welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans is a showcase of servicenow personalities that have punched above their weight and elevated the servicenow community titans of now is brought to you by me robert the duke fedoric if you want to see what i'm up to check out my website theduke.digital here you'll find all my cj and the duke episodes links to my youtube content and my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that win servicenow jobs hey everyone welcome back to another episode of titans of service now it is so good to have you here today we have one of the most titanic titans thus far he's been with servicenow since uh 2011 and has progressed from vp of solution consulting and now sits in the hallowed seat of chief innovation officer it is my deep honor to welcome to the titans pantheon dave the right view right dave welcome to the show hey rob thanks for uh thanks for giving me the opportunity really looking forward the opportunity is mine man i'm hoping i don't screw this up but it's so good to have you here man the protocol is we always start at the start so if you could some people may have heard the story but if you just briefly tell us how it is you arrived at servicenow yeah it's a it's an interesting story it goes kind of way back before service now even started in the mid 90s i used to work for peregrine systems and and for people who don't know the history of peregrine systems fred luddy who founded servicenow was the cto of peregrine systems for a long time so i uh i worked as a an architect over in peregrine systems and i got to know fred i used to travel to san diego pretty often so i i got to meet soon we used to talk about different things what he was doing with the code where the product was going where the the company was going and then it kind of all went a bit wrong from a peregrine perspective and it it kind of spiraled into into chapter 11. and i recovered from chapter 11 but i i kind of left during that recovery program process went to uh went to mercury interactive stayed there for a few years and then ended up going to vmware so i ended up being i had a technology for europe for six years for um for vmware and during that time what was happening was fred had obviously started service now and servicenow is was going from strength to strength but um maybe maybe i made the mistake a lot of customers made initially that i looked at the product and thought well it's an icsm solution it's nice but the hell i'm virtualizing stuff i'm like you know riding into the cloud and it's all amazing and look at all this new technology and then i got a phone call from a guy called kevin summelsey and kevin used to kevin used to be my boss when i was at peregrine systems and at mercury and he said hey you know i'm at service now would you like to come and join and run the solution consulting team and i've been watching what the company was doing but i was like and not really not that much it seems to be seems to be itil and i've done nothing wrong so there's no reason to go back to the world of ital and he said well he said have a chat with my boss his boss at the time was dave schneider so uh i was over in america and dave said why don't you come to san diego and just like meet a few people and chat it through so at the time i met uh i met frank slootman and mike scapelli and all the team still wasn't really that sure about it and then was speaking to frank actually and frank said well you know it's more of a platform play and i was like what's he mean by a platform play so chance of different people uh and in the end fred said well it's not really supposed to be an itsm solution it's supposed to be a platform to do any type of work but the only the only way i could get people to understand it was to build this itsm solution and when he said that and when we started to talk about all these different areas that are just service management when you think about it that was when it kind of clicked for me and i thought well this this hasn't even got a total addressable market because this could manage any type of service so if the messaging's right if the technology is right yeah this this could be really big so i i left vmware at that point and uh yeah joined in 2011 so that was my that was my journey into the company and then the different jobs that we we went through after that with just kind of progressions of it but i was i was kind of core solution consulting that was that was my background i'd ran pre-sales at companies for well 20 years maybe so that was that was what i came to do originally and then it just moved on and on to different positions and different positions and the the you went from that to the chief strategy officer yeah so that was uh that was just a conversation with frank one day where i've been doing more and more meetings where i was kind of the i was kind of the glue that connected corporate to customer maybe so i'd kind of see what was happening on the solution consulting side i had a background around all the technology and and kind of opinions on on what we should do and and one day i started this series whereas i was kind of catching up with frank every every other friday and uh yeah we were just it was funny we were sitting having uh we're having lunch i remember we were having a chicken sandwich i had a chicken sandwich and he said uh he said there's only uh there's only really two ways you'll progress your career any more than you are frank was always frank was always really blunt so so you kind of said you're at the top of your game you know you're at the at the time the second biggest sas company in the world you're running solution consulting there isn't there isn't a higher job in the solution consulting world so you said the only way you'll ever progress is if you do something in sales or if you do something on the product side and he started talking about product management and i was like ah i've had a good life i've been through i've been through a lot of different companies that have all ipo successfully so so why not have a career change because he's gonna say why don't you move into product management and then he said so i've spoke to the board and we'd like to make chief strategy officer and it really was one of those chicken sandwich right by the mouth [Laughter] should i drop the sandwich i'll go for that frank that works for oh man you know you're in the good promotions when they say i talk to the board about it yeah that's when it goes well and then i went through went through an evolution so so the weird thing was like running strategy at the time was very much looking at technology and looking at what new technologies were out there and and whereabouts we could go from a product perspective and then when when frank left john donahoe arrived and uh i was sitting having breakfast with john on his uh his first or second day we were in san francisco and that again was a funny conversation we sat there and he said uh he said so you know what what do you do and i describe what i did and it was all very product focused and uh and john said i said so you're not really what i call a chief strategy officer and and you know i was reacting and saying well really yeah that's interesting and obviously in the back of my mind i'm just going ah yeah he doesn't think i'm a chief strategy officer but um strategy to john was different so strategy to john was everything about the company it was what market you go into it was what your channel strategy would be it was what your price model would look like and everything he was reeling off i was like yeah this this isn't my thing i'm i'm product in new technology so you said at that point well we still need someone looking at new tech so i'd like you to focus on being the chief innovation officer and that's been the way it's been for the last four years like what does the everyday look like for a chief innovation officer because i i split across all these different areas so i have i have the evangelists which are the people you tend to see on stage big events uh some of the people that you'll see doing like idc calls or kind of analyst press calls so i have the analysts i have advocacy which is the people that work with customers around the reference cases we produce they work with them around videos around all the customers you see on stage at knowledge that they're kind of all coordinated through that and then i have the exec briefing team as well which organizes all the exact briefings and the content that goes into them so so it's kind of a a real mix but the what's the easiest way to do it's just probably pull up a let me just pull up a calendar week and then i can i can kind of go through it and pull out some themes okay so so we are two weeks ago so if i look at a week for me it starts off with in this case there was some uh just internal meetings with so i met with marketing operations to understand what was happening on positioning i met with strategic tech alliances because we were getting ready for this solonus announcements and i i wanted to understand that a bit more uh i met with phil who runs mergers and acquisitions and we looked at what the state of the market was around around companies we could potentially look at or companies that we were just seeing emerging uh we did press briefings for the salonist stuff i we're redesigning what we do with the exec briefing so i caught up with the people who were on all the physical experience side of that uh looked at the reference customers that we were going to use for the earnings call and then uh next day we were hosting a special interest group so i was presenting a special interest group to the federal government a few people i mentor so i was doing some mentoring sessions in the afternoon recorded another video for a customer who wanted to do a conference and they just wanted a a rolling video around technology and then and then i went to san francisco so i had that's okay so that's that used to be a normal week now it's an unusual me i i met a customer i went to meet with shell so i physically met a customer which is the first time i physically met a customer in uh in 18 months and then i came back from that next day i met with the now x team so i talked about some of the future technologies we're doing and then recorded a video with idc so so it's interesting now a lot of the things uh a video recordings or video sessions when it used to all be personal meetings so i used to i used to probably travel 100 days a year so so if you think of working working years 212 days i think is the way consulting views it so yeah i i used to travel for half of it and now i think i've done three flights in 18 months all right you know i thank you for doing that i don't think a lot like those of us on the front lines just see the you know those c positions it's like but what is it like like what does he actually do what are they actually doing so um i've been just waiting to ask that question for years so appreciate the the answer on that i have another kind of c position mechanical question what comes first like is it is it cj's team that does some product information innovation and and comes to you or is it you see stuff on the horizon and you're taking that to cj's team are you even allowed to say yeah yeah i can say so so i think that's uh i mean that's one of the interesting assumptions people have people people look at a title and assume that title defines what your job is so innovation i don't think belongs with a it doesn't belong with a person i'm not i'm not even sure it belongs with team i think if you're really going to innovation you're going to do it successfully that that's like something that's within the company dna so so it can kind of go in any direction so all the all the innovation that's created everything that goes out to market everything that's out there that you can download cj and his team have created i mean i've got i've got no capabilities to create any product cj cj creates all that and as the as the companies got bigger and bigger obviously you have people who are domain experts in their area so they they understand what needs to happen at that level you've got uh carl vanderpool's team running now x that are looking at well what what could we build that's completely new technology out there that's where you see some of the stuff around process optimization uh in the san diego release you'll see some of the stuff around robotic process automation he did the connected op stuff he's now looking at things around supply chain so so some of it's driven there my my role from uh an innovation perspective i suppose is it's an influence role so i'll speak to different people whether it's pac casey on the engineering side whether it whether it is carl running now x whether it's some of the business unit leaders and i'll i'll just try and talk about things that i'm hearing customers talk about or talk about things that are actual evolutions in the marketplace from technology and try and try and persuade people that that it's something we need to look at it can be a long process i mean sometimes sometimes i might see something and think wow this is this is going to be really interesting and not everyone else buys into the concept we we had this i mean this happened a long time ago with uh things like machine learning i was i was really passionate around machine learning you know i thought artificial intelligence was was gonna fundamentally change the way we did everything to the same level that search changed the way we did everything but there was a lot of people at the company who aren't at the company anymore who were kind of convinced well it's just a buzzword are you just jumping on a buzzword bandwagon there is it really going to be a big thing and and sometimes you you hit those barriers where people just think it's a trend and it's not really going to be a big thing and sometimes they're right sometimes you look at something and you're like yep this is going to be the next big thing and and it doesn't happen so it's it's right to have that sense of caution i i said when um when frank was ceo i remember saying to him this is so difficult you know i've got to convince every other member of the exec team that we need to do something before we do it it'd be so much easier if i could just say we do this and we did it and frank said no he said he said your job is to pass through the nine gates but then say okay we can do it he said your job is not to bypass those gates so um so that was a good philosophy and it's it's worked okay for me i i love these inside scoops on frank by the way that's it's a lot of fun i i could write a book on frank but i don't think i don't think i'll be allowed well your job is to pass the nine gates that's right get that done that will be one of them yeah so kind of on that same topic we talk about the innovations you you pursue and the things that tend to be big concepts but maybe the precise use case isn't there yet so uh but what about in the opposite direction has there been anything that has surprised you how well it took off so suppose there's i mean there's there's the short-term stuff that that i never would have expected so i never and this is kind of driven by market needs i suppose i never thought we'd write a safe workplace app and and i never thought we'd do vaccine administration management so there's there's just areas that i never thought we'd go into because i i just never thought we'd need them you know i i never thought that would be a fundamental shift in what we needed to do but the uh the real thing i suppose that that always surprised me and this goes right to the core of the company i don't even know how to say this without going through the whole story of servicenow so the interesting the interesting thing to me is for years i've been able to go to any it show and say you know what do you do every day and and there will be like graphs and histograms and charts that went back for years that showed exactly what they did how much percentage time they spent on things how it was better than it was last year how it was cheaper than it was last year and i could go anywhere else in the company and say oh you know what what do you do every day and it was like oh you know i've got a feel for it isn't there it's all tribal knowledge well well we do some of this and we do some of that and you'd say well is it is it better than last year is it worse than last year where do you want it to get to and no one really had that measurements so so i think what's been interesting and what's probably changed the company for the most has been this realization by organizations that that every part of the company does provide a service but almost no one in the past had a way of tracking the effectiveness of that service so when we started to go into these different workflows i think that's what really if you wanted to know what changed the share price the most it was that it was that realization that i i'd say it actually spent 20 years trying to get things right trying to trying to understand the metrics of how it performed trying to improve how it performs and you don't have to take everything that it does but just that concept of having a piece of work that you're going to assign to someone to do that you're going to track that fundamentally changed the way a lot of people thought about work and i think that that vision of going down these different routes with different workflows probably probably shifted the company the most although ironically although although i'm saying it's a shift all it was really doing was bringing fred's vision to life because that's what he always wanted the platform to be anyone it was like the day one thing the second i put my hands on it and like it took it's taken us six months to replace magic total service desk with hp service desk and when we got service now i mean we literally deployed it in in like four or five weeks six weeks at a stretch but like right on the tail of that we were so desperate to find something else to do so we didn't look like you know the project plan said six months just like just like hp like we don't want to look like fools here so let's throw something in there let's increase the scope and get the time right because this money was allotted and so they basically they had this manager who was in charge of figuring out we called it imac install move ad change okay yeah yeah and but he was like a super analytical dude and so he just disappeared for a couple months kind of while we were setting up servicenow and he came out the other side of that with this giant excel sheet about here's everything everybody every office in the entire world how they onboard a full-time employee and a freelancer and this and that right down to like how does he get how do these people get the building cards do they work at a building or not what software do they need and when and is that handled globally or locally and just more excel sheets than you can imagine one process ever holding and i'm like let's try let's try putting that on an order guide and it was it was like the ground shifted like violently underneath us because all of a sudden we're talking to these teams they're like how do you handle this globally well we wait for the emails come in sometimes we have to get them translated because just the whole operation was over email and you know you get a freelancer you're trying to get them in you hire them on a tuesday they're coming in next tuesday and they're gone on thursday right everybody else is treating that like a full-time employee and is going through the same process so there'll be like two months after we needed the freelancer they're all like done and gone and the transaction happened underneath it but like when i say that the ground shifted violently it was like all of a sudden the whole organization is like how come you guys do this so well right and i t poor i t at the time this is like 13 years ago like what do you mean master what do you mean we do things well you know they're expecting the whip and they got praise anyways short tangent but i totally hear you on the the the non-i.t elements of of work suddenly understanding the value of work visibility and workflow and work automation and integration and all those good things it's miraculous it's you know i've never been i've never seen or heard of another tool that allows us to make that big a difference it was it was it was always so funny because you could go people would always say to me well how do you go and speak to all these different departments when you don't know what they do but but just that what you were saying then that breakdown i i could go and sit with human resources and say well what you do every day and they describe everything they do and i'd just be sitting in my mind going well there's your categories and it's like okay who who does the work for this job and they tell me who did it and i'm like well there's your assignment groups how how quick do you have to do it and people had started to find in slas and really really quickly in the space of like an hour you can build a service map of what it is they actually do yeah i mean if anybody asked me that question i would be like i ask them it's you know like i don't come with my own ideas i ask them what outcomes they're trying to achieve right i mean and for for the people that are still kind of existing in email like the achievement is getting visibility around it and that'll be good for a couple months and then then we'll start figuring out like is this exactly what you expect that process to take right you know and why do we why do we even have processes at all it's to you know it's to change an outcome yeah all right uh one question that my my audience loves is could you tell me about a time at servicenow where you didn't think you were gonna make it where your back was against the wall you just thought the world's against me how am i gonna pull this off so um it was really it was really early on it was um it must have been 2013 because it would that's right it was the day after i moved to america so it was it was february the third 2013 and um and what happened at that point was i had um i had all the solution consultants in the world which sounds really grandiose but there's like 60 of them at the time there's like well over a thousand of them now but um i was trying to get it from 60 to around 200 well well i think when i joined it was 40. try and get it from 40 to 200 so that was my that was my task of dave schneider and i arrived on february the third and um i got a i got an email from the guy around all the solution consultants in the uk uh in amir actually and he'd been there for five or six years already what i didn't realize was the third of february was vesting day so this was the the first day that everyone who'd been here for multiple years could sell stock after the ipo so and they could sell all their stock because it invested for four years so the guy who ran europe phoned me up and he said hey you know i know you're in america and i probably should have said last week when you're in europe but um but i'm i'm going to sell my stock and i'm going to resign i was like ah no so now so now i've got no one running europe and i'm remote and i'm in america so what am i going to do so so that's going to be a challenge i went in the office to to think about what i was going to do and then the the guy around america from a solution consultant come in and said uh yeah he said uh dave i'm i'm going to sell my stock and i'm going to resign i'm like okay so now now 60 so the leadership has vested out and left and everyone else sits as a direct report into me and and at that point i suppose at that point i was a little bit frustrated because i was like how can how can people not see the vision of where the company can go you know to actually exit at this point is is is not the wisest move but um but also i understood you know if people put in all those years in a startup they they want to get something back from it but yeah all of a sudden i went from a highly structured management team to having 60 direct reports that all came through to me but i knew i then had to build a management structure around and and try and build something out that was sustainable and and i thought since my main task was to grow the team i thought this is this is going to be impossible i'm going to fail this year because i'm going to be so focused on building a management team i'm not going to have time to recruit all the heads that i need but luckily there was a a lot of people that that stepped up that were already in the company that had management experience that helped out and over that that next six months we built out a management team to to stabilize it but yeah that that first day in america when i had all the buzz being in america was kind of on the undercut a little bit when most of the management team resigned on the same day and it was interesting that was my again being english and not not being an american not being american at the time or or understanding the way it worked in america the the guy who ran the us came to me and he said yes i'm gonna i'm gonna resign and i was like wow well it's okay so so you know what's your notice period and when do you when do you plan on leaving and i didn't understand californian employment laws so he just rolled his sleeve up and looked at his watch and he went in about two hours i was like you can't do that you can't do a phone up hr they said yeah yeah you can do that so that was uh that was a an interesting insight into right to work employment law and also an interesting insight into how you deal with employees when they've been there right from the start how do you keep that motivation going to keep them wanting to be there it's funny you mentioned that i just learned that lesson the hard way this week as well i on occasion i help organizations find servicenow talent and um i have this resource she's uh she's actually got a doctorate degree in cyber security she's awesome and this company was curious about her and they they asked me they're like well what's her notice period like her what and they're like well she has to give her employer so much so much notice before she can leave how many months i'm like months yeah yeah wow so that was an eye opener yeah different in different countries yeah weird yeah everyone's got their own rules yeah i feel blessed for where i am um all right here's here's another question in the same kind of vein but because you weren't always at service now and uh you've done a lot of interesting things i got from another podcast that you you didn't take the college route either right you kind of took the school hard knocks route um and i'm wondering if there is any kind of profound life or work experience that has been a foundation of your work at servicenow wow that's a telephone um something that gave you an unfair advantage maybe or so so i think the um oh it was funny i was doing a a video session the other week with uh with a uh a woman from a woman who looked after facebook messenger we were we were doing this presentation on can you can you go from school all the way to like a c-suite position with no qualification can you do it now you know the same way we could do it then and she started off as a classical musician and ended up like kind of running facebook messenger um and and the interesting thing that they came out of all this was i think if you're not if you're not formally educated in something if you're not given something that's one area that you focus on and you become the domain expert in that area i think it sets you up to be really adaptable so so because you haven't got a specialization or any any preconceived notion when a new task comes along the fact that you don't know how to do it is fine because you know you've not been specifically trained to do anything so so it makes you very it makes you very flexible in how you approach things but it also for me it also makes it feel like things are maybe even a little bit easier to achieve because i i'll i'll see something where i've got no experience of it and think well yeah okay i don't know how to do it but but i know how to find out how to do it i know how to self-educate around it you know quite often i'll be asked to do presentations where i'm just not a subject matter expert in that area but the benefit is that presentation might be two weeks out or three weeks out and i get the luxury of saying well you know what i'm gonna do today i'm gonna learn everything i can about this subject i'm going to watch the videos i'm going to read the white papers i'm going to see if there's people who'll communicate direct with me and and it means that you maybe because you've never learned formally it means that you constantly want to learn and i think that that makes you have maybe a different attitude on some level but but that that's the thing that's kind of stood me up the most it's that that desire to learn and that interest to learn but but not feeling that you're you're bound by any constraints around how you learn that's really profound and if there's a wider market listening to this video i just ask you to consider the kinds of things that dave has done for servicenow and consider what you might be missing out on with these hard degree requirements at the base level of your hr and you know it's to your own detriment what does it gain you versus what could you gain from widening that outlook a little bit more and and that's i mean there's a bigger bigger discussion around that to be honest rob but that's that's one of the things that i think perhaps perhaps from a society perspective we miss now that that you you can look at certain countries uh i think japan's one it is rails one it might be canada is the other where um [Music] more than 50 percent of the population between 25 and 65 have got degrees so i think it's like 55 or 56 so then you come to the point where having a degree is is the norm whereas it used to be used as a separation and i think what we what we might have missed a little bit and companies are starting to to go back and look at this again is when you do internships when you bring people on and look if they're going to be the best fit for your company maybe maybe widening the scope so it's not just looking at people who've got degrees gets you somewhere because i i i ended up in my first job in it because of an aptitude test so i was tested to see whether i'd be good at operating a mainframe um and there wasn't a degree for that so so that was the only way we could do it but i i think the fact we don't use aptitude anymore is is kind of a miss you know maybe maybe maybe people should start looking at having more of a mix of what they do when they look at intern programs or look at how they actually recruit people but that's just a society thing yeah i i fully agree uh and then some uh maybe another podcast on that someday yeah that'd be cool all right dave we are approaching time so i'm wondering if uh if there's any advice you could give to the titans audience let me start off with a story and then and then kind of talk to to where abouts i think people could go so so people often ask me and you're talking before about about qualifications and how you get jobs and stuff people people often say did you ever go in with a vision of what you wanted to do did you ever do you ever arrive at a company and go this is what i want to be and and it was interesting for me so i've never really thought that before and then i was at um and i'm going to go back to peregrine again i was at uh an event in 1999 at uh the peregrines whole and they their user conference used to be called synergy and i was at synergy 1999 in the san diego convention center and uh and i watched fred do a keynote so fred luddy's on stage and he's doing like the the kind of closing keynote for the events and i stood there and i thought that that's what i want to do i i want to be the person that gets to to talk about what they think is going to happen they get to understand what's going to happen next i would love to be that but i also knew at the back of my mind i wasn't uh i wasn't a programmer so so i couldn't do what fred did i couldn't write code so some so in my mind at that point i was like well maybe this is maybe it's beyond me i mean yeah i'd like to do that but you know i'd like to be a hollywood actor but you know just just wanting to do something doesn't mean you're going to do it and then through circumstance and through evolution and through through different jobs and different experiences i i end up in whatever year it was 2014 doing a knowledge keynote where i'm doing it with fred so if i had gone back 15 years to look at someone who inspired me to want to do something did i ever think i'd get to the point where i'd be doing it with them with that exact person i i never imagined that in in my entire lifetime and now kind of moving forward from that i spend so much time where customers will come in and they'll say hey can you just come in and speak to my engineering team or can you come in and speak to my company not not just what about what servicenow does but about what what technology does about where technology is going next about what it could do for that company and and i've got no training about that you know it's just an interest i've had and people like listening to what you've got to say so so i think what what i'd say to everyone who's listening is if if you've got an interest and you've got a desire to do something you should you should follow it because the you don't need an inordinate amount of confidence to do something you don't need to be given it on a tray to be able to do it if you've got a passion for something and you're good at it then then eventually it'll come through so so stick with it excellent advice all right dave we are at time i want to thank you again for joining us on titans and welcome to the pantheon so good to have you here all right well thanks for the opportunity it was really good fun man do you want your message in front of the best servicenow admins developers architects and product owners in the business want a conversation about your servicenow strategy and architecture you can reach me via my website at www.theduke.digital if you want to contribute to high frequency high quality servicenow content all you need to do is feed the algorithm with likes shares and comments thanks for watching you