Syncing with ServiceNow: How we seamlessly adapt to change and boost efficiency

Continuous change and economic uncertainty are normal in today’s business environment. In fact, 88% of executives believe their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up, according to Accenture.

A unified and intelligent platform can help organizations focus on what matters most—Net Promoter Score, revenue growth, and margin expansion—and seamlessly adapt to change.

At ServiceNow, we use our solutions internally to maintain this same focus while ensuring we’re ready to take on whatever comes next. Let’s look at three examples:

• IT Service Management and IT Operations Management (together known as service operations)
• IT Asset Management
• Strategic Portfolio Management

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Eddie McDonald
Co-host: Mike Sabia

Transcript

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Andy Whiteside: Everyone welcome to Episode 29 of sinking with service. Now, your host, Andy White said, I've got Mike Xavier and Eddie Mcdonald on, guys. How's it going

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: doing? Well, how are you

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Andy Whiteside: so? Eddie, you didn't know this, but before you jumped on, Mike was eating lunch

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Mike Sabia: and it then I did the math, and it's mountain time. So it made sense, and then he told me, No, no, this is breakfast is like, Oh, wow! You must be really good.

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Mike Sabia: So I've got a problem with that assumption because Mike is eating on almost every call I'm on with. That goes back about 5 or 6 years, though there's a inside joke there. But yes.

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Mike Sabia: Mike, are you one of those guys? It just eats constantly through the day and never gains any weight I can a little more weight nowadays than than previously. But when your heads down coding or heads down work a problem, you're not focused, and sometimes you're on a call with people, and as long as it's internal like, hey? Maybe this opportunity to get caught up

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Andy Whiteside: I eat nonstop it's kind of it is already on a customer. Call. If you like, turn the camera off, take a quick bites, chew it up, turn the camera back on. I do it all time. But I today today it was probably the first day in

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Andy Whiteside: maybe years, where I went and sat down and had lunch by myself.

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Andy Whiteside: If I'm not with a client, I'm usually at my desk eating a sandwich and working typically, it's just the world we live in these days, I think.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: alright. So let me share my screen with you guys Mike, the blog that you brought today. Okay, well, let me do my commercial. It's February twelfth.

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Andy Whiteside: 2024, and does integrate is here to help you guys help help customers out there using the service now platform. And that thing is massively robust. If you're a service now, customer, and you're not getting great advisement from your partner or service now, or both, because, to be honest, it's it's hard you really do need somebody who really understands your business and really wants to dig in with you.

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Andy Whiteside: That's why we're here. Zintigra would be happy to help you. So reach out to myself Eddie Mcdonald or Mike Savia. And you can find us on Linkedin. Let's let's talk, and let's find a way to help you get the value out of the platform. The platform has a ton of value

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Andy Whiteside: most people never see it, because they never know how to get to what they're actually trying to do.

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Andy Whiteside: Mike, the blog you brought today is from February of this year. Oh, the the I'll give you the name of the blog first. It's how we seamlessly adapt to change and boost efficiency as that relates to service. Now, I'm sure. And the the author is Sanka. I'm not even gonna try on the last name, Mike. You know how to pronounce the author's name, either. Okay, well, first name is Sanka, I think. But we appreciate them writing this blog, and we're gonna jump into a little bit, Mike. Why did you pick this one?

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Mike Sabia: Well, if you, a customer, are new to service now, or perhaps you're already using service now. But you have a particular need usually come. You often come to a part of say, Hey, this is the need we have. Our Perton product isn't doing the job. It's no longer supported. What have you? But we wanna raise it up to a little bit higher level and kind of look

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Mike Sabia: at that single plane of glass of what stores now can offer. If you're always reacting to what an issue is.

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Mike Sabia: then you are not able to react quickly. If you're always having people ask for stuff that out of process, and you have to handle those mainly individually. It's not efficient way of doing your business. So this blog has talked about, you know, Zoom being able to seamlessly adapt, and this could be improving your self service and automation, allowing people to request things and automation to have those have things preapproved. Speed up the business. So you're not spending time managing the business

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Mike Sabia: similarly for the self service. There's also, you know, streamlining the the Rec. The software usage and the reclamation. Hey? Who's using the software? Can we, you know, identify automatically who has installed? But it's not utilizing it, and therefore using up the license, something that we could reclaim or you know, or what's our growth within the organization? How can we look at that in a higher level rather than just saying, Hey, we have a a Sam issue. Once audits come up.

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Mike Sabia: how do we be proactive in improving our platform. How can we do that? Seamlessly and efficiently?

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Andy Whiteside: So that seems just logical, right? But the service form is something that is in tune with that.

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Mike Sabia: The Service know platform is is very much in tune with that, you know, there are a lot of

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Mike Sabia: point solutions that do an individual product, and you know sometimes they do it very well, but having that single PIN glass to everything that's going on, you have a project, and that relates to a change, and what your assets are, everything's comes together, and what we want to be able to do is by looking at it holistically and not just say, Hey, you come to this

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Mike Sabia: to us with this? Ask. We want to be able to come to you and say, Hey, let's look at your business, how to to? How can we make your your business more efficient? How can we?

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Mike Sabia: you know.

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Mike Sabia: do that self service automation? How can we react proactively rather than reactively. And this this blog talks about, you know the some of the advantages that the author found in their business, the improved efficiency and being able to react the

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Mike Sabia: amount of you know.

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Mike Sabia: you know, not having to look at all the alerts that that are coming in from your event management system to be able to have those automated, to be able to focus on what the key ones are improving the whole business by

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Mike Sabia: investing in the tool. Yeah. So so, Mike, you said, some interest. You actually use the word, you know, proactive and reactive a number of times. And I think that that is

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: really the key. That's the thread, this moving through this, this blog post here is that change is going to happen whether you like it or not. Your teams gonna grow and contract tools are gonna change. Customers gonna change sales, cycles, ebs and ebs and flows. And if you're reacting to your environment versus proactively making the changes anticipating

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: these changes is gonna be a very, very different environment. And I think it's important to remember to focus on what's coming down the road? How can we be proactively embracing the change with our tools being becoming more efficient and and capitalizing on these changes versus

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: like you said, reacting to them. Now, we're behind the 8 ball. We're losing well, ultimately losing money. If we're reacting to change instead of being an active participant.

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Andy Whiteside: because the the first section talks about self service and automation. That's where our whole world's going, including what people should be doing within their business. Right?

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Andy Whiteside: So, Mike, what are they covering here?

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Mike Sabia: Well, they they talk about specifically. Talk about a a few different things. One is that event management like you have a lot of alerts out there. Somebody has to look at them. Maybe they're raising flags, and then somebody has to look at the whole picture and say, hey? Which ones are important which have met the threshold, and by being able to automate this and say, Hey, only tell me if it's been happening for 5 min, or only tell me

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Mike Sabia: when certain things are happening, or

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Mike Sabia: you know, maybe it's still healthy. But let me know that there's a trend, and next month we are going to have a more severe thing. Let's be

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Mike Sabia: proactive in identifying it and looking into addressing it sooner.

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Mike Sabia: But and even above beyond that, there's also, you know, there are people who are asking for things from the business. It might be, adding myself to it myself to a new group asking for a new software or hardware.

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Mike Sabia: devops, if you wanna be able to spin up a new Vm. In order to do your business. All those things in the past have been very manually but manually handled. But if we can automate those, facilitate them, create those workflows to make it happen.

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Mike Sabia: then it'll speed up a colleague of ours just on Friday was asking me about the fact that, you know, with our part of our onboarding process. There are some steps that are kind of leaning on him, and he wanted to automate this process. We ourselves and Tegger are looking to improve the process, the business. But

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Mike Sabia: we don't want to just do it when we want to. We want to kind of look at that roadmap

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Andy Whiteside: what can handle today. But but where do we want to come in another? You know, 12 months. What do we wanna think about going forward? Ish in terms of revenue. But we're still a small business 100 roughly 100 employees.

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Andy Whiteside: you know it. This applies to everybody, doesn't it?

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Andy Whiteside: And you can't. You can't forget that, you know, we're talking about self service and automation here, and there's been a number of studies with, you know the Gen. Z's and millennials. They don't wanna create a ticket. They wanna self help. They want a natural language understanding virtual agent. They can get answers.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: you know, they don't wanna create tickets. They don't wanna communicate. They just want what they want really, really, quickly. And service now can enable that. So if you haven't leaned into the, you know, significant ticket reduction mentality. Then you're kind of missing the boat.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, they they like I, in some cases like what sounds really broken. I wanna talk to somebody. But for the most part, I wanna send like 5 words of text

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Andy Whiteside: in some type of system and get my result.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Yep, 100%

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Mike Sabia: Streamline software reclamation and request Mike, do we handle this? So I touched on this a little bit when I first started speaking. The idea is that if somebody needs to.

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Mike Sabia: as per a new software package, you know. Maybe they need visio or the like if they can request it. and it identifies that the asset is already there that we still have assets to to delegate.

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Mike Sabia: Then they can, you know, can be automatically approved if you give it given to them and be installed in your PC. If you know, in some cases, you know, maybe we're running out of licenses. Maybe it has to go to that extra procurement person at that point, but we can automate a lot of it. And similarly, if we have automate reclamation rules where we say, Hey, the people who have visit installed. If they haven't used it for 6 months, maybe we'll pull that license back. And on that salt. That also can be automated. Streamline. It

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Mike Sabia: speed up the business. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: I and I love the fact. I'm not relying on a human being on the back end to log it, coming and going because we know how that's gonna turn out.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Yeah. And you know, they're obviously talking about software here. And then software asset management pro is not really part of this conversation. But since we're talking about software, it is the quickest roi of any module on the platform. It is significant software cost savings, I mean, I think. Well, they keep moving the goal post this between 10 and 20% of your software. Spend your first year and somewhere between 5 and 10 year after year after that.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: But it is significant if you can automate that reclamation and understand where your software licensing are. The money you can save is significant. Well, they call it bottom. They call out what we we were able to save 7,400 h of labor, reduce expenses by 620,000

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Mike Sabia: and avoid more than 3 million in unnecessary costs for unused license. Go ahead, Mike. Sorry

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Mike Sabia: buying it, and you're utilizing it. But there's an audit, either internally, or maybe by the partner. Say, Hey, we see that you have X number installed, but you only pay for this much. Then you have an unexpected

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Mike Sabia: expense, and if you can plan that and say, Hey, you know, let's reclaim those before, so that we never have to get to that. So we don't have to pay that fine great savings. And as Eddie said, it's a great and justifiable roi on the software as management phone. And and I'm assuming that happens fairly quickly. And you measured and happens quickly. And it's paid for itself.

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Mike Sabia: It's usually, I think the Roi is 6 to 7 months is on on software rest management pro, which is just unheard of to be less than a year.

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Andy Whiteside: And you know, maybe I'm throwing in the buzz buzz acronym here. But at some point, like with everything else in these platforms, AI starts to even play a larger role. And if and until you've got, you know, these processes in AI into the platform. You can't use the AI against it for it

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Mike Sabia: right we have customers who come to us and say, Hey, we want this, or maybe our budgets. No, not there yet, but they're all immediately talking about geni genai, and to be able to demonstrate to them that the platform can handle that as they grow and can afford it.

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Mike Sabia: The savings are there now, Gen. AI is is not free. There are

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Mike Sabia: CPU and electricity costs of behind service now, providing that. So there, there are some justifications you have to make for bringing Gen. AI to the environment. But the the savings can be tangible, whether it is improving your developers efforts in time or, speeding up your agents to be able to see a summary of a ticket so that they can quickly jump on and product provide support to the customer for that great customer experience.

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Mike Sabia: All of it's very powerful. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: alright, Mike. The last section. The article says, goal alignment mapping and project delivery. How does that apply?

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Mike Sabia: For sure? So there are going to be in a large company. There's gonna be different initiatives like, Hey, I wanna do this. I wanna do that. And to be able to look at all of those

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Mike Sabia: projects and be able to build business cases around them and be able to say, these are our expenses, to deploy it from a resourcing and availability perspective. What is the criticality of the system? What's the the importance of it? If you can look at all of those things, all those projects cost time.

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Mike Sabia: You know what it means for the executive team. You're able to prioritize those, and as you prioritize them, then you're spending your time and money in the areas that are most productive for your organization. I have to imagine organizations again of all sizes need their executives need this, whether they know it or not.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: You know the best part about this and the way that Mike just laid it out. So you know, somebody has an idea. Then that idea turns into demand and the demand turns into a project. But before that happens, those steps that might just outlines. Let's look at the business impact. Let's look at the cost. Let's see what the let's see what the timelines gonna be like, what it does. It removes the politics

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: from deciding what project happens, in what order? Because you're looking at it objectively. And then there's another parallel stream for sales based organizations like our own that we utilize service. Now, strategic portfolio management to run our projects so as opportunities move through a cycle, we get visibility. Our project team gets visibility through spm to understand what type of project it is. When the opportunity is closed

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: we can click a button and spin up a project that outlines that type of project with all the associated tasks. So all of the labor and the project management work that goes into just getting a project started, we can hedge against that with pre-built project templates and pre-built tasks. It's it's really quite amazing.

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Andy Whiteside: To me. It just means that you're running your business through some type of platform that's formulizing it all. So that, like Eddie said, you're not just making decisions based on.

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Andy Whiteside: I don't know project popularity, even.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Right? Yeah, it's squeaky. Wheel it it. Squeaky wheels get a lot of work in the corporate world.

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Andy Whiteside: I wonder how many times it's squeaky Wheel calls a project to happen only to have to be reworked later, because other projects had priority should have had priority.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, exactly alright. Well, hey, Mike, you anything that we didn't cover on this topic that you wanna make sure we highlighted. There is a Pdf. And of course we have the capabilities in our discussions, pre discussions, and project discussions to help

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Andy Whiteside: help customers adopt these types of technologies and and basically run their business, and more of a a structured way off the platform.

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Mike Sabia: For sure, from a you know, pre-sales perspective, you know, talking about where your roadmap is, what are we trying to accomplish? And then all the way into the actual project delivery. Eddie made some great comments about. You know we ourselves

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Mike Sabia: use service now to help us through our resourcing. To make sure we can allocate the resources based on our project needs. And and you know, Soft book and hard book, those resources. And and when a customer comes to us says, Hey, we want to do this. We can give that personal experience on how we've used it, how it's helped us and how it can help them.

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Andy Whiteside: You know. I went back and read the I do this a lot. Go back to the very beginning of the article and try to figure out if we covered, and II guess I just completely overlooked the very first sentence here which I would have read had I had I thought about it, says, continuous change and economic uncertainty are normal in today's business environment. In fact, 88% of executives believe that the customers, their customers and the environment around their customers is changing faster they can keep can keep up. That's scary

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Mike Sabia: right? And and to that, you know, there are sometimes slowdowns in the economy, and and you might, as a person at first glance might say, Oh, maybe that's going to slow down our partners, Integrra. We're slow down service now as usage, and that's not the case. This is just more opportunity to. Yes, you have to spend some money, but greater returns on that investment.

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Mike Sabia: and when things are tight.

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Mike Sabia: Send the money. Get further savings out. Yeah, it it really it depends. It's it's a state of mind, is change a 4 letter word. It's not. It's a 6 letter word, but I mean it's the mentality around change. Do you embrace it? Do you lean into it? Are you growing your business, or are you keeping the lights on that decision? Whatever? The answer to that question dictates how you embrace change? Yeah. And if you're not, then your business gonna die.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Yeah, domestic.

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Andy Whiteside: Very few businesses can sustain long term lack of change. In fact, I can't think of

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Andy Whiteside: many. Maybe our maybe our education system. And even that was not right. Alright, guys. Well, thank you for jumping all the day covering this, I look forward to finding a new topic in 2 weeks and doing again.

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Eddie McDonald - XenTegra: Thanks, Andy.

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Andy Whiteside: See you guys.