live from las vegas it's the cube covering knowledge 60 brought to you by service now here your host dave vellante and Jeff Frick welcome back to knowledge 16 everybody this is the cube this is day two for the cube at knowledge our fourth year here cube goes out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we find the people that really know what they're talking about April Carter is a practitioner she's a senior IT operations manager at cars.com you want when a car go check out cars.com April thanks for coming on the cube thank you so take us inside well first of all talking about cars com I mean very competitive industry you're in right very competitive lots of merging market you're transforming thing you're disrupting and you're banging heads with everybody else is trying to do that but what's happening in the business what are the real pressures that are they're putting on i.t coming up with those new services really and really delivering quickly so we're very much anjel shops and we're doing continuous integration and continuous delivery is the big things for us right now the need for speed but so take us inside the world of IT Service Management your world you know what's it like so basically our transformation was you think of us of us accom so you think that were you know ahead of them a game but when I got two cars they were very paper and spreadsheet driven email is still even still very key to what we do you're rolling your eyes when you say that we can relate it annoys me so you know what service now has really helped us to really start that process and really rethink the services we deliver to our employees so everybody thinks of that external face to cars.com and that's what we focus on so much and we forget that internal phase so making things easier for our employees okay so um maybe start with the the journey of service now you you brought service now into the organization three years ago you had had experience in prior lives with not with service now but with other itsm vendors and they have always been very painful so when we did our bake off on what product that we were going to use you know when they came in they weren't we weren't really considering them a contender how long ago was this sorry two three years okay um but when they came in and they did their demo that you you know we were in the system and we're like this is a little too good to be true and then they say they we could be implemented in three months were like yeah right right that never happens but it all came to fruition and we were implemented with you know incident problem changed the basics you know knowledge an employee self-service portal with probably 30 or so orderable IIT items and it was a big deal for us and a huge success and how long did it take uh three months three months then you got a cake we did get a game everybody gets in here they don't miss daddy must have that in service now so they don't miss that reverse process okay so what was so the cars before was really paper-based spreadsheet based email base what was the business impact the business impact is really trying to drive our business partners in HR and in even in the development space to really try to rethink the way they interact internally so HR we implemented an onboarding automation so we went from multiple forms that we had to fill out as hiring managers to down to one so that was a big deal for us plus we were manually creating user accounts we were manually provisioning and how hardware and access we went through the entire process of about six months after we implemented service now to really try to grab ahold of that process and make it easier because we were delivering our new employees they're all of their things on time that first day because that's our goal but it was extremely painful for the service desk and those folks that Purdue that provisioning so we wanted to make it easier for them and we were able to okay so you you you brought in HR is Ellis recruiting but yeah okay HR pieces a little bit more difficult so we have let we left that piece out so we said onboarding yep you met onboarding so for my recruiting so as a hiring manager you basically submit the form to hire somebody and then all the way through to provisioning all their heirs and that inner integrates or interfaces in some way shape or form with your HR system or um it doesn't today it integrates with the recruiting system right okay which is separate from the HR system am okay and how does that integration occur so basically what what we did was we stood up a form within our catalog so as a hiring manager I can fill out all the information I need from the position that I'm filling through you know their salary requirements and all that kind of stuff plus all of their access they need once that person is hired all that's in there that in that form I can also save that form so as I need it in the future because I'm never going to remember what each person needs so i can say that form as well but then what service now does it sends that all that data over to Silk Road and actually implements all that data for the recruiters so they don't have to manually enter it because they were manually entering it before how do you find stuff ready listen giant content repository all right search it's just we have great search capabilities yeah yeah so this is that simple yeah cuz I could never find anything in my laptop uh-huh I'm very organized so it's one of those things that the the CMS that we had a portal that we have implemented now the design when we were implementing cuz it was three months we didn't really were thinking about everything it was a very broad scope when we were implementing so we didn't really think too heavily on a design of the portal and i think that the organization of the portals what probably annoys me the most at this point because people have to navigate through so much so with the news i'm very excited about the new CMS that they're pulling in helsinki which will actually help us to actual redesign that portal and get it so it's not so deep so as you say it's very hierarchical before yes and so now you're you're able to develop up with hell sinking a flatter structure exactly and it's much more easy to manage because right now it's kind of hard to manage especially if you don't have the technical skill set to do so because it's it's not easy it's more like nested folders versus labels exactly love labels so jizz so talk some more about the kinds of things that that you want to do with with the platform so there's a couple things we really want to push HR so HR is very very paper-based they love their paper actually so we implemented a take my paper ok what's your week HR status change form that you know it's a very very large process so any any time you want to change an employee status whether it's giving them a raise or changing their their location that they're based we fill out this foot paper form so we automated that and put it into service now it goes through approval processes so it's even auditable now or at least much easier to audit it and at the end of the design process was the HR folks are like well as long as I can print it out at the end I'll be fine yeah not really the point uploaded to ever know ok the other really thing that we're really excited about is actually so with the continuous delivery continuous integration that we're doing on the development side is we're opening up a lot of API is that our developers can use to automate a lot of their processes so we want to automate our release cycles right now everything's somewhat manual when we're doing release there's still people at the keyboard it's not wholly up manual but we want to get to that point where they just click on something in JIRA and it initiates the Jenkins Jenkins crates you know changes and it automates it all for them but it's still completely auditable from our perspective if you had to take a creative benefits pie and and you how to allocate a portion of the value let's say that's received by sort of IT versus outside of IT what would that pie look like I would say the biggest benefit is you know that an employee's so my goal is is to make the employees life easier I mean and that's the way I evangelize the product it's really what can I do to make your life easier what can I do to take some process it's very heavy and make it lighter for you that's the biggest biggest benefit the other thing is the ease of development on the tool so we don't want to go out and buy something every time a developer decides it wants to do something else so the ease of development so we can build small ABS we have a library app so they can check out kindle books I can check out Kendall even logins and within the tool that they're just little apps we're not going to go somewhere and buy that but we need to be able to do that so we can do that easily within the tool and it's funny in making the employees job easier is this nice second order effect where your phone doesn't ring exactly that's my goal are you don't tell him that little secret we were just doing it for you April could you talk about building these you know lightweight apps well describe the skill set of the people who are building these apps so they hard core developers or they locoed developers both I think its a mix of both so we some hard core developers that JavaScript pretty much 24 7 and then we have you know the admins who I can I code it within the tool myself but I'm definitely not a developer but it makes it easy enough for me to be able to do those little snippets of code that i need to make form easier for somebody to make it prettier to make it behave lightweight as so you're not you've never been a developer you've never written no code no never i still do it never works in pewter science major no ok but so you know you said no like okay so uh so you're smart this is ok all right ok but and so i want to dig it to level but so you are able to build apps or at least improve apps absolutely and I think there's there's multiple ways to do it obviously research the internet can tell me how to do a lot of stuff the community has been very helpful there's a also share the where you can find you know little little apps that will help you along your way as well so they make it very easy to actually kind of build out your core product did you have to go through training to get to that point or was it just sort of autodidactic or Ashley knowledge has been most of my training we didn't training at the beginning when we implemented but I haven't taken a look at training sense and you mentioned JIRA and just every tonight these stories make me think of JIRA it sounds like you know using kind of best practice in the hardcore software development part of the house and now bringing that over into the less hardcore software development side of the house but still very similar types of techniques and processes absolutely yeah that's great so bumper sticker on knowledge 16 for you what's the way they wouldn't when the trucks are pulling away from the Mandalay Bay was from April Carter standpoint what's it gonna say so the one thing there's a couple things I guess you know I did I always find vendors it at the show so I found we're implementing move soft right now it's a it's an event management tool and we're literally going through the process as we're here at the conference but it's it's an event management tool it I can't I in service now i can create manage my critical instant through being the OC critical incidents are my my bread and butter I have to make sure that those go off well and they that we reduce that time and i always find products here that I'm like oh I want to look into that we found one downstairs just yesterday that help is gonna help us and hopefully manage our mobile communications so all the cell phones and tablets and everything that we have in our orders and then dealing with the external vendors like Verizon and AT&T have been fun maybe not quite fun yeah I'm surprised something good here and and I learn a lot a new thing so it's it's always been very helpful how many years have you been coming um this will be my fourth your fourth all right same as ours too yeah April an awesome having you thanks so much for coming on the cube you know cube newbie did a great job awesome yeah you're a cube alone I here alone all right thank you thank you okay keep right here everybody will be back with our next guest is the cube we're live from knowledge 16 in Las Vegas bright back every once in a while a true break