[Announcer]: Live from Orlando, Florida, It's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (electronic music) >> Hi Everybody, we're back in Orlando, Florida. This is The Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage and we are covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and my co-host, Jeff Fricke. Jeff, our fifth year doing Knowledge. >> Amazing. >> We've talked over the years about ServiceNow extending its platform into the line of business, and one of those areas is HR. We've had a number of guests on the HR and we're pleased to invite Deepak Bharadwaj, who is the general manager of the HR business unit. Great to see you Deepak, thanks for coming on again. >> Thanks Dave, pleasure. >> So off from the keynote this morning, I had tweeted out it was the best IT demo I'd ever seen. No technology, just people with footballs, soccer balls, taking us through an HR example. But, so before we get there, the keynote today. A huge audience, a lot of interest in HR and bringing ServiceNow to HR. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think what we recognized is HR is where a lot of these processes related life events start and then that has implications to many other departments. So, you think about onboarding, off boarding, transfers, relocations, external leave of absence. Almost all of these processes cut across all departments. And the department that gets the biggest workload often times is IT. So, one of the reasons we see all that interest from IT in HR type use cases is because they are at the receiving end of all of that action, if you will, and if we can solve it for IT, we solve it for HR, we are ultimately solving it for the employee and that's what we're all about. So, it's truly exciting to see the interest both in my HR topic keynote yesterday, as well as today. There are slightly different audiences. My topic keynote was more geared towards the HR audience and we actually have a lot of them at the show, which is always encouraging. And today's keynote was more geared towards what we call our IT champions who want to integrate HR to impress the platform and that's absolutely work we like to see as well. >> Yeah, so the momentum in the business is quite good. I know you guys don't break out the numbers specifically for your business unit but you talk about a lot of Pioneer Lightspeed HR customers. You gave some examples. One of the examples you gave was your recent, your personal experience. Everybody can relate to HR, but your recent name change. >> Yup. >> So give us an update, sort of on the business and talk a little bit more about why HR is so critical to ServiceNow. >> I think the opportunity to transform the enterprise is huge with HR, and just looking at the traction that we're seeing from the market place, it's almost the next adjacency after IT where there's just a lot of inefficiency. If you think about our work and lightspeed model, we're really going after unstructured work patterns and guess where the most unstructured work happens today. It's in HR. It's a nice adjacency for us. Plays well with our platform, the core of what we do with service management. And it's a market that's been underserved for years. Customers have told us, "This is what we would like you "to do." And that's how the HR business unit itself was formed, that's why I came here, that's how I got this job. And since then, we've just seen just dramatic traction, especially as the emphasis moves more and more towards making that experience truly consumerized, the service experience for the employee consumerized across all of the departments within the enterprise. So how do you treat your employees just like you would your customers? That's kind of a theme that you see cut across the entire costumer base, and they're really wanting to get on that bandwagon. And ServiceNow is an excellent platform to be accomplishing that. >> It's just so interesting how we see these great successes built in companies recently, just attacking unidentified inefficiency. The Cloud identified just a ridiculously low utilization rate at corporate data centers, and unlocked the value of that efficiency. Uber unlocked the inefficiency of all these cars sitting around not being used. And as you guys have identified, there's so much inefficiency in these unstructured processes that go cross multiple channels. Phone, text, email, Slack, Gerub, pick your favorite thing, they're all over the place. So, it's really this huge value opportunity to grab because it is just grossly inefficient, and almost so inefficient we don't even recognize that there's a much, much better way, until you actually do it in a much, much better way. >> Yeah, no, Jeff, that's absolutely right. So, like you mentioned, there's a technology aspect to this, so, there's just multiple systems, and that leads to inefficiency. And then, when you don't get what you want from the technology, what do you do? You resort to people. And so, for years, HR has dealt with this problem by just throwing more people at it. And the way I like to think about it is we've gone from this era of trying to, essentially, create reincarnations of things that were already automated. So, I come from the HCM space, if you will. Talent management, recruiting, and so, we've taken a recruiting system, and then tried to make that better and better and better. Put it in the cloud, and so on and so forth. And if you look Code HR and some of these other technologies that's what they do, and they do a great job at that. But what we've recognized is, yes, that is obviously important and necessary, but really, like I said earlier, when you have a life event, you are looking for just information, so you can make the choices that you want to be making during that life event. You want step-by-step guidance. You want access to some person, a real person, that can help answer those questions. And when you don't get those types of things, now you're back to unstructured emails and sending text messages to somebody in HR, and that's not their job. Their job is to be helping you with providing strategic support. And so, how can we unlock the utilization, if you will, of those HR professionals, the people, as an asset, within HR, and make them more productive. That's what we're all about. >> And then jump on the latest, greatest trend, which is Cloud, obviously you guys have Cloud application, a little bit of software automation, a little bit data support into that automation, and then, ta-da. Hopefully, it's a whole lot smoother process. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What has to happen for a customer to take advantage of HR within ServiceNow? We had one guest on yesterday that they actually started at HR, but generally, that's not the case, right? Normally, it's an extension of ITSM. So, what's the typical case and what are the prerequisites for customers? >> I think in mind, a couple of things have to happen. One is HR has to be brought in. So, we got a lot of IT champions, which is great, but I encouraged them to go out and to give these HR people a hug, literally. Because they need to understand what the platform can do for HR and how it can unlock that productivity that he just spoke about, Jeff. And HR has to be brought in, they need to be educated on the problem that they have. A lot of times, they don't even recognize that there's a problem, because they've just gotten used to doing things a certain way, and now, there is this revolutionary platform that can help them, so getting them on board, getting that buy in is important. I think the other thing that has to happen is these organizations need to identify very specific set of problems that they want to go after because if you look at the problem set that we can address it's everything from just simple case management all the way to automating business processes like on boarding. You can start wherever you want in that spectrum, but you need to figure out what your priorities are and start there, and if it's case management, that's fine. You figure that out. Now, you can actually measure progress and move from there. If you want to start with on boarding and automating a business process, that's fine, as well. But very often, I find that our customers need some help in trying to identify the priority projects that they can tackle. And that's a blessing and a curse of having such a powerful platform. It can do everything, and often times, it's just getting to the right set of priorities that you want to tackle. >> The flexibility of the platform, like you say, it's a two-sided coin. But I want to ask you a question. You're a software executive, you've been in the business a while. You know one of the complaints of software, historically, is if I have a process that's fossilized, a lot of times when I bring in new software, I have to change that process to adapt to the way in which the software handles it, and that's been a headwind for a lot of adoption. If I have a process that's baked can I just sort of use that within ServiceNow, and apply the existing processes? And is that typically how it happens? Or do customers sit back and say, hey, there's a better way to do this? >> Yeah, I would say, there's probably a mix of the two. There is the where do I start? I have a process, can't I just take that and put it into ServiceNow? And absolutely. That's been happening since ServiceNow has been in its existence. That's the core of what we do, being able to structure work, being able to automate it through workflows, things like that. But oftentimes, what'll happen is then they get the analytics, using performance analytics or reporting solutions, you can now start to look at what's working, what's not, and then make some adjustments. So, for example, with HR, you might start off with, hey, everything is a general inquiry. And so, now you're getting a number of things that are tagged as general inquiries, but then you look at analytics data, and it says, well 30% of those are actually going to the payroll department. So guess what? Now we need to restructure our processes so that we've got some special handling for payroll, because that tends to be a friction point for employees. And that's how our platform can provide that visibility, so you can evolve as your needs evolve and you mature. >> I was going to say, and I'm sure people are wondering, there's other big HCM applications out there. You've worked with some of them. How does the ServiceNow offering suite fix into their existing HR application infrastructure. >> Great question. So, this is probably the number one question that our customers ask us. They're trying to figure out where does ServiceNow start and where do these other applications begin. And I think the answer is it depends. And we want to provide customers with choices. What we are trying to optimize for is that employee service experience. What does that look like, and how do we make it as consumerized as possible? So, there's maybe three broad use cases where these solutions fit in. So, one might be I am within one of these systems. So, let's say I'm doing a performance review within a work day or success factors, and now, I have a question, I'm stuck here. Now, you're in ServiceNow, and you're submitting a case, asking a question, searching a knowledge article, as an example. That's one use case. The second use case is something happened in my life. I'm going to have a baby, or somebody in my family is sick and I need to tend to them. Or I need to relocate an employee from a different country. Where do I even begin? So you start with ServiceNow, potentially. You figure out what you want to do, and then you submit the request, and eventually, you might end up completing a transaction in one of the systems. But what we do is help guide that employee to where they need to be going. And the third one really is the use case we explored this morning, which is around on boarding, off boarding, transfers, how do we take what's happening within those systems, and extend that to all the other department? So, there may be aspects of on boarding, as an example, that's happening in a recruiting system. How do we take that and then extend it into IT and finance and facilities, and so on and so forth. >> Jeff: Great. That's a good question. >> Deepak, can you share with us some early customer experiences, some maybe metrics, proof points? >> Sure, yeah. I actually had a couple of those on the screen this morning so I'll use Sally Beauty as an example. Beauty supply retailer. And they started with the employee relations function, and trying to optimize that. And the challenge they were having is all of the employee relations questions from the field, and they got a number of stores, and all of these associates where sending in these questions and inquiries and complaints, in some cases, to the HR business partner. So, there were regional business partners in each of the regions, and they were getting all of these questions. So, as a result, that HR business partner, who is supposed to be thinking about how to help staff new stores, and just provide more strategic support to the managers, district managers, they are fielding first level questions about employee relations. And so, what they did was they centralized that function, the HR service delivering function, so that there is all these calls go to a central location, and they just had two people, now, manning it, and we did some value calculation with them, and what we recognized is they had saved the equivalent of seven people's worth of time, that could then be repurposed back into something else. So, the centralized the function, the moved work from high cost business partners to lower cost HR support personnel, and each person that you can free up is at least $100,000 a year, fully loaded. And so that math starts to add up pretty fast and pretty quickly. This is just employee relations. You extend that to benefits and payroll, and so on and so forth. You in millions of dollars a year. >> That's a pretty powerful example, and even though they're not getting rid of people, but they're avoiding potentially new hires, and as you say, they're driving new value. Every company we talk to is trying to do some kind of digital transformation. What they don't want to do is route paper. So, is that what you're seeing? Where are they putting the resources that they're saving. What are seeing? Some examples of what customers are doing. >> It's all sorts of things. I think analyzing the data is a big area. Just the data science piece of it. So, if you look at a service center, would you rather be looking at how to reorganize your resources, or would you rather respond via email to all these unstructured queries? Clearly, the former is a much more higher value added work. So that's one area that you see a lot of repurposing. The other that I talk about is how can you improve the quality of service itself. So, instead of you answering questions about my benefits plan, go find me a better benefits plan. Do some research and look at what else it out there. That's where you should be spending time. And the classic one is really around talent. There's just a lot of talent management type activities that need to take place from sourcing, recruiting, managing succession planning processes and thing like that. Again, you should not be telling me how to put a job requisition online, and what pay grade to select and what area to post this in. All of that should be available as some sort of a knowledge-based item. You should be actually going out there and doing your job of sourcing high-quality candidates. So, that's how these things really compliment each other and unlock the potential of the HR team. >> Yeah, spend your time sharpening the sod, not whackin' at the tree, right? >> Exactly. >> I got an automated tree whacker. I can actually focus on where I want to go next. >> All right, real quick, we have limited time here, but the announcements that you're makin' today, we haven't touched on that yet. So, give us the run down. >> What we've done, essentially, is looked at processes that require, and the way we categorize it is these are processes that are usually long running, processes that require action across multiple parties, multiple departments, and they have a specific sequence. So, we looked at that as the baseline, and we said, hey, what fits into this? Because if we could create a structure that models this out in a very easy to configure manner, than what problems could we solve. Obviously we used onboarding as the example of where we wanted to go, but we found out that that model is easily applicable for transfers or off boarding, things like that. And so, what we've done is taken the underlying workflow capabilities off the platforms. Underneath the covers, it's still a workflow that is running but we essentially created a very clean data model on top. The imagery that I use is when you go into these HR, visit any HR customer, if they are going through an exercise of revamping, let's say, their onboarding process, then you'll see a wall with sticky notes, Post-It sticky notes, different colors. And we took that and we said how can we get that into the software, where you'll see phases. There is day, offer stage, pre boarding, week one, month one, and so on and so forth, and each of those stickies, they actually represent activities within the application. So, we've created a model that lets you take that visual imagery and put it in the product, so it's just easy for them, easy for HR to be able to configure this without needing any technical expertise and that's where I think there's a lot of IP. It helps them with change management. It'll help with adoption. And hopefully, it'll bring a true transformation, not just to HR, but across the enterprise. >> Excellent, well, Deepak, thanks very much for coming back in The Cube. It's good to see you again. >> My pleasure, Dave, Jeff. Thank you so much. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from Knowledge17, and we'll be right back. (electronic music)