from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi buddy welcome to this special noob digital event where we're focusing in on data ops data ops in Acton with generous support from friends at IBM let me set up the situation here there's a real problem going on in the industry and that's that people are not getting the most out of their data data is plentiful but insights perhaps aren't what's the reason for that well it's really a pretty complicated situation for a lot of organizations there's data silos there's challenges with skill sets and lack of skills there's tons of tools out there sort of a tools brief the data pipeline is not automated the business lines oftentimes don't feel as though they own the data so that creates some real concerns around data quality and a lot of finger-point quality the opportunity here is to really operationalize the data pipeline and infuse AI into that equation and really attack their cost-cutting and revenue generation opportunities that are there in front of you think about this virtually every application this decade is going to be infused with AI if it's not it's not going to be competitive and so we have organized a panel of great practitioners to really dig in to these issues first I want to introduce Victoria Stassi with who's an industry expert in a top at Northwestern you two'll very great to see you again thanks for coming on excellent nice to see you as well and Caitlin Alfre is the director of AI a vai accelerator and also part of the peak data officers organization at IBM who has actually eaten some of it his own practice what a creep let me say it that way Caitlin great to see you again and Steve Lewis good to see you again see vice president director of management associated a bank and Thompson thanks for coming on thanks Dave make speaker alright guys so you heard my authority with in terms of operationalizing getting the most insight hey data is wonderful insights aren't but getting insight in real time is critical in this decade each of you is a sense as to where you are on that journey or Victoria your taste because you're brand new to Northwestern Mutual but you have a lot of deep expertise in in health care and manufacturing financial services but where you see just the general industry climate and we'll talk about the journeys that you are on both personally and professionally so it's all fair sure I think right now right again just me going is you need to have speech insight right so as I experienced going through many organizations are all facing the same challenges today and a lot of those pounds is hard where do my to live is my data trust meaning has a bank curated has been Clinton's visit qualified has a big a lot of that is ready what we see often happen is businesses right they know their KPIs they know their business metrics but they can't find where that data Linda Barragan asked there's abundant data disparity all over the place but it is replicated because it's not well managed it's a lot of what governance in the platform of pools that governance to speak right offer fact it organizations pay is just that piece of it I can tell you where data is I can tell you what's trusted that when you can quickly access information and bring back answers to business questions that is one answer not many answers leaving the business to question what's the right path right which is the correct answer which which way do I go at the executive level that's the biggest challenge where we want the industry to go moving forward right is one breaking that down along that information to be published quickly and to an emailing data virtualization a lot of what you see today is most businesses right it takes time to build out large warehouses at an enterprise level we need to pivot quicker so a lot of what businesses are doing is we're leaning them towards taking advantage of data virtualization allowing them to connect to these data sources right to bring that information back quickly so they don't have to replicate that information across different systems or different applications right and then to be able to provide that those answers back quickly also allowing for seamless access to from the analysts that are running running full speed right try and find the answers as quickly as they find great okay and I want to get into that sort of how news Steve let me go to you one of the things that we talked about earlier was just infusing this this mindset of a data cult and thinking about data as a service so talk a little bit about how you got started what was the starting NICUs through that sure I think the biggest thing for us there is to change that mindset from data being just for reporting or things that have happened in the past to do some insights on us and some data that already existed well we've tried to shift the mentality there is to start to use data and use that into our actual applications so that we're providing those insight in real time through the applications as they're consumed helping with customer experience helping with our personalization and an optimization of our application the way we've started down that path or kind of the journey that we're still on was to get the foundation laid birch so part of that has been making sure we have access to all that data whether it's through virtualization like vic talked about or whether it's through having more of the the data selected in a data like that that where we have all of that foundational data available as opposed to waiting for people to ask for it that's been the biggest culture shift for us is having that availability of data to be ready to be able to provide those insights as opposed to having to make the businesses or the application or asked for that day Oh Kailyn when I first met into pulp andari the idea wobble he paid up there yeah I was asking him okay where does a what's the role of that at CBO and and he mentioned a number of things but two of the things that stood out is you got to understand how data affect the monetization of your company that doesn't mean you know selling the data what role does it play and help cut cost or ink revenue or productivity or no customer service etc the other thing he said was you've got a align with the lines of piss a little sounded good and this is several years ago and IBM took it upon itself Greek its own champagne I was gonna say you know dogfooding whatever but it's not easy just flip a switch and an infuse a I and automate the data pipeline you guys had to go you know some real of pain to get there and you did you were early on you took some arrows and now you're helping your customers better on thin debt but talk about some of the use cases that where you guys have applied this obviously the biggest organization you know one of the biggest in the world the real challenge is they're sure I'm happy today you know we've been on this journey for about four years now so we stood up our first book to get office 2016 and you're right it was all about getting what data strategy offered and executed internally and we want to be very transparent because as you've mentioned you know a lot of challenges possible think differently about the value and so as we wrote that data strategy at that time about coming to enterprise and then we quickly of pivoted to see the real opportunity and value of infusing AI across all of our needs were close to your question on a couple of specific use cases I'd say you know we invested that time getting that platform built and implemented and then we were able to take advantage of that one particular example that I've been really excited about I have a practitioner on my team who's a supply chain expert and a couple of years ago he started building out supply chain solution so that we can better mitigate our risk in the event of a natural disaster like the earthquake hurricane anywhere around the world and be cuz we invest at the time and getting the date of pipelines right getting that all of that were created and cleaned and the quality of it we were able to recently in recent weeks add the really critical Kovach 19 data and deliver that out to our employees internally for their preparation purposes make that available to our nonprofit partners and now we're starting to see our first customers take advantage too with the health and well-being of their employees mine so that's you know an example I think where and I'm seeing a lot of you know my clients I work with they invest in the data and AI readiness and then they're able to take advantage of all of that work work very quickly in an agile fashion just spin up those out well I think one of the keys there who Kaelin is that you know we can talk about that in a covet 19 contact but it's that's gonna carry through that that notion of of business resiliency is it's gonna live on you know in this post pivot world isn't it absolutely I think for all of us the importance of investing in the business continuity and resiliency type work so that we know what to do in the event of either natural disaster or something beyond you know it'll be grounded in that and I think it'll only become more important for us to be able to act quickly and so the investment in those platforms and approach that we're taking and you know I see many of us taking will really be grounded in that resiliency so Vic and Steve I want to dig into this a little bit because you know we use this concept of data op we're stealing from DevOps and there are similarities but there are also differences now let's talk about the data pipeline if you think about the data pipeline as a sort of quasi linear process where you're investing data and you might be using you know tools but whether it's Kafka or you know we have a favorite who will you have and then you're transforming that that data and then you got a you know discovery you got to do some some exploration you got to figure out your metadata catalog and then you're trying to analyze that data to get some insights and then you ultimately you want to operationalize it so you know and and you could come up with your own data pipeline but generally that sort of concept is is I think well accepted there's different roles and unlike DevOps where it might be the same developer who's actually implementing security policies picking it the operations in in data ops there might be different roles and fact very often are there's data science there's may be an IT role there's data engineering there's analysts etc so Vic I wonder if you could you could talk about the challenges in in managing and automating that data pipeline applying data ops and how practitioners can overcome them yeah I would say a perfect example would be a client that I was just recently working for where we actually took a team and we built up a team using agile methodologies that framework right we're rapidly ingesting data and then proving out data's fit for purpose right so often now we talk a lot about big data and that is really where a lot of industries are going they're trying to add an enrichment to their own data sources so what they're doing is they're purchasing these third-party data sets so in doing so right you make that initial purchase but what many companies are doing today is they have no real way to vet that so they'll purchase the information they aren't going to vet it upfront they're going to bring it into an environment there it's going to take them time to understand if the data is of quality or not and by the time they do typically the sales gone and done and they're not going to ask for anything back but we were able to do it the most recent claim was use an instructure data source right bring that and ingest that with modelers using this agile team right and within two weeks we were able to bring the data in from the third-party vendor what we considered rapid prototyping right be able to profile the data understand if the data is of quality or not and then quickly figure out that you know what the data's not so in doing that we were able to then contact the vendor back tell them you know it sorry the data set up to snuff we'd like our money back we're not gonna go forward with it that's enabling businesses to be smarter with what they're doing with 30 new purchases today as many businesses right now um as much as they want to rely on their own data right they actually want to rely on cross the data from third-party sources and that's really what data Ops is allowing us to do it's allowing us to think at a broader a higher level right what to bring the information what structures can we store them in that they don't necessarily have to be modeled because a modeler is great right but if we have to take time to model all the information before we even know we want to use it that's gonna slow the process now and that's slowing the business down the business is looking for us to speed up all of our processes a lot of what we heard in the past raised that IP tends to slow us down and that's where we're trying to change that perception in the industry is no we're actually here to speed you up we have all the tools and technologies to do so and they're only getting better I would say also on data scientists right that's another piece of the pie for us if we can bring the information in and we can quickly catalog it in a metadata and burn it bring in the information in the backend data data assets right and then supply that information back to scientists gone are the days where scientists are going and asking for connections to all these different data sources waiting days for access requests to be approved just to find out that once they figure out how it with them the relationship diagram right the design looks like in that back-end database how to get to it write the code to get to it and then figure out this is not the information I need that Sally next to me right fold me the wrong information that's where the catalog comes in that's where due to absent data governance having that catalog that metadata management platform available to you they can go into a catalog without having to request access to anything quickly and within five minutes they can see the structures what if the tables look like what did the fields look like are these are these the metrics I need to bring back answers to the business that's data apps it's allowing us to speed up all of that information you know taking stuff that took months now down two weeks down two days down two hours so Steve I wonder if you could pick up on that and just help us understand what data means you we talked about earlier in our previous conversation I mentioned it upfront is this notion of you know the demand for for data access is it was through the roof and and you've gone from that to sort of more of a self-service environment where it's not IT owning the data it's really the businesses owning the data but what what is what is all this data op stuff meaning in your world sure I think it's very similar it's it's how do we enable and get access to that clicker showing the right controls showing the right processes and and building that scalability and agility and into all of it so that we're we're doing this at scale it's much more rapidly available we can discover new data separately determine if it's right or or more importantly if it's wrong similar to what what Vic described it's it's how do we enable the business to make those right decisions on whether or not they're going down the right path whether they're not the catalog is a big part of that we've also introduced a lot of frameworks around scale so just the ability to rapidly ingest data and make that available has been a key for us we've also focused on a prototyping environment so that sandbox mentality of how do we rapidly stand those up for users and and still provide some controls but have provide that ability for people to do that that exploration what we're finding is that by providing the platform and and the foundational layers that were we're getting the use cases to sort of evolve and come out of that as opposed to having the use cases prior to then go build things from we're shifting the mentality within the organization to say we don't know what we need yet let's let's start to explore that's kind of that data scientist mentality and culture it more of a way of thinking as opposed to you know an actual project or implement well I think that that cultural aspect is important of course Caitlin you guys are an AI company or at least that you know part of what you do but you know you've you for four decades maybe centuries you've been organized around different things by factoring plant but sales channel or whatever it is but-but-but-but how has the chief data officer organization within IBM been able to transform itself and and really infuse a data culture across the entire company one of the approaches you know we've taken and we talk about sort of the blueprint to drive AI transformation so that we can achieve and deliver these really high value use cases we talked about the data the technology which we've just pressed on with organizational piece of it duration are so important the change management enabling and equipping our data stewards I'll give one a civic example that I've been really excited about when we were building our platform and starting to pull districting structured unstructured pull it in our ADA stewards are spending a lot of time manually tagging and creating business metadata about that data and we identified that that was a real pain point costing us a lot of money valuable resources so we started to automate the metadata and doing that in partnership with our deep learning practitioners and some of the models that they were able to build that capability we pushed out into our contacts our product last year and one of the really exciting things for me to see is our data stewards who be so value exporters and the skills that they bring have reported that you know it's really changed the way they're able to work it's really sped up their process it's enabled them to then move on to higher value to abilities and and business benefits so they're very happy from an organizational you know completion point of view so I think there's ways to identify those use cases particularly for taste you know we drove some significant productivity savings we also really empowered and hold our data stewards we really value to make their job you know easier more efficient and and help them move on to things that they are more you know excited about doing so I think that's that you know another example of approaching taken yes so the cultural piece the people piece is key we talked a little bit about the process I want to get into a little bit into the tech Steve I wonder if you could tell us you know what's it what's the tech we have this bevy of tools I mentioned a number of them upfront you've got different data stores you've got open source pooling you've got IBM tooling what are the critical components of the technology that people should be thinking about tapping in architecture from ingestion perspective we're trying to do a lot of and a Python framework and scaleable ingestion pipe frameworks on the catalog side I think what we've done is gone with IBM PAC which provides a platform for a lot of these tools to stay integrated together so things from the discovery of data sources the cataloging the documentation of those data sources and then all the way through the actual advanced analytics and Python models and our our models and the open source ID combined with the ability to do some data prep and refinery work having that all in an integrated platform was a key to us for us that the rollout and of more of these tools in bulk as opposed to having the point solutions so that's been a big focus area for us and then on the analytic side and the web versus IDE there's a lot of different components you can go into whether it's meal soft whether it's AWS and some of the native functionalities out there you mentioned before Kafka and Anissa streams and different streaming technologies those are all the ones that are kind of in our Ketil box that we're starting to look at so and one of the keys here is we're trying to make decisions in as close to real time as possible as opposed to the business having to wait you know weeks or months and then by the time they get insights it's late and really rearview mirror so Vic your focus you know in your career has been a lot on data data quality governance master data management data from a data quality standpoint as well what are some of the key tools that you're familiar with that you've used that really have enabled you operationalize that data pipeline you know I would say I'm definitely the IBM tools I have the most experience with that also informatica though as well those are to me the two top players IBM definitely has come to the table with a suite right like Steve said cloud pack for data is really a one-stop shop so that's allowing that quick seamless access for business user versus them having to go into some of the previous versions that IBM had rolled out where you're going into different user interfaces right to find your information and that can become clunky it can add the process it can also create almost like a bad taste and if in most people's mouths because they don't want to navigate from system to system to system just to get their information so cloud pack to me definitely brings everything to the table in one in a one-stop shop type of environment in for me also though is working on the same thing and I would tell you that they haven't come up with a solution that really comes close to what IBM is done with cloud pack for data I'd be interested to see if they can bring that on the horizon but really IBM suite of tools allows for profiling follow the analytics write metadata management access to db2 warehouse on cloud those are the tools that I've worked in my past to implement as well as cloud object store to bring all that together to provide that one stop that at Northwestern right we're working right now with belieber I think calibra is a great set it pool are great garments catalog right but that's really what it's truly made for is it's a governance catalog you have to bring some other pieces to the table in order for it to serve up all the cloud pack does today which is the advanced profiling the data virtualization that cloud pack enables today the machine learning at the level where you can actually work with our and Python code and you put our notebooks inside of pack that's some of this the pieces right that are missing in some of the under vent other vendor schools today so one of the things that you're hearing here is the theme of openness others addition we've talked about a lot of tools and not IBM tools all IBM tools there there are many but but people want to use what they want to use so Kaitlin from an IBM perspective what's your commitment the openness number one but also to you know we talked a lot about cloud packs but to simplify the experience for your client well and I thank Stephen Victoria for you know speaking to their experience I really appreciate feedback and part of our approach has been to really take one the challenges that we've had I mentioned some of the capabilities that we brought forward in our cloud platform data product one being you know automating metadata generation and that was something we had to solve for our own data challenges in need so we will continue to source you know our use cases from and grounded from a practitioner perspective of what we're trying to do and solve and build and the approach we've really been taking is co-creation line and that we roll these capability about the product and work with our customers like Stephen light victorious you really solicit feedback to product route our dev teams push that out and just be very open and transparent I mean we want to deliver a seamless experience we want to do it in partnership and continue to solicit feedback and improve and roll out so no I think that will that has been our approach will continue to be and really appreciate the partnerships that we've been able to foster so we don't have a ton of time but I want to go to practitioners on the panel and ask you about key key performance indicators when I think about DevOps one of the things that we're measuring is the elapsed time the deploy applications start finished where we're measuring the amount of rework that has to be done the the quality of the deliverable what are the KPIs Victoria that are indicators of success in operationalizing date the data pipeline well I would definitely say your ability to deliver quickly right so how fast can you deliver is that is that quicker than what you've been able to do in the past right what is the user experience like right so have you been able to measure what what the amount of time was right that users are spending to bring information to the table in the past versus have you been able to reduce that time to delivery right of information business answers to business questions those are the key performance indicators to me that tell you that the suite that we've put in place today right it's providing information quickly I can get my business answers quickly but quicker than I could before and the information is accurate so being able to measure is it quality that I've been giving that I've given back or is this not is it the wrong information and yet I've got to go back to the table and find where I need to gather that from from somewhere else that to me tells us okay you know what the tools we've put in place today my teams are working quicker they're answering the questions they need to accurately that is when we know we're on the right path Steve anything you add to that I think she covered a lot of the people components the around the data quality scoring right for all the different data attributes coming up with a metric around how to measure that and and then showing that trend over time to show that it's getting better the other one that we're doing is just around overall date availability how how much data are we providing to our users and and showing that trend so when I first started you know we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 files that had been brought into the warehouse and and had been published and available in the neighborhood of a couple thousand fields we've grown that into weave we have thousands of cables now available so it's it's been you know hundreds of percent in scale as far as just the availability of that data how much is out there how much is is ready and available for for people to just dig in and put into their their analytics and their models and get those back into the other application so that's another key metric that we're starting to track as well so last question so I said at the top that every application is gonna need to be infused with AI this decade otherwise that application not going to be as competitive as it could be and so for those that are maybe stuck in their journey don't really know where to get started I'll start with with Caitlin and go to Victoria and then and then even bring us home what advice would you give the people that need to get going on this my advice is I think you pull the folks that are either producing or accessing your data and figure out what the rate is between I mentioned some of the data management challenges we were seeing this these processes were taking weeks and prone to error highly manual so part was ripe for AI project so identifying those use cases I think that are really causing you know the most free work and and manual effort you can move really quickly and as you build this platform out you're able to spin those up on an accelerated fashion I think identifying that and figuring out the business impact are able to drive very early on you can get going and start really seeing the value great yeah I would actually say kids I hit it on the head but I would probably add to that right is the first and foremost in my opinion right the importance around this is data governance you need to implement a data governance at an enterprise level many organizations will do it but they'll have silos of governance you really need an interface I did a government's platform that consists of a true framework of an operational model model charters right you have data domain owners data domain stewards data custodians all that needs to be defined and while that may take some work in in the beginning right the payoff down the line is that much more it's it it's allowing your business to truly own the data once they own the data and they take part in classifying the data assets for technologists and for analysts right you can start to eliminate some of the technical debt that most organizations have acquired today they can start to look at what are some of the systems that we can turn off what are some of the systems that we see valium truly build out a capability matrix we can start mapping systems right to capabilities and start to say where do we have wares or redundancy right what can we get rid of that's the first piece of it and then the second piece of it is really leveraging the tools that are out there today the IBM tools some of the other tools out there as well that enable some of the newer next-generation capabilities like unit nai right for example allowing automation for automation which right for all of us means that a lot of the analysts that are in place today they can access the information quicker they can deliver the information accurately like we've been talking about because it's been classified that pre works being done it's never too late to start but once you start that it just really acts as a domino effect to everything else where you start to see everything else fall into place all right thank you and Steve bring us on but advice for your your peers that want to get started sure I think the key for me too is like like those guys have talked about I think all everything they said is valid and accurate thing I would add is is from a starting perspective if you haven't started start right don't don't try to overthink that over plan it it started just do something and and and start the show that progress and value the use cases will come even if you think you're not there yet it's amazing once you have the national components there how some of these things start to come out of the woodwork so so it started it going may have it have that iterative approach to this and an open mindset it's encourage exploration and enablement look your organization in the eye to say why are their silos why do these things like this what are our problem what are the things getting in our way and and focus and tackle those those areas as opposed to trying to put up more rails and more boundaries and kind of encourage that silo mentality really really look at how do you how do you focus on that enablement and then the last comment would just be on scale everything should be focused on scale what you think is a one-time process today you're gonna do it again we've all been there you're gonna do it a thousand times again so prepare for that prepare forever that you're gonna do everything a thousand times and and start to instill that culture within your organization a great advice guys data bringing machine intelligence an AI to really drive insights and scaling with a cloud operating model no matter where that data live it's really great to have have three such knowledgeable practitioners Caitlyn Toria and Steve thanks so much for coming on the cube and helping support this panel all right and thank you for watching everybody now remember this panel was part of the raw material that went into a crowd chat that we hosted on May 27th Crouch at net slash data ops so go check that out this is Dave Volante for the cube thanks for watching [Music]

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the kue covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now welcome back to knowledge 15 everybody I'm Dave vellante and we're here this is the cube and we've been unpacking the experience that is service now knowledge knowledge 15 with this our third knowledge we did 13 14 and now 15 we're very excited to be here Nicole Tate and van Tran are here the two consultants in the IT service management space happen to be focused on health care right now but they got a lot of experience couple IT practitioners folks welcome to the cube it's great to see you so to call uh let me start with you so your first knowledge or you've been to a couple knowledge shows her so I started back in New Orleans with such okay no it's true yeah all right right so wow you've seen the transformation of knowledge along with the evolution of service now when you what do you think about this one so I'm amazed you know the first knowledge i attended I remember being overwhelmed I hadn't even implemented my first phase and so I'm sitting in these sessions and I'm just like wow these people are rockstars look at all these cool things that they're doing and I came back very energized very revived and started on my own journey after that and now I'm seeing some of these same people coming up and being their own rock stars and kind of watching the conference grow it's really impressive so if you go back van you know a few years ago so the IT and still in many organizations is of the whipping child of the organization but we've really seen a transformation in that role for particularly the clients that are the customers that are here maybe you could talk about that in your own experience yeah I started with service now back probably in 2007 and so back then it was something that was shown as something is an easy platform that you can easily configure and through the growth of service now you know it's become more complicated and clients have had more requirements so then we've seen more dedicated roles to this profession and a lot of resources are needed to be successful in the complication that we have today especially in the health care industry so it's it's it's going getting more complicated and they'll be need to be more people involved to make it successful so you both are relatively new to healthcare right it's turn over the last 12 months or so or less casing the call but you've got a lot of experience you're consulting with different organizations you know around and what's different about health care Nicole what are your first impressions so I think health care has been one of these things that's very complicated and rightfully so it's it's people's health you know it's their lives but with recent legislation and recent things that are coming down health care is being forced to be more of a product more of a service right and as the cost per patient Rises and you're getting less back from insurance right you have to get creative and there's going to have to be some disruption in this industry I'm and I see service now as a platform that will be able to streamline a lot of these complex processes put some automation behind it and really reduce some costs so you think it'll reduce our bills I hope so so van let's talk about your experiences with with service now he said started in 2007 did I hear right that's when I first he's dead okay how did that all come about it's it's still fairly new at that time so when when our our service desk was replacing a tool it was just something that you brought in and then I worked at the helpdesk at that time so I was in charge of just sort of configured to replace our old tool at that time and so and since then I've just kind of did a little fudging here and there and but as I went through my career I've had more dedicated part in service now and so now I'm a full-time developer and so I'm just doing it a lot lot more now and Nicole you were saying off-camera that your experience is you were one of the first to go beyond IT maybe you could tell us about that yeah so and when I came to the New Orleans conference I was just worried about it's an IT tool and as I was sitting there listening to some of the sessions and some of the use cases I thought you know there's there's something unique here we could we can take this really far so I came back and I did a really aggressive roadmap and I showed my boss and he says you're trying to do everything in six months and I said fine give me 12 and he says okay good luck whatever go do whatever you need to do and I met with HR facilities accounts payable engineering and then we rolled out 15 business apps in 18 months vicious very it was really nice because we had everybody using the same platform and once you get everybody using the same platform then you can automate your enterprise processes so this stuff that you know everybody has a piece of that before you have to take outside of a workflow you'd have to go door knocking and say hey it's your turn to do your part now we just you know hit the now button right it just goes everybody just got an automated task to do their keys they would do that these you go to the next piece we were able to bring a lot of products to market very fast for that house we're breaking ice new ground how did you go about succeeding there just take us through kind of the steps that he took yeah um initially HR came to me and says you know we do what you do and I send our IT you don't do what we do and he says no absolutely we have these we have incidents and she do no you don't you know you ok let's now really have a conversation and he's any starts to walk me through he says yeah you know you didn't get paid what would you think that was that was and I'm like oh it's a really big incident and he said yeah exactly so I need something that I can have as a portal for employees to come through and get services from HR and I was like that makes a lot of sense you know let's go ahead and do this so we did a proof of concept where we got everybody in the room and did an 8-hour jam session and we came out of that with actually a really good app it took three weeks to roll it out because we had to do change management and some training to the field but time to market it was literally four weeks and we had an enterprise HR you know case automation piece to it so it's really cool what was it ok but there was no app creator back then right now so how did that all work so it was me i just right clicked and created an app into the table and prayed that i did it right youryour coder by background I'm not I'm definitely from the business side of the house so I did the the proof of concept and then I had a developer come in and do some of the security and some of the more complex logic that was needed to support something like HR but there's a lot of sensitive sensitivity to data and things like that van you're a you a developer by right background or no I come the service that side so that's why what your service now developer and now my service not developer so you guys are the low coders or no coders as they say how did you get into being a developer service now well starting at the service desk you know at that time I just took calls and wrote up incidents and I moved into the application space and I still had a hand in service now and I did a little bit more coding in my application role and then in my consulting role then that's when I start to do more coding and stuff like that and so then so that's how I got in that space and I like coding yeah people wouldn't have to call me as much as when I wrecked at the service desk i was able to concentrate more and not be pulled in two different directions and as a developer i can just focus on what i'm working on in front of my screen at that time ok so I'm envisioning you know code right as code I see our developers they got code all the place and understand it maybe it's HTML maybe it's Python whatever it is so what's it like to be a service now developer it's not so much different from that it's just you have to know that there's some proprietary functions within the ServiceNow system but it's mostly javascript-based and there's some jelly and then you can do some HTML on the CMS front too but the server has a lot of tools that sort of make it a little bit easier for people who don't code very much as one of those who do code very much and then it because gives them short cousin they don't have to write everything themselves so today's developer in service now can to have the options to make it really complex if they need to or they can use the out of box tools to help them configure their application in a more efficient matter it helps with better practice or if you don't have a computer science background I have a computer science okay so that helped it does it does how hey okay so you've taken courses and you understand logic and yes yeah that definitely does have some code maybe not commercially but yeah I've been insane Nicole did you have a computer science background I don't have an MBA I'm straight up business now okay and you consider yourself now a service now developer or no you just sort of broke the ice so I'm definitely capable of putting together you know as it you know part of my role is being a champion for the organization identifying solution opportunities I can put together a POC or proof of concept within the tool and show people what they could do what life could be like if they use service now and then when you actually want to roll something out to production and have security and some automated business rules and things like that you know I'll partner with van and say help me this is the things that we want to go ahead and do here's some of the additional harder requirements that we need to solve here but yeah I'm capable of going in and doing stuff to it but the job of pieces and things like that I let the experts handle that so what makes a good developer and how does that compare to what makes a good service now developer there's got to be similarities or their differences there are slight differences what makes a good service now developers that you're aware of the best practice and you use the proprietary functions within the system some of the stuff comes with out of box and and depending on what your requirements are maybe you don't want to skirt around that you want to use that because you know you when things change on the service and Alfre you don't want your stuff to break so a good service now developer will take into account the existing out of box functionality things that you can figure and then you would code and help support that so that when you do changes and upgrades to that then your stuff wouldn't break so it's just about being conscious about what's best practice supporting the outer box functions when it's appropriate and and versus a regular developer well you wouldn't you might not have a system that you're working with you're just creating your own application so that's the general difference which you know you must be started about something else what you've seen at the very excited about your nieces and yeah so talk about what you want you've seen that's got you it's very it's very very nice and I see there has a presence that's a good idea about having a chat and the ability to do that and and I what I really like is the more support behind the mobil feature because in today it's we have the mobile feature but it but what we need may not it may not be fully supported yet but i see in geneva they're making a big push into the mobile app space and then I think that's when mobile apps going to start taking off for service now when we get to Geneva the real-time peace with angular yes that definitely supply yes okay all right a call so let's talk about n van both of you guys have one point to weigh in on this so let's take a hypothetical situation in healthcare you guys get relatively new to healthcare so you come up with a fresh perspective describe a typical healthcare situation may be using a variety of tools and a lot of stovepipes a lot of inefficiencies describe that situation and how you get from there to where you want to be and what is that state and how do you get there so one of the things that you know we're focusing on right now is standardized processes so in IT we're battling kind of the firefighting or the being a very reactive so if we can get everybody to fall into place with a standard process that allow us to have a very similar experience from the hospital with IT so if a doctor calls in they'll they'll have the very similar experience each and every time as opposed to it being somewhat varied or they have their their hook up their IT hook up if you will right the other kind of interesting piece is we do a lot of rounding so we go to the hospital and we try to find out what's better and in doing that I noticed that we have a lot of paper sheets where we file you know if a piece of equipments broken or anything you'd help with something at the hospital they're actually filling out a piece of paper it's a form for that there's a form he's a paper form you know there's an app for that will and help you there's a fourth with us it's a foreigner or stack of paper I'm in you know our field service your I'm printed if you want that's right good scan it yeah um so our field services reps then go through every morning and they collect these pieces of paper and then they dispatch out some additional people to go fix these things or replace the items I'm you know what I'd like to see is you know a mobile device there and it's just you know right there for them to be able to do that I think those are some prime opportunities that are kind of the low-hanging fruit for us from an IT perspective but I also think that there's some great things that we could do outside of IT on this platform you know supply chain managing some of the you know needle sticks you know if you take a use case like that it's a huge challenge in healthcare today and when you have a practitioner who sticks themselves with the needle they have to go and fill out a form they have to go to occupational health they have to go and do all of these different things there's a set process behind that um you know it'd be nice for them to be able to log it from their mobile device that they had this issue they would get some sort of task or some sort of notification this is hey now your next step in this process is to go do this it gets checked off that way and you can confirm that that practitioner followed the appropriate steps and then what really excites me is the opportunity to do analysis behind that so is it the the nurse who's working the 18-hour shift that always gets the needle sticks and those are higher is that the night shift is it this specific specific area that's having an issue you can start compiling some of that data and doing a lot of the reporting out of service now on how could we how could we be better I would think it's awfully challenging to do some of that analysis if it's on spreadsheets and paper and things like that now doctors aren't known for being the most aggressive users of technology at least historically uh maybe that's unfair has that changed I think I disagree with that because I think you're seeing significant significant advances in health care today and I think they're looking for technology you know I ran into a physician the other day and he's been working at the hospital for 50-plus years and he's in he says oh you're from IT and I said I am and he says when are we gonna get better technology and I thought that was really interesting because I think it shows that they're really wanting more from us he's on that's why I'm here I'm here to help so van what are some of the applications that you're working on developing or getting adopted what kind of just about everything anything like out of box like incident helping change cmdb Service Catalog discovery and then most recently I I developed and get me and my team developed a social media management app and so you know I can fix you can help control Twitter feeds and stuff like that so and then there's we also have custom apps that that might sort of support an existing medical system and so we review the process for that and then we custom-built out that request system so a request for an enhancement might come in and there'd be a workflow behind that but it's not an incident a change or a Service Catalog requests doctors tweet my corporate corporate tweets perfectly i guess it could be so what is the social media management app to that's interesting basically it would it would prevent accidental inappropriate treats or controversial treats for the organization and you would store the credentials in service now and so none of your social media team but actually need to know the credentials and so you give them the ability to post to the social media but they would have to go through service now they have to submit a suggestion for a post and it would go through a workflow and a review and there would be some of that I would have the final say and the final edit on that post and they can polish it up and make it look good and then it would say post it now and then it would go out from service now and actually post it on the twitter feed and this way you can prevent you know if their people are leaving and coming you don't have to keep changing the password you can just give a masses to service now you can just take it away so it is also much secure and it prevents people from accidentally posting stuff in sizing us that's a real concern in today's industry about accidentally posting such does that work so i have my service now credentials yeah and then i have access it's it's a access controls to this app yeah you have you would get access to service now you'd open up a record producer and you'd submit a suggestion for a post so let's say I worked in department XYZ and I say you know our company should really talk about this out there and so I would submit this post suggestion it would go through a workflow behind the scenes and it would get reviewed and if they feel that you know what we really should be talking about this then they'll review it no maybe work with a couple of people to polish it up and then they'll post it and the person who suggested it doesn't need to know the credentials but they got their post out there and so that's the power of service now you don't have to give the credential salad so is that is that how it works is pretty pretty much anybody can make a suggestion anyone can make a sort of a user-generated content I here within the organization yeah you'd get everyone to participate maybe it's just not the social media team anymore you get feedback from the entire organ asian about what they feel should be out there that's relevant to their area and maybe you didn't know that that should be something you're talking about and so you'd get that feedback you'd get to review it and maybe you don't want to post it out or maybe you do and if you do you can get some work notes and discussions on the suggestive post and when you're ready you can post it up through service now to the app now would you for instance take that app and put it in in the store in theory would you do that yeah it would be on share I mean for others too yeah yeah okay have you done that or are you planning on doing that trying to do that yeah you see the charge for it no no okay that's cool great i love free apps but I mean a lot of people want to put stuff in the store so they can you know make money right your motivation is the major Shara sharing knowledge and just help people I mean it's it's it's not a complicated program or anything like that but it's it done okay so what why recreated yeah now what's the general philosophy with sort of developing applications now that the stores here is this whole ecosystem make or buy builder by that's the what's the philosophy or I guess it depends on whether you have a big team if you have a team of 20 X developer's then you could build it yourself to exactly to your specifications and if your team is small and you're relatively small company maybe it's worth it you just buy the app there's also an advantage to making it because then you can support it you know exactly what's behind it I think you know people are going to download off of share and like put applications on the platform they need to thoroughly understand how that application was built and so that they can understand all the business rules and the logic that comes in from a management perspective I think that's really really important to vet out how those apps are been configured we could talk about services so a lot of large service organizations here systems integrators folks that are you know pretty astute on best practice within service now an IT Service Management or in your experiences past experience cars experience are you using service providers how are you using them what would you recommend in that regards a lot of people like oh wow that's a lot of money but we're talking about the family jewels here too so you have to be careful so what would you recommend there and what's your experience been so when I was at the telecommunications organization we used a lot of different partners and in what we found is that each partner kind of brings a different strengths and that really allowed us to leverage you know one partner who's really nailed asset management for example that's one that we want to partner with asset management but maybe not on HR case management another partner could be really good at you know governance risk and compliance and bring a really strong you know strong suite there that's what we want to partner with I'm kind of finding a little bit of a shift now um you know I prefer to use service now professional services you know it's the one back to Pat one throat to choke kind of thing and but they also you know are able to tap into a huge consulting you know practice so if I'm leading an implementation in healthcare I can partner with them and say I want people that have health care experience and when I was at telecommunications I said hey I need somebody that has telecommunications experience they brought their a-game to the telecommunication space so it's really important because I think while everybody does incident management there are specific use cases for these different industries and things that are the I gotchas and they've been through those things and they can bring that knowledge and I think that that's worth you know the money that they charge is bringing the blog's up this health care provider and they did it this way and this is what they found don't do that you know we've gotten a lot of help on our recent project in that area just don't do this do it this way you know specific to our our guidelines writing for our industry we're running out of time you have a van a couple couple final questions man from your perspective coming from help desk now throw them in the application development role what's the one action item you would give you know to your peers what should they be focused on to be successful as a developer I think they would need to focus more on the business and be more you know listening and gathering requirements because i think you know there might be like a developer role and that business systems analyst role and not that that's not important but it would help the developer if they had a general understanding of the business and the flow of that so I think if they could extend just beyond being a developer fully if they could understand the business in the process that would definitely help them question and think about whether what they're building even though it's based off the requirements is really the best way to do it because they have the understanding of the business process to so to call you're nodding profusely okay look van took that one what's the piece of advice you would give your your peers and be your own internal sales rep so as we're asking the development community to fill in that gap of you know the business analyst and understanding the business and coming up with creative solutions you know from a solution owner a platform owner perspective it's be the champion you know HR is not going to know the capabilities of the platform unless you're out in front of them coming up with these solutions and showing the capabilities behind it so you know be the champion because it can only benefit your organization for everybody to be using the same technology you know it's interesting IT people traditionally you wouldn't consider them the most sales oriented our marketing oriented people in the planet but you walk around this conference and and you call it use it to our champion it's a good word but internal champion internal sales people you see a lot more that it events like this generally but specifically knowledge and so that's a skill set that's new IT isn't it it's good yeah and I think you know the platform allows that right we're not spending a lot of time coding and you know being very complicated our role is really making their processes less complicated so that we can automate in the tool faster right so if I can push back on the business and say hey why are you doing it that way this is a better way to do it I'm also simplifying our lives from a development perspective and I can go to market quicker as opposed to having to build all this custom functionality to support some crazy business requirement right so I think that's why you see a lot more champions at this conference because that's the skill set that's really important to make sure you don't mess up your platform all right we'll leave it there Nicole van thanks very much thank you thanks for having us all right keep it right to everybody will be back this is knowledge 15 is the cube with the back with our next guest right after this