roy pisola welcome to workflow wednesday and today i've got tom urban with me and we're going to talk about how to turn your cmdb into an atm compelling topic right hi tom hi troy how are you doing well uh enjoying thanks for having me indeed it's it's been fun preparing for this we've been talking about a number of different things as as aligned financials and third era work together but as we've been working on this and looking at so many different ways we can instrument cmbb for financial analysis i'm excited about this session today so thanks thanks for joining me live thanks for having me appreciate it you're welcome um one of the things that we talked about like i said uh is how do we really do the the financial analysis so we can see hard roi that was our title that we worked on but the message that came out of is turn your cmbb into an atm talk to me a little bit about what you mean by instrumenting cmdb for financials well a lot of times when people look at a cmdb they look at it there's three lenses to look through and they look through two of them and it's like a two-legged stool right so they look at it right from from the functional perspective what is this asset going to do for me and the physical perspective where is it what is it attached to etc right there's also that financial perspective and that's where you say you know what did this thing cost me not what's the most current cost for this thing but what did this actual item cost me what's my ongoing maintenance what's it costing me to support it you know it what's my mean time between failure and what's my replacement cost and and all those dynamics that that are within it and the other piece that's within there is this this life cycle so it's not a static item right it has a you call it cradle to grave or request to retirement a lot of times companies will have pieces and parts of that life cycle but with a platform like servicenow you can have the entire life cycle from the time somebody said hey i want this to the time that the company said this thing's no longer useful so it's really good to have those and oftentimes with companies they're like because they have these fragmented systems trying to make those actionable they're going out there and they're trying to cobble it all together and the information's you know it's disjointed it's out of date and it makes it really difficult to take action on it right it does you know and maybe you want to pop up that slide the the one that we were talking about before it's like we've seen this that oh i need a new server or i need a laptop there's a way to do that we see that in servicenow right and and then you've got this other side you know it's it is so disconnected isn't it well these are just two pieces right so with in a typical servicenow environment this is what we'll see i need something and it gets approved or doesn't get approved and then it gets thrown over to procurement and you know i feel bad for the guys in procurement because oftentimes you know sometimes somebody knew they needed this like a month ago and they're like hey you've got the request i need it tomorrow and they're like why am i just hearing about this now right so procurement's always in this catch-up mode and they're swivel chairing they go to finance to these guys have money for it eventually you know they'll place an order for it and our view of the world the financial view of the world that purchase order that's the birth certificate for an asset right it's it's not when you discover it discovering which takes place in other parts of i.t let's go see what we have it's not what we own it's what we have what what we have that's plugged in and on it's it's even beyond what we have because sometimes it sits on the shelf right it's in our store rooms and other ways right somebody's not on the internet or not on a network right so and so it's it's managing those two things and tying those together so here's things we can discover but when did we buy it what purchase order did we buy it on there's things we discovered that we don't have a purchase order for what happened there was that like the shadow i.t or do we not want this thing on the network right and then here are the things that we that have the full life cycle we we approve this request it was bought it's on the network it has this much time etc right and so all that information and because we financially enable all that information we start to pick up nickels and dimes all over the place as we find that and so let me show you the next slide and this is what a connected asset life cycle looks like and sometimes people will look at this and depending on who we're talking to they'll see it as an eye chart like a lot of servicenow people would be like how many workflows do you have going here but it looks complicated to that but when we talk to a procurement person they go wow you've really simplified what happens yeah right it's there it's like it it's a view we commonly see where it's like no we've got a simple environment and then as you start drawing it out you see this massive spaghetti of all these intertwined things right and i think that's what you found is is you found a way to kind of diagram it where it's there is some complexity but as you start looking at it it's really a pretty greatly i would say simplified flow that ties all that stuff in well we're not introducing anything to anybody here right there they have this environment today we've just put it into a diagram and showed them where the pieces and parts connect and this is this is your workflow and it's a workflow of workflows right and so as people look at this like when i buy something and i have that birth certificate well let's capture that in the cmdp and and why do we want to know that we we start to figure out when are we buying stuff when are things getting consumed when does our subscription start or our maintenance start when does it end and we find all these knobs that we can start to tweak um the touchless workflow was something that somebody had they this was a company that was expanding greatly and what they were trying to do was encourage people to get standard items and it was the wild west anybody could order anything and it didn't matter if you ordered something that was pre-authorized or not authorized it still went through the the same process what they said was if this is an item that it's already approved that they'll support and management has already approved on it let's put it through this touchless workflow and so how do you encourage users to do that well when they order something you say look you ordered this item here's a different item that's almost the same that i have in stock that you can have tomorrow right or if you really really want that item like you don't turn people down right you just give them options that steer them right if you still want that item it's got to go through these two levels of approval it's got to go through your management level it's got to go through it management level then i got to order it then i've got to bring it in and oh by the way i'm not expediting or bringing it overnight you can have it in 10 weeks right so if you if you really really want it you can get it you just have to wait two and a half months or this thing's pretty close and you can have it tomorrow so you know it helps everybody kind of benefits when you put options in front of people that steer them down roads you want them to go down because you know it's all it's about spares and you know if they drop it and you have to replace it and all those things right the fewer items you have to track the easier everybody's life gets and and if you kind of pick at that scenario a little bit you know i i think all of us have heard or experienced well i requested something and they say it's going to take me three months to get it right because you don't have that that offer back where it's like i'm glad you asked for this we can do that it's going to take three months but we found this similar thing that you know shipped to you in the next six hours right it's right that that or even information is often lacking you could you can work with a lot of vendors that will say look you can actually have this stuff ready and available give us visibility into what you're going to buy and then when you need it boom we can expedite it to you but we know what's coming and so you know a lot of companies will buy you know companies hire more people in q1 than q4 or on average right and if you're just ordering things like based on what you ordered last month well you're not going to have enough things in in january and you're going to have too much stuff in like november december sure and and so by using this and having this visibility we can say look we're not going to figure out what to buy servicenow is going to tell us based on quarter over quarter year over year you know employee head count we can take all those metrics and say this is really what you should have in stock because we're trying to bring all those numbers down we're trying to get everything to just in time and there's another piece in here available budget i can't tell you the number of companies that somebody puts in a request and they start screaming at procurement and procurement just says okay i'll order it for you and then you find out the guy didn't have any money right and then how do you walk that backwards think of all the work that that creates for people and it's like look happy to order for it but you don't have any money either cancel your request or go get money you know it just makes people's lives easier when you have that kind of visibility the three-way match is an interesting one because it's where you say did i order this did i receive it and does the invoice match it and you think okay well logically it makes sense right right that you should do that on every order but oftentimes people will get an invoice and they're like well it looks like something we would order let's pay it and we actually had one customer this is one one invoice one item that they never received and the vendor couldn't prove they actually delivered it there was no proof of delivery there was no proof of receipt okay it was 176 thousand dollars paid for everything right we became and that was that's kind of the gift that keeps on giving like it's not like they did that once and that was it that paid for the project but then every other time that happened that was just cash in the bank so you talked about turning the cldb into an atm that's cash right there right keeping keeping that consistent each time right and then as we get to the end you know another thing people will just send you an invoice for maintenance hey you bought all these things for us we see all these things registered here's the maintenance well if you're doing ham salmon you look in there you're like wait a minute a quarter of these things were retired right we don't even use those anymore so just being able to bounce the cmdb against the invoice for the maintenance again more cash just rolls back into the company right to really scaling maintenance to what's live and in use right dynamically exactly exactly so you're probably wondering okay there's a few things there show me some numbers at least this is the part i like to do so these are some of the more popular ones there's a lot more soft dollar savings in other areas that i hinted at the last one but these are the ones that really i think people rally behind and when they take it to get approval for a project like that these are the ones that people you you put it on a piece of paper and they see it and they're like oh yeah we do have paint around that and like like i said like the three-way match you get one of those that pays for the project maintenance you get one of those it pays for the project you know but there's all these areas that people have and so this is really looking at it get away from the workflows and you know inventory and everything else what are we trying to do where can we actually put down goals and that's what you see on here is you know we'll help people put down targets what do you think you can save so it's not us giving them a number it's them giving us a number and sometimes people will just say well i just want to pay for the project with one of these things so let's put that though right it doesn't matter because you're one you're going to get it wrong any number works because it's going to be wrong in year one once you're smarter about it then you can say okay this is what we did last year let's you know let's do it again and you know a lot of times when people look at servicenow for ham sam they're looking for that year one roi look at all these licenses that people weren't even using and it paid for it well you clawed that back but in year two you may be able to claw back some but you're not going to get that big hit like you got in year one yep these are hits that keep coming right because maintenance you know that bill would just keep coming year after year after year three-way match those invoices come year after year after year and as you scale up it's more important to have visibility and trying to throw bodies at this or spreadsheets at this you know it's you're not going to have that same confidence as i got the whole life cycle right here in front of me i know what's going on right that's that's i i think this is the part that i i've enjoyed so much as we've talked and as we've looked at how our companies work together that that it really is creating that ongoing look that we can be continually looking at how to optimize the spend and optimize the savings because it should keep giving back um one of the things that we were talking about a little bit before we started is you know what pieces should an organization have in place to really start seeing some of these these levers well so let's go back to this one because that's a that's a great question um and you know sometimes people will say well talk to me about the color coding and kind of see the legend there on the on the right side so you know ideally you'll have service catalog like we're not saying don't start here this is a great place to start right get your service catalog in place get your ham sale in place get your discovery in place but think about the bigger picture as you're building out the cmdb financially enable it i can't tell you the number of times people will say we're going to bring you in at nine months after we finish the cmdb project we're like are you as part of that project are you going to financially enable it and they're like what are you talking about well my guess is remember at the beginning you're going to physically enable it and you're going to functionally enable it are you going to financially enable it and he's like i don't know why would i do that well if this is all you're ever going to do you don't need to but as you start to think about this right that purchase order like one of the servicenow can do procurement right purchasing but a lot of times bigger companies will already have a procurement system and the beauty of servicenow is it plays nice like if you have something you like let's just share information if you have something you don't like so if now can say well we could probably make it better we can replace it and so that's why we have those pieces but as we put a purchase wreck over to you give it back to us so we can put it in the cmdb we know when it was purchased we know when it was received we know when it went into service well what does that tell us wow if there's two months there that means we lost two months of uh you know of subscription on that thing or of maintenance on that thing so can we tighten that up are there different areas where we can start to look at those things so um i didn't answer your question yet so service catalog on the front and i think it's a good way to go yep ham sam on the back end is a good way to go ham sam and and financially enable him sam as you do it um one of the things that and this is a little bit selfish in our part we try to encourage people to do is take projects programs portfolios and start to do your it budgeting and service now around those things because now what i can do is i can say okay i have this budget i've committed these funds this purchase person made this request do they have money right and it changes budgets yes well a dangerous thing some people do is let's say i had i have a hundred million dollar budget just for a round number um i have 75k in purchase orders and i've paid for or i'm sorry 75 million in purchase orders 40 million in that i've actually paid out against my budget a lot of people say well my budget was 100 million i've spent 40 million i have 60 million left it's like no you've 100 you only committed 45 left right so there's all these little pieces that you you know it's the gotchas and that's where people end up going over their budget they're like you know remember the old story well how can i my i'd be out of money i still have checks left in my checkbook it's kind of like that it's like just because you have the check doesn't mean you can write it right because the po has already gone out it just hasn't circled back right correct correct so that budgeting would be an itb app right so we've talked about ham sam you got your cmdb you probably have discovery itvm is going to help you with the budgeting um itsm or psm is going to help you in that procurement process so depending on which way you'll run it right the requests in the flow yep exactly um and that's also going to help you on the back end because you know you're creating tasks to say i sent this back to the vendor where is it um but a lot of times the financial kind of weaves in and out of different applications on the platform depending on what you're wanting to do and just so you know that the pinkish parts those are outside of service now so that's just us playing nice with other pieces because you know you'll hear we have a procurement solution don't get in our kitchen or yeah we have a budgeting solution don't get in our kitchen we're not doing enterprise budgeting and servicenow we're doing i.t budgeting and the difference there is you know a a enterprise budget or a finance budget is a capex optics thing and i t budget is a services projects and demands thing and by doing that in service now that's a whole different conversation let's we could do a workflow wednesday on that yeah this makes money on that right anything we touch makes money so when we if we want to pivot over to that one that's a whole new thing that it's really interesting how you can be smarter with your budget and adapt to things like a pandemic that gets dropped on you right how do you adjust to work from home initiatives you know keeping on-prem people safe without any incremental budget how do you do that smoothly and efficiently well you do it in servicenow right with with servicenow and then like we were talking before looking at how you do some of that scenario planning and finding a way to do that and and some of that's still art of the possible for us but we're looking at ways to really help our clients be able to have not only asset but particularly get into that strategic portfolio management and application portfolio management how do you do some scenario planning and looking at the budgeting to tie it into this whole tree the full asset life cycle so it's not just asset but it's it's like we're talking about before it said strategic portfolios um that is a whole nother discussion um but let's let's take the remaining time we have tom and just kind of talk about what's it look like to engage with third era and line financials what's the next step for a company that's like man my cmdb is i've got one it doesn't feel like an atm to me i think the best thing to do is and we'll do this a lot of times we'll let's have a conversation what are your biggest pain points you know when we go to this what's your biggest pain point you know do you have too much inventory do you have too little inventory are too many people screaming is there this you know are we trying to bring the temperature down um but you know what where are you trying to go with it and and what's the best way to get there because when we don't encourage anybody to boil the ocean take this a step at a time and the cool thing is we'll take down a chunk of that and we'll find the roi and it pays for everything else right people are blown away and we've actually built out roi calculators so you know servicenow has a business value assessment and that really focuses on those other legs of the stool but we built these roi calculators because we're looking at hard dollars you can't have hard dollar roi unless you have high dollar you know visibility right right and so um that you know that helps people see okay this is where those are going to come in and so we get that hard we put down a metric if we meet that metric can we keep going why would you not keep going if troy every time you talk to me i gave you 20 why wouldn't you want to keep talking to me yeah i'd have you on speed dial right let me ask you something about heart roi because i know you brought this up multiple times but you know many of us in this industry have worked on creating roi calculators and and the common thing is we have customers telling us or you know the people that we deliver for whether it's an internal team one of the things that that i hear over and over is i've worked on this roi calculator but the people i sent to you say it's wrong while that's common you had that happen but was wrong in not the way that we expect tell us that story about the customer told you that your roi calculator is wrong so that was that was an interesting one because it was a friendly first of all they said can you really do this in service now like absolutely we've done it for a lot of people we can do it for you okay so help us build an roi calculator we built an roi calculator like okay take us behind the curtain show us your numbers and they picked it apart saying this number's low takes us you know twice as long to do that and this number's low and this number's low and we build them out based on the size of your i.t budget so if it's 100 million dollars you're not going to have as much roi as if you have like you know a 500 million dollar budget just because yeah some rules of thumbnail skill right um but yeah we've had them pull it apart and actually make it even stronger or why so we don't try to come in and say you know if the planet's aligned and it's not a leap year you could maybe on a good day get this money it's like you're going to get this money and then some right because we want people to feel extremely comfortable that that we can do this for them we don't want them to be holding their breath that oh boy i hope this works or i'm getting fired it's like and we've actually had people who have taken our calculator and they said i'm cutting your numbers in half and i'm cutting them again because if i put this in front of them they're going to expect this from me it's like do what the way you want so he he had you know two aces up his sleeve when he presented the roi to his leadership yep so so if i restate that just just to kind of unpack what i heard on the roi calculator there's one client that looked at it and was like no we need to ramp this up to see significantly more roi than what your model had put together then you had another customer it's like while it's been vetted and proven he took that same model he's like i'm gonna cut all these in half because i don't know i don't over promise i won't over deliver right those are both of those are a good place to be oh absolutely the other thing that i want to call out particularly when we have this slide still up is is we've got five knobs categories if you will right of of spend reduction and five categories of spend optimization as organizations are watching this or considering this and start talking to us that's really important to be able to say here's 10 different ways your cmdb can turn into an atm these aren't once and done these are these are reoccurring right but over and over the other thing i heard you say is as we've worked with clients through this process out of those 10 if we pick one of them that's more than paid for the project right right so think about that i i've said this to people and they don't believe me going in but they believe when we're done you're only going to do one thing with servicenow over the next 12 months and you're trying to demonstrate roi like if anybody tells you service now is too expensive they haven't done this project right if they've done this project they're like wow servicenow is cheaper than spreadsheets you know everybody says spreadsheets are free free spreadsheets are really expensive to use they're not going to do this for you yeah they're free to create but the maintenance behind them is crazy expensive right so this is the best thing you can do with servicenow especially if anybody's giving you pushback and on how much it costs you're not optimizing it you know it's it's kind of like buying a ferrari to go get a loaf of bread well you can get a loaf of bread with a lot cheaper vehicle but if you have this ferrari you know let's open that thing up and let's let it the thing let it roar right right this has been awesome tom you know i thank you for taking the time with me today i've enjoyed working with you at third era and his third era and align financials are partners and as people are watching this you know obviously this is going to be on linkedin it'll youtube and twitter if this sparked your interest the next step would be to reach out to either myself or tom and just say show me those 10 ways we could optimize let's find a way to turn your cmdb into an atm any closing thoughts tom um that would that would be it i i will tell you that we get a lot of naysayers and when we they reach out and they say prove this the meeting is usually with like two or three people and then they'll say can you do the same presentation a week from now and i'm going to go get 20 people and it's like oh you were the scouting party because even when we tell them they don't believe it right and so we we come in and we do the same thing again because you really really can't do this service now and if you're not doing this you're missing a huge opportunity yeah i think it's pretty compelling but it does take a little bit to get through and that's why i'm not surprised where it's like i heard you oh there is something there yeah that's more people with their their eyeballs on it and i think that's good yeah get all the naysayers in the room though you're right it it let's get everybody together because it's not us versus them it's guys we're all looking for the same thing here as a company right we just don't necessarily look at the world the same way and this allows everybody it's not to say change the way you look at it it's just that it's all stored one way and it presents to the consumer the way they want to consume it indeed cool well again tom thank you for everyone watching workflow wednesday meet me here every week as i live stream something about what's happening now in the business world and what's happening now on service now and reach out was part of third era we are an elite servicenow provider arguably one of them that stands out in this ecosystem that you really need to meet if you haven't already reach out to myself if you want to reach out to tom you can reach out to him both of us you can find us on linkedin again thanks so much and tune in next week we're talking about managed services see you later thanks everyone bye-bye