>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the kue covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now welcome back to knowledge 15 everybody I'm Dave vellante and we're here this is the cube and we've been unpacking the experience that is service now knowledge knowledge 15 with this our third knowledge we did 13 14 and now 15 we're very excited to be here Nicole Tate and van Tran are here the two consultants in the IT service management space happen to be focused on health care right now but they got a lot of experience couple IT practitioners folks welcome to the cube it's great to see you so to call uh let me start with you so your first knowledge or you've been to a couple knowledge shows her so I started back in New Orleans with such okay no it's true yeah all right right so wow you've seen the transformation of knowledge along with the evolution of service now when you what do you think about this one so I'm amazed you know the first knowledge i attended I remember being overwhelmed I hadn't even implemented my first phase and so I'm sitting in these sessions and I'm just like wow these people are rockstars look at all these cool things that they're doing and I came back very energized very revived and started on my own journey after that and now I'm seeing some of these same people coming up and being their own rock stars and kind of watching the conference grow it's really impressive so if you go back van you know a few years ago so the IT and still in many organizations is of the whipping child of the organization but we've really seen a transformation in that role for particularly the clients that are the customers that are here maybe you could talk about that in your own experience yeah I started with service now back probably in 2007 and so back then it was something that was shown as something is an easy platform that you can easily configure and through the growth of service now you know it's become more complicated and clients have had more requirements so then we've seen more dedicated roles to this profession and a lot of resources are needed to be successful in the complication that we have today especially in the health care industry so it's it's it's going getting more complicated and they'll be need to be more people involved to make it successful so you both are relatively new to healthcare right it's turn over the last 12 months or so or less casing the call but you've got a lot of experience you're consulting with different organizations you know around and what's different about health care Nicole what are your first impressions so I think health care has been one of these things that's very complicated and rightfully so it's it's people's health you know it's their lives but with recent legislation and recent things that are coming down health care is being forced to be more of a product more of a service right and as the cost per patient Rises and you're getting less back from insurance right you have to get creative and there's going to have to be some disruption in this industry I'm and I see service now as a platform that will be able to streamline a lot of these complex processes put some automation behind it and really reduce some costs so you think it'll reduce our bills I hope so so van let's talk about your experiences with with service now he said started in 2007 did I hear right that's when I first he's dead okay how did that all come about it's it's still fairly new at that time so when when our our service desk was replacing a tool it was just something that you brought in and then I worked at the helpdesk at that time so I was in charge of just sort of configured to replace our old tool at that time and so and since then I've just kind of did a little fudging here and there and but as I went through my career I've had more dedicated part in service now and so now I'm a full-time developer and so I'm just doing it a lot lot more now and Nicole you were saying off-camera that your experience is you were one of the first to go beyond IT maybe you could tell us about that yeah so and when I came to the New Orleans conference I was just worried about it's an IT tool and as I was sitting there listening to some of the sessions and some of the use cases I thought you know there's there's something unique here we could we can take this really far so I came back and I did a really aggressive roadmap and I showed my boss and he says you're trying to do everything in six months and I said fine give me 12 and he says okay good luck whatever go do whatever you need to do and I met with HR facilities accounts payable engineering and then we rolled out 15 business apps in 18 months vicious very it was really nice because we had everybody using the same platform and once you get everybody using the same platform then you can automate your enterprise processes so this stuff that you know everybody has a piece of that before you have to take outside of a workflow you'd have to go door knocking and say hey it's your turn to do your part now we just you know hit the now button right it just goes everybody just got an automated task to do their keys they would do that these you go to the next piece we were able to bring a lot of products to market very fast for that house we're breaking ice new ground how did you go about succeeding there just take us through kind of the steps that he took yeah um initially HR came to me and says you know we do what you do and I send our IT you don't do what we do and he says no absolutely we have these we have incidents and she do no you don't you know you ok let's now really have a conversation and he's any starts to walk me through he says yeah you know you didn't get paid what would you think that was that was and I'm like oh it's a really big incident and he said yeah exactly so I need something that I can have as a portal for employees to come through and get services from HR and I was like that makes a lot of sense you know let's go ahead and do this so we did a proof of concept where we got everybody in the room and did an 8-hour jam session and we came out of that with actually a really good app it took three weeks to roll it out because we had to do change management and some training to the field but time to market it was literally four weeks and we had an enterprise HR you know case automation piece to it so it's really cool what was it ok but there was no app creator back then right now so how did that all work so it was me i just right clicked and created an app into the table and prayed that i did it right youryour coder by background I'm not I'm definitely from the business side of the house so I did the the proof of concept and then I had a developer come in and do some of the security and some of the more complex logic that was needed to support something like HR but there's a lot of sensitive sensitivity to data and things like that van you're a you a developer by right background or no I come the service that side so that's why what your service now developer and now my service not developer so you guys are the low coders or no coders as they say how did you get into being a developer service now well starting at the service desk you know at that time I just took calls and wrote up incidents and I moved into the application space and I still had a hand in service now and I did a little bit more coding in my application role and then in my consulting role then that's when I start to do more coding and stuff like that and so then so that's how I got in that space and I like coding yeah people wouldn't have to call me as much as when I wrecked at the service desk i was able to concentrate more and not be pulled in two different directions and as a developer i can just focus on what i'm working on in front of my screen at that time ok so I'm envisioning you know code right as code I see our developers they got code all the place and understand it maybe it's HTML maybe it's Python whatever it is so what's it like to be a service now developer it's not so much different from that it's just you have to know that there's some proprietary functions within the ServiceNow system but it's mostly javascript-based and there's some jelly and then you can do some HTML on the CMS front too but the server has a lot of tools that sort of make it a little bit easier for people who don't code very much as one of those who do code very much and then it because gives them short cousin they don't have to write everything themselves so today's developer in service now can to have the options to make it really complex if they need to or they can use the out of box tools to help them configure their application in a more efficient matter it helps with better practice or if you don't have a computer science background I have a computer science okay so that helped it does it does how hey okay so you've taken courses and you understand logic and yes yeah that definitely does have some code maybe not commercially but yeah I've been insane Nicole did you have a computer science background I don't have an MBA I'm straight up business now okay and you consider yourself now a service now developer or no you just sort of broke the ice so I'm definitely capable of putting together you know as it you know part of my role is being a champion for the organization identifying solution opportunities I can put together a POC or proof of concept within the tool and show people what they could do what life could be like if they use service now and then when you actually want to roll something out to production and have security and some automated business rules and things like that you know I'll partner with van and say help me this is the things that we want to go ahead and do here's some of the additional harder requirements that we need to solve here but yeah I'm capable of going in and doing stuff to it but the job of pieces and things like that I let the experts handle that so what makes a good developer and how does that compare to what makes a good service now developer there's got to be similarities or their differences there are slight differences what makes a good service now developers that you're aware of the best practice and you use the proprietary functions within the system some of the stuff comes with out of box and and depending on what your requirements are maybe you don't want to skirt around that you want to use that because you know you when things change on the service and Alfre you don't want your stuff to break so a good service now developer will take into account the existing out of box functionality things that you can figure and then you would code and help support that so that when you do changes and upgrades to that then your stuff wouldn't break so it's just about being conscious about what's best practice supporting the outer box functions when it's appropriate and and versus a regular developer well you wouldn't you might not have a system that you're working with you're just creating your own application so that's the general difference which you know you must be started about something else what you've seen at the very excited about your nieces and yeah so talk about what you want you've seen that's got you it's very it's very very nice and I see there has a presence that's a good idea about having a chat and the ability to do that and and I what I really like is the more support behind the mobil feature because in today it's we have the mobile feature but it but what we need may not it may not be fully supported yet but i see in geneva they're making a big push into the mobile app space and then I think that's when mobile apps going to start taking off for service now when we get to Geneva the real-time peace with angular yes that definitely supply yes okay all right a call so let's talk about n van both of you guys have one point to weigh in on this so let's take a hypothetical situation in healthcare you guys get relatively new to healthcare so you come up with a fresh perspective describe a typical healthcare situation may be using a variety of tools and a lot of stovepipes a lot of inefficiencies describe that situation and how you get from there to where you want to be and what is that state and how do you get there so one of the things that you know we're focusing on right now is standardized processes so in IT we're battling kind of the firefighting or the being a very reactive so if we can get everybody to fall into place with a standard process that allow us to have a very similar experience from the hospital with IT so if a doctor calls in they'll they'll have the very similar experience each and every time as opposed to it being somewhat varied or they have their their hook up their IT hook up if you will right the other kind of interesting piece is we do a lot of rounding so we go to the hospital and we try to find out what's better and in doing that I noticed that we have a lot of paper sheets where we file you know if a piece of equipments broken or anything you'd help with something at the hospital they're actually filling out a piece of paper it's a form for that there's a form he's a paper form you know there's an app for that will and help you there's a fourth with us it's a foreigner or stack of paper I'm in you know our field service your I'm printed if you want that's right good scan it yeah um so our field services reps then go through every morning and they collect these pieces of paper and then they dispatch out some additional people to go fix these things or replace the items I'm you know what I'd like to see is you know a mobile device there and it's just you know right there for them to be able to do that I think those are some prime opportunities that are kind of the low-hanging fruit for us from an IT perspective but I also think that there's some great things that we could do outside of IT on this platform you know supply chain managing some of the you know needle sticks you know if you take a use case like that it's a huge challenge in healthcare today and when you have a practitioner who sticks themselves with the needle they have to go and fill out a form they have to go to occupational health they have to go and do all of these different things there's a set process behind that um you know it'd be nice for them to be able to log it from their mobile device that they had this issue they would get some sort of task or some sort of notification this is hey now your next step in this process is to go do this it gets checked off that way and you can confirm that that practitioner followed the appropriate steps and then what really excites me is the opportunity to do analysis behind that so is it the the nurse who's working the 18-hour shift that always gets the needle sticks and those are higher is that the night shift is it this specific specific area that's having an issue you can start compiling some of that data and doing a lot of the reporting out of service now on how could we how could we be better I would think it's awfully challenging to do some of that analysis if it's on spreadsheets and paper and things like that now doctors aren't known for being the most aggressive users of technology at least historically uh maybe that's unfair has that changed I think I disagree with that because I think you're seeing significant significant advances in health care today and I think they're looking for technology you know I ran into a physician the other day and he's been working at the hospital for 50-plus years and he's in he says oh you're from IT and I said I am and he says when are we gonna get better technology and I thought that was really interesting because I think it shows that they're really wanting more from us he's on that's why I'm here I'm here to help so van what are some of the applications that you're working on developing or getting adopted what kind of just about everything anything like out of box like incident helping change cmdb Service Catalog discovery and then most recently I I developed and get me and my team developed a social media management app and so you know I can fix you can help control Twitter feeds and stuff like that so and then there's we also have custom apps that that might sort of support an existing medical system and so we review the process for that and then we custom-built out that request system so a request for an enhancement might come in and there'd be a workflow behind that but it's not an incident a change or a Service Catalog requests doctors tweet my corporate corporate tweets perfectly i guess it could be so what is the social media management app to that's interesting basically it would it would prevent accidental inappropriate treats or controversial treats for the organization and you would store the credentials in service now and so none of your social media team but actually need to know the credentials and so you give them the ability to post to the social media but they would have to go through service now they have to submit a suggestion for a post and it would go through a workflow and a review and there would be some of that I would have the final say and the final edit on that post and they can polish it up and make it look good and then it would say post it now and then it would go out from service now and actually post it on the twitter feed and this way you can prevent you know if their people are leaving and coming you don't have to keep changing the password you can just give a masses to service now you can just take it away so it is also much secure and it prevents people from accidentally posting stuff in sizing us that's a real concern in today's industry about accidentally posting such does that work so i have my service now credentials yeah and then i have access it's it's a access controls to this app yeah you have you would get access to service now you'd open up a record producer and you'd submit a suggestion for a post so let's say I worked in department XYZ and I say you know our company should really talk about this out there and so I would submit this post suggestion it would go through a workflow behind the scenes and it would get reviewed and if they feel that you know what we really should be talking about this then they'll review it no maybe work with a couple of people to polish it up and then they'll post it and the person who suggested it doesn't need to know the credentials but they got their post out there and so that's the power of service now you don't have to give the credential salad so is that is that how it works is pretty pretty much anybody can make a suggestion anyone can make a sort of a user-generated content I here within the organization yeah you'd get everyone to participate maybe it's just not the social media team anymore you get feedback from the entire organ asian about what they feel should be out there that's relevant to their area and maybe you didn't know that that should be something you're talking about and so you'd get that feedback you'd get to review it and maybe you don't want to post it out or maybe you do and if you do you can get some work notes and discussions on the suggestive post and when you're ready you can post it up through service now to the app now would you for instance take that app and put it in in the store in theory would you do that yeah it would be on share I mean for others too yeah yeah okay have you done that or are you planning on doing that trying to do that yeah you see the charge for it no no okay that's cool great i love free apps but I mean a lot of people want to put stuff in the store so they can you know make money right your motivation is the major Shara sharing knowledge and just help people I mean it's it's it's not a complicated program or anything like that but it's it done okay so what why recreated yeah now what's the general philosophy with sort of developing applications now that the stores here is this whole ecosystem make or buy builder by that's the what's the philosophy or I guess it depends on whether you have a big team if you have a team of 20 X developer's then you could build it yourself to exactly to your specifications and if your team is small and you're relatively small company maybe it's worth it you just buy the app there's also an advantage to making it because then you can support it you know exactly what's behind it I think you know people are going to download off of share and like put applications on the platform they need to thoroughly understand how that application was built and so that they can understand all the business rules and the logic that comes in from a management perspective I think that's really really important to vet out how those apps are been configured we could talk about services so a lot of large service organizations here systems integrators folks that are you know pretty astute on best practice within service now an IT Service Management or in your experiences past experience cars experience are you using service providers how are you using them what would you recommend in that regards a lot of people like oh wow that's a lot of money but we're talking about the family jewels here too so you have to be careful so what would you recommend there and what's your experience been so when I was at the telecommunications organization we used a lot of different partners and in what we found is that each partner kind of brings a different strengths and that really allowed us to leverage you know one partner who's really nailed asset management for example that's one that we want to partner with asset management but maybe not on HR case management another partner could be really good at you know governance risk and compliance and bring a really strong you know strong suite there that's what we want to partner with I'm kind of finding a little bit of a shift now um you know I prefer to use service now professional services you know it's the one back to Pat one throat to choke kind of thing and but they also you know are able to tap into a huge consulting you know practice so if I'm leading an implementation in healthcare I can partner with them and say I want people that have health care experience and when I was at telecommunications I said hey I need somebody that has telecommunications experience they brought their a-game to the telecommunication space so it's really important because I think while everybody does incident management there are specific use cases for these different industries and things that are the I gotchas and they've been through those things and they can bring that knowledge and I think that that's worth you know the money that they charge is bringing the blog's up this health care provider and they did it this way and this is what they found don't do that you know we've gotten a lot of help on our recent project in that area just don't do this do it this way you know specific to our our guidelines writing for our industry we're running out of time you have a van a couple couple final questions man from your perspective coming from help desk now throw them in the application development role what's the one action item you would give you know to your peers what should they be focused on to be successful as a developer I think they would need to focus more on the business and be more you know listening and gathering requirements because i think you know there might be like a developer role and that business systems analyst role and not that that's not important but it would help the developer if they had a general understanding of the business and the flow of that so I think if they could extend just beyond being a developer fully if they could understand the business in the process that would definitely help them question and think about whether what they're building even though it's based off the requirements is really the best way to do it because they have the understanding of the business process to so to call you're nodding profusely okay look van took that one what's the piece of advice you would give your your peers and be your own internal sales rep so as we're asking the development community to fill in that gap of you know the business analyst and understanding the business and coming up with creative solutions you know from a solution owner a platform owner perspective it's be the champion you know HR is not going to know the capabilities of the platform unless you're out in front of them coming up with these solutions and showing the capabilities behind it so you know be the champion because it can only benefit your organization for everybody to be using the same technology you know it's interesting IT people traditionally you wouldn't consider them the most sales oriented our marketing oriented people in the planet but you walk around this conference and and you call it use it to our champion it's a good word but internal champion internal sales people you see a lot more that it events like this generally but specifically knowledge and so that's a skill set that's new IT isn't it it's good yeah and I think you know the platform allows that right we're not spending a lot of time coding and you know being very complicated our role is really making their processes less complicated so that we can automate in the tool faster right so if I can push back on the business and say hey why are you doing it that way this is a better way to do it I'm also simplifying our lives from a development perspective and I can go to market quicker as opposed to having to build all this custom functionality to support some crazy business requirement right so I think that's why you see a lot more champions at this conference because that's the skill set that's really important to make sure you don't mess up your platform all right we'll leave it there Nicole van thanks very much thank you thanks for having us all right keep it right to everybody will be back this is knowledge 15 is the cube with the back with our next guest right after this