>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, live from Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Michael Hubbard, who is the VP Inspire program at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be back here, and for another year of this session. >> Always a pleasure to have you on. So, I want you to just refresh for our viewers, what the Inspire program is, who are you, what do you do? >> Perfect. So, as the name connotates, our job is to inspire the future of work. So as you are all learning about ServiceNow's new vision and purpose, to really make the world of work work better for people. We're finding that subset of 1% of folks that have a bold idea, a vision and a passion, for massive digital transformation, and a leader with both the power and the vision and span of control to say: if you'll partner with me, let's go get something done, in a 90-day sort of sprint, that has measurable business outcomes, mapped to a tactical approach, mapped to an inspirational sort of experience where digitization, digital transformation, it becomes real, because by the end of this process, you've got an example of it on your phone, in your environment, exciting your stakeholders and your employees. >> I wonder if we could talk about the past of work. There was a major, y'know, swing in the last 10-15 years of remote workers, the world flattening, and the emphasis was on giving people the tools, whether it was video, or good conferencing calling, etc, so that they could collaborate. And then you kind of saw the pendulum swing, there were a couple of companies, very high profile, certainly Yahoo, IBM, where they try to create the bee-hive effect, to really foster more collaboration. What are your thoughts on that pendulum swing, y'know, centralization, de-centralization, and what does the future of work look like, to your customers? >> So the pleasure of my job is that I live in this conversation, all week, every week, with some of the most transformative business and IT leaders in the global 2000. Your examples, Dave, they hit upon sort of tools that tried to catalyze a different way of working. We gave somebody chat, or we gave somebody the ability to work from home because they had internet connected to their house, and they had a phone line, and what else do you need, maybe a webcam. But these tools didn't fundamentally change the flow of work through the enterprise, right, and so I think the future of work, in terms of comparing it to the attempts of the past, it's a more fundamental shift that says, people process technology, governance, culture, purpose, all have to evolve, and I think there's finally enough hunger to do the hard work, not of throwing a new tool at an employee, or throwing a new policy at a user group, but changing all those other elements, those systemic elements, because overall productivity per employee has not changed. Overall satisfaction with your experience, and the pleasure of being at work, is not getting better fast enough, and you compare it to what we've enjoyed as consumers, in our personal life, and the contrast has gotten so stark that there's finally that passion among business leaders to say: enough's enough, it's time to stop buying point solutions, and start looking at the holistic change that's going to improve revenue per employee, improve my retention rates of my top talent, attract millennial and post-millennial talent, and are looking for partners that will take that holistic view of a platform, that'll work with those tools, but will knit it all together for a big outcome. >> So it sounds great, can you tell us, give us some examples of some success stories? >> Absolutely, so we work, we're very selective, we're an investment in some of our most ambitious customers, we work with about 1% of those. So, for example, Accenture has been a great partner for us, and go to market-serving customers, but I'm speaking about their CIO organization, folks like Tom Breezy and Andrew Wilson, who lead experience transformation, lead employee centricity, and lead the IT work, working with them on making leave of absence easier, because women in the workforce, and getting them back into the workforce after a pregnancy or a troubled pregnancy, that immediately yields benefits to their most tangible source of revenue, which is billable credible resources to serve their clients. So if we can help them with the generational women issues, that will really help their customers, their investors, and their top-line. So that's the type of work we do with Accenture, Virgin Trains is another great example. Virgin Trains were doing work, of course in good old ITSM, good old make IT better, but outside of IT, how can we make your experience on the platform better, in terms of empowering the people for Virgin Trains working the platform, working the train car, to have the right answer for you when you have a problem, to empower them with better knowledge, better workflow, so that they're able to ask the enterprise for help, and then action the answer for you as the employee. Allianz Life is another example, huge insurance company, and they're facing what many financial services firms are facing, which is that balance between agile business and the need for governance and compliance. So we worked with Steve, their chief compliance officer, to change the way that they manage the underwriting and approval of new policies, so it both allows them to make the business move faster and reduce the costs to underwrite and manage and comply to federal regulations. Doesn't have that much to do with IT, but the foundation of a platform that changes how work flows through enterprise across different stakeholders, and across many tools, and Dave, as you said, "mediums," that's what it's all about. >> So many companies that we talk to really dance around the automation issue, and you heard John Donahoe this morning saying look, we're all about automating workflows, so we have to take this head on. What are the conversations like amongst the Inspire customers, with regards to automation, machines replacing humans, etc, could we explore that a little bit? >> Yes, so as you'll hear more and more from ServiceNow, and as we're seeing within our Inspire customer base, there's two sort of threads that we tend to pull on. One thread is we try to find those opportunities for technology and automation to be in service of people, versus the inverse of suddenly now we're all just supporting the tech, and we're trying to just eke out a little piece of value to still add as people inside of a tech revolution, we're turning that around, and we think we can get the noise out the way of the people, by having the technology to serve them, workflow's a great example, alert's a great example, machine learning to solve the easy, repeatable problems is a great example, and that will free up the humans to do the things that make us human, that are more evolved, that are more advanced, that require empathy, etc. So that's one thread we pull on a lot within Inspire, is finding those human moments, cause moments really matter, and then empowering and transforming the ability for that person to serve their fellow employees or their customers. The second thread we pull on is we really push back on the idea, whether it's automation or any other sort technology buzz word trend, push back on the idea of incremental improvement. So if you have a process that's five days, we're not going to talk about how we can get it to four and a half, we're going to talk about why we can't get it to zero, And for regulatory reasons, that human element of needing empathy and interaction and building rapport, there might be reasons it creeps back up to a day, but let's start with that zero-based budgeting approach that says "five days, start with what if we "tried to get it to zero?" And that changes the frame of the conversation on automation from being about maybe attacking a certain percentage of people or time and trying to take a little cost out, to resetting the purpose of how that process supports an outcome in an enterprise. >> I want to ask you about that tension between the human-centered, the empathetic approach, versus the business, the business processes, the business that needs to get done. What are some of the challenges that your customers have faced, that you sort of see as the biggest pain points to implementing some of the changes that you want to see changed? >> So the hardest the thing to create for us, as an advisory team with the customer, is urgency. So what we have to find first is urgency, that today is not good enough. Change is a mandate, it's a requirement, there's no if, there's just a how, right, and that's why we focus on just 1%, because not everyone's ready for that type of a commitment to change. Once you have the urgency, you have to have vision, so we work with a lot of great customers, but we will never know your business the way you do, we'll never know your customers the way you do, so you have to bring your half of that vision. We'll spark ideas about what other people are doing and what's possible, and you've got to bring that back to a relevant outcome for your business. And different companies have different cultures, with different purpose statements, and some will resonate with taking out costs, some will resonate with empowering their employees, some will be all about, let's say in the healthcare space, we've done work with VITAS hospice care. If you think about hospice, of course it's not about just the nurse, of course it's not about just the patient, it's actually about coordinating the family, because it's the family that often needs the most support and interaction in that process, and so you really have to understand, you can push through the tension if you get to a meaningful purpose statement around what makes that company's existence necessary, and why people choose to work there, and that's really the start of every Inspire engagement, is getting that alignment. >> Michael, one of the drivers of digital transformation is fear, fear of missing out, "FOMA", but also fear of getting disrupted. Ginni Rometty at a conference, at the Think conference recently, used the term "incumbent disruptors." I would think that resonates with a lot of your customers, we want to be the disruptors, not get disrupted, some defense, yes, but we also want to go on offense. What are your thoughts on your customers' ability to be incumbent disruptors, and what role does ServiceNow play in that? >> Great question, and two thoughts to the answer. One is: ServiceNow lives in that intersection too, because we're getting big enough now that we start to worry about the upstarts, perhaps, in our own market space, as we look at customers who have been with us for years, have rolled us out broadly, suddenly we're the incumbent. So we are, in our own world, are thinking about making sure we are a disruptive incumbent, and continue to drive that value for our customers, but to take it back to our customers instead of ourselves. The key there is that tension, to use the word you used earlier, of those- let's take FinTech in financial services. FinTech startups, they're all trying to race to create a market disruption, create a wedge in a marketplace, of a consistent use case with a group of consistent business problems they're solving, while all the incumbents have all the capital, access to markets, access to cultures, brand credibility in the world, and they just don't know if they're going to have enough time to move their giant battleship before this little swift boat sweeps around them and takes a flanking position. So it's a very real challenge, and where we tend to focus is with those big companies, as a catalyst, bringing our whatever's in the water of Silicon Valley out to New York, or to London, or wherever, and helping them get a little of that swift boat style into what is really a big aircraft carrier group that they're trying to turn. >> Financial services is a really interesting case study, because it really, that industry has not yet been disrupted in a big way, even though like you said, there's a lot of FinTech swift boats trying to go after 'em. Do you think traditional incumbent financial services firms will lose control of payment systems, or do you think they will respond? >> Well we have an interesting member of our company, our CEO who, of course, has some history with PayPal, so that'd be great question for Mr Donahoe. I think it's too early to tell, but I also don't think it'll be a binary answer. What we're seeing when we work with some of these large companies is a very different fear or challenge around disruption in emerging markets versus established markets. So in established markets, they probably are going to get the time to reinvent themselves, because of the amount of momentum they have with customers, the amount of stickiness they have with customers. I mean the simplest truth that I've found in whether you win or lose a disruption battle with a customer is how hard it is for that customer to give up their relationship with you. It's the same in divorce, it's the same in changing airlines it's the same in changing credit cards. You've got all your points in one place. So in these established markets I think they're going to have the time to really succeed, but in emerging markets, that's where the battleground is really sitting. >> Yeah and financial service firms have always done a pretty good job of getting on to that next wave. >> We'll have to ask John Donahoe. >> We will, we will, and he's coming up soon, so... But thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again, it's always a pleasure to talk to you Michael. >> Yeah, fantastic to see you both, and it's just exciting to see this show continue to grow, and to have new customers, not just CIOs, but chief people officers, heads of talent, joining the conversation around the future of work. >> Dave: Awesome, thanks Michael! >> Thank you. >> Well thanks to you for joining our conversation. >> Michael: You bet. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18, coming up just after this. (light techno music)

live from las vegas it's the cube covering knowledge 60 brought to you by service now here your host dave vellante and Jeff Frick welcome back to knowledge 16 everybody this is the cube the cube is sick silicon angles flagship product we go out to the events last year we did almost 80 events probably do 100 this year Jeff I don't know Michael Hubbard is here is the vice president of service now inspire Michael welcome to the cube inspire us thank you that that's what I get to do every day to some of our amazing amazing customers no prospects what is inspire hear a lot about it but really sure so for the last year or two we've been receiving invitations to truly step into some of our customers and prospects business transformations and we're getting inspired by what they're trying to do in changing the way they operate fundamentally as a company and when we see an opportunity for our role to inspire the rest of the market to inspire the rest of the customers we haven't touched yet and actually change the understanding of why we exist as a company I get the honor of leading a team that just focuses on those invitations and goes and does what it takes to make those customers successful mostly through strategy insights advice as well as giving them tangible sort of super bowl commercials that let them explain to their organization what they're trying to do because we're a cloud company we can simply spin that up build it and give it to them let them go shop it around so that they get momentum to achieve that outcome and there so it's essentially a consultative service that is not a for pay service it's something that you offer for your top customers is that correct correct it's an investment right and it is about finding the roughly 1 percent of customers that are really trying to do something inspiring and helping them be as successful as possible really so how do I how does one qualify to be an inspire recipient inviting that biting me on the cubes a good start so uh but but that's the right question right because we're burdened with too many the blessing of too many opportunities to many adjacencies as a platform that could do someone things in the world so how do we prioritize the first thing is about finding leaders that truly have a passion and a commitment and the authority to drive a big change because no change is easy you will have to change career paths for some of the employees processes for some of the ploys maybe governance and compliance and attestation expectations of how business gets done that's hard so we're finding looking for a person who has both the power and the vision to change the way they go to market and then secondly we want to make sure that if that change happened it would be considered meaningful if we were a part of it that's all we need so strong stomach yeah right and obviously a substantial investment in service now so they could leverage some of the changes that you want to bring forward it would be unwise for someone to gain our advice if they didn't think our platform was the right way to achieve at least a meaningful portion of it right because our expertise is rooted obviously and where we come from and where we spend a lot of our time and in the insights of where our company's going so if you think our vision as a company is relevant that we might be a good person to help you with your vision you're biased and you're not shy about saying that I would say where we are definitely aren't atheists we have religion right we have a religion and and we're going to apply that religion to what you're trying to achieve so if you think there's synergy there then maybe we're a good fit to help you with that and the big difference between worrying about whether we're biased or not is think about how accountable we are because when we give you this advice we are the ones we have to deliver on it right and that's the always been the big challenge between the the the folks whose feet don't touch the ground in terms of telling you what you should do then the folks who pick up that vision and try to execute it but they weren't there for the inception of it we want to break that cycle and bring it together so how much of the advice that you're providing your customers is specific to leveraging the platform versus sort of business process changes and other you know types of initiatives that are transformational so so we start with an outcome and we tend to start with an experience so an outcome might be faster time to equality choir knowledge reducing a reducing rate of turn in the employee base by improve Net Promoter Score of employee satisfaction might be margin expansion it might be revenue growth who knows once we know what that outcome is then let's try to think about the moments where its most tangible that that the outcome of this transformation is going to deliver a better version of that moment and that's what I talked about with those Super Bowl commercials the two minutes sort of experience that lives on your mobile device that makes you want to drink that beer or be that guy or buy that product be in that environment so we create that in that environment with our labs team we confirm that that's a line to the future state they want and then we back into all the things that's going to take people process technology architecture governance to achieve that so a lot of business strategy stuff that you're doing as well I wouldn't say we're helping customers define their business strategy but if they have a compelling before-and-after statement we want to be an enabler of fact yes that's a hard job because almost everyone we've had on at some level qualifies for what you're describing and I would also imagine you definitely wanted to be a client for chevre lydon but you know there's always that problem if people don't have skin in the game when it comes time to get hard work done usually maybe a little more motivated dead skin in the game so we're that skin comes through you know they already made a big investment in service now how do I get more out of that investment how do i leverage that investment across you know broader ecosystem or get those benefits that I realized here you know there there and there might imagine those are pretty important thing to consider it absolutely so commitment is a crucial word right and I'd say we spend half our time with customers that they're not customers to prospects that are considering going on a journey with us a journey to everything as a service enterprise service management the service revolution all the the catchphrases I'm sure you've seen throughout this week the other half our customers that have started on the journey their cio their CFO they already have this asset in their software estate and we're helping them sweat that ass that more in both cases it comes back to finding the person that I shake hands with and look in the eye and we have that social contract that frankly means more than herschel contract that if I helped you and I make you successful and I show you that I truly understand what you're trying to achieve why wouldn't you want me to help you with it so we really don't have challenges around conversion and follow through on the advice that we give in the role is the CIO is you're dealing with cio CXOs so yes prime earlier today we're dealing with CIOs and CTOs in mega organizations with you know six to ten billion dollar I teaspoons we're not we may be in a division right a divisional CIO but we're also starting to get the CRS right because what if we could take the IT practices that help an employee engage in services and apply them to the way a customer it consumes services so i SAT with a CRO shortly after the recent sales force outage talking about how he can better quantify the work of his 2000 application engineers it's a software company because when he goes to the CFO and wants to talk about needing 50 more engineers to help capture more revenue the CFO says well what are all the 2,000 doing he says I have no idea right so can we be the system a record that answers what those people are doing for their customers what does an engagement look like take us through the anatomy as it you know start to finish yeah so so obviously there's a lot of work up front to make sure we're in the right place with the right person solving a well-understood problem right so qualifying is huge for us because there's only 40 or 50 of us and we've got a blessed amount of opportunity in the market of people we could work with so qualifying is important once we get to the point that we have that social contract that handshake agreement that says I understand your outcome going to I'm going to give you a plan to achieve it than together we're gonna we're going to go we're going to go get that outcome the next step is really bringing the rest of the team that that leader depends upon right the inclusive doing it with his organization bring that team together through workshops strategy tactics operating model make sure that they understand it have a rough draft of a plan socialize that plan once it's understood among the leadership team let's help with the organizational change management by pushing that out to the to the larger audience in parallel let's prove it right where a cloud platform i should not deliver you a powerpoint presentation of your future i should give you a glimpse of it right and it should be on your mobile device and that experience is that is one of those deliverables now let's give you a business case that says we believe it's going to make money save money reduce risk in this quantity and these time frames as follows so one of the delivers actually you code some capability correct correct we tend to be a low code company all right being a pass platform as well as a SAS company but absolutely we're delivering experiences that allow that visionaries CIO to show his or her stakeholders why all this change is worth it because on the other end something Goods going to come out of it what is the typical length of an engagement I'd say on the average there about six to eight weeks it just takes that much time to manage all of the mutual understanding of us learning than us advising than them accepting in it the end it really is their plan it's not our I don't think that's much time wrote down six to eight weeks and I said that it's maybe too aggressive but you're saying on average you can complete that and say so that is that presumes that the client is putting forth you know the resources necessary to get it done the meetings etc and you're picking a time when everybody can it is yes and so these are not free they actually consume the most valuable resources these organizations have which is probably their strongest leaders and the people who understand their current state and their customers and their problems the best so it's by no means free to two of these CIOs and they understand that they're not writing a check but they're spending their time absolutely they're they're valuable you can always make more money it can't make more time from these precious resources and they get that and when did inspire when did it start so it actually started in January this year so I've been with service now about eight months recently we servicenow and our leadership team got really serious about being able to do this for customers and I was fortunate enough to join the company to help build out that program and so we're in our freshman year right we're learning a lot and we're taking those learnings and we're putting them into what we call the customer journey so if I've got these insights about what some of our most ambitious customers are doing how can I translate those insights into a scalable knowledge base by which every customer could learn these lessons the easy way versus the hard way and that's what the customer journey is which we shared a lot of here at knowledge this week how many of these have you done so we've done about 30 so far will do about another 20 this year I don't think we'll ever get to more than that a year that's a lot 30 and five months just getting started what we are a very surgical consulting team meaning that you know we want to get in do the job right and then transition to to the team that's ultimately going to do the actual implementation then we stay on just in a governance and oversight sort of capacity doing QPR's quarterly helping out if something does go awry and learning what was wrong about the assumptions we made up front so that we correct that the next 20 customers really go back and look at the business case and say okay we got it wrong as we go absolutely value oh but he ever does that I know I know like the weather man check in the paper from Moscow yeah exactly but all your realization is so important as an industry we're not good at it and the beauty of our platform is if you turn on all the functionality we could actually have that done for you real time just like because the work you're doing is captured that the value hypothesis is going to be proven out for you or refuted for you right in the platform so then we come in make sure that that's set up pull that data out and then we educate the market about roughly what percentage Michael of those 30 said okay the business case looks good we're going to move forward all of them it's a matter of how quickly they move forward and with how much urgency because if we take a three-year plan that has six or seven components in terms of work streams and outcomes they might say I'm going to do while seven eventually but I'm going to start with this one and this one is the burning bridge that I have to but every single one of them has moved forward with taking a subset of our recommendations that implementing them on our platform so obviously part of the qualification process is some kind of back a napkin business case where you have a high probability of success right absolutely because our most precious resource is the same as is our time you got it you got a rig it very nice say that I don't mean it as a pejorative but you better make sure that you're gonna have a high business absolutely so absolutely qualification super important but we're blessed with an incredible number of customers that are coming and giving us these invitations and we've gotten pretty good already at getting right to the heart of how is this team able to solve the problem they have or is are we the wrong team inside of service now the help that they really need the product team the business units do they really need our professional services to get in there and turn some of the wrenches do they just need education right do they need third-party help from a partner to scale their their staff so you coming to the cube obviously you're not trying to stay stealth but have you been presenting this week is demand now going through the roof and are you sorry that you know you know so so I get the the pleasure of spending my time in two areas one this high touch high cost of delivery motion that we've been talking about today but the other half of my time is taking those learnings that are harvested and putting that into sort of a canonical framework that we call the customer journey which is programmatically how do most people consume our platform attain value from our platform what are the major inhibitors to progress what are the accelerants that help them go faster and that's what we've been talking about this week at knowledge is helping people understand the journey we've got some self-service tools that are available through our field organization for any of our customers to sit down and rather than having to come to me and my team working with your local service now partner representative use some of these tools and say this is where I am these are the things I'm trying to achieve this is what I should do next house that compared to other people and then service now based upon your understanding of my plan what benefits to most people get as a result so some basic benchmarking and so we've got that tool and that's really what we've been talking about this week at knowledge sounds like a fantastic program really congratulations on getting it off the ground and really appreciate you coming to the cube and sharing that with I've a long time watch her first time participants no way I'm very happy to be here now a Cuba longer fantastic thank you Michael thank you all right keep right to everybody Jeff and I will be back with our next guest we're live from knowledge 16 this is the cube right back this is a tale of