>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Chris Bedi, he is the CIO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we're hearing so much about improving employee experience and this is the goal, your goal, and also the collective goal of CIO, so can you tell us a little bit about why this, and how do you see your role in this? >> Yeah for sure, I mean if I rewind three or four years I don't think experience was really on anybody's agenda, or not high on the list. I think, you know, what we've come to realize or I've come to realize is that experience is critical to actually getting the right behavioral and economic outcomes. It is not optional anymore because with the amount of transformation that we're driving through technology it's changing processes, changing the way customers interact with us, suppliers interact with us, and that change needs to be easy. And not just easy for easy sake, but otherwise we don't get the business outcomes we are looking for. So, for me it's very purpose driven to say that for us to get those economic outcomes we have to focus on experience. >> I feel like the CIO role is evolving, and we've talked about this before, I'd love your thoughts on it. You know, it kind of used to be, alright we're going to keep the lights on, granted that's still part of the role but it's table stakes. >> It doesn't go away. (Rebecca laughs) But yes, still part of the role. >> You know, we can outsource our email, you know, what are we going to do with the cloud, okay. That's shifting, you know, with the digital economy, machine intelligence, the economy booming, this war on talent especially in Silicone Valley. Things are changing, how do you see the role changing and where do you see it evolving to? >> Well, I think the CIO role is changing. It's driven really by what's going on in every industry. If you think about it, everything, how fast your company operates, how efficient your processes are, how engaged your employees are via employee experiences, the mode in which you're able to interact with your customers, how digital your supply chain is, everything is powered by technology platforms and CIO's are the ones governing and managing and those technology platforms to deliver those outcomes, and I think it's only going to increase where technology has a bigger and bigger impact and I think that is really driving a shift in the CIO role where CIO's need to be front and center. There is no more, here's the business strategy, here's the technology strategy. They are one and the same thing and I think in our consumer lives we talk about the digital divides or the have's and have nots. I think the same thing is going to play out in enterprises where those enterprises that can figure out how to harness these newer technologies to drive meaningful business outcomes are going to start to separate themselves from the competition and that separation's only going to get bigger with time. So I think there's a tremendous amount of urgency on this topic as well. I was reading a recent article which talked about CEO's priorities for IT and saying favoring speed over cost, and I don't think that's because all of a sudden we're going to become frivolous with our spending. But I think again it just speaks to the urgency and the need for businesses to transform and it's now. >> It's not just harnessing the technologies, it's also harnessing the employee behaviors that need to change in order to create these cultural shifts that you're talking about, right, or? >> Yeah, for sure, and I would say and we had our CIO Decisions yesterday, one of the key topics was, you know, driving cultural transformation and I find that's a lot of what I'm doing and that involves a lot of selling, quite frankly. I mean, I don't have sales in my title, but by the very definition of it we're saying this technology has the promise to unlock a new business model, unlock a new process. Get to that next level of efficiency or productivity. But, you're selling a vision, right, and that means change, and people don't like change. As long as someone else is changing they're fine with it, once it's themselves, so we have to focus a lot and really double down on transformation efforts and play a key role in that, and to link it back to your first question, that transformation gets so much easier if we can deliver compelling experiences, right? So, it's all kind of tied together. >> Four years ago at K15, Frank Slootman sort of threw down the gauntlet to CIO's in the audience and said, you must become business leaders, if you don't become business leaders you'll be a dinosaur. How are you a business leader, and how are you becoming a business leader? >> I think it's really shaping IT's agenda based upon what's important to the organization. And, that's going to be different for different organizations but largely it's going to be things tied to customers, how productive and engaged are the employees, what can we do to drive margin, which is top and bottom line improvement in the economic model, and making sure that IT's goals and objectives are one and the same with the business goals and objectives. So, for example we do at ServiceNow in IT, we have a shared contract with every function. Marketing, sales, you know, professional services, that here's the business outcomes. On my dashboard, you'll seldom see a whole bunch of IT metrics, it's all about did we get to the business metric or not. Cuz if you're not measuring that then I'm not sure what you're measuring. >> Okay, so you, and I'm sure you have a lot of IT metrics, too, but you're able to then tie those IT metrics to business metrics >> Sure. >> And show how a change in one flows through the value to affect another. >> Yeah, I mean, where the role was, that doesn't go away and it's a critical part of the role and I don't want to undermine it which is, all the invisible things that just happen in corporations, you know, the utilities of, is the networking, and phones and all that, that has to be rock solid. That's table stakes, but yeah, for the next part of that, it's really driving those transformational business outcomes. >> So you're a big proponent and advocate of machine learning, how do you see machine learning transforming the modern work experience, the modern workplace and then the employee experience of the modern workplace? >> I think at a very high level, it's around speed and effectiveness of decision making. And, machine learning, I think has the promise or the opportunity for all of us to unlock that next wave of productivity. Just like in the late '90s we had ERP's and they drove a lot of automation, and supply chain and finance organizations around the world got better. They got faster, more efficient. I think machine learning can do that for the entire enterprise by leveraging platforms to help people make faster and better decisions. I know there's a lot written about replacing humans and things like that. I don't buy into that, I think it's just helping us be better and I think there's used cases all over the enterprise. The biggest barriers to machine learning in my mind typically come with talent. How do you do it, and the good news is here, I mean what we embedded with machine learning in the ServiceNow platform, you don't need an army of data scientists that are super hard to find, almost democratizing the ability to leverage machine learning. Second biggest one that when I talk to CIOs, it's lack of the right data, and they don't have the right data perhaps because they haven't yet digitized their processes, so that's a critical precursor. You got to digitize your processes to generate the right data to then feed the algorithms to get the outcome, but yeah machine learning I think is going to materially transform how we operate dramatically over the next three to five years. >> And, I mean, IT systems continue to get more complex. They in many cases becoming more of a black box. I wonder if I could get your thoughts on this. I mean, I remember reading Michael Lewis's book, Flash Boys, and he talked a lot about the flash crash, and nobody could explain it. They chalk it up to a computer glitch, and his premise was a computer glitch is computers are so complex we can't explain them anymore. >> Yeah. >> AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, going to make that even more complex and more of a black box. Is that a problem for us mortals? >> I think it's a problem, (laughs) for us mortals, but I think it's a problem and I'll tie it back to the transformation in human behavior. We're, I'll call it prototyping and rolling out and leveraging machine learning in our own enterprise, and one of the things we've observed is that us humans, us mortals as you call us, we need to know why, so if a machiner is making an algorithmic based recommendation or a decision we need to know why. And, our employees had a hard time accepting the ML based recommendation without knowing the why. So, we had to go back and rework that, and say how do we surface the why in the context of the recommendation and that got people over the hump. So I think it is a super important point where, as these algorithms get more and more sophisticated, our human brains, the way we interpret it, is we still need the why. >> Yeah, so you're trying to white box that, is what you're saying, which again is not easy. I often use the example of, a computer can tell me if I'm looking at a dog, or I joke Silicone Valley if you watch Silicone Valley >> Yeah yeah yeah, >> Hot dog or not hot dog. >> Hot dog, exactly. >> But, try to explain how you know it's a dog, it's hard >> It is challenging. >> To do that. >> Right. >> Especially if you think about data scientists, they are incredibly cerebral and way smarter than me and, they often have a hard time simplifying it enough where its consumable if you will. So, it is a challenge and I think, you know, it's something that'll evolve as we start to use more of it cause we'll just have to figure it out as an industry. >> I want to ask you about, one of the things that we're hearing so much about this conference is the neat things that you're doing around eradicating employee pain points and taking care of all those onerous, annoying, tedious tasks that we have to do, the filling out of paperwork and all of that sort of thing. What are sort of the next things you're thinking about, the other parts of the work day that are annoying for all of us when you sort of think ahead to the product lineup? >> I think, one of the things we do is figure out where you are and you know, digital transformation, right, is great, but it has so many different meanings depending on your company or your industry. So what we did internally is we actually gave definition and an answer to the question of how digital are you? So we take every process and a collection of processes to a department and bubble it up and so on forth, and we rate every process on how fast it is, how intelligent is, which is a measure of machine learning, and what's the experience we're delivering. And taking those three measures, we're able to come up with a score and more than anything it gave us a common language around the enterprise to say, how do we move this from a score of 50 to 70, how do we move this from a 60 to a 90, and which processes are most important to move first, second and third, right, and without that it gets really hard because digital transformation can just feel like this abstract concept and as business leaders, we do better when we have measurement. And once we have a number and a target and a goal, it's easier to get people aligned to that. So, that's been helpful for us as well on a change management aspect. >> So true. Coach K, you guys always have great outside guests come in and speak at your CIO Decisions Conference, I mean Robert Gates is one that, you know, I mean as much as you've accomplished in your life you haven't accomplished nearly as much as that guy. >> Yeah. >> Very humbling. Coach K was your, one of your guests this week, you host that event. >> I do. >> Share with us some of the, some of the learnings from Coach K. >> We had Coach K, Duke's basketball coach, I would argue best coach, best basketball coach >> I'm a Tarheel. >> Sorry, Tarheel here. >> Yeah exactly, Dean Smith. >> We had a couple in the audience- >> He said he's no Dean Smith the other day, (Rebecca laughs) well you know I don't know. >> And I am a college hoops junkie so for me, it was a massive treat. I just wanted to talk to him about so many games and things like that. But he, he really gave a great talk about just how to be a better leader, how to constantly be learning and applying yourself. I mean he's 71 years old and how he needs, he talked about how he had to reinvent himself at least ten times, he's been coaching for 42 years. To meet the players where they are, and changing himself. And every season, the day after the season ends, having a meeting with his managers saying, what do we need to change? And it could be they just won the national championship. So, never resting on his laurels, constantly learning, and he had really interesting anecdotes about when he coached the U.S. Olympic team, and the difference of 18-year-olds right out of high school versus these are the superstars of the NBA, massive egos, and one of the interesting things, he said so many interesting things I could keep going on but just, you know, he said don't leave your ego at the door. Bring your ego, cause that what makes you great. I need you to have that ego Kobe when you're taking that last second shot cause that's what makes you, you. But, also what he spent a lot of time is getting them aligned on values. Here's the core values that which we are going to operate as a team and that are going to allow us to be successful. And I think that leadership lesson applies to any team. He applied it in a very difficult environment while millions of people are watching but, and he talked about how he took that collection of individuals and made them a unit, and that was super powerful. >> Yeah, he coached the first dream team which was Magic, >> Yeah I think he's coached four or five, and >> and I think Byrd might have been hurt but he played, >> yeah. And how he would just >> and Jordan I mean that, try and bring that eclectic mix together. >> And then to hear, have someone be so, you know, I've done all these things, and then be articulate enough to be able to say, and this is what I did >> Yeah and just super humble >> this is how I brought out the best in people. >> Super humble and just, again, constant learning right, I mean John our CEO talks about be a learning animal. I think Coach K embodied that in spades. >> West Point grad too, right, with a lot of discipline >> Yeah. >> That's right, yeah, yeah. >> in his background and >> for sure, >> and it's really inspirational. >> And then he talked about that, that's where he learned a lot of his leadership lessons. >> Really, yeah? >> At West Point. >> Well, Chris it's been so fun talking to you we could, maybe we should get Coach K on with you. A little like, Mike Krzyzewski, yeah >> That would be a treat for me, you and me could talk about Duke Tarheels. >> Yeah, well okay, alright, if you insist. >> We could bring John Wooden into the greatest coaches ever conversation in fairness >> We could, we could. >> to the wizard of Westwood I mean. >> Cool, well thank you. >> Chris, thanks again for coming on. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18 coming up just after this. (techno music)