you Wiki bon org this is the cube Silicon angles continuous production we're here at knowledge service now it's big used user conference that we'd be going this is day three for us we had a half day today but we've been meeting with a number of customers CIOs IT practitioners folks from kpn are here Petros L Stroh is the CIO of KPN and Martin the no blue is the person in charge of ServiceNow and manages that implementation at kpn Petra Martin welcome to the cube thank you thanks for having us good morning yeah it's it's our pleasure really appreciate you guys spending some time there let's start with kpn tell us more about kpn you are the dominant telecommunications provider in the Netherlands but tell us a little bit more about so kpn is actually quite important on the market of the Netherlands we focused mainly on fixed and wireless communication but also on IT solutions so customers we have over 45 million customers within the Netherlands and within the kpn we are serving around 26,000 employees so talk a little bit about what's happening in your your business I mean here you've got you know tremendous you know disruption and lots of competition but you still got a couple of big giant whales in the industry what's it like in your region so within our region what you see is this we are dominating the market quite heavily is the government is focusing on to get the monopolies down so we are struggling a lot getting other partners on the market and we have to serve them as well so it is a little bit of a hardest feel to working - yeah so there's a big hand it's sort of dictating some of the requirements that you have to comply to so what does that mean for your IT infrastructure what kind of pressures does that put on you so as we are dominating the infrastructure we need to allow our competitors to use our infrastructure so yeah we do that at the best serves as we can but it feels a little bit off I remember when we went to that the United States you have to bite your tongue and do it okay so let's let's get into the whole ServiceNow implementation well first of all is it if you've been to more multiple knowledge conferences or is this your first one so this is my first one for ServiceNow although it was two weeks ago I was also at the CA Technology event both in their Las Vegas as well so but I'm enjoying it a lot oh you spent a lot of time in less of a so so give me your impressions of the of the conference what do you think what I noticed and I'm not sure what Martha thinks of it but I taste a lot of fun and I really enjoy that their service now is really liking what they do they're really interesting and that gives me also a lot of energy and ideas what you could say utilize in the Netherlands yeah I'm also really impressed with the way it was organized it's good incredible you have 4,000 people who all can can drink and eat and and and and be in a conference room at the same time is incredible yeah the logistics were very good here the accommodations are very nice so and it's also a good mix of informal meetings meeting people in just in the hallways and having good conversations and good speeches as well and it's a good mix of CIOs and IT practice all right so let's get it to the service how long you guys been working with ServiceNow what was the catalyst to bring ServiceNow into your organization so we three years ago we started to work with ServiceNow so we have quite some experience at these states and a year ago we started to work with the self-service portal as well and I must say we started to become innovative using that kind of services okay so well what was the what was the catalyst to bring it in and how did you justify bringing it in so what we had in the in the previous time we had several systems that meant every time we had to unboard a customer it took several systems to work with so what we did is we decided within the company that we didn't want to develop our own software anymore so we were looking for the best breed of applications or suppliers that could help us to bring value to our business so one of the things what notified with ServiceNow is that they are first the best brief with this application area but also the relationship with ServiceNow is quite good because if you want a strategic partnership you need to focus both on also development and new functionalities and that's actually what we find in ServiceNow so how did it occur that you were able to bring in ServiceNow Petra it was that something that that you had a vision of was that someone like Martin brought it to your attention was that the CFO driving it how did that all come about and as I'm quite recently in the role but I know a little bit of history it was actually on the strategic level PP level where they decided we need to go into a another direction so together together with the CEO CFO etc decision has been made to go into a new direction and they finally select the service now for this part of business you feel like your executive management or RIT savvy man it's somewhat uncommon to have we keep hearing about the the Cobblers children but here you had a situation where the senior executives were pushing for something like this is that unique in your field and I think because our company is focusing both on telecommunication and IT they they know sometimes much more than we do so I think that is also part of of that job a bit of a blessing and a curse I think they know what they're talking about but that's also that the DAR says sometimes there's no even better yeah so there's there's no hiding enough to be dangerous and we need to make sure that we keep focus what we need to do and not interfering that then interfering us too much so that is quite a fat joke all right let's talk about the self-service capability that you've built it's describe what that is you seem you know very proud of it so I want to learn more about that yeah so we're quite proud on the self-service part of what we actually had started one year ago we started to build the self-service portal in which the customer has the possibility to find answers on their issues problem incidents etc and what makes it so unique is that actually customers who entered the self-service portal can find their answers directly they can do that 24 by 7 so as you know if you're Matt home and you work on your iPad you solution now and not tomorrow and what is also quite unique is that they uses from this community help each other and what does that mean is if you have an question and you go to the self-service parking don't find an answer you can accelerate your own no let's article goes to the service desk who make it qualified that it can enter into the system so the next time and other users has this question can find the right answer into this no its database so there's a social component of it now now where did that come from was that part of the service now capability if you guys build that no it's it's a it is part of the surface now capability but it was specifically thought up for this just to bring the cost down and to to keep it interactive weekly it's it's it's always strange to have people work with you and not being able to help each other but at night when evening they go home and write Wikipedia about other things so why not bring that action through the workplace so talk about the the clients that are on this using this self-service policy it's mostly internal clients but you also have external clients can you describe that so we have the customers who intern and you're using odd of course the people who have the office automation of workspace so they can use it for that one and actually this year we're going to bring also business applications to the knowledge articles so a 600 applications will be served by the self-service portal as well so that is mainly internal focus we have also external customers are over a thousand customers who also have the possibility to enter this self-service portal and find the answers on their questions and by the way we have reached this year that over ten percent of the incidents are actually solved by the users themselves and forty-one percent of customers who have a question to solve that answers on the self-service portal versa now what oversees what calling up sending an email nicely so that is amazing so it means the Service Desk can focus on the more complicated stuff where do you see those metrics going over time the idea of the self service desk is is that it will go up even beyond the 56 that's what we anticipate on so well when it gets to that level what happens you know to your business from a cost standpoint how does that you know how does that benefit can you quantify that in any way that is a little bit hard because we are in the way to find it out but for me as an idea responsibilities we always have to drive on cost so I'm I'm really looking forward to the cost is going down so what we did is we made an agreement with the service there's they promised us that a cost would go dramatically downsize and let's see what we will accomplish so maybe next year you can ask me what and so we we hear a lot of customers saying ok we start with incident and change and problem and we start building the CMDB yeah is that where you started and where are you on that journey that's that's where we started and that's where we're at now and we use the knowledge geoportal as well but we're always exploring other options ServiceNow is always expanding always always searching for new ways to to please their customers and our our vision on this is that we already paid for all those modules so why not use them so we're always exploring at the moment we're exploring the asset management module and we're exploring the vendor management module as well so you have existing tools to do things like vendor management and asset management how does that transition go how do you sort of bring on the new and tear down the old and how do you manage the disruption associated with that well it's it's of course always a life cycle and clothes driven sometimes certain things are just end of life cycle you have to replace them are you going to buy something new or are you going to buy or are you going to use something that is in sa P or in ServiceNow so that's that's always a choice you have to make can you go ahead so I think what is also quite important as I mentioned before we are always looking of the best-of-breed solutions what we do see is the Suites into ServiceNow we always look at them are they indeed the Best of Breed for that kind of specific services if not we will go for another solution if yes we will go for the service now and the second hand we're trying to influence ServiceNow as much as possible so they can actually change the modules into the way our customers are looking for so this brings up a very interesting discussion this whole best-of-breed versus integrated suite now you mentioned you use sa P there's a classic example sa PE the beauty of it is it's sort of big and you could do so many things with it but the problem is it's big uns how many things you could do with it it's complex so for instance if you want to do HR there might be some other packages so you your philosophy Petra is you guys want to be Best of Breed that's the the primary objective and then maybe secondarily is sort of the integrated suite is that right that's correct and so what we do is is for every process we are looking into application so no development on outside anymore we're looking for most of the times our solutions who are really Best of Breed in that kind of fur field so that is the idea now doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of sort of a single system of record or does you somehow integrate ServiceNow into maybe those other components yeah so we have a platform of several systems and we integrate them heavily so the CA technology which ServiceNow is heavily insert that and also sup we're looking into it how we can integrate that as well but that is quite a challenge yes the ServiceNow is our core and other systems are integrated in the ServiceNow fire bus now given that you're looking for sounds like you're really looking for SAS and off-the-shelf commercial software can I infer from that that you don't plan on developing a lot of your own applications you know we're hearing a lot about app creator and things like that or will you take advantage of those things so the app creation is definitely a field I'm interested in I because what I want is technology infrastructure should be a commodity everything seems working my customer these days want services they don't want technology so what I'm looking for is how can I keep up with the speed of my customers and therefore I'm looking for solutions outside of the market so we saw that presentation of threat with the application development and quite interested in that part that looks really promising so how do you so let's go back to the self-service for a bit because it's something that you guys are is somewhat unique in terms of what you're describing and it's quite a large scale when you think of self-service you think of things like you know Google and Facebook and Amazon do you feel like you're on the path to achieve that level of experience for your users I definitely think so and it's not because I'm saying it's my customer actually saying that and that is key important to me so we saw the satisfaction level of the customer went up and what we do also see is is the customer these days one 24/7 support so example you're coming home and your kid have problems with the iPad Mini I know how that % sure they go to my self-service for and it's fine and if they don't find the answer they can enter it into it so for me more open the better it is I have to serve each other yeah and you get learning from that that knowledge permeate so so how about things like single sign-on how do you handle that challenge we already incorporated single sign-on so it's not a problem for ServiceNow at the moment yeah we started that last year because what we saw is is people entering twice the system is not of their convenience so we started to enter that last year and I must say people are quite happy with it so tell me more about what the users are saying I'm interested in your client's experiences what kind of feedback have you received if it is a it's a good question you're asking there are double reaction first of all they are not aware of it so you need to make sure they get aware that there is a self-service portal so what we did we did a lot of communication and telling and broadcast in the world we have a new self-service portal once they get used to it is that quite happy with it and what you also see is this we're actually rewarding people to come to the self-service portal so every time they go that'll help someone they deserve points and in the net and say quite keen on getting points and I think based upon that the reactions became quite positive and they're quite upset if they can't find answer into the system so yeah I think that's positive I think users don't really care if they're using ServiceNow or something else they just wanted to work and and the ServiceNow is just it's just the means to an end I think that's a good thing he said it's actually not the tool it's actually the services of delivering and service and I was able to give us that possibility that's an interesting comment because you think about you think about sales force people sales people know they're in Salesforce now very sort of high degree of affinity there whereas ServiceNow it's invisible you're the you're the service and and that comes with the shell we put over it as well our self-service portal it gives us our own looking fuel so people don't have an idea they think they're on an internet sites probably yeah I love that philosophy ServiceNow seems to have they want to make you the heroes they don't want that's good okay we have time for one more question for each of you so petrol let me start with you from a cio perspective what advice would you give your CIO peers in terms of thinking about bringing in capabilities such as ServiceNow generally and specifically around self-service so my comment is what I do see is it's technology is a given for the customers the customers just want the serves and they want the best service that is so what I think you need to do is make sure your lights on is as it should be but focus so much more on the self-service so people can have the perception that they get what they want and they get it now and they get it whenever and the best kind of answers they're looking for so I think that's why you need to look for and with your own department you will not be able to do that anymore so you need partners to help you to be quick flexible and profiling to service your customer wants no marks on your in the front lines yeah making it all happen what advice would you give your fellow peers and practitioners I would say invest heavily in heavily in communication as well people process and especially the people part is very important if you're replacing all tools with new tools people always get a bit homesick and they want their all they want the old functionality back and you have to force them to get to give it to give it a chance and stay state state suit will be out of the box SAS solution don't go changing too much in the beginning and really give people the time and a chance to to get the note to get to know to get to know the new product yeah communicate those benefits I see I pet your Martin thank you very much for coming on and sharing the the kpn service now stories really pleasure meeting you both alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with the winner of the hackathon right after this this is the cube so like an angle we'll be back right after this word