your business case without a true understanding of what your workload is. So that transparency and understanding is super important will be put forward. And

Kristin Elliott  29:01  

exactly what you're describing grant, I was just reminiscing about a client that I've been working with for a few years. And, and we started small with a pilot, it was a Department of Transportation. And we started small with a pilot so that we could prove out what that workload really looked like because that the sea level had no way of reporting on it, even though they knew they were understaffed, and their teams were, you know, kind of crashing under the weight here. So once we were able to establish that first group and be able to report on that and have some good solid metrics, they then were able to use that to then roll that out to other parts of the state. And to the point where we're almost complete with the full state of districts and I'm so excited to know that you know, your, your, your, your neighborhood Department of Transportation agent is is has a workload that they can actually live with because of what we've been able to do and what we've been able to prove with the reporting, so it's so exciting.

Grant Pulver  30:06  

There was a question that kind of intrigued me that I, I see a lot going on right now, especially in the m&a world that we are around instance consolidation. So I was wondering if maybe we could talk about that for a few minutes in what we're seeing in the in the ecosystem and move through that.

Greg Irwin  30:23  

Let's get at it. Please, if you have a story, or you can, you know, expand upon it a little bit.

Kristin Elliott  30:33  

I have a story, I'll keep it short. And so I've worked with a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the last couple of years, as you mentioned, Grant, it's pretty common occurrence these days, particularly with managed service providers. And that, you know, there's a lot of benefit to kind of figuring out a good way to organize yourselves and begin creating like sort of like a rinse repeat sort of scenario, from a process standpoint to make sure that the experience is smooth on both sides for all parties involved. Again, I'm in the process kind of process person, not the technical person. So I don't know if I'm just see if you have anything you want to add to that.

Jesse Nocon  31:21  

Right. So instance consolidation from a, from a technical perspective. I, I think that it really comes down to more of the process side, right, and taking the time upfront to evaluate what's working, what's not working. And then after that, starting to figure out the technical, right. So if you've decided, right, hey, our incident process or our change processes are really working well, right, let's, let's, let's merge those. And let's take the datasets and start looking to transform and engage with those datasets to fit the process that we have. But from the other perspective, right, somebody evaluations like, oh, we have totally disparate change processes between all these instances are the groups that we're merging, that are being merged, we're going to rebuild the process from the ground up at that point, it's probably not worth the kind of effort to technically bring in right historical data or make large technical transformations there. And it's better to start from a brand new steady state. Yeah,

Kristin Elliott  32:24  

I think that it's also like me, personally, I've been a party to an acquisition, and I've been, you know, the company organization that was being folded into the the parent company. And, you know, it can be a pretty, for lack of a better word, crappy experience for you as it as an individual, because it you know, you've built, you've worked so hard within your organization to define processes that work for you that you think are best practice, and so on, and so forth. And so I think, for the companies that are acquiring another company, it it behooves us to think about what what good we might be able to take what you know that from the other companies process, and, you know, giving us an opportunity to really like leverage that, rather than just trying to, you know, shoehorn the new company into our own process. Just an observation.

Grant Pulver  33:22  

I think the caution I would give there, is sometimes it's easier to go Greenfield that start over. But take update sites and take, you know, data and information if something's working in one of those instances. There's a couple of reasons I say that I'll use the old infomercial line of this is nor not supported, nor endorsed by the channel, right. But it's kind of what we've seen in the environment is, from an OCM standpoint, it's good because everybody's got a fresh start. It's an opportunity to also transform your business at that same time, is what happens is those seven instances you have, you've been doing the same thing for for two to six years, say, and things have changed so much in the world, right? We're not this focus is on promise, we are as remote working now and things have. So to me, the advantage of being able to consolidate those instances isn't just from an administrative and it just isn't from an operational standpoint, it's an opportunity for you to transform your business and start to bring those groups together and start to look at possibly, not necessarily but possibly a shared services type approach that's expanded from your original and I really would encourage you to sit down and bring everybody in together and have your discussions about you know, what the aches and pains are. And then all of those business units have a vested interest or an ownership in it to help with that organizational changes. You're going forward. That unique opportunity when you're doing that to transform your business. So

Jesse Nocon  35:00  

first from a pricing standpoint, from a licensing standpoint, I'm not necessarily where if there been any changes to the way that structured, but that's certainly something that, you know, we could coordinate with with ServiceNow and get you some updated answers on from a.

Greg Irwin  35:18  

From a usability standpoint,

Jesse Nocon  35:21  

I don't know if there are any specific features in San Diego however, I know there were features in Rome around this. And it was really focused on being able to write coordinate your DevOps stack. So it sounds like for you all, it's Jenkins and JIRA, right for some other folks, you know, there may be some other like Azure DevOps, or some other kind of systems that they are integrating and their work there was around making the experience easier, and the maintenance and the setup of those integrations so you're able to more easily go through and create those pathways and those connections inside the platform, you're able to leverage more out of box integration hub spokes that are that have specific DevOps actions. Right. So, right, with Jenkins, right, creating your change, and, you know, ensuring that you get the proper communication and feedback for pre approved ones or ones that require approval. How do you coordinate that? And, and so, so the ability to handle the nuance, instead of just having to handle it one way, that's where the improvements have been made. And I mean,

Grant Pulver  36:30  

thank you, from a workflow standpoint, that's why I wanted to bring it back. You're right, it was more about the business side of that, and the workflow that it is about the the platform, right to be able to have a constant consistent motion, especially when you're talking about DevOps or release management, and change management to be able to move that through. Yep. I

Greg Irwin  36:51  

think there's one one notion that I heard in there that I'm not I just want to test grant, from a engagement perspective, is it necessarily more expensive to start and build off a greenfield to unify, as opposed to picking, you know, a single target, and, you know, building enhancements into a single target? No, it's

Grant Pulver  37:17  

actually it's probably a little cheaper, and seems, because you can focus more on the 80%. And what's really a truly value true value to your corporation, or your stakeholders. And it's akin to cooking, right? If you're trying to dig the chocolate chips out, because you want to put raisins in, it's probably quicker just to make some oatmeal raisin cookies, right? Especially when your instances are two plus years old. And you've lost some of that functionality or take being able to take advantage of the newer functionality, because of some of the workflows that are out there. So, I mean, I don't think it's a huge savings to go Greenfield, but it's certainly not a huge cost increase. And again, I would just take advantage of that, because you can really use it to transform and understand your business a little bit better, and have it aligned to your business objectives. That way. I had to get some sort of food reference. And

Kristin Elliott  38:13  

I mean, last kind of comment from me on that would also be many of you have multiple instances, and I would highly recommend it if you don't. And so there's a lot of kind of things that you can do to Z Budan instance, you know, work in that fresh environment, you know, occasionally, you know, you might be able to get a loaner, you know, just depending on your situation, like, No, I, I wouldn't let that kind of a barrier keep you from leveraging that advice that Grant's just given because it the fresh palette is very, very useful, even just from a frustration standpoint for the team. So encourage that.

Greg Irwin  38:55  

Unfortunately, we're at the end of the hour, but it doesn't have to be the last conversation if you have follow up. Or something specific that the group can help with. Show him your that's Acorio or BWG or others on the group. We strive to build a community. That's it, let's let's wrap with the team and Acorio And by the way, they're they're the experts. You know, when we get dig into the weeds, they can help with the questions or projects you've got. Grant, Jesse, Kristin, do we favor one of you grab the mic, and share with us some some parting words. Real quick. I

Kristin Elliott  39:33  

just wanted to say thank you that having these kinds of conversations and hearing what you all are going through and what problems you're trying to solve. And this is why I get up in the morning. I know I sound like a nerd but I love this platform. And I love working with clients and it's so exciting to hear you know what you can achieve with with the product and so yeah, I would just say go forth and keep on going and you know Let us know if there's anything that we can do to help if we can connect you with any resources or anything like that we're happy to. So I hope you have a good rest of your week.

Greg Irwin  40:09  

Absolutely. All right, everybody. Thank you.

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