>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. We are here in Las Vegas at the Venetian I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Thomas Squeo. He is the Senior Vice President for Digital Transformation & Enterprise Architecture at West Corp. Thanks so much for coming on the show! >> Good morning, thank you for having me. >> So Digital Transformation, you're the SVP it's a buzzword of the technology industry and also at this conference. Tell us a little bit about how you describe it what it means and then also about West's journey. >> Sure, so in my own role within West Digital Transformation gives me an opportunity to have higher amounts of contact with the business side of the organization. Whether it be customer success, product management, looking at our strategic accounts team and basically working across all aspects of the business. While I am running Enterprise Architecture I also run product engineering for the organization and those combined rolls give me the opportunity to take things from strategy to tactic inside the organization but the Digital Transformation component gives me the context for what the organization needs to move towards. >> Dave: Essentially, you guys are a digital company, right? >> We are. >> So, I mean, you're digital evolving maybe. What is Digital Transformation mean to a company like yours that's born digital if you will? >> Right, so we came out of a traditional Teleco background so everything about our business was driven by software and up until about 2015 it was very human capital intensive. So what we've done is we've kind of re-tooled ourself to be a more forward looking technology organization that's driven by software delivering solutions on behalf of our customers. And that includes much more of a service and solution portfolio then it does in a human capital portfolio. >> So as you transition from a business to a digital business what was the roll of data? How did the data model evolve? >> Well I think that one of the things that we look at in our data model is that because of the scope and scale of our business, they have different data model requirements for different aspects of our business. Our safety business operates under DHS critical infrastructure rules whereas our unified communications is particularly dictated by regulatory and compliance environments and healthcare, education, commercial and utility markets and other aspects depending on what kind of notifications are going out. It might be under HIPA, high trust and those kinds of things Those are really kind of the drivers for us to be able to prioritize how it effects our data model and our INFOSEC profile. >> So you have to have sort of semi-siloed data model, right? >> Correct. So we don't see a lot of customer movement across the organization only about 30% of our customers buy from multiple West businesses and they're typically very compartmentalized around the use and consumption model that we actually have been approached for. >> So as the digital leader, does that present challenges for you or it is what it is and you just deal with it? >> Thomas: It actually presents more opportunities than anything else and the reason why is because we can take learning from very forward looking, leaning cloud native platforms and be able to apply that into some of our legacy business or we could also look at something like the regulatory environment than how certain businesses actually satisfy that and be able to mature some other aspects of our business that might be a little bit more loose or came in through an acquisition that wasn't governed by kind of an organization of the scale of ours. >> Rebecca: So you're a very progressive leader and before the cameras were rolling we were talking a little bit about how there is this mentality particularly in IT this sort of break it, fix it mentality and keeping going that way. What's your best advice for people in rolls in IT and elsewhere in the organization to get out of that mindset? >> Well the most important thing I think is that you have to move out of an order taker roll and your really have to kind of move into a either a strategic advisor kind of an internal consultancy model where in which your IT leadership team is not necessarily seeking a seat at the table, that's kind of a cliche in that regard but much more of how do you partner with the General Managers, Segment Presidents and so on and so forth as an advisor on the side working with them on how they consume the technology services across the organization. That's really how we focused our architecture team as opposed to necessarily looking at bringing in an external consultancy to kind of lead and broker that conversation inside the organization. >> Dave: What are you doing with ServiceNow? >> So we are actually, we've just released in April our first phase with ServiceNow. It was a significant transition over multiple service management platforms. We've rolled out service management and knowledge already. We're underway with operations management next. And we're talking about all the aspects of it. So we're taking very much an out of the box approach. We're not doing an customizations, we're doing a lot more configuration around workflow and so on. We've been able to establish a really strong leadership presence around the organization from a governing perspective, how we're going to float those changes into the organization and then ultimately how are we going to deliver. We kind of take it as kind of the base fractal as the first phase and first implementation. And then how do you expand upon that to ultimately make sure it's woven into the fabric in the organization as a tool for not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> So no custom mods. Check. >> Thomas: No custom mods. >> Smart. How about a single CMDB with a siloed or a fractured data model. >> Thomas: That's very much a part of our strategy. >> So okay, you bought into that. >> We look at asset management as kind of the bridge between logical Enterprise Architecture models and how it actually translates into physical infrastructure the CMDB is that source of truth for that and we're looking to ServiceNow to be able to provide that for our organization and that includes not only in our on prem instances, our virtualized environments our hybrid cloud environments ultimately looking at them as kind of a cloud management provider as we scale up and take advantage of that. And that includes charge back, show back being able to show what consumption is, being able to have our capacity teams be able to do forecasts based on, you know, cyclical environments where or storms or things like that move across and effect where our compute resources are ultimately deployed. >> But you don't get there overnight. I mean you got organizational barriers you got politics involved. What's the timeline look like to effect that? >> We started our transformation journey in late 2015. We reorganized the initial aspects of our IT organization everything but product development in 2016 and really spent the next 18 months kind of driving towards table setting on a platform level, not only in how we were dealing with service management but how our cloud native platform was being built out, our CICD tools data center consolidation all those activities. And then ultimately when in 2017 we reorganized the last elements of our product engineering and our development organization and now really kind of lit a fuse if you will on that transformation journey. So rather than necessarily have it start at on point and look at the distance between strategic kind of alignment we've actually gone and put definite milestones and breakpoints for us to be able to kind of reenergize that part of the organization. >> Thomas, thanks so much for coming on theCube it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 in a little bit. (upbeat music)