but cute at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff Creek we're back this is Dave vellante with Jeff Frick we're here live at moscone south and we're covering wall-to-wall this knowledge conference service now transforming IT from a cost center into a value producer services is the the tip of the spear service oriented businesses we're seeing this notion of a single cmdb as a single data model as a very powerful concept and one that the majority of companies don't have today but the ones that are moving in that direction are definitely transforming in a way that is pretty meaningful Brad Powell is here he's the vice president of internal customer technologies that merits a customer of service now Brad welcome back to the queue good thank you it's good to be here so you are speaking at this event right absolutely what's your topic IT evolution so taking IT to the next level okay so before we get it to that tell us a little bit about your company you know you roll what you've been doing you know the last since we last talked sure absolutely well we're actually going through a huge cultural shift inside of merits right now and it's all about the people right IT needs to realize that we're really a service based organization now and so that's really hard for people to grasp right we talk about i.t changing all the time and when IT people here that they think moving from one technology to a new technology this time it's completely different it's all about the people so we're asking the IT people to change and be more like sales people to really sell the services that it's-- offering and that's difficult for them so I'm really driving that inside America's culture from an organization perspective to really get out in front of it and solve real people needs you know we talk about business needs it's really people needs that we need to solve and so that's what I've been up to so what are some of the secrets because we that keeps coming up over and over that is going to change and like it its people and probably love we're getting out of their comfort zones oh absolutely are they reset you know how receptive are they really i think you know you have some people that are receptive some people that aren't but they have to get out of there there there East their comfort right to be able to do this and what it really takes is you got to step back and look at the bigger picture right this is kind of where tools come in IT has always been this kind of working on request working on incidents tracking it in that way those metrics are really are useless to our customers because we are trying to prove our existence by numbers they don't care right they carry solving my problems right so we have to transition them out and that's where you bring tools in because what you're able to do is automate those activities right and anytime that you're freeing up from them that's when you take them out and move them into the business actually sitting with the business to understand and listen to what they're saying so that they can solve those business needs so that's what you have to do and it is very uncomfortable for IT I always think about the old saturday night live skit I don't know if you guys remember it but it had the IT people and they call right and they'd say here can you solve this and you'd say click here do this do this and they move and then they jump out of the way and he'd slam on the keyboard and fix it right that's the old IT that's the old silo die team we don't have that anymore now we need to listen become that sales become brokers of services it's interesting you talk about you know sales itea sales people I had we had one of the guests on Martha hella actually said generally IT people are not great salespeople they undersell mom now now part of the issue is a sales person you want a hot product right we got a hot product that you're really proud of then it's easier mm-hmm to sell so I guess the question is how has your product evolved in the last you know in years and and what have been the drivers so the product how you need to evolve you know when you're started talking about tools is ease of use that is going to be the number one selling for your customers of IT above anything else so if I can give the customer solution like they get it at home you know if they have a problem they google it they look it up they fix it themselves so you need to really take that to the next level and sell that where you bring the people in to get them engaged is they know the back-end technology in order to make that happen and so they get excited about that and then what you need to do is put people in front of them to really sell that to the business I'm talking marketing slicks I'm talking everything that's where you need to do really so you guys are doing collateral yeah we have to be able to sell your IT services I mean that's what it's all about we are transitioning to a service based culture one hundred percent and you know you brought up a good point there are a lot of people that just can't make that transition it doesn't mean that we don't need them anymore what it does mean though is you need to really focus their efforts in a certain area and then put that customer facing sales oriented people out in front of the customers so what was the contribution of service now to this transformation was it you know a little small piece of it was it the you know the other end of the spectrum the reason why was it the key enabler talk about them yeah well when you look at it and this is you know coming back to from a tools discussion is what you want to do is you want to be able to free up that it's-- time right in order to do that you need to automate in order to automate you need tools to automate which is the orchestration pieces and things like that of service now so that is actually enabler for us to free up the time to get in front of the businesses to be able to sell our services so that was a really big step in the right direction the other thing is ticketing systems of the past were just really used to track things right that's not the case anymore you don't just track things with IT ticketing systems now what you want to do is actually use it to sell your service okay so you have to build your catalog you have to build all those services in such a way that's easy to use like an Amazon things like that so that you can really sell those services and that's where the tools come in so it's actually twofold it frees up your IT people's time in order for them to get in front of business and then you need to use it to sell and get out of IT get into facilities management get into HR management all of those different things are huge and really it's like an upsell for IT well Brad that's really interesting because the research that we've done it with you gone so you started with problem management and change management like most service now customers but the research we've done at Wikibon when we asked people about moving to transforming to IT as a service and do you know service catalogs and what the biggest challenges what they tell us is that the hardest part is aligning with the business figuring out what the business needs aligning with those business needs developing those service catalogs in a way that resonates right the business so if I heard you correctly you're saying you started with problem and change management and all the sort of blocking and tackling and then that freed up resources for you guys to actually go and talk to the wallets of that dragon ization that's right you have to automate those activities that you do day in and day out from an incident change perspective and that frees up your staff to actually go sit with the business and listen and learn and that's a skill set that you have to teach your IT people but it's an important skill set because if you can put the eye teeth workforce actually with the business they'll hear the problems that they're facing and start to work through that with them and that's a win-win for everybody so I gotta ask you was culturally how did you achieve this of this transformation was it we was a situation where the the IT staff was sort of clamoring for this did you have to drag them kicking and screaming you know changes is often times not easy sometimes it's it's welcome but but often times it's not so how were you able to affect that that change from a cultural standpoint you know that that's a very good question and it wasn't easy I'll be honest with you it's a very difficult transition because you're changing people you know it's not too little thing like that so what you do is you find those things that motivate those right the real geeks of IT what do they want to do they want to automate they want to build those back-end systems so drive them towards that okay so that that gets them motivated and starting from the cultural shift and besides that you know they want to be innovative they really do if you talk to any IT guy they want to be innovative they want to make a difference it's just guiding them along path and it takes a lot of work to change a culture like that but it's so important and without it your IT organizations just aren't going to make it you know you have those people like your database administrators your system administrators that are set and siloed in their ways that's just the old IT you know though they need to go to cloud providers may be in work because you know they're still there still doing that type of activity but your corporate business now it's going to be service providers and that's how you need to make them change and understand that so a couple of questions so one is how are the business people receiving this new you know almost of pairing it sounds like with with IT folks and then to from the IT perspective what do they think about Amazon what do they think about shadow IT you know are they pissed about it are they happy to have something to combat it are they you know we just can't compete there they're working at a different speed than we are you know I this is one of the things I always talk about in my presentations at maritz is we don't I T in the future doesn't compete we complement and that's where you need to do so if you're putting a lot of your servers in the cloud and an Amazon or Azure build a portal and make it easy for your customers to do it too you're complimenting those services that's where I T needs to go is more of a complementing factor and the business are they liking it absolutely because we're solving real business problems they actually are getting there faster than I T right think about it when you go home you fix your own issues you go to the store it's easy its quick right you are driving the customers of I tier driving this cultural shift IT needs to catch up and get get going in this direction today excellent so let me get one more if I know we're getting light on time but I remember one of the highlights of knowledge 13 was the brad vegas movie where I think you hit every single venue up and down the strip from the from the airport to the Grand Canyon so I'm curious have they taken you out for the streets of San Francisco they have not taken me out for the streets of San Francisco but that was quite a life-changing event I tell you we hit every stop in Vegas you name it we were there and luckily they cut you know they didn't show the whole video they cut sections out that maybe was a little too risky we got to find that video we'll put it up on our playlist because it's certainly a must-see TV that cruise around San Francisco of a lot less interesting oh yeah you never know this is early yeah I Lombard Street whoo I hype 4head listen thanks very much for coming Lee anytime great to see you thank you so much I keep right there everybody would react with our next guest we're live from 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