>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube, covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is day two of ServiceNow, Knowledge, and this is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bart Murphy is here, he's the CTO of York Risk Services, and he's the CIO and CTO of CareWorks, Cube alum. Bart, good to see you again. >> Great to see you guys. So we were talking off camera, Mark came over, we're talking about the CIO Decisions, you participated in that last year as well. What have you been doing at the conference? What are you seeing that's interesting? >> Well I've been attending the sessions and you just mentioned the CIO Decisions, that was my day yesterday. Great opportunity to get you know, great speakers, we mentioned a few of them that spoke yesterday, but also there were some customer round tables that allowed you to collaborate with your peers over a few areas, and sort of discuss what's working for them, what's not. You know, what their road map looks like, how they're selling that to the board, those type of things. It was a very productive day. >> So, since we last talked, what have you been working on? We had a great discussion last year on security, I'm sure things have changed there, they keep evolving. What kind of things you've been working on, what are some of the initiatives that are new? >> Yeah, so last year we did talk about that and my desire, I was somewhat excited when I started to see the new play into SecOps with ServiceNow. So we've now gone live with SecOps. We're continuing to mature our security posture as a company, and I think that's, when you look at a road map or you're looking at things, what we want to see is continual capability maturity in our security space. One, we need to be there, right? As an organization, we're a services organization. We also want to just make sure that we're continuing to get better and automate. So we saw SecOps as a real opportunity for that. So we've now gone live, we've deployed that. We did it and integrated that with certain tools that we have, Tanium, LogRhythm, Symantec, some of our scanning tools. What that's allowing us to do is look at a wide range of log information, parse through that in order to automate certain types of work flows and cases. So whether it be as simple as finding an end point that say has an outdated Symantec update and having that automatically update, or create a case because it can't push the automation, those type of things we're trying to do now to try to raise the level of our security and start weeding through all the noise that's out there, that's provided with all the tools that we have. >> How did you find the integration? >> Well, we did the integration ourselves, and we found the integration, compared to some other products that we've done in the past, to be much smoother. You know, I think this is a later product that they've built into their platform. I think they've taken into account implementation, so some of the integrations were out of the box like the Tanium, others, we built those integrations. So, and we also, I think I may have mentioned this, not sure if I did, when I looked at my incident security response plan and the way I developed that, I developed it very closely to what was coming out of the box with ServiceNow. I wanted to make sure that our policies, procedures, process for that really just met out-of-the-box functionality, so we didn't have to do a lot of customization and configuration there, and we could focus on the technical integrations that really provide some of the power of the automation with the CMBB. >> Speaking of sort of custom work, you talk about M and A, you mention you get a mulligan coming. >> Bart: Yeah. >> Talk about that a little bit, kind of unwinding some of the custom mods. >> Yeah, so we have multiple instances of ServiceNow, and over the last year we've been building our newest instance with York Risk Services Group, that's our total company. And I'm in the process now of taking what we built for CareWorks, you know, we have been a customer since 2010, and really learning what we did well there and what we didn't do well. In addition to the fact that a lot of customization that we did on that platform is no longer really required, that's how much the platform has matured with ServiceNow. >> Which one was it, which release, do you remember? >> Oh gosh, Berlin, probably. >> Berlin, right, right. >> Early, early on if I'm accurate, from the very beginning. And you know GRC was an example where we did a lot of customization because that product just is night and day compared from where it is today. >> Jeff: Right >> So now we get a new opportunity to look at our process to see, say, is this something that we really need to keep the customization, or can we leverage the platform better, and by the way, even if we do have to do customization, can we do it a better way? So it is a little bit of a mulligan, from that standpoint, we get a sort of fresh start on a platform that we understand even better now, and we're doing it at a larger scale, so we're trying to really look at those automation opportunities so we can gain the efficiencies that we need. >> So I wonder if you can talk about the sort of business impact that you've seen over the years. You've been a long-time ServiceNow customer, and it just feels like this whole ecosystem is on the steep part of the s-curve now. Maybe describe the sort of business impact in whatever terms make sense. >> Well, I think partly supporting consolidated shared services, whether it's in IT or other areas of the business, and even finding areas of the business that aren't doing a good job of tracking their work today. And it still exists, in I think every organization. I was mentioning, you know, another area that we're looking at that we'll most likely deploy this year or early next year, I would assume this year, is the HR Case Management. >> Dave: Mmm hmm. >> That's an area very similar to IT, very similar to other areas that we've built use cases within ServiceNow, where things are done primarily through email. It's very inefficient, they don't have very good metrics to understand how much support they're providing the organization. They're pressured just as I am from an SG&A perspective, to do more with less. And the only way we're going to be able to continue to do more with less is to provide some level of automation and stay consistent with it. So when I started looking at ServiceNow, and yes, we're probably on that s-curve too. We've done some really good work on the automation side, but now with the platform, with what they're doing with some of the analytics, what they're, you know, I know what they're going to do with machine learning, what we can do with some of the predictive stuff. How can we take a security instance, for example, have it remediate itself and then inform us on what it did? Those are the type of things that I think's going to bring us way sharp up on that curve. I mean we've done a good job, we're very technical, we've done a good job automating, I'm not, but for what we can do I think over the next three to four years with this platform and the automation, is going to be a game changer for us and we're going to need that. 'Cause you know our SG&A can't grow at the same rate. You want to have that margin improvement, and this is one of the areas that we can use a platform to do that. >> It's interesting, you're, always a lot of talk about automation when we're here. >> Yeah. >> Different automated processes and make them easier. But you mentioned before we went on air, you just mentioned it again, that the desire to get measurement on the process as the primary driving factor, 'cause you just can't measure that which is in email and all these disparate systems, and now you can actually use the motivation of measurement so then you can get improvement as a primary driver to implement it. >> Yeah, I mean one of our core values is to be a data-driven decision making company. And you can't improve what you can't measure. And there's still to this day a lot of these processes that we take for granted. You know, SecOps, HR, operation service center, claim setup. We think we're doing a good job managing it and understanding the productivity of it, but we don't have really good tools in place or they're very disparate. So if we can get that into one CMDB, we can start to leverage automation. Once we start to measure it, we truly can start to see that business value, 'cause we can see those measurements go down. So whether we're using out-of-the-box performance analytics now, you know we started originally, performance analytics was a separate product. On the new York one, again, that's another benefit, we just turn it on, right? And there's already really good, rich data that it's giving us to stay, and we can compare that against our previous performance, whether it's incidents, closing rate, you know all these type of things out of the box. So I can start to show improvement. It's not to say that we don't have areas to improve, we do. There are things outside of ServiceNow that we need to do to improve our overall capability. So whether you're talking leveraging orchestration within ServiceNow but then I need a deployment tool to actually go and do that work. So that's where Tanium comes into play, so there's other strategies we're deploying to say where can we get the full life-cycle of that automation? And that's where engineering discipline and bringing that to your supply chain of activities is key. >> The other thing that you mentioned that kind of flipped it on its head, is you talked about your incidents response plan and trying to make it pretty much as out of the box from ServiceNow as possible. Was that because you just kind of went with the custom, or now are they delivering more best practices in the way that configuration comes out of the box that you don't really have to think about it. >> Yeah, I mean absolutely. >> You can presume best practices, because that's how it's preconfigured out of the box. >> Yeah, and I don't think they tout that, and I understand why, but they're getting feedback from a ton of customers on how to build a process in the most efficient way. I don't think they're doing it in a vanilla way. I think they're doing it in an efficient, robust way. So I think they are at that point where there's a lot of things that come out of the box that people really need to pay attention to. Like I understand that we may have done it this way, but this way is more than sufficient. And if it means that I don't have to customize and I can make my upgrades even easier than they are today, 'cause they aren't that painful at all, on the ServiceNow front, then why not? And then we can benefit from their maturity on the platform, because they're going to continue to add in releases and add in functionality just like we saw over the last two days. >> Back to the sort of s-curve, it sounds like you're getting in the position now to get real operating leverage almost like Metcalf's Law. The first one you get some benefit, but the nth one, boy that's when it really kicks in. >> I hope so. That's what I'm, I think right now we've spent a lot of time and energy getting onto one platform, right? Whether it's from all the acquisitions, whether it's from an older instance to a newer instance. I think once we get critical mass on that platform, yes, the automation stuff will make a marketable difference. We've done some great things for our business but I think once we get everybody on one platform and we get that true understanding of how we want to do our enterprise process and we have some other uplift in our areas and systems. You know, Tanium's a new product that we have. We're looking potentially HRIS, there's other things at play that will play in the ecosystem. And as we mature those and really understand what our end game's going to be, I think that's where we have that power. >> One of the speakers at CIO Decisions this week was author Daniel Pink. We had him on the Cube, talk about selling is human. When you run a business case, you talked about the HR, moving into HR, do you go sell, do you make the business case, are they coming to you, is it push/pull, how does it work? >> A little bit of both. As a CTO and as any executive, I listen to Daniel as well and I'm a firm believer that we're all in sales. All of us are part of some type of revenue-generating company, okay, and if we don't take that to heart, and we just think that we're some cog in a wheel in somebody else's problem, shame on you. No company's going to grow without a full company of great sales people. They're either advocates for their brand, they understand the mission, they understand what they're doing for the mission. So from a sales perspective, certainly I'm going around trying to tell people about the capability of ServiceNow. I saw the CEO speak yesterday too and one thing that struck me that I think a lot of people need to do, is he's spent a lot of time over the last 49 days trying to understand the vernacular of IT. You know, he was the CEO at some large companies, they all had IT, now he's at an IT company. And so he's trying to really understand the speak and some of the capabilities that you have to understand. He's got a better appreciation of it. It's my job, really, to be able to do that type of evangelism within our company to say here are some of the platforms that we have and here are some of the capabilities and at least start the conversation. I will tell you that other times I have people come to me because they've either heard from someone else that they're using it at their company and their HR team loves it, or what's it about? But I need to go around and say I see you guys doing this and we have a platform that's totally made for that. It's why it was built. Let's have a demo or let's start looking at how you think that would improve your guys' productivity. You're stretched for resources, I'm stretched for resources, and just come at it from a common problem statement perspective. Then we build the business case from there. >> I see. So we hear a lot of the announcements this morning, Jacarta, another release. What do you, and so there's a lot of things they did in there, performance improvements, UI improvements and things like that, bringing in intelligent automation, a lot of really good, cool things in there. What's, from your mind, on their to-do list? What kinds of things, I mean, are they doing the types of things that you want them to do, is there something big that could really make a difference to your business? >> Yeah, I wish I was like the ServiceNow product visionary. (laughing) But I'm not, I got to commend 'em. I think they're doing some pretty darn good things. When you start to look at SecOps and its play into GRC and the way that you really start to automate some of your controls, which are a huge component of, I'm not going to say waste within your organization, but they take a lot of time, and they bring value, don't get me wrong, but they aren't bringing...they're not bringing in revenue, they're a lot of compliance and they're good practices, so the more we can automate some of those they're high value but you want your team working on other innovation type of stuff, I think the better. When they start looking at what they're doing with the data now, everybody's becoming a data company, everybody's talking about machine learning. Everybody's talking about AI. I think that is the next place that they got to get to. If they can start to generate, again, some of that low value work, whether it's automating an entire incident end to end. I mean, there's insurance companies out there that are doing that, right, trying to automate a claim end to end. So I think the more they can look at their domain and determine ways to automate an entire workflow, which they are well on their path. They've been doing that from a workflow automation perspective for years. Now take it into AI to do it, I think they're going to be in a good position, a better position than I am in, probably if I was to develop that myself. >> Right. >> So I think that will help me scale from a user support perspective and just workflow in general, service management perspective. >> So you might not be the product guru going forward, but the thing you know probably better than a lot of people under the 15,000 is how to get people to adopt a platform. I wonder if you can share some of your tips and tricks to fellow practitioners to convince the people to don't pick up the phone, you know, put it in the platform? >> Yeah, it's evangelism. You got to get out and educate people on what the platform's about. As a procurer of the platform, you know and ServiceNow is not a cheap solution, and nor should it be. I think you need to go and justify, I'm getting this platform and it's up to me to make sure that we're going to leverage those dollars as much as possible. So anything I buy I want to make sure we're leveraging it as much as we can within the organization. I'm also a firm believer, I understand that reality hits and it's not going to happen overnight. So how do you build a backlog and start really working through that? We do an agile process, we're doing releases every two weeks. We're trying to, I may take an opportunity in IT but then the next one I want to do is going to be in the business. Or it's going to be with security or it's going to be with HR. Trying to get winds across the spectrum instead of trying to take big projects. Big projects take time, you know, there's a lot of little things that I can do to whet their appetite, on boarding, off boarding, transfers, HR started to get familiar with ServiceNow and what it could o just in that space. That whet their appetite, then, to have a more serious discussion about case management, right, which we're still having. So I think trying to figure out how you can handle a backlog of smaller hit items to get winds, will allow you to get a little bit more credibility if you start looking at a more wholesale change to their entire business, which this would be, a wholesale change to their business. >> You have kind of this dual role of CTO and CIO. Over the last several years, so much has changed in information technology, cloud, infrastructures, code and now you're seeing containers explode, the whole sassification of softwares eating the world, obviously service management is playing a big part there. Now AI, the whole big data meme. How has the CIO role evolved and changed and how has that affected you? Particularly the CIO piece, and you know, the CTO piece as well, I guess. Technology's always there, the CTO has got to be following that. But the CIO role seems to be changing quite dramatically. >> I think each organization's a little different. The way I look at it is, and some organizations, and maybe it's just me, some people see a CIO as an operational guy or girl, and some of them see their CTO as going out and looking at new technology. The way I, and why I sort of have the title of the CTO is I never want to have a build and run type of organization. I don't want to have a marginalized CIO that's basically just keeping the lights running, maybe keeping enterprise systems up. We need to be innovative as an entire team and those assets that we build, the same people need to support them, because, man, they build much better assets if they have to support them, let me tell you. (laughing) I think the role is changing whether you use the term CTO, CIO, you know, who is that person that's going to help ensure that you're not only looking at new platforms but not, I don't want to just spend all my time looking at new platforms or looking at new innovations. And certainly want to be aware of the trends. What's the right time to look at that for your organization? Some would say you always need to be on top of all of that, and I don't need to be on top of every AI vendor or data analytics company. What I need to understand is within the context of our organization, our financial structure, where we are as a maturity as an organization, where are the tools right now that can really make a major lift? And sometimes those aren't the most recent platforms. Sometimes they aren't the gold-standard platforms, sometimes they're just grunt and hard work. So I think the role, I hope the role evolves into where somebody takes ownership of all that and it's not carved up. Now, I think there are, even in our organization, there's a place. We have a Chief Innovation Officer, who is staying on top of some of the front-end stuff dealing with our industry. And that's a fine model as well. But I don't like breaking up between operations and development work and innovation. I like to make sure that those are all in sync. I think that's where you don't get a lot of rogue IT, a lot of shadow IT, because ultimately somebody's got to support it, and we want to make sure that that support cost is as lean as possible. >> That's a great answer, steeped in accountability, Bart. It's always great having you on the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you guys, it's a pleasure to see you. >> All right, good to see you. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is the Cube live from Knowledge 17. Be right back. (upbeat music)