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If you didn't make it to a ServiceNow WorldForum, Cory and I break down some talking points from the Chicago event. We discuss the new talking points: supply chain, inflation, compliance, employees. We talk the "3 Intents of Tokyo". New apps and irreducible complexity. Driving engagement. CMBD (again?!), and bureaucracy vs governance.
Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:00:00] Duke: So what are you talking about today, Corey?
[00:00:01] CJ: Oh, Duke, we're gonna talk about the Service Now. World Forum.
[00:00:04] Duke: Yeah, so, , there was the New York, London, and Chicago ones are already done, right?
[00:00:10] CJ: Yeah. And then Toronto. Is this week I'll be there. , if you'll be there as well, Come out, come find me. Let's have a chat.
[00:00:16] Duke: I unfortunately will not be making it this Thursday, even though I am Canadian and could very easily do it. But, unfortunately just things are getting in my.
[00:00:24] CJ: I hear you.
[00:00:25] Duke: Corey and I had the honor of going to , the World Forum, last week in Chicago, and we thought for those of you who weren't there, I don't think they recorded anything and, and put it online.
So we'll just give you our thoughts on a whole bunch of stuff that happened,
[00:00:39] CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:00:40] Duke: and a whole bunch of stuff that was said. And some of it we agree with and some of it's like, what? So, we're always gonna be the realist with you. , Where do we start, man?
[00:00:48] CJ: you know, I, you know, the first thing I wanna say before we jump, jump into it, right? Like, as I look at these things the World Forum is kinda like the rise of the many knowledge, right? I think that's kind of what Covid has left us with with ServiceNow right now is as they kind of migrate back to that one true knowledge that I think will be next year, they've, um, sprinkled in all of these little kind of regional events to get folks together.
And so I just wanna say I'm deeply appreciative of that. It was great to see everyone. That I saw at the World Forum. It was great seeing you in person again, even though we see each other all the time. But it was, but it was great, Being in that environment again. So, you know, I just wanted to say before we jumped in, that it was a great experience and if, I don't know how many of these things are, but if you can get to one, get.
[00:01:31] Duke: Seriously, and I'll. You know, it's a privilege of being in the ecosystem for so long, but, small local, as it was still bigger than Knowledge 12 or, or at least it felt that way. It felt like a knowledge 12 sized event. And it's just like, Chicago and surrounding areas
[00:01:51] CJ: Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Even though I know some people flew in too, but Yeah.
[00:01:55] Duke: The expo hall was definitely knowledge 12 or larger.
[00:01:59] CJ: Wow,
[00:02:00] Duke: and so that was nice. So, yeah, I guess like the in-person event, it's totally where it's at.
I thank ServiceNow for, doing their level best with the virtual events, but man, you could tell the difference. You could so tell the difference.
[00:02:14] CJ: And everybody felt it too, right? Like everyone felt that
[00:02:17] Duke: I mean, the vibe is still there. Right. Totally
[00:02:19] CJ: Yeah. Yeah. All right.
[00:02:22] Duke: speaking of vibes, ServiceNow's messaging shifts here and there, back and forth if you've been at it for a long time.
But I found like a really definitive shift in the vibe, in terms of like, what is ServiceNow do, what is it there for? What big, big problems can it help?
[00:02:38] CJ: Right.
[00:02:38] Duke: And at the very beginning it was all I t SM and custom apps and, I think the message I saw loud and clear, the words that they said over and over and over again, inflation, supply chain compliance, employee happiness, employee retention.
[00:02:53] CJ: Right.
[00:02:54] Duke: It was those things over and over and over again. You could probably go in there like if you were a fresher with ServiceNow and you didn't grow up in it, you could probably go in there and believe that it's not an IT app or that it, that it never was.
[00:03:08] CJ: Yeah, that's a good point, right? Like that it never was. What I found like year to year with ServiceNow is, that I love is the way that it kind of reinvents itself, , to tackle the pressing problems of the moment. Sometimes it's the platform of platforms, right? Because there's a lot of platforms out there in your enterprise environment.
It's like, we won't replace those things. We'll just be the thing that you go to that integrates all of that stuff and gives you that single pane of glass sometimes, like you know, this year it's inflation, supply chain compliance, employee satisfaction, and happiness. All things that are like top of mind for most people running a company right now.
[00:03:45] Duke: Yeah, , there's some flavor of like, these are the big problems, Dejo, and let's put our marketing messaging around it. But what better platform to put behind it than ServiceNow, right? It's not just.
[00:03:56] CJ: Amen.
[00:03:57] Duke: I mean? You're, you're not just capitalizing on this thing. I was happy though that they said, Where was my Trello board Um, kind of the head speaker, she said, You know, you've gotta use the now platform across silos. And I was just like, Sweet. We're back to the old good messaging
[00:04:19] CJ: That's the thing that got me excited, like way back when is that? Talking about the now platform, how you use it across multiple. Departments, silos, if you will, inside an enterprise, right?
And unlock all of that data that you have internally, and again, turn it into one single pane of glass and feed that up to make better, management decisions and to, automate and execute work better.
[00:04:43] Duke: it's like the single arc across everything that we've talked about,
[00:04:46] CJ: Absolutely.
[00:04:47] Duke: It's just platform, platform, platform, platform,
[00:04:50] CJ: Man, it's the purpose, dude, guess sorry, I get, I get stoked about this, man. It it's the point, when you're coming into this ecosystem, right? And you're wondering like, what's service down good for what, what's the whole point of this thing, right? Like it's this, it's breaking down those silos, right?
And it's exposing all of the inner workings of your enterprise. Front and personal so that you can utilize it to build better enterprises, right? to execute work better, to get better insight and, better d uh, data mining and make better decisions, all of those things.
And it all starts with taking the now platform and spreading it like a virus across your enterprise.
[00:05:28] Duke: Spreading like a virus. Let's take that to the SecOps team.
[00:05:36] CJ: This is the service now virus.
[00:05:37] Duke: Yeah. , one thing that I found interesting, they were talking about Tokyo release and how Tokyo's awesome and you should go to Tokyo. but they broke it down into like these three intense. and I loved these. And ServiceNow, if you're listening, this would be a great thing to have at the start of a release.
Especially of late, it's just kind of. You get to the, to the pre-release and, the MVPs and the CMAs and all people who are getting previews just get, 30 slides on new stuff across the platform, but it's no overarching intent. And so it was, cool for me to see that they had these three.
One was to boost engagement with people in and out of your organization. Supercharged intelligence. And purpose built solutions. Now, I love two outta three of those. I think another one is just kind of like, throw marketing B at the wall and see if it sticks. But but which 1:00 AM I talking about?
[00:06:33] CJ: that is the question, right? So one of these I like as well, but I, yeah, I'm a little less convinced on, and then the other two, then I'm kinda like, Okay, I get it. So it'll be interesting to see where we line up on this
[00:06:45] Duke: The boost, The boost engagement. Super practical, right? Like everybody who's got ServiceNow wants more engagement with, the people that they have ServiceNow for,
[00:06:54] CJ: Yeah, no doubt.
[00:06:55] Duke: the Purpose-Built Solutions, totally obvious. They've got all kinds of new ones, but the supercharged intelligence was kind of like, what is that?
How do you know you've got it so that, that was a weird one. Is the supercharge intelligence.
[00:07:09] CJ: Yeah. So for me, is purpose-built solutions. and not weird in the sense that I, I don't get it, right. It's weird in the sense for me that I lean a little away from it, For me, , I like purpose-built solutions. I think a lot of people do.
I just don't think that everyone works the same,
[00:07:26] Duke: No, you're totally right. Yeah, totally.
[00:07:29] CJ: and I hope that we're not getting to the point where a ServiceNow is building 80, 20 or 90 10 solutions, Where they're baking 80% or 90% of the, work process into the solution and making it hard to configure, or customize, or whatever word you wanna use there for the individuals who want it, who actually want to use it and make it mapped to how they work internally,
[00:07:52] Duke: Right. Or you get like those instances where a ServiceNow works with a customer to build a v1, but the V1 is so entrenched in that first customer's worldview. what if you miss?
[00:08:03] CJ: Yes. What if you miss? I love
[00:08:05] Duke: And I'm not, like, I'm not, I'm totally not denigrating ServiceNow. I'm just saying like, it's happened, you know,
[00:08:11] CJ: No, absolutely right.
[00:08:13] Duke: one place that I know of.
but. it's not like they can say that, I understand they have to market, And they can't just say, Hey, this is v1 and we hope it sticks. They're going to walk out with a swagger and say, Yeah, this is awesome. It's a purpose-built solution for fill in the blank, supply chain management, ESG compliance, whatever.
[00:08:31] CJ: yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:32] Duke: . But, But yeah, I just wish there was it's so hard version to version. They'll roll out new stuff, new stuff, new stuff. But it's so hard to keep visibility of it cause it's all coming out at once. It's all various stages of maturity by the time the release hits.
[00:08:45] CJ: Yeah. For me it's like, give us more to do. as the architects, as the developers, as the folks in the ecosystem who are actually building this stuff for you, like, I don't need you to build out 80% of this solution. I'm fine. If you build out 50 or 60% of it, leave that other 40% as the stuff I can come in and build on top of to make it work for my client.
Give me that. ? And, that helps me dramatically because it gives me the stub of, this is how the process kind of works. These are the things that we've left out for you to configure. Like there's the task state utal. script include, right? Like that allows you to manage task, stay so much more effectively than when we used to do it in the good old days, back in, you know, five, eight years ago, whenever, build that kind of stuff and expose it, you know, as APIs or configuration options and, give me guidance, like general, put a little bit of, of opinion there. But let me take it from there and build out and don't bake everything so, that it makes it so hard for me to unwind it and make it work for my client.
[00:09:47] Duke: And before anybody thinks, man, you're just knocking service now, down a bit. just appreciate how hard this is. So I grew up in a super like evangelical church family, right? And, gosh, I can't get super controversial here, , but one of the, one of the like arguments for like biblical literacy of creation, Is this, this concept of irreducible complexity. And I'm not saying I believe in this or whatever. , I'm just saying that there's this cool concept called irreducible complexity, which is basically like the thing isn't a thing until it is.
[00:10:15] CJ: All right.
[00:10:15] Duke: So it's like, how is an eyeball, like a half eyeball until it's an eyeball
[00:10:21] CJ: Oh, I
[00:10:21] Duke: It's got like a million working parts in there, right? And it's just like, until it's an eyeball, what uses it and how does it make you give you an advantage? Right? And But I don't wanna make this like a debate, right? I'm not like,
[00:10:32] CJ: No, no, no.
[00:10:33] Duke: but, but it's a concept that's applicable everywhere.
And so ServiceNow in a really hard place because if they wanna go into some new industry, they have to have something irreducible complex at the start. think about, field service management, There has to be an interface to basically like schedule. That go on trips to get the stuff done.
The scheduling interface has to be exquisite. Otherwise you've got nothing like you've got nothing and you can't build on top of that. So the struggle of service now as they plum into these new markets is how do I make something the right thing that is irreducible complex.
[00:11:11] CJ: I love that. . I like then the idea of purpose-built solutions, but then have them gracefully degrade over time. And what I mean by like gracefully degrade is when you're dealing with a web page, right?
And you got web page and it works great on your monitor, and then it also works great in your mobile, right? And it does that because CSS and these frameworks and what have you, right, all kind of look around and they know where, what device that they're on, and then they, they map to where they are. Like, give me the, these processes that gracefully, degrade to less complex.
over life cycle time, so then I can customize them or configure them more. Right. I get that you, you're gonna have to show up in the market with a fully baked product That makes sense, from the perspective of, I irreducible complexity, but, feel like three, four revisions in the future.
You don't, you need to also have added the ability to configure and customize.
[00:12:05] Duke: yeah.
[00:12:06] CJ: In order to match the market.
, before we get off of this particular, , topic around the intents, I did wanna say a couple things around like boost engagement.
I was just finished up the cta and one of the things that we talked about there, was performance management. And one of the, ideas that jumped in my head is that, in order to have a successful, ServiceNow instance, right, Like you have to have a highly performant ServiceNow.
Because nobody wants to engage with a slow system, right? And so from the, from the standpoint of boosting engagement, I think performance management should factor heavily into this. If you're any, if you're an architect that owns an instance, or product owner that owns an instance, right? Like if you wanna boost the engagement of your service internally, you gotta make sure that that thing is performing well.
Nobody's got patience, like slow systems. So that's one of the things that, you know, I like them specifically calling out boost engagement, and that's kind of my spin on it, right? It's making sure that everything works well and fast and efficiently if you're going to be the, if you're gonna take on the role of internal evangelist,
[00:13:08] Duke: yeah. And I took it as just more filling out of. The portal interface and, what do people need at the portal? And so one thing they showed off, and this is, dovetailing into more messaging that we heard over and over and over, I think in other knowledges you would've heard like driving efficiencies and blah, blah, blah. Right?
[00:13:28] CJ: Yep.
[00:13:28] Duke: Um, like, and, and, and money and stuff. the prime benefits that we kept hearing over and over and over again at, at World Forum was talent retention, employees engagement. Right.
[00:13:41] CJ: right?
[00:13:42] Duke: dovetails into the boosting engagement intent of Tokyo because they rolled out this thing.
They're like, Hey, we're just gonna, demo manager hub. And I was like,
[00:13:52] CJ: What?
[00:13:53] Duke: is. I was just like looking around to see if any other, anybody else was as flummoxed as I was, because I just never heard about this manager hub. But they pulled it up in employee center and it was a cool little graphical interface. Like, Here's all the people that work for you, and who's on time off leave and da, da da da.
And I'm just like, I'm filling in the blanks in my head, like, Oh, wouldn't this be nice for resource management? this person's got a red circle around them or whatever that means. They're gone, They're, they're outta the office. And I should probably check on their tasks or whatever, but they were just doing different things with people that were associated to you as a manager.
And kind of took my breath away cuz it's like you, you read and read and read. You spend hours reading about listening about Tokyo, and then they're just like, Hey, here's something that you didn't know about
[00:14:36] CJ: You know, Duke, I'm gonna throw a acronym out here, and I just coined in my head, right? And, and I'm gonna give you half credit on this because you're the one who kind of inspired me to look at things this way. dashboard driven development, That's the kind of way I look at like this. manager hub and, and, uh, some of the.
Hubs and dashboards and workspaces and things of that nature that they're really putting a lot of, focus on. And it's really about the curated experience of the folks who are doing the work, being able to have all the data that they need presented to them in one place and a static place that they can always go And then use that to actually do their. I think, back when we came up that, you know, was reporting more so than dashboards, right? I mean, they didn't have dashboards at first. They had homepages, which are kinda like dashboards, but not quite, and.
we built based on the process, we built based on, execution. We didn't bill based on the folks who were doing the work or, Giving the folks who are doing the work or managing the work, or managing the folks who are doing the work, that insight, that single pane of glass again, right?
Uh, where, they could see everything and be able to just have this one place that they can go where everything is, was just exposed and bubbled up to
[00:15:49] Duke: Like audience will put a link in the description below, do our episode on what's up with reporting, ? Where we talked about the three personas of reporting. I totally vibe with that, is this idea that you forget the operators, right? You get, you get the help desk and all they care about iss.
Like what is the next most important task for me to do, period. Nothing else matters to me, but you're putting these trend graphs in front of them like they care, like they got two seconds to look at. And what would they do about it anyway? No, their problem is still, what's the next most important task? So that element of it.
But I also think ServiceNow is going the right direction on this with, workspaces and UI builder.
[00:16:28] CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:29] Duke: mean, let's, let's talk about the difficulty of UI builders some other time, but just this concept of the dashboard, the working interface, the form, the list don't have to be separate things.
[00:16:42] CJ: Right,
[00:16:43] Duke: It could all just be like one operational interface where I'm seeing, air quotes reports, but really operational data that is contextualized now,
[00:16:54] CJ: Yep.
[00:16:54] Duke: and I have a, an interface to do something about it.
So that's what the, the manager hub looked like to me was, Oh, here's the people you manage and a bunch of stuff you could do with them right now.
[00:17:04] CJ: So that's what I mean, right? That's why I say you get, you know, you get credit for me for just kinda like changing my, way that I look at these things, right? And the way that I view this especially, and that's why. You know, we used to call the task like the atomic unit of work, right?
Uh, I, I, you know, I feel like the dashboard is like the, atomic unit of X and I can't figure out what X is yet, but I'll have something cool eventually for it. But, it's the, it's that place where you wanna go. Like your operators are gonna want to go where your managers are gonna wanna go, Where they can see everything about their world and they can interact and, execute from that place. And that's going to impact how you build, right? Because it impacts how you surface, And once you understand that you are surfacing work for a specific. Type of persona, right? , you then have to change the way to how you build a, how you build a platform out.
Right? And that's where, and that's why I love this and I love this direction the, the manager hub and all these other hubs that they've been, that they've been building out. Because again, it's dashboard driven development it's accelerating the way the work gets done. And that's what the platform is here for.
[00:18:08] Duke: It boggles my mind how we get this far into Tokyo, And. It's like manager hub, this is big.
[00:18:15] CJ: Yeah, it's huge. Right?
[00:18:17] Duke: And it's like, it's not like I've just sat and ignored Tokyo. Like I've, been neck deep in the docks, just searching for stuff I can make videos about. I would've made a video on this in a heartbeat, but it's just, , is this set of things that changed so broad, or is do they just need better polish on their pre-release messaging?
Like, I would've loved to say at the beginning, not at the now forum, a month after Tokyo is about boosting engagement by manager hub, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. Supercharging your intelligence by do, do, do, do, you know, and so on and so forth.
[00:18:51] CJ: yeah, absolutely. Right.
[00:18:53] Duke: And speaking of stuff that they just said that I have no idea about, have you figured out this ServiceNow vault thing yet?
[00:18:59] CJ: Dude. All right. So like, I'm an IT guy, right? And, and so I hear ServiceNow vote and the first thing I think this is like some credential management is I, Tom, this is gonna be wicked. And so I'm sitting at, in the forum, right? I'm sitting in the, uh, in the keynote. I pull out my phone and I start Googling, What the hell is Service Now vault?
Right? Like hopefully it's on docs. And I go and I take a look at it. Like while they're talking about it, I'm literally reading about it. I'm like, This is sweet. I had never heard of it before, this is freaking awesome.
[00:19:27] Duke: Yeah, and if you just, you guys are probably scrambling for the docs page, but we'll save you a up here. Encryption, Encryption and key management secrets management, codesign data privacy log export service
[00:19:39] CJ: Yeah.
[00:19:40] Duke: the, is the main things under ServiceNow vault. But again, it was just, Does this have previous versions?
No, it doesn't. Like
[00:19:49] CJ: Let,
[00:19:49] Duke: crazy . That's why you have to go to these things. Cause it doesn't matter how much r and d you do, they'll just come up with these stuff that's just like game changers that you couldn't even get to.
[00:19:59] CJ: Absolutely right. And let, let me tell you this, will solve so many problems when I go in for like a discovery gig or an orchestration gig back in the day, right? And I've got security breathing down my neck. You need credentials to do what you need, what level, you know? And it's like, where are you going to put, And it was like, who has access?
And it's like,
[00:20:19] Duke: I'm gonna put it in the cloud.
[00:20:21] CJ: Right, exactly. Like, oh my God, like, is it, it's right. So then it's like, Yeah, I am gonna put it in the cloud. They're like, You wanna do what with it? And then I gotta go through like, you know, how mid several works with ServiceNow and how is all one direction and it's all pull and not pushing, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And or push not whatever the case is, you know, in one direction. All of that. And that takes, sometimes that can delay a whole project, two weeks, Going through all those conversations and getting those folks comfortable. I see with service down Vault, the ability to.
[00:20:49] Duke: so, another conversation they had, they had this panel of three, senior level, IT leaders and
[00:20:55] CJ: I like that dude. The panel of three
[00:20:58] Duke: the panel of three Um, What was some of the biggest takeaways for you on that?
[00:21:03] CJ: There was one, one particular thing that I found like incredibly awesome and I, I won't still have done that on that one. I'll let you, I'll let you bring that one up. And I think we both kind of vibed on. but there was the emphasis around like some of the supply chain stuff that they're doing and some of that purpose-built application stuff.
And so folks were talking a little bit about that. I did like to hear that, but there was one other aspect there that I'll, I'll let, I'll let you go with because I
[00:21:27] Duke: Man, I don't know. There's two or three big ones for me. But,
[00:21:30] CJ: Go for it.
[00:21:30] Duke: some of which I agreed with. So there was this, what we call the CMDB incident,
[00:21:35] CJ: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Duke: like one of the speakers, he's like, who here has a great cmdb? And Corey and I are arguing over what word he used, but it was kind of like, if you'd understood it right in that instant, in the moment, it was kind of like, who's doing really well with their cmdb?
[00:21:49] CJ: Yeah, that was the sentiment.
[00:21:50] Duke: And they turned the lights on as if people were gonna stand up. And it was just like silence and then laughter. And it was kind of one of those things of like, did, did they mean to do this? Like
[00:22:06] CJ: right?
[00:22:07] Duke: So, so many things in my journey have come together at that point. Like, Oh, we don't have a good cmdb. Yeah, there's a club for that. It's called everybody and they meet at happy hour at five o'clock. The end of every,
[00:22:19] CJ: Absolutely right. Like I think, you know, it was a learning experience, right? And it, it validates what I've seen. everyone wants a cmdb. Nobody really has a good one. and even if you get a good one, through built for you, it takes a lot of time and upkeep and maintenance to keep it going.
And I think the value proposition has to be more clear for fault in order to invest the time and money into it.
[00:22:43] Duke: Value proposition. But that's the thing that make, makes me wonder, like, did they mean it to happen that way? Because he immediately starts going into how CMDB was the linchpin for their security operations. It's like one of the oldest lending institutions in America, and they're like, We've got ancient systems.
Like it's a struggle for us to stay secure. Right? And so we used the CMDB to, be the bedrock for our SEC op stuff. Now I'm sure there's lots of really interesting detail. beyond that abstraction, but that to me seems like if I was going to go for a CNB implementation and try and win, that's the circumstance I'd wanna be in because it's got a clear intent
[00:23:23] CJ: Yeah.
[00:23:23] Duke: to prove or so you can like forget about every class and property that doesn't get you to more secure stuff.
[00:23:29] CJ: Yeah,
[00:23:30] Duke: And just, And just go with that. And then when somebody else says, Oh, but we need to know X or Y, then it's just one more use case. One more use case, but build to the use cases, not build to, holy shit. Our discovery just brought in 8 million cis.
[00:23:44] CJ: Yeah, so what you just talked about right there is, uh, cmdb, charter, CMDB governance, right? And then, and then execution with, with the appropriate
[00:23:52] Duke: We should see if we can get that guy on the show.
[00:23:54] CJ: Yeah, I got, Yeah, I got him. I'm gonna, Pham, we were in a CTA classic, together. He's a, he's fricking amazing. I just haven't, Yeah, I haven't texted him yet, just because I know we're both.
finishing up CTA and doing capstones and all that kind stuff, but yeah, I'm definitely gonna text him. We're gonna get him on the show. The way he talks about CMDB is flipping amazing, right? Like I do CMDB implementations. I'm pretty good at it. I am nothing compared to.
[00:24:15] Duke: Yeah. Okay, so another talking point that came up during the panel was that I really loved. So he, in particular, he, he was talking about like CMDB was the linchpin for our cybersecurity efforts and automated governance. And somebody else on the panel said something about managing bureaucracy versus governance.
And I was just like, Oh, and you were all the way across the room and I couldn't reach it to high five. And I was like, Woo.
[00:24:45] CJ: Is a killer sound soundbite. , bureaucracy versus governance and, what the CMDB does enable, ? Is governance instead of, you know, that that additional bureaucracy.
Of flitting about and trying to understand and putting additional roadblocks and things in the process because you don't quite know what you have, right? CMDB allows you to always know what you have and therefore streamline the processes to action against it.
[00:25:11] Duke: Man, I'd love to have a whole episode on that and just riff on how do you tell the difference? how do you know if you've got something that's bureaucratic versus governed?
[00:25:20] CJ: It depends on how many people are involved in it, right? How many steps? , there's always an, it depends here, right? Like, cuz you can have a a 12 step process that is highly, scaled, Versus a three step process that's bureaucratic depending on the size of the organization and the needs, right?
Like if it's a validated environment or not, if it's government or not. Right. If there's PII considerations or not, right? Like, so it is gonna always be a, , it depends conversation, but at the same time, you wanna make sure that you've got , all the data available to the people who need it without them having to request it.
That's the way I start by looking at it.
[00:25:54] Duke: If I was to take a, wild swing at it, I'd say something does it provide a serious outcome that you need or prevent a dire outcome that you don't need? Right? It's like some of these things, it's like, it's bureaucratic, but what's the context?
[00:26:07] CJ: Right.
[00:26:07] Duke: I worked at a pharmacy, like at a pharmaceutical company, we were doing change management on validated systems or change management on systems that would talk to validated systems, and it was.
Anybody would look at that as, this is so super bureaucratic, but it's just like, okay, well if it's not and we fail at this, then they're gonna stop us from making the drug for another five, six years, hundreds of millions of dollars of damage
[00:26:30] CJ: Exactly.
[00:26:30] Duke: so nobody cares that a bunch of hundred K employees don't like this
Nobody cares.
[00:26:40] CJ: the, the consequences are way too big for
[00:26:44] Duke: Half a million dollars in labor is annoyed. Who cares?
[00:26:47] CJ: Who cares? it's a rounding era.
[00:26:51] Duke: yeah, it's somewhere in there, right? But we should get a, compliance expert on, and I really talk about this.
[00:26:56] CJ: No, we absolutely should. , I think this is under discussed aspect of the platform, right around compliance. And obviously ServiceNow thinks that too because they highlighted it. in this world forum. I, I really do think we should dive into that more and, and maybe talk about how we can break compliance out of its shell a little bit and, and spread it more across the platform instead of having it over just in the, uh,
[00:27:16] Duke: Yeah. Like somebody way over there uses grc and it's like, how can it just be fully integrated together,
[00:27:22] CJ: Yeah. Because there's compliance aspects everywhere, or should be.
[00:27:27] Duke: And it's, it is kind of like, well, you could be doing something outta compliance for months before the compliance people say, Hey,
[00:27:34] CJ: right.
[00:27:35] Duke: , anyway, we probably have one room for one more and I think this is a good thing to leave it just cuz it underscores so much, CJ and the Duke stuff.
one of the people on the panel said you have to think of ServiceNow as a product. Across teams, so set up a proper team with proper architecture and have clear measures of success. I was like, Hello?
[00:27:53] CJ: Oh,
[00:27:54] Duke: know
[00:27:54] CJ: I, I was just like Mike Drop right there.
They could literally could have hashtag that one CJ and the Duke, um,
[00:28:00] Duke: Right, Totally. Right.
[00:28:02] CJ: that's what we preach here, right? Like setting up proper teams, making sure we've got the proper architecture, making sure it's all, it's clear across the entire team structure and the product, right?
And, and knowing what it, what success looks like, right? Like, I, I don't think people set. the success criteria often enough. especially when engaging with outside assistance, what does success looks like look like when I leave? Right.
[00:28:31] Duke: Yep. You totally took the words right outta my mouth, if you're an organization, it's like, I gotta get somebody's service now, and most likely I'm gonna need a partner to team up with to do a bunch of stuff. So I have the choice between getting like an admin or a product owner, Which do I get? Well, if you're gonna use partners anyway, get somebody who's a product. You see what I mean? To set up these paradigms, to set up good architecture, good practices, all this stuff. To be a leader for the tool such that you can plug in whatever vendors you want. Don't rely on the vendors to do that cause they're gonna be so many of them and they're gonna be in and out.
They're not gonna be your perpetual source of sage advice, if that makes any.
[00:29:10] CJ: Yep.
[00:29:11] Duke: But even if you can, like, even if the all you can afford is like a new ServiceNow admin, put that aspiration in front of them. Listen, you're, yes, you're an admin, but you are basically, you have to own this tool and go ye out and find out the best practices for it and establish that for us here.
[00:29:27] CJ: Yes. A center of excellence, right? I think big companies do this, or at least some of them do. I don't think enough companies do this. a center of excellence to me is an absolute must because you're going to call someone for help at some point, And you need to show.
If, when I come in, like, What, you own this thing, right? Like you need to tell me how I, how to interact with it, imagine that it's an API and you know you're making a call. I'm the I'm, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the payload, right? Like, show me where to go. that was a geeky metaphor, um,
[00:29:59] Duke: It fits so.
[00:30:01] CJ: that's the thing. So the, the center of excellence, is often missing. And I think all of this stuff people look at as fluff. And I probably did too way back when, when I would. Predominantly doing it and not really, ServiceNow didn't really understand, process and service management and things of that nature.
but these things exist for a reason. And I know larger companies do them because they have way more hands in the pot. And it becomes harder to scale these one to one conversations, than, you know, than it does at a smaller company. But smaller companies can benefit from this stuff too, because it, it holds you accountable, right?
Um, for your own. It is one of those things, right? And, and to ensure that you get the value out of anybody that you engage with, any other vendor you engage with in the product itself,
[00:30:42] Duke: . All right. I think that's all we got time for today, folks. , join us on the next one we're probably gonna talk about. Rise up, right?
[00:30:48] CJ: rise up.
[00:30:49] Duke: up. All right. Let's see you on the next one, folks.