welcome everybody to our Digital Services Forum bi-weekly call today we're going to fortunate enough to have a CIO with us to give us some CIO perspectives and we'll do some introductions in a while on how we use servicenow for a digital transformation platform what we're going to do is I always go through in the beginning with the group if today's your first time we use we like to use the chat a lot so if you could post your name in the chat and where you're from that'd be great just so that others can welcome you to the group and um there's a link at the bottom here that I'm going to post in the chat I put it in the chat every week it's a link to all of the resources we use we are a forum so we have a couple things available to us the first thing is the zoom registration that you all registered for today we also have the Forum home page which will be uniform homepage is our community and servicenow communities we have a YouTube playlist where we put all these meetings and then some other video assets that we keep as part of the Forum and then we have a shared instance and you can request that shared instance access from me sometimes we'll do demos on that shared instance so this way if the person that's doing the demo doesn't want to be passing it out to everybody individually you can just say look I put that that configuration or that code or whatever on the shared instance so that those are the four resources that we use for the group and like I said I'll post this link so that everybody has access to those four resources and those four main links will get you to anything that the group actually shares with people that brings us to our vision mission and we're and what we're actually doing we initially started this group to focus on cmdb digital Service delivery and and doing a lot of that work on the business side of the cmdb to configure services and things like that and we realize that everybody was trying to do that the purpose that everybody the why behind all that was for digital transformation so we switched about two years ago to being a thought leader in digital transformation as part of doing this work that we're doing so our mission is to enable all our members to drive their own digital Transformations using the platform we share as much work as we can so that you're not redoing things whether it's just a discussion like we're having today and we record that could be papers it could be things we share on that shared instance and then also videos any videos that we have so we have some papers you'll see some papers if you go on our community you'll see some links to videos You'll see Decks that we shared so this way you could take them and use them in your own organization this is hosted by the EA team so a lot of topics you'll see are Enterprise architecture related and then we do our main way of getting information out is this call you're on today these bi-weekly calls and we have them we've been having them every other week since 2018 right and our agenda today is pretty simple we're gonna have a round table with Riz and Martin are going to come on and uh talk about their perspectives and that's going to be most of the agenda today and I think at the end we'll open it up for a little q a so real real simple straightforward agenda and with that I'm going to hand it over to Martin so we don't spend any more time in the kind of the um housekeeping part so Martin I think you could take screen share away right yeah let me make sure I can make sure everybody can see my screen yes Sarah looks good all right yeah so just uh today's not about me it's about Riz but just for those that I haven't gotten to me and I'm a peer of John's my name is Martin chaparria based out of Houston but I support all of the basically Texas to Florida to Boston so I've gotten to work with many of you as clients and customers before coming over four and a half years ago I was um I was a service now customer myself for about eight years so been around the platforms it's about 2010 uh and I'm excited because today we've got um rizwan Jan with us who um has has um numerous numerous experiences in and around the platform so rizz I'm not going to have you read all of this but uh if you don't mind taking some time introducing yourself to the group a little bit about your background then we'll jump into more just a Fireside kind of q a sure thanks Martin and John thanks for having me uh so yeah been been in I.T in the cyber world for over 20 years uh so I'm I joined CNA here about about nine and a half months ago uh as their new CIO so I lead obviously their I.T operations their cyber and then uh what's new to me in this role is I'm running their industrial based security too so we work in a classified environment uh work with the Navy so our mission is the Safety and Security of the U.S nation and Homeland and prior to CNA I was at hjf Henry M Jackson foundation and uh their mission was to do uh military medicine for for obviously uh the military they were congressionally authorized by Ronald Reagan and was their CIO over there as well as their ciso and uh did a lot of work prior to that at Booz Allen uh doing a lot of sock and instant response in the cyber world PCI and then uh you know prior to that in Aetna HP AIG so all the big boys that are in the industry so and then here I am now uh just about to share our digital transformation servicenow story awesome yeah it's great to have you and thank you for joining us many of those names you just threw out our services now shops as well so um okay let's just jump in um and uh we will have some time at the end just for the audience it's free to just kind of pepper um rizz and make them super uncomfortable with any of your questions as well but before that um so let's just start at the beginning you know you mentioned you're with a hjf what what motivated um HJ you have to undertake a digital transformation effort and what were the specific business challenges that you were trying to trying to address uh so I'll backtrack a little bit so when I joined HF in 2016 as their CSO I came in then you know uh there there are again congressionally authorized they're doing a lot of pH IPI work and they did not have a cyber Department uh so I came in there to see so built out their entire cyber Department um in about 10 months and it was just me but I I recruited built out um you know sock instant response third party risk governance you name it application security so about a year in um we got a new CEO in place uh a 35 year old 35 years in in the the Army two-star General and he was also the the the chief medical officer and for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and this is what's the motivation right it stops from it really starts from the top he came in and wiped out the entire executive staff the only person he kept was me and the reason why is uh a culture that's pretty resistant to change uh and he saw my track worker I was able to build out a whole department and then he elevated me CIO and he's like Riz basically your interim and you gotta you gotta earn it and my one question is do you want me to keep the ship steady or do you want me to be audacious and he's like you own it like it's yours so uh I I did an evaluation with an RIT Department right I mean we had tickets open you always look internally before I could even Provide support externally right we had tickets open for 250 plus days you know the only reason these tickets were even being closed at the service desk level was you know employees customers and partners are leaving or or people were freaking dying right it was like that type of scenario no standards no processes in place so I brought in service now to start with the itsm which then boiled over to of course cmdb itom and really standard was able to standardize on my I.T Department from there what happened was and and my service now Representatives warned me about this and I kind of did not believe it at the time like when she gets your house in order you're going to start seeing these business stakeholders coming to you because they want to fix some of their uh business requirements as well and I was again very skeptical of that and but sure enough uh you guys were right and that happened um so we started building out a whole policy Initiative for our compliance people uh as well so that that that was a that was a big win externally and then from there you know our business development people wanted to build out a CRM we were able to do that uh we were able to build out our internet and all that stuff so it started to rapidly you know it was like a domino effect people started talking and then the shadow I.T started getting squeezed out as well because then we were able to build out some street cred and uh get a lot of work done and and we were starting to really become partners with the business versus just being a task taker yeah I love that I love the the using the term partners of the business um that to be pretty uh nerve-wracking right Last Man Standing as you wipe out executive staffs um you you have to lead this effort with with your neck on the line um how did servicenow factor into that digital transformation strategy and then talk a little bit about some of the challenges you had implemented initially yeah the strategy servicenow was the court of our strategy right I'm all about to minimize our technology stack as much as possible Right easier to maintain easier on on my staff too so they can have a good work life balance the challenge is I would say not just at hcf even my current organization and I'm sure a lot of people could um you know agree with me here which was having the business sit down with you to really map out their business requirements generally what happens right is like hey we have this business problem I.T fix it for us and then what what happens I T tries to fix a problem without the business engagement and then we roll out a crappy product so that was a challenge to have people actually sit there you know people are like hey I'm busy I can't do this or I can't do that but my my response to that hey you were not that busy when you're bringing up these problems with me right so do you want to fix the problem or do you not because this is not going to just be me holding the bag and I'm and you know what I try to tell my team here and and my previous organizations like we we're not a doormat right we we want to partner with you and um those days of I.T being a task taker or just a a waiter a waitress those days are over we're uh here right we're a business partner and we want to help so let's the analogy I always use is if you're painting a room right you you're gonna tape do drop cloth you know prep it that prep work takes a lot of time those are your business requirements once we get those business requirements in place right the painting is going to be really really fast the product building the product is gonna be fast so those are some of the challenges but you have to go around one by one start building those relationships try to build lose trust and then they'll start sitting with you and they'll proactively start you know providing information and not only that you this is your time to educate them too is like this is your time to change how you do work right if you're taking 14 steps to complete one task then maybe you want to trim that down to two or three steps so try to be Innovative and think about uh work efficiency versus hey this is how we used to do it so we're going to kind of lift and shift this into service now and so I really wanted to start thinking outside the box and become uh innovators within their own business that's great I love that I love the terms um that you're using here I want to do a little impromptu surveys we're going to use a chat here how many of you feel like you are actually um aligned with the business as part of your I.T strategy and I.T organization pop in a yes no maybe a comment something in the chat we'll keep that conversation going one of the terms I've always not really been a fan of is aligning I.T with the business because it is part of the business like whatever your your corporate strategy is whatever those goals and targets are it it it's going to require um you know it and it's involvement a digital involvement shouldn't be separate so I love hearing that about it and also real quick um who was it that posted that comment about the uh the Phoenix project yeah I was thinking the exact same thing that that's fantastic it's lived out in real life um Okay so we've talked about a little bit about the technology and how servicenow was an enabler we'll get a little more into that but I want to start off by saying hey one of the things I hear all the time me as a customer other customers I talk to we're not really sure that we have the right operating model right the right skills the right roles right governance how did you address this it's the loaded question it's always back to your traditional uh I.T and cyber components right people processing technology uh I I did not try to roll out technology because that's where you're going to fail right so I started focusing on people which was either people are transitioning out through natural attrition or you know sometimes they don't fit unfortunately within where we're trying to head so focus on the people start pumping and training and and cut the handcuffs off of them too so they could come to the table with some ideas that they feel empowered so once they feel empowered to do certain things they're gonna you're gonna have additional buy-in with internally within your team to do great things right uh and then you start focusing on processes um processes is is is the core to everything right uh if you have bad processes technology is not going to work and and it becomes shelf where so uh the processes and those things are easy to fix just come up with a good policy SLA a governance strategy and and then and then start wrapping up technology around those processes but so that's how I started to build uh my operating model out too uh even in my current uh my current employment here my first 30 days which what I did was I don't even want to look at my technology stack I'm not looking at my processes I'm just going to do a people assessment and I met with the entire team from top to bottom ask them one-on-one what can I make what can I do to make you stay right it was kind of more of like a stay interview like why would you want to leave and that kind of then starts really connecting to the heartstrings of what's working and what's not working for these individuals and then 30 days from there is then that's when you when I took action of all right this is my team some people are are moving around to uh other organizations within I.T other teams within I.T or you know unfortunately you do not fit with where we're headed and then uh We're Off to the Races so always Focus again people process and then last thing technology because technology is the stuff that's expensive and that's where you're going to start ruining your reputation to right is if you you roll out a half-assed product you know user adoption is low the trust is broken with the the business and it's it's over right so sometimes it is really good that some of these things things take some time to deploy right it may take six ten months but you do it once and you do it right No One's Gonna remember hey that you rolled out a product 30 days after your go live date or 60 days after you go live No One's Gonna remember that right people are going to remember hey this was a crappy rollout and now I don't want to use it so again do not rush through this stuff take your time and make sure everything's squared away yeah our esteemed CEOs famous for his quote of uh trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets and that that couldn't be more true that's exactly right I I yeah I love that hey Martin yes we got about a third or third a third with the question that you asked earlier about who's part of their digital transformation so a third said yes yeah the third said sort of and in a third said no not yet so that's about where we are and then uh and then I'm not sure how to interpret Mitch as we think we are I believe that that actually resonates with me just coming from because oftentimes you're sitting there and there's that disconnect um I'll tell a quick story here just to sidebar um I I was traditionally oil and gas I did a little bit of health care but I did only gas when I first took a roll um at a second customer I went and I met with all the business heads and um I remember meeting with an infrastructure director there was super excited we're moving a cloud we're doing all this great stuff Innovation moving the business forward and I said well what are we doing hyper converge Cloud compute just gonna be fast can be cheaper I said how is that providing us you know to to do better in the business where's the value we're getting from the business and it couldn't get off of just how it's you know how great this I.T stuff and I was like well unless we're a data center company I thought our goal was to get oil out of the ground and put it on the market right so we think in I.T we're a line doing all this awesome stuff when the business is looking at us like you're just a back office cost sitter right so we want to Elevate those get us to a level where we're really aligned to the capabilities of the business and using technology as a critical enabler to do that so yeah that actually does resonate with me Mitch foreign so now from like servicenow capabilities you know we see all the service now has got a breadth of technical things that it can do um and only growing for those that are at knowledge or part of the knowledge Community last week you saw just new innovation all the time coming on the platform uh Riz how how is the capabilities of the platform how did that help you at hjf um improve your operations in your processes 100 it provided uh visibility right we were fully transparent from an I.T operations perspective and we're not working in a black box so think of it as an Amazon experience right when you order a package you know where it is when it's being delivered they take a picture send it to you in full and you have a full visibility into uh you know from the beginning to end it is the same thing that that servicenow platform provided us was which was from a customer perspective is they know where things are who's working on it and when it's going to be completed and also wrapped around slas and and discipline internally within the IT team as well right because now guess what you need it's it's about efficiency and meeting customer expectations and their demands and if you're not meeting those guess what we're going to see it and the customer is going to see it and then we have transactional surveys you're going to be dinged on that and we and what we did was we mapped this back to our performance goals internally as well right because we're a metrics driven organization uh it was not about hey what's I'll get to it when I get to it but but with that too with the full transparency that's where the trust started because they're like oh wow I mean now I actually understand what it's doing what they're doing we even rolled out a whole um our PPM which which was uh tracking all our business projects as well not just tickets but the business stakeholders knew uh where some of these projects were and that allowed us to then carve out product owners as well like hey business finance there's your product owner we have our internal Business Systems team that's going to be partnered with you from an I.T perspective as a product owner so now we're actually becoming partners and we both have a say into what we're doing with a certain project so I think the the full full transparency of how we were doing things uh was a huge win that then baked in some of our processes too I mean servicenow you're gonna customize things to your business requirements right not everything's out out of the box but some of the stuff that was out of the box was a quick win for us as far as you know building out some good internal processes yeah so the the the Strategic portfolio management side right the project portfolio I love that you you Incorporated that because that starts to change the conversation right oftentimes when I'm talking to customers I'll go to a CIO and he's like Martin this is just expensive ticketing you guys are super expensive it's so expensive help me so I'll go I'll take a peek we'll you know do some assessments I'm like yeah you're right very expensive tickets because you're using this for ticketing you know but we have all these other capabilities let's start looking at other initiatives that you're going in the organization and demand and project management it's a great way to start I'm not talking about service now demand I'm talking about let's start with I.T but eventually get to Enterprise right we have all these efforts that are happening how are we making those trade-off decisions how are we focusing where we're going to invest where we're going to spend time money and resources because those are the those are scarce right that starts to change the conversation I'm glad that you brought that up as um part of your journey um so you you touched on this a little bit but I'd like for you to elaborate a little bit um just on how servicenow has enabled you to better engage with customers with partners with employees and if there's any specific use cases that come to mind where other organizations may have learned from your efforts yeah I mean uh to your earlier point right Martin when we rolled out our project management uh module we also then started to look externally too from the procurement perspective we're looking at our suppliers we we built out a whole supplier portal where our vendors were coming in um from filling out their assessments contractual language to even a customer portal and all of these portals that we started to to build out customer portal Vendor Portal CRM you know you name even our finance workflow HR uh Service delivery we package all that stuff up and we were probably one of the first um to Pioneer this is we built out our whole intranet platform we were sitting on an old Legacy crappy internet and that was a cherry on top to bring everything that we worked on to together right from itsm to everything I just mentioned on one single platform people could go you see where their tickets are they could request things uh they could see what their customers are doing and that Intranet that impact was just huge for us and this is what makes me smile a lot was Disney caught on uh Disney heard about what we did and this is the uh yeah 500 million they're not in the news much these days uh but 500 million dollar like a mid-sized organization right and Disney catches the wind of what we're doing and they they took our use case and they built out the entire internet uh platform for Disney on the servicenow platform so that was huge for us we uh we were brought in to talk to them as well um and it had a good like requirements Gathering session and they took it and and they ran with it which was a phenomenal phenomenal win uh just because now you know that you're you're doing the things that are right the big boys that are out out there you know they're actually looking at us uh as some Trailblazers to do uh some things that are uh you know best for their business as well so impact right it's all about sharing in in this community it's about helping one another and um that that was just I I can't say enough and then uh servicenow you guys I think whip that uh a whole use case and story around that so I think that's even sitting on your internal internet as well yeah that that's excellent so I want to stay here for just one second because you mentioned how you centralize the experience which is huge because that's really where rubber hits the road but that that that's hard because organizations are built in silos right so talk a little bit about what the reaction was between you know your HR your customer and all these different department heads and how they had to agree because I mean like agreement is probably the hardest part of of any type of effort like that uh it's a good question what what we did too is what's what's the root cause of every organization right it's it's poor data that that's it right people don't know where their data is no data standardization so and that was uh the same thing that we were struggling with at HAF so that's what triggered everyone to come together I started a whole data data integration project which was hey we're going to be with each business stakeholder and just give me two or three core data fields that you want standardized right and and we kept it simple which was first name last name business unit right and then and that and that brought everyone to the table because we had people spelling names wrong last name wrong maybe first name and it was just not it was not standardized right so that might sound trivial but I bet every person on this call understands that pain right right so we we start with our finance right procurement and HR and that and that and then that's where like hey our data stinks right because at the end of the day it's not it's data it's the business data so do you business do you want your data to be efficient do you are you able to pull some good bi reports your workflows are they good or not right so we started there and that's when everyone started coming to the table and once we got those data sets formalize and fixed this is where then we started to build out those silos started to break down because we're like hey HR you know you want these workflows we could leverage HR Service delivery but you're pulling some of the financial data in but you gotta you know standardize that data set and that's how everything started to come together and everyone started coming to the table pretty rapidly and and was again a monster win for us but it was a culture shift and that stuff takes time that honestly this did not happen overnight this took about a year and a half of just trying to build relationships build that trust so people can start working together because as everyone knows like you could have a great strategy I could have a great operational plan that's mapped to the strategy but the culture will eat that strategy for lunch right and and that's a hard nut to crack so like my recommendation is even if you freaking hate your CFO right or CIO or or your chiro whoever it may be get that stuff out of your head you guys have enough friends and families you don't have to be friends with them but you gotta start winning those hearts and minds and and go out to lunch for an hour have just a conversation about anything right and then that's where change starts to happen is you know you build these relationships and it's it's and it's going to make your life a lot easier from an I.T perspective to be honest that's excellent I love that quote that coach reads it for lunch that's awesome you know everybody wants change everyone's one everybody wants Innovation but nobody wants to change right that's the hardest part here yeah okay so um give us some good and bad what'd you learn from um your from hjf that you're going to carry on to CNA because you did some good work but there's got to be some ugliness there's got to be some Badness so talk a little bit about what you're gonna uh leverage in your experience now that you're leading the efforts for CNA I'll start with the bad which was um you know being a a new CIO at the previous organization is I did have that I talked about business requirements and why that was important and all that but when I started rolling when I initially rolled out service now I we rolled it out at itsm but even that was a clunky rollout because I'm like all right this is just I.T Centric right we're just gonna roll it out but it wasn't because then we took it out of the box that was my mistake and then you you know the messaging that's going out to our users it had crazy like I.T Centric language it was not a very externally business focused it had multiple links and people started to get really really confused and and in the other catastrophic mistake that I made was I did not have a good training program and communication plan in place to generate excitement to train individuals and I was just trying to make my quick win and a quick impact so when that thing came out guess what I had to dial that thing back in bring it back in and then deploy it redeploy it uh about two months later and that deployment went well but that was one of my lessons learned is it just make sure it's not out of the box get your requirements together get your training and communication plan I mean the good thing right I was there for what six years I was a we were able to do change the entire from top to bottom how the organization works right we when covet hit we had covert self-assessment and testing um workflows built in for HR you know so we were able to do a lot even then we started doing the facilities uh workflows and uh it basically the tentacles for service now in every single piece of organization at hdf I mean they were using it and the user adoption was high we had to partner up with a third third party as well to get some service now delivery uh servicenow developers to to assist us because the demand was so high right we couldn't even keep up but that was that was a huge win and then what I carried over here with me is exactly I took what my bad experience was right so I built out a servicenow team here and uh we did not have service now uh my first four or five months but I had a servicenow team and I and I told them your your only job for the next five months is you're gonna meet every single business stakeholder and you're gonna start building out a whole requirements Library we may not get to it a year or two from now but you have it thrown in the library we just threw it on the end we built out a massive repository for our our requirements and um we're about to roll out itsm here in the July time frame right after that I need to go for for the external Focus business impact so we're pivoting fast to SPM right we're gonna build that out for our projects uh for for the business projects you know all of that so they they have some sort of appetite suppressant but they can also see all right it's finally delivering on something so we were prepared and then other than that was were we baked in our training program and we partner out with our Communications team because I'm like listen I.T people we don't know how to write we don't know how to communicate so I need this our communication campaign to be in English where people can understand it so they took our technical jargon start putting that into business speak and and we've been slowly like saying hey 30 days out 60 days out right like that that type of communication plan just to generate excitement so it's been it's been a good lesson for me from that bad experience no it's excellent I I want to reiterate one thing you called out you said we couldn't keep up we had to rely on a partner so for any of our partners that are on the call like having a solid Partners critical to any good operating model right it's your organization and your resources it's servicenow what we can bring to the table and a solid partner is going to help you be successful so good shout out to all the good work that our partner ecosystem does all right so let's talk about um and again just coming fresh off of knowledge I think I might know where this is going but where do you see the platform evolving right we we talk about all the power of what surface Now can do and then you can talk about what some of those evolving or emerging capabilities um would help you in in cna's digital transformation effort AI right I mean that's where it's at uh llm chat GPT you name it it's it's that's where uh technology is going that's where servicenow is evolving too and and then you know I had my meeting with my CEO about two days ago and I'm already planning for FY 26 and full disclosure I told her like we may not have a service desk tier one team at that point right we we may just have ai running and addressing some of these questions that's pulling from the knowledge base articles that we have some common themes that we've been seeing in the last couple of years so we're already trying to start to plan for that I already rolled out um my llm governance strategy and policy about two weeks ago uh so that's that's been tremendous but we're preparing for that so but that that's where that's where all of this stuff is headed and uh we're gonna need uh unfortunately probably in some cases right less people but this also opens the opportunity for additional people on the other side of the house as far as you know maintaining and managing the AIS that are in the ecosystems so it opens up doors right and technology is changing every six months something new is coming out so it's it's a good uh it's this is never ending we're always learning in this space right so I think that's a that's a good positive to have that you're never going to get bored yeah and we at servicenow are not unlike any other tech company where we're all trying to put strategies around how we're going to Encompass gen Ai and if you weren't there at knowledge last week go look at CJ's keynote it's incredible what we're doing even with stuff like now assist which is now available in the store you know natural language gen AI modern you know creating forms creating workflow um so yeah that that that's my Shameless plug to the servicenow store to go down a little bit um okay now we've talked a lot about service now but the servicenow we we tout ourselves as platform and platforms breaking down silos connecting systems connecting data as you mentioned earlier so um how has the now platform helped you realize value and investments in other strategic platforms and Technologies I was able to decommission probably about four other Technologies uh because of of the single platform right uh so I mean with with the HR Service delivery we were able to minimize our HRS uh system we we reworked that licensing we were able to limit our footprint uh from a financial perspective too because we built out a lot of Financial workflows and then also baked in some of the RPA stuff with with some of those financial workflows so that's been tremendous so I was uh at least at HF I was able to to save about seven hundred thousand dollars just to to rework some of the licensing and and some in certain cases decommission some Legacy technology because again what I said earlier was one technology try to limit your technology stack right uh and and save money on some of that makes you more efficient I mean even here uh again we're early in our servicenow journey but I'm already about close creeping up close to a million dollars already that the technology that I'm going to decommission one service now goes live because we're going to hit the ground running here right after uh itsm drops so uh it it tremendously helps and so to your other cios right yeah servicenow is it expensive yeah but it's it's one platform that could do many so start looking at the other platforms that you could decommission that are Legacy or you no longer need or this is your time to make the big impact to redefine some of the way that the business works right so again we are innovators at heart and uh we do honestly Drive the business and and the culture that starts changing that starts with I.T it's not going to start with the business right it's World we're a lot like business stakeholders where we're trying to change the hearts and minds of people of to work differently right and and start thinking outside the box but that's how we were able to start you know start uh saving a lot of money which was look at what other things we could kill that we no longer need that's great yeah anytime I go into work with an organization the first question I ask is who owns a digital experience right and if it's not the CIO then why is it not because that's the person that's actually delivering the the capabilities um that are going to be uh built as part of that experience right okay so again I I got introduced to servicenow in 2010 to be honest it was not something I was really interested in I was literally Googling what is serviced now when my boss was like here's this thing because you don't really know where to put it does it help desk is it corporate app is it a pass is it you know all these things um but look at back it's been one of the best things professionally but also personally that's happened to me so I'd love to understand how surface now has actually helped you personally this may sound corn I mean it is honestly from a professional perspective it it just changed my life right I I was just a CSO twiddling my thumb just me uh in in 2016 sitting there and I was able to build that that whole department and and then when I was elevated a CIO again what I said was I was interim so I made my big impact by bringing in service now to start building that trust and that's essentially just changed me professionally that interim title fell off uh people are asking me like you and John asked me for these speaking engagements I've done several speaking engagements for servicenow now and um when and then other organizations and other vendors in the space like you you name it uh Z scalar varonis is they they caught wind uh of what I was doing for for you guys and they started asking me to do a lot of speaking engagements for them as well so it kind of gave me some street cred and the funny thing was that uh when I came here in August of of last year me and the CFO were new I started one month before her and you know how we all are we'll start doing reconing before we jump into another organization and see what uh what helps I mean what makes these people tick and Christina our CFO I I had walked in uh and she was here a month later and she's standing in her door she's like hey you must be risen like I I am nice to meet you Christine she's like she's like I love service now I Googled you and here's my list and this is my first time in my life I'm like holy I don't even have to sway or have these long conversations with the CFO to like open up your purse strings and she said to me she's like when are when are we getting it I'm like are you going to give me money she's like whatever you need to do Riz just get it done and this was day one so she's Googling me and looking this stuff up and it that kind of gave me chills I'm like wow this is this is friggin incredible like that like like there is like no resistance like people just just falling over and and I took her list and that became our part of it was our uh servicenow road map of what we're gonna do for finance and it and that's what has done for me personally and and I'll take it another step further too he's like it's built out really good friendships these are not just like business partners like Martin when I'm looking at you like we met what about a month to two months ago two months ago right and I feel like I've known you for the last 10 years so like the the relationships meeting good people you know just shooting the and having a good time but also working hard strategizing and and really stimulating thought uh and and to start thinking differently it's made me better and it's made me grounded and this is I'm talking about a piece of technology and what has done for me right so uh it's it's it's pretty cool and and it's it's been a it's been an awesome awesome ride but I can't say enough about the relationships I mean it they matter right I really get turned off and uh when I was at Aetna the ciso that I was working for at the time he he had said to me he's like Liz where we're going out to RSA there's gonna be a bunch of vendors out there just just use them and abuse them and get what you need to get and then come back home and I and I kind of was like whoa like you're really treating people like Commodities here and you really don't give a crap but he was a brilliant see so I I and I I told myself hey I'm going to do the do things differently like they're people just like us I don't want to be treated like crap like I will never ever treat you know quote unquote vendors or business partners like crap like at the end of the day guess who's going to be saving your ass when you're in a pickle right it's it's going to be our vendors and partners that are going to be in there or they're going to be in there talking to the CEO to try to help sway the conversation in your direction so uh the last thing I want to do is hey if I'm if I'm from if I I'm in a jam I'm calling Martin I've treated him like crap and Martin looks at my phone it's like hey you know what I'm fishing I ain't picking this up and puts it down and two two three days go by and Martin's like hey sorry I was with a bunch of other customers I'm getting to you now now where the relationships matter is like you may be on this fisherman oh it's red hey what's up man like how can I help what's going on so that's that's what I've taken uh from my journey and the relationships and what service now has done for me is is it's gave me a lot of new and good friends and we're just killing it together and it's it's been fun that's awesome I love hearing that yeah I do appreciate the partnership and the friendship there is you're exactly right okay I think we have two more questions and we're gonna open this up to the group but um how have you been able to measure the impact of service now to the organization you know we always hear you know how do we determine the value we're getting from the platform we do pull surveys a lot not just transactional surveys but we'll send out um not here but we we're not there yet here but my previous organization we sent out poll surveys every three months and also we sent out surveys 30 days after deployment of of new modules that we were rolling out just to see hey what's working what's not working we generally focused on on the bad stuff uh of what was not working just you know a Lessons Learned where we could get better and then second then we pivot to the good stuff all right this is what's working we continue to do this but I think surveys matter I mean they're huge generally I get it with surveys too right I mean if it's really really good experience No One's Gonna fill it out if it's crappy generally people will fill it out right but that's the stuff that we wanna see we want to hear um and also I I I made my rounds personally as well and said you know please be honest tell me what's not working and we'll get it right so and have that Personal Touch but uh that's how we kind of measured our overall performance but with that said too I I also looked at how did it make our CEOs strategic plan successful and better from the stuff that we were doing at servicenow so did I meet his or her deliverables right and then you start peeling that onion back and a few layers down so yep service now did this but it you know it kind of impacted the Strategic plan up there so you it was it was a two-prong approach that I took aligning what you're doing to organization goals and targets absolutely yeah it's the best way to measure I agree okay last question that we're gonna open this up to everyone but you have a bunch of leaders bunch of people driving digital transformation their own organization what advice are you giving to others that are either just taking this on or looking at expanding and maturing within their own business take your time be patient I think and I've just harped on this enough so I'm just gonna say this one more time but build good relationships that way it's going to make your life a lot easier but uh also to have your good clear strategy right why are you rolling out servicenow and how is it mapped to your enterprise-wide strategic plan and and if it does then you're gonna have an easier time to build that stuff out and tell your story but uh again like um you're going to end up buying a lot right that's that's inevitable it's gonna happen like yes it's expensive I don't want to do this I don't want to buy that but it's going to happen and the business is going to push for it but but think but just to slow roll it a little bit think logically build out your requirements and come up with a good sound strategy before you start doing things out of the box right and what did I say it was like avoid building things out of the box because that's where you're going to lose the business because you don't you have not engaged them you want a quick win and you you don't even know how that business is working so avoid the out of the box build out the requirements and start customizing and Catering to how you do business within uh your service now uh ecosystem excellent awesome well thank you for taking the time I'm going to open it up get some questions from the group here John I might need your help I saw that we had a few coming in um yeah I'm trying to roll some of them together so we can get as much as we can uh in the last few minutes yeah there was a lot around the cmdb uh your approach to integrating with itsm anything with digital products and then also anything around portfolio structuring if you have any so I don't know if you want to comment on one or all of those together but a lot of it was around that data foundation's piece yeah uh I mean it's all it's a domino frag we started with itsm right I times cmdb followed that then PPM which what I'm doing differently here is it's it's going to be itsm itom and then we're going externally to do the PPM and then we're gonna go back in and do cmdb it all depends on how you want to do it right but internally from an I.T perspective I think that's the way to to go which is itsm I Tom cmdb uh and get your data fixed internally within it that way you know where your assets are you know what applications you're you're managing you got your asset management your inventory there you got some good orchestration and automation built in as well right and I'll alleviate some of uh your it's uh time internally to to do this where they're toggling back and forth through multiple systems so I mean that's how we did it again I apologize because I'm not the technical guy here either right I'm just the CIO that's driving strategy but that's that that was our game plan of from here in my previous organization of how we started to roll this stuff out one of the big things a lot of people are talking about today are like a shift from digital from project management to product management yeah are you guys embracing any of that strategy and does that affect service now yes so that that was my that's my big push and then some people are like hey we don't roll that products no you do right you're you're rolling out products and so I I I I this is how I I say it's like you're gonna build trust so I want a product owner on the business side and I want a product owner on the I.T side right so if we're doing a CRM gonna have an I.T product owner on the CRM and then an I.T I mean a business development product owner and they're going to partner and they're going to start talking about business requirements how to build this stuff out to to gain even more momentum what I I've said to the team here is think of the product so because I want to drive ownership and and ownership is always hard right so I said think of this product that you're building you're a CEO of a startup company this is your product so how are you going to Market this how are you going to have a good training plan communication plan and how are you going to make your customers want to use your product that you're rolling out and that analogies change the minds because then it drives ownership it also drives some pride to like hey some competitive juices start flowing too like yeah look look what I just did my my CRM is way better than your HR Service delivery that you just did right so if people get Juiced up but then also you start picking uh some good ideas of what's working and what's not but that that's how I I've been doing it is hey we have projects but within those projects you do you're working on a product and product owners are it's critical it's it's everything excellent and then the um other question I had come in was around um oh the one I guess it's more of a comments around killing products so I know you know Brad Stone he he said the same thing as you like one of the things we always celebrate releasing new things but we need to celebrate getting rid of old things more so that was more of a comment and you said that a couple times so I thought that was really enlightening to hear that people you know need to make room for the new right I'm 100 um so I mean I just I said nine hundred thousand dollars right earlier this is by we're on the government fiscal year I should be able in the next two months I mean we'll be at 1.2 million uh killing Legacy products already wow that that there's not working you know we were our itsm here was is I don't know I never even heard of this it was service wise right it sounds like it's more like service unwise but it was service wise and it's like we're done man and and these little rinky things like 30 grand 40 Grand here I mean stuff starts to add up pretty quickly and that's where you started investing in next-gen technology yeah a lot of times I think that's a big part of the problems you don't see that old stuff going out the door like it should be doing so yeah okay and what about that because people forget really quickly right yeah yeah and what about um people on this group we talked a lot about portfolios because we got a portfolio for portfolios for portfolios so there's the project portfolio the app portfolio the service portfolio the catalog in a sense to portfolio from a CIO perspective have you had any specific portfolio like anything that you look at to give you kind of groupings of things yeah so you mean internally from an I.T perspective or groupings of things from external I'm talking like digital portfolios how do you look at things do you look at them like in groups in bunches of work or do you have these product portfolios or is it individual products um no I look it as as product portfolios that's how I'm looking at it so I have my roadmap in and it's there's like all right here's my products this is the person associated with it and that here's the health of it are we good are we not good so I've been doing it from a product perspective and that also uh I I then take those metrics too and then I do deliver that stuff to our CEO and then uh the board in some cases as well as is because they're all worried about our our technical debt right so I could I could then showcase here are my products these are things are in green these are in red here's why it kind of tells you tells them a story right so it's more of a a business perspective versus I'm not looking at did we breach any slas or you know dwell with time on some some of these tickets or anything like that I'm just looking at business products and and and how we're uh managing that yeah do you have any costing at those at that level too at the business product levels or do we we do the costing is it's it's going to be It's associated with that and that was that HF that's what we did we're doing that here but before I was able to do that John we're in the midst of also re talk about data array our data here stinks as well so we're re-implementing our financial management system so that's gonna we're we should be done here in the next four months and that's then we're gonna pivot right to start pulling in that financial data so we have that associated with each product but I couldn't do that initially right because our data was bad so I didn't want any like phony baloney numbers that are associated with some of those products yeah okay and then I had a couple questions uh if this is a hard one but it's like team um some people are saying they have really small teams that how do you I don't know if you have any words of wisdom around building a team and sizing a team some people say like we got stuck with three people and that all this stuff gets dropped on them or well I think this is a a good point Riz this might be a little mic drop for you how big is your team my servicenow team is two people yeah oh wow that's it and uh even my my previous organization my servicenow team was two and a half people we had a consultant uh that was working um halftime so it's just two people and and what I did was um I actually took this person from my previous organization she came with me so uh I think that's why they're pretty much upset with me too uh you know Talent follows right so yeah uh but what I did with this individual is uh she was working on some Legacy again Legacy technology and I'm like Hey we're gonna bring in service now and I I worry about Career Development I never want people to leave but I will be the first one high-fiving I'm out the door because one day I may be working for them and it's all about paying it forward so I I told her I was like don't you want like a service now on your resume you see hell yeah so you could get plucked in in two seconds I'll invest in you I'll train you I'll do everything that you want me to do and she was all in and she's the one who's really interfacing with my my the business folks and building out those requirements and then what I did was I took her and then what Martin had alluded to earlier is like these are where your partners come in and I could use some of their bench strength from uh you know leveraging some of their Developers and we could rapidly develop right so at HF I had about four developers on the bench with one of our partners and we this is where we started to really generate and spit out a mass amount of products workflows you know notifications emails all that stuff was just coming out really rapidly because she was like the the connective tissue in between you know getting the business requirements thrown off the developers they develop she take it and then send it back but she understands how servicenow Works inside and out right so what the developers were building out was was meeting the requirement needs of the business so you don't need a lot of people you at least internally you you don't yeah it sounds like you're doing um I just read an article on the digital Factory from McKinsey and it sounds a lot like that you're spinning up these kind of um squads of people uh focused on products and then you could move Partners in and out of the products as you need to yeah and uh so you just basically redefining a structure that works for HR Service delivery and then I Tom and you're moving them around absolutely 100 yep that's awesome that's awesome so there's your service now team is really big but it's just spread out across the responsibilities are spread out I think right these two people do everything right that's it's a couple people are commenting how would they do that with two people but it's right right and I'll tell you John as a I think the four people cost me about a hundred grand A Year Without Fringe right so that becomes part of your staff that's that's a huge win right to start generating things and then I could tell the business and the CEO and the executive staff hey I didn't hire anybody that's I got four people for a price of one not even the price of one because you're not including Fringe so it's it's it was a it was a big win yeah so that's really integrating into the business and that's how you accumulate the help with it awesome I think it takes us right up to the end I'm Happy to Skip my section reviewing our next meetings because this was uh this is incredible we like to hear this this is uh taking everything from the top level we've been a lot on the nuts and bolts in the cmdb so really appreciate your time today thank you so much no thanks for having me John and thanks Martin you bet bye everyone all right guys bye everybody