now I'd like to introduce Gus Pasteur director for Creative for workflows for U.S federal at servicenow Gus will be discussing maintaining control and visibility with Hyper automation which could prove to be one effective modernization approach as agencies work to keep Pace with digital expectations of their users Gus thanks so much for joining us welcome to the stage looking forward to learning more [Applause] it's been a long time since I've been up on stage in front of a lot of people so it's nice to be back um hyper automation what is it besides a buzzword for you guys it is the opportunity to leverage a platform and the tools within that platform to evolve with the problems of your business over the course of time for me um I like to always ask myself what qualifies me to stand up in front of people and talk about how a vendor like servicenow could help somebody achieve the bespoke mission needs or problems of their business usually when I talk to my customers I like to I like to ask them a question about 90 of people answer the question the same way the first question is when you think of servicenow what do you think of typically what they say to us is servicenow is a ticketing platform and I think that is uh probably one of the simplest ways to start with this conversation but the important thing to note is the history of servicenow where servicenow comes from and where it's going so servicenow interestingly enough was founded by a gentleman named Fred Luddy and Fred recognized that most if not all customers regardless of Industry vertical set or segment struggle to Route work effectively across the Enterprise he sat down and he built a platform that solved two problems first problem routing work effectively across the Enterprise the second problem is Bridging the Gap between people with business problems and the technical teams that are to deliver on those problems so in sitting down he built this platform with three key pillars those pillars were first and foremost a standardized set of developer tools we'll talk more about that in a second the second layer of that is a standard way to which we model data across the Enterprise and third is a standard way to deliver service across the Enterprise those things came together with the venture capitalist venture capitalist Said Fred that sounds really cool but we don't know what to do with it we need a use case first use case he went and looked at ITIL said we can digitize that he used the standardized set of developer tools he used that model for data he used that model for Service delivery and he built and digitized ITIL into what we refer to as a scoped app so the interpretation of servicenow is actually more analogous to the problem of delivering service across the Enterprise if servicenow can show you that we can route work effectively between someone who needs something and someone who can do something based on act or based on Insight that informs action then servicenow can be leveraged to generalize that problem of Service delivery and deliver value across the entirety of the Enterprise right that's the value statement that's the conversation so a little bit about what you guys as customers or as as workers in the mission of federal government are dealing with a couple more buzzwords right I'll say it like this I'm 33 years old about to turn 34. I was born at a time where I remember very much what it was like to for everything to be paper-based for everything to be very manual and arduous processes and now I have a kind of a bread in expectation of what it means to consume Services both in the commercial Marketplace but also from government I live in the city of Richmond I know it's not the federal government but I think it tells a story in the city of Richmond when I move from one physical address to another I then have to go to the DMV and I have to update records or I have to update my information and they still don't get my taxes right they still mess everything up and frankly it it pisses me off right it does and I think that we can do better I work at servicenow servicenow isn't perfect I have problems sometimes routing work effectively across the Enterprise because you know what we don't use servicenow for everything servicenow is really simple it's a series of if thin statements and at the end of a loop we kick work from person or to another system there's a lot of confusion about what servicenow can do but if you think back to the story that I told a few minutes ago about where servicenow came from the thing that matters most is what do we do with these tools how do we solve more problems going forward we've heard a lot about user-centric design and focusing on the human we'll talk a little bit more about that for me my perspective is human centered design starts with empowering the human to actually do the design not necessarily participate in the design process it's a little bit different for everybody another thing we talk about we talk about using these standardized tools I talk a lot to my customers about the power of low and no code Lola no code is an interesting Concept in that there are people on both sides of a polarizing issue low and no code can be seen as a way to deliver value on a configurable system and expedite an outcome it can also be seen as a simplified or marginalized view of very complex technical skill set the first thing I'll say to all of you is that low and no code is not a replacement for full stack development complex technical engineering teams with desirable skills and an expensive base to have to pay them on what I believe is that low and no code has a place in the Enterprise but its place is not to be the entire Enterprise it's about picking the best tool for the job and delivering on it at the right time how do you do that you have to have a plan you have to have a strategy first it starts with automating what is automation another buzzword automation is the ability to build or to create to connect dots in a line of process over the past with automation using a bunch of silos we've created more silos my background is open source development kubernetes Cloud Foundry before that and infrastructure space I started in an infrastructure where either you had all these disparate storage compute networking and virtualization teams and the process to just make a change to carve up a lot and the meetings and things that happens it was it was outrageous and then I started to realize that software-defined infrastructure the Advent of the public cloud and really the commercialization of a scalable distributed storage fabric it wasn't just about improving technology it also was going to dramatically impact the people who have built skill sets in those specific areas the same thing is happening with software development low code has a place full stack has a place but eventually these things come together it's the way the technology it's the way the technology is it's the way that it happens so with servicenow we think there's a way to do it by focusing not just on people not just on the deliverable but on being responsible and sustainable for the entire Enterprise and embracing you know what we are our our method or our model our interpretation of governance so if we do what we've always done we get what we always got servicenow I'm a Believer servicenow is a believer that if we Embrace a platform a true platform approach not everything has to live in that platform for the platform to be valuable we see that across I.T the ability to plug distributed Management Systems distributed Cloud environments distributed you name it into servicenow as a central repository to report monitor or to task these things are very much the same across the entirety of the Enterprise business strategy it's the intent it's the focused approach to solve a problem with a platform we've talked about chat GPT we've taught AI ml you name it my question is what's next seriously the fact is we we constantly have these conversations about this technology is going to it's going to reinvent the wheel it's going to make everything so much better and a week later it's there's something new it's going to be so much better these are Plug and Play things they do make things better but they eventually become interchangeable but they have to plug into something and servicenow as a platform of platforms can facilitate the plug-and-play of different Technologies as they evolve and the ability to have users be participants in the develop in the development process focusing on a people first mentality citizen development is something that a lot of people say and I frankly I think it's the biggest one of the biggest farces in technology just like digital transformation what citizen development so citizen development is kind of is kind of a it's a pipe dream and at servicenow we talk about it I try to be realistic really what we should be talking about is delegated development how do we use the people with skill sets at our disposal regardless of what platform that they're building honor in and how do we put the right person with the right skills and the right components or tools or scoped apps that's what we call it to be successful there are elements development is a spectrum it doesn't all happen in one place the same way at the same time governance and this is we're getting there hold on we'll go back all right so governance is like the thing that sets servicenow apart from a lot of other low and no code vendors from my perspective I think about it this way if servicenow is a platform that can deliver the right information to the right person at the right time and deliver an actionable Insight if we take that role-based approach to delivering service and turn it inside out and point it at development teams then we can put the right developer in the right scoped app and give them access to the right tools at the right time without giving them the case of the Kingdom if servicenow is based on acl's permissions controls and giving people a position of success then we can do that for developers too and sometimes that means the ability to leverage no coders in conjunction with low and pro coders now servicenow doesn't have a proprietary proprietary development language right and we do it's on the back end and yes occasionally you know real platform owners are going to have to know that but from a development standpoint it's kind of ready to go so what do you have to need to know you have to know if then statements drag and drop you could probably build on Wix and Squarespace as somebody who exists in a procurement arm could you use the same type of logic and servicenow absolutely but are you the person that's going to be spinning up a data model are you the person that's going to be configuring a user experience no absolutely not so we'll use ACLS and permissions to put people in the right place so that they can be successful and that's something that sets servicenow apart from our competition right there's there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat it's going to change a thousand different times before we're all said and done but the thing that that Rings true for me from servicenow is as I've watched technology evolved and I've watched people evolve it it stands to reason that this is this is the next thing that's going to happen people have an expectation that not only should technology be accessible and consumable but they are also have they also are we're coming up on the age where they're going to be willing participants in that and I.T can either be an enabler or it can be a detractor and when I T detracts people are still going to go find a way to do what it is they want and probably what that means is we're going to perpetuate the cycles of I.T past Shadow I.T spinning in different areas spitting up new silos creating more gaps creating more problems creating more of a headache for people in security does that mean everything goes on serviced now absolutely not but it means it has a place and it's time to start thinking about servicenow as an enabler to transformation how much time do we have by the way all right some of my customers have have really um they've come up they've come a long way from where we started this conversation and the story about where service now started and and honestly sometimes there's these political battles that happen in organizations about you know what should be built where and when and anybody from servicenow or any vendor who says that they know is wrong it's all about what's best for your organization the fact is is that the tool the tool can bring you value but you're not going to build a weapon system you're not going to build a trading system you're going to stick to what servicenow does really well and that's workflow and if you focus on workflow and you can rationalize your problems down to a series of if then statements then you can bring value on the servicenow platform and if problems go to die and backlog which creates new problems then in theory servicenow has a governance model where we can reach out and through a responsible way of teaching and educating end users can incorporate them in the outcome of what technology can actually deliver today there's a lot of known low code vendors that are out there there's a lot of cheap ways to build forms and collect information if you remember one thing from all of this what sets servicenow apart from our peers is it's what you do with that information after you collect it that sets sets every sets everybody else apart from us or US from them that's where our the organizations that we partner with are seeing an immense amount of value because they're taking complex problems and creating a bunch of little Simple Solutions that have a unified way of engaging one thing that I'll say too that's interesting about servicenow is the ability to use servicenow and what I refer to as like this agility layer agility is not about how quickly you can move to put things in service now it could also be about how quickly you could move servicenow to be a component of your Enterprise strategy a lot of times what we see is organizations they struggle with user experience user experience we've talked a lot about it but user experience also pertains to your vendors sap Oracle whoever a lot of times when power users need configuration and customization Within These big massive erps or back-end systems that we build within that system itself which inherently creates more complexity so when you have to move over up to s4hana or something like that it's a massive undertaking from a professional service engagement not just to make an underlying software code upgrade but to be able to untangle all the configurations and customizations that are built there within well if those configurations are just workflows why not abstract those workflows put them in service now and use servicenow as the agility layer which in theory or actuality is just a really comprehensive way of integrating simply and natively to a platform like sap and leverage sap for what it is keep your core of data really clean abstract user experience put it in servicenow and allow that to scale across the Enterprise Integrations is something that a lot of people struggle with for us Integrations are pretty simple we can build we can you can build your own apis we can support all the traditional methods for integrating or you can consume spokes spokes are pre-built connectors that we work on and we build with our vendors in the isv ecosystem and those spokes can be used to natively integrate your workflow problems directly to external systems servicenow manages that you can use it as many times as you want why would you spend time building what already exists and this is also goes back into the governance conversation with governance a lot of times on low and no code platforms you may be sitting at your desk building an integration and someone two doors down is building the exact same integration for a different purpose why don't we share that work why does that have to be something that's distributed and never collected or never Federated so with servicenow what we believe is that we are a configurable system not I.T Paths of systems configuration that means that we can take what exists what is a known good State we can stamp it we can blueprint it and we can make it accessible to others to consume which accelerates the developmental process but it also keeps us from uh from doing duplicative work that can't be can't be monitored or managed very well all of these things are out of box with servicenow it's just about how you look about look at it and how you think about it user experience is something again we've talked about quite a bit user experience for servicenow and app development obviously they are one in the same but they're typically thought about after the fact or in a little bit different way of putting them together so the way that I talk about it is this Builders build apps apps have tables table store data workflow goes on top workflow moves data around and it's then how we present those things all around it that makes it actually actionable on the front end we have portal based experiences much unlike what we've seen with VA that gives you a stand the standardized ability to actually come in to assist come into an environment into a business into a government service and to interact with that service that's a requester-based experience and then we go down into that actionable experience someone who's doing work on behalf of others that's a fulfiller workspace that workspace is entirely configurable the workspace is the workplace this is where people spend more time working and less time getting work done because we orchestrate we automate and we organize right here for them the cool thing about mobile app development on servicenow is because servicenow is a configurable system we've already passed that container across into the Google app and Google Play Store in the Apple Store and that means that anytime you publish something to that Google to that app that exists on your smartphone it's all it can go across the wire effectively intraday right you go through your changes you go through your testing but it's drastically and dramatically simplifies the application development experience that is basically mirrored by that fulfiller or that service portal experience as well it's just a configuration change and it looks different based on the device that it's on but when somebody logs in to work in servicenow they're getting the exact same thing they would get elsewhere so as I wrap up the important thing to remember here is hyper automation is the ability to consume problems with tools that are going to vary and change if you have problems that are spreadsheet driven that are put on email that are manual those are things that can easily digitize and brought to servicenow platform and you can absolutely use servicenow's value that we show through the ability to deliver Services through it which everybody knows this for to extend that across the entirety of the Enterprise so I appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk today a little bit about the importance of governance servicenow is a governable platform from the ground up always has been always will be so I appreciate you guys thank you [Applause]