>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge18, ServiceNow's big customer event. 18,000 ServiceNow practitioners and partners and constituents here. As I say, this is day three. This is our sixth year at Knowledge. Jeff Frick and I are co-hosting. When we started in 2013 early on, we saw this ecosystem grow, and one of the first CIOs we had on from the ServiceNow customer base was Link Alander, who is here. He's the Vice Chancellor of College Services at Lone Star College. Link, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> It's always great to get back and talk with you, see what's happening in the industry, and follow you. But, once again, great conference. >> It really is, I mean, wow. Last year was huge. The growth keeps coming. We said that Dan Rogers, the CMO, K18, 18,000. How ironic. >> Yeah, wow, let's see, your first was six years ago, right? >> Dave: Yep, it was 2013. So my first would have been New Orleans, which had been I think 2012, 2011. >> Right, right, the year before we met 'em. >> Three to four thousand in this conference. Actually, that might be the high count. >> Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing. And the ecosystem has exploded. What's your take on how, not only ServiceNow and the ecosystem have grown, but how it's affected your business? >> Let's start with the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start with the ecosystem part because, really, you've got so many more partners out there now. You've got so many more integration points. What was really exciting as we saw this morning with Pat, and some of the enhancements they're doing on the DevOps side, but also what we're going to see with the ability to integrate our cloud linkage, which is really the challenge for everybody as a practitioner today. How do you bring all these cloud services? I've got quite a few of them in my environment. How do I actually integrate those in with my ServiceNow, with my ERP, with all of the other instances? So, seeing what they're doing in that space is great. From the business standpoint, when we came onto ServiceNow, we came on like everybody else, a journey for IT service management. Can we improve our services? Can we help our customers out? In our case, that'd be our faculty and staff. What we didn't realize was the opportunity that came to us with the platform. And one of the first things we did when we brought the platform back to us was we built an app for students. We built a way to help students out with their student financial aid. Now I've got, I think we're roughly at about nine of our areas that are using Enterprise Service Management. I just came back from giving a presentation about legal, and what we've done in the legal space to where that's helped the organization to move forward faster. So that's really cool in what it does, but it also elevates the position of IT in the organization. It really does bring us forward. >> Yeah so, let's talk a little about Lone Star College, 'cause I love your model, you know, and we can both relate. Kids in college, and, you know, the cost of education, the ROI, which I think is a big focus of what you guys provide for your students, so how's that going? How's the model working? >> Well the model's working great. And you know, you hear the pressures out there, 'cause one of the first thing is, how do you help a student complete. So, we're really very focused on student completion, but then now, you've got another focus that, well, it's been there, but it's really getting stronger, on gainful employment. So not only that, how do you get a student in college, how do they complete on time, but then how do they come out and have a livable wage, an earnable wage? And so I'll give a plug on that always because that's what we're focused on. Whether you're just coming to us to transfer to another institution or whether you're coming in the workforce. And we have a very strong workforce development, and one of the things I got out of this conference that I've been working on for quite awhile was for us to become a ServiceNow train, to get that integrated into our curriculum. And I was really excited. We've talked to them before about this, and it's been a discussion, but now what we're looking at is a program that they put in France where they have a six week program that if people are going out of there, coming in, six weeks later, job retrained, 100% placement. A year later, they have 98% retention, and those 2% just went to another company. So I can't think of a better opportunity for us from our standpoints in our workforce development. And I'm really excited we're going to be starting to move that forward now. >> It's interesting to hear John Donahoe on Tuesday talk about their measurement of customer success. And we were asking him on theCUBE, well, your customers measure success in a lot of different ways, so how do you take that input? Your measurement of success is student success, as you just have indicated. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, my focus has always been is IT is just a support operation. We're not the mission of the college. And that's important. Because as long as we have that mindset, we realize that it's us helping the faculty to less stress on their life, or the staff, then we've improved their experience, which will improve the student experience. The same goes for the administrative systems. We want administrative systems to have a user interface that's intuitive to today's student. It wasn't designed by a person that was intuitive to today's student. So we have that challenge, and that's what I liked about the change this year and the user interface in ServiceNow and where they're going with UI and UX, and how much of an enhancement that makes for our customers. But it's also, that's the changes that are happening in industry right now. Coach K was at the CIO Decisions, and he was talking about he's headed to go through all this process, and 50 forward years of difference, and he's recruiting 18-year-olds, and he's sending emojis to them, his recruits. But like, yeah, because you have to relate to it. So, we started a process, and this is where coming to a conference like this helps me a lot, because it's like, yeah, I went down the right path. But my team came to me, and I've got a phenomenal team. They came to me and said, you know what, we really need to look at UI, UX, and design thinking. And I'm like, okay. Now let's discuss what we really want to do with this. One group was wanting design thinking to think about analytics. What does the customer need? How do they want to see this data come to them? And how can they make data-informed decisions? Well, we have then rolled that same design thinking into, how do we roll out the fluid technologies in our ERP? How do we become more of a user interface that today's student wants, to what we're trying to do next in mobile? >> That's a really interesting take, because we talk often about millennials entering the workforce, right? And consumerization of IT and expectations. But they're usually a pretty small and growing percentage of the workforce at a particular company. For you, it's like 90% of your customer base, right? And they're on the bleeding edge. They're coming in there 18, 17 years old. So you got to be way out front on this customer experience. So have you really taken that opportunity to redesign that UI, UX, and interface to the applications? That must be a giant priority. >> We've done a lot of incremental items, but really it's been a huge priority for us for the last, we have two really cool items coming down the path. One is the UI UX experience. How do we transform the student experience? The next is a process that our academic success side, the student services side have gone down, with guided pathways. Okay, you and I went to college. What did we do? We saw an advisor every single time we registered. Then we up to the thing, and we filled in a bubble sheet, right? >> Right, right. >> Well right now, the students are registering on a mobile phone while they're sitting down at a Starbucks. They're not seeing an advisor. We want them to see an advisor. So we push them those directions, but this guided pathway says, you know what, I want to do this degree. Then we just line out, here's the classes you're going to take, and whether we use program enrollment, whatever methodology, we can help guide them in their pathway to success and completion, which is a big difference. And that's what needs to happen today. >> Right, well it's interesting, I always like to talk about banking, right? 'Cause banking, you used to go see the banker, go into the teller, and, you know, deposit your check and get your cash. And now most people's experience with their bank is via electronic, whether it's online, on their phone, or their app. You have kind of the dichotomy, 'cause they still have their interaction with the teachers. So there's still a very people element, but I would imagine more and more and more of that administrative execution, as you just described, is now moving to the mobile platform. That's the way they interact with the administration of the school. >> Well, that's their expectation. So, that's what we have to deliver, and it's a challenge because we have resources, we have limitations in resources or capabilities, but it's really keeping that focus going to where you look at it. So as we're doing this UI UX right now, one of our major goals is going to be to bring students in the engagement as we go through the design process, and get their feedback. Not computer science people, not IT people. We want the normal student that's going to go register for a class. And since what you have is such a large transient population, you know, two years, they're in, they're done. 100,000 per semester. 160,000 unique each year. You've got to create that rich experience, but the engagement, the bonding to the institution. And I like the bank for an example because not too long ago I switched banks because I didn't like their app. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And it's easy to do, it's real easy to do. >> Airlines, you appreciate the good apps. >> Link: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> How does ServiceNow contribute to that user experience, that, your customer experience? >> Well right now from the student side, they don't see much of ServiceNow. They can submit requests, and we can handle their incidents, and those types of items. They have certain things. We have the student financial aid. But it really is about the Enterprise Service Management philosophy. I think if you go back to one of theCUBEs, maybe two or three years ago, I said, "Who would have ever thought they would come to IT to talk about service delivery?" Okay? Now, everybody at Enterprise is like, okay, how do you do this? How do you not let things fall through the crack? So that the legal app was a great one, because that was a challenge that our general council or our COO had when he came in. Everything was falling through the crack. So they worked through their workflows. They built a process. And then they built, we built an app for them in ServiceNow that handles everything. Now when I'm in a cabinet meeting, I get to hear about how legal's doing so great. I'm like, what about me? I think we're still doing a good job. (laughing) >> Well, Link, I'm curious too on, kind of the big theme has always been at this show kind of low code, no code developing, right? Enable people that aren't native coders to build apps, to build workflows. How has that evolved over time within your organization? >> Well, we still want to make sure when we're putting out code. What it's enabled for us is, of course, our developers, it makes it easier to get to time to completion of a project. But we still want to make sure that whatever's built is production ready. You know, so we're not opening up the tool case to everybody. (laughing) But, sad to say, I actually still go in, and I'll build my dashboards, and I'll build my interaction, and I use my performance analytics, which does enable people. And we're seeing that in some of our heavier Enterprise Service Management side, but as far as letting them dive into the no code environment, I still have to put some protection on us. And like any organization, we always have to think of IT security. That's the other piece of it. What are they putting out there? What could be a violation of privacy? How do we handle that? >> Jeff: Right. >> So, we stay completely engaged, but the speed to deliver is what the change is. Our legal app was a three month development project. Three months to go from a, they had a separate system. And to go through the process, redesign it, build it, and put it in production. Three months. >> Three months? >> How many people, roughly? How many people did it take to get there? >> Well, we use a development partner that used three, and then I had two at the time on my own. I still have only three individuals that actually handle our, that are primary to ServiceNow in my organization, as large as our installation base is. >> Really? And that includes the permeation of ServiceNow into the rest of the organization, or? >> Link: Yes. >> Dave: Really? >> 'Cause I added, and before that, if it has been last year, it was one and a half. >> Dave: Wow. >> That's what I had then. And technically, I probably have only two and a half because one person has another job, which is running our call center. >> So what are you using now? You got obviously ITSM, what else is in there? >> ITSM, ITBM, we got a great presentation we gave earlier on project portfolio management, and what we've done with that. And where we're going next. Business operations. We're actually launching this summer, if everything goes right. This is more of an internal, us doing it, but what I've been doing is I've been taking our contract management piece, utilization, incidents request change, and project. Now I'm going to roll it in and then do analytics against it to come back with what is the total cost per service per month per individual. On every license contract I hold. >> It's funny, the contract management software licensing management piece is a huge untapped area that we hear over and over and over again. >> So, two years ago we talked a lot about security. I think ServiceNow just at that point had announced its intentions to get into that business. What do you make of their whole SecOps modules, and is it something you've looked at? State of security, any comments? >> Well this is one of those situations I think we're just a little bit too far ahead of them again. 'Cause we actually had built a modular ourself that handled what we needed. In my environment, I've got an ISO, but I also have the partners that support us. My SOC is operated by a third party. So they feed in the alerts. We ingest the alerts into the security module, and then we take action from there. So basically, they were about, a little bit behind us. And we had just looked at the model saying we need a better way to manage that event. >> So you got that covered. Yeah, I want to ask you, you know, a couple years ago we, when the big data meme was hitting, we were, of course, asking you all these data questions. Now the big theme is AI, and in some regards it's like, same wine, new bottle. But it's different. What's your thoughts on machine intelligence? Obviously ServiceNow talking about it a lot. How applicable is it to you? >> Okay, so. (laughing) >> You know why, that's good. I had to ask. >> Augmented intelligence. Let's just not make it artificial, okay? 'Cause I, when Fred had that conversation during the fireside and he said, you know, a computer takes 10,000 images to know what a cat is. And of course, the computer's a mundane object that can look at 10,000 images to determine that's a cat. You showed me the other ones earlier today, I about rolled over laughing. >> It's allowed on the blueberry, check it out. >> You know, augmented intelligence is going to be a driver. There's no question about it. What we saw on the interface about it abled to, as the machine learning goes through the process, it's picking up the information, and it's helping the agent to get to the resolution faster, that's great. Knowledge bases that are integrated in with that. Can you think about how much quicker it would be for somebody like myself who's going to go to a chatbot, and I'm going to run through a chatbot in automated intelligence and do that type of work. So that's going to make a significant difference. One of the areas we think they will be dramatic, for especially this generation, the millennials coming into the school, will be to put that augmented intelligence in, in that process. Because, trying to explain to a student, you know, yeah, you go to the registrar's office to take care of this, and you go to the bursar's office to take, they have no clue what those mean. Well, if we can take it to their language, but then also add in augmented intelligence to guide them through those navigation points. So augmented intelligence over the next years, it's taking that big data now, it's actually put into use, all that machine learning, and making something happen out of it. >> You know, digital is one of those things where I actually think the customers led the vendor community. So often in the IT business, and the technology business in general, a lot of vendor hype, whether it's hyper converged or software to fund, they kind of jam it down our throats, and then sort of get it adopted. I almost feel like, you've been doing digital for awhile now because your student force has sent you in that direction. And I feel like the vendor community is now catching up, but is that a right perception? I mean that, the digital is certainly real, and then you guys are leaning in in a big way. >> I think between the three of us we could probably come up with all the different hype words that have been used, and probably fill this room with every one of those words, right? But the reality is, as practitioners, you're looking at what is your customer base, what do you need to be able to deal with. So, we've been into digital transformation, absolutely. Is it a good definition? Was cloud a good definition? I mean, what am I really? It's either I'm going to use software as a surface, a platform as a sur, I have a gigantic private cloud. Okay, that's great. We're talking about high availability and scalability. But when you put all those in, we've been in a digital transformation everywhere. Your banks did it, that's why you have a bank app. Airplanes did it because, you know, what was that ticketing system they used to use? >> Dave: Yeah, Sabre. >> Sabre, that's what it was, oh yeah. It's probably still out there somewhere. But the reality is, is that, if you're not transforming digitally, you're going to get left behind. And even some big IT companies, and I'm sure we got a list of those bit IT companies also, that have fallen off the face of the earth, or are struggling to stay on because they didn't go through that digital transformation. They tried to do the same thing the same way and move forward. You can't do that. >> You know, you just reminded me. I just got a, hey, it's been awhile since I goofed on Nick Carr, but you remember, as a CIO, Does IT Matter? Right, in the early 2000s, that book. I mean, IT matters more than ever, right? I mean, Nick Carr obviously very accomplished, but missed it by a mile. >> Well, it's funny 'cause then IT was a support organization. Now that IT is an integrated piece in the way that everything just happens, right? It's not keeping the lights on and support so much anymore. >> I can't remember who brought that up in the keynote. Talking about the fact that, basically, we permeate the organization, okay? 'Cause there's not a function that they're doing that doesn't have some type of IT. And the question is are you sewing it together correctly. Because in the end, what are they going to want? Well, you want a seamless student experience. You want a seamless employee experience. Nobody's perfect, everything needs improvement. I'll always say that. But then at the same time is, you want that data to be all tied together so you can take advantage of big data. You can take advantage of machine learning. And then you can come back and report on it. You know, what we've done, so I guess three years ago is when I took over. I was put in charge of our analytics team. And our focus was unlocking the data so that people could have access and make decisions that are informed. You know, it's not data driven. We need to see the data, look at it, and come forward from there. So things like what ServiceNow did in performance analytics. Our general council highlighted the performance analytics as soon as we, we missed it, as he said. We put it in the first app, we didn't do it. We needed to add it. So we added it in. And he's like, wow, what I always thought was one thing. But now that I'm seeing the data, and I'm seeing the patterns, it's totally different. Because we have assumptions just 'cause we think we're busy. Performance analytics is letting him see exactly what's happening in his organization. >> Let me ask you a question. If somebody on your staff, let's say somebody that you mentored, came up to you and said, "Listen, Link, I really want to be a CIO. I mean, it's my aspiration. What advice would you give me?" >> Well, it's kind of hard when you ask this one, because I've mentored and then partnered, I wouldn't even call it mentored anymore, a great friend of mine, and he's now a CIO at Spellman in Georgia, yeah. In fact I was just chatting with him earlier because I saw something, I was like, hey, you need to check this out. It'll solve your problem. You know, it's a simple key fact. If you want to be in IT, you've got to be agile. You really have to be agile. You can't be rigid. You can't close those doors and keep your focus, and you have to constantly learn. If you don't just constantly learn, then you fall off. And that's something, when we talk about digital transformation and these companies that haven't made the transformation, that aren't here anymore, they stopped learning. They thought they had it. It's the companies that have actually continued to learn, or the CIOs or people coming up the ranks that look at it. And they look at things differently. It really is. The digital transformation is about keeping the CIO transformed, and every one of the staff. Had a discussion not too long ago with one CIO about how does he energize his staff. He's trying to do a transformation, but his staff is entrenched in the old way we did things. And, you know, sometimes you just have to shake things and get 'em excited about this piece of it. And a lot of times, if you're especially in a college, I have the luck of bringing a student in. What was your experience with that application? What did you think about it? They think it's the greatest thing they've ever created. But when you get it in front of a student, it can be something totally different. So, the biggest one right there, you got to have agility, you got to constantly learn, and you really, you know I might have a laser focus about things, I have a very agile planning model I use, but at the same time is I try to keep the door open to any possibilities. >> Well, Link, you're a great leader, and a friend of theCUBE. Can't thank you enough for making some time out of your busy schedule to come back on. Great to see you again. >> Jeff: Good seeing ya. >> It was great seeing you again, as always. As always. >> Alright, keep it right here, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Las Vegas, ServiceNow Knowledge18. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)