>> 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)