[Music] foreign so first of all thank you all for coming to uh service down Federal Forum we're excited to have you all here today and I'm really excited that you chose to come to our breakout on total experience I want to be able to continue the conversation that we started on the main stage uh earlier this morning I love this concept of total experience because it goes beyond just an idea that there's an employee experience or a customer experience or a user experience or I'm talking about how I interact you know with technology we know experiences sometimes picking up a telephone and calling somebody or walking up to a service desk or standing in line at a at a checkout everything about interacting with a customer service organization to get that service you're evaluating everything as a person the good things and the bad things so I think it's a nice Evolution that we're going Beyond simplistically saying it's a customer or employer user kind of experience think about the whole the whole thing because that's really the way we think about this stuff in the real world so we have a great conversation for you now to build out what we've talked about earlier today again by saying I'm Jonathan album I'm the federal CTO for servicenow uh before joining servicenow I worked in the federal government for many years I was a Chief Information officer at different agencies mostly in the Department of Agriculture and eventually I became the CIO for the Department and this was always a topic that was very important to the secretary of agriculture the agency administrators I worked at uh Curious by show hands how many government employees we have here okay that's great and you know one of the things that I'll I'll be honest with sort of uh bothered me a little bit is that when you work in the government sometimes people look at the work we do in government and they say oh the private sector can do that better and you know look at the customer experience they say when's the last time that you tried to call your internet service provider and make a change to your account or talk to the cell phone company or you know deal with some other kind of frustrating medical bill or something it's it experience is hard if you work in the government or you don't work in the government we can all learn from each other which is one of the things that we want to be doing as part of this Federal I.T community that we're all we're all a part of my colleague today is AJ Siegel AJ why don't we why don't you share a little bit about your background yeah thanks Jonathan my name is AJ Siegel I've been in the user experience profession for about 20 years now I worked in insurance for about a decade I worked in ad tech for a year and then discovered servicenow I spent about six years helping customers in innovate with the servicenow platform by bringing design thinking into workshops and design activities now for the last 14 months I've been helping our customers and partners learn how to deliver great experiences with servicenow that's great and when I first met AJ he was in a great role at servicenow and because he was uh he was sort of above the different kinds of workflows that we have he he was in a group where they talked about how do we get the best experience for someone irrespective of the different kinds of products and solution servicenow offered so he's always been someone in ajville he's been someone in my estimation was able to think big dream big like we talk about and come up with great solutions for really hard problems and this idea of total experience I think fits fits that exactly because you know all the time that I I spent in government uh as a sharing you know you leave with this idea that government is complex and when government is really hard or problems are really hard I think oftentimes it's very difficult for us to know where to start and you've been on a lot of these projects so you know where where do you get started how what sort of advice and best practice have you experienced yeah I think one of the most important things that anyone can do is recognize that they're human beings on the other side of the screen that you're putting you're building software implementing software for and we aren't them we aren't uh a person that is maybe dealing with citizens on a daily basis we're not an agent out in the field driving a truck we're I.T professionals we're implementing software we're HR professionals so we need to build empathy with the users we're creating for and understand that they have different abilities with technology than we do and also different understandings of the organization than we do and I'm happy to talk about different activities that help with that but getting out and getting to know your users is probably the most important thing that I can suggest to any any federal agency any customer of servicenows trying to get value out of the platform uh know your users I want to share there are seats in front for anybody in the back there's a few seats in these uh up upper Rose we'd love to have you up here no need to stand uh so AJ I think it's a great point you know get to know your users we heard on our total experience panel um earlier that the the VA surveyed 500 veterans something like that and that really helped them get a human-centered perspective on on a veteran's experience what kinds of activities in addition to maybe surveys or other things have have you done in order to learn listen to learn we heard that earlier today too to be able to learn from uh people in the field or people who are using the technologies that we're talking let me actually show a picture that really helps illustrate this so if you look down in the bottom right on these pipe cleaner headset things going on that's the guy over on the right is my colleague Greg and actually what he's doing here is working with call center agents observing how they would handle simulated calls to understand how they were conversing with their citizen with their constituent but also how they were using technology I remember I used to do this a lot when I was in Insurance I'd go down to Tennessee to our call center and I'd see all the different ways people use paper to take notes writing people's driver's license numbers down writing bin numbers for Carl for cars down all pii by the way so from a security perspective a major risk and the reason why was the workflow on the screen didn't match the natural conversation flow which was typically something like tell me about all the drivers in your home tell me about all the vehicles in your home but the system was designed tell me all the vehicles in your home then tell me all the drivers but the agents because they're empathic they care about their users the cut the caller they would have a natural conversation and work around the system we saw that all the time so by sitting with users by watching how users work and now we can do it virtually there's so many ways to do it virtually now it's really powerful it I I love the fact that you brought up the system because you know bringing up the system re-emphasizes that this idea of total experience includes that user experience too not just the experience of an employee using or at an at an organization or a customer but what's it like to use the system now the whole human is entered human-centered design movement that's been with us for you know some time now but is really being embraced by agencies I think has uh again a reflection of that kind of work and the ex and the expectations that people have when you go to work you want to work with technologies that are like the technologies that you interact with at home or commercial websites or leading Brands and we have to pull those ideas and methods like AJ is describing into into our into our work here um I I want to also open this up for questions as we continue so we have a we have a you know a big crowd and a lot of you work at different government agencies and you're experiencing these things and let you know if there's a someone who wants to share a thought or a comment I'd love for you to be able to to do so as we as we continue our our conversation here so we've talked about some ways to um get information so you listen to learn so you have an idea you shared your your experience with the the call center and you know you can organize a screen differently or at least you understand the way that people interact with customers and what that means from a technology perspective so it's it's all good we can pick uh we can pick an approach to get data we then have to prioritize because it's never just one thing it's a lot of things and let's assume we pick what the most important thing is some leaders said this is the most important thing uh AJ what have you done in order to get people behind this project and once you get them there what do you do to keep them there yeah and I know sometimes I talk idealistically and I think one of the dangers is that when you get in a room and there's a director a senior person their opinion wins and may shut out the best ideas so some of the things we actually do to get buy-in from Project stakeholders delivery team members even users is we run what we call alignment jams and there are other names for this thing I used to call anchors and wins different activities where you find ways to get ideas from everybody not everybody's comfortable in front of an audience like we are now not everybody's comfortable shouting their ideas out so we actually find very specific methods to work with a group of people in a meeting room in a in a team's conversation to make sure every idea is heard and every idea has equal weight regardless of the adjectives after somebody's name I think that's really important to get buy-in from stakeholders what kind of background or skill sets you need to to execute one of these one of these sessions I think at a start learning how to do the technique is fairly easy right it involves sticky notes and Sharpies so if you're able to go to Staples or Office Depot or the Supply Closet that's the first skill yeah I think over time there is facilitation skill that you have to develop to manage different participants that want to shout out shout over others to have backup plans if an activity is not working so there's some great resources online that can teach you how to become a facilitator we're actually running some sessions later this week in the servicenow office out in Vienna for customers on Wednesday and for partners on Thursday to teach some of these techniques as well but building that empathy to be able to work with a group of people who you may not know is is a I realize it's a leap for a lot of us technologists to do that but I think it's a really valuable skill for some of us you know just want to re-emphasize well this is a servicenow conference but AJ's talking about has nothing to do with servicenow correct right servicenow is a great platform and we can meet lots and lots of incredible incredibly hard requirements but to get started it's about having a dialogue being able to think together draw things out it gets a mind share around a solution or a problem and what a solution might be what a workflow might be really understand and the way work and data flow through your organization think about what the future workflow should be or what a new approach is all those things you don't need a technology to do other than the Sharpie and the and the and the sticky pad so you know I share that because again from my experience in the government sometimes I'd see projects not start because there wasn't funding we can't buy something well I'm just reminding you you don't have to necessarily buy something to get started on the thinking part and you get that thinking part you have a lot of Runway so when there is funding available the end of the year or the next budget cycle well you can execute you can buy a license you can buy a technology and you can execute quickly because you've done the harder part you know that people part so um I think that those are great ideas we're going to share a little bit more about the workshops that you're that you're talking about in a in a moment but I want to I want to Pivot um from uh you know further down the project right we have an idea of what the problem is we've done some work to together to think about what Solutions might be um and we we've now we're we're going to execute a project how do you execute these projects effectively yeah it's a great question I think there are a couple things one thing I've seen in working with customers is we do treat these often as projects not products and so we look at it as a software upgrade and the goal is to implement the software not necessarily implement it well but just to get it done to check off a box so if we shift that and say no this is an opportunity to improve whatever the previous software was doing then we start thinking about what are the activities we do to figure out what to improve so we observe the users using the current solution we like I said before with that call center example and then we find ways to prototype what the new solution might look like you know so we get into agile okay so we need to find ways to rapidly prototype that doesn't have to be on the platform now if you get comfortable with page designer for service portal or UI Builder great good God Bless you that's awesome go build it on the platform but there are tools that folks like me use like figma sketch Adobe XD if that's still around to prototype and Enterprise face and get feedback so when I had that call center story I prototyped in about 12 hours less than that probably a different workflow for getting a quote for car insurance and brought it back to the agents two days later and said how does this help you on your phone calls let's simulate give me a quote for car insurance I got feedback and these questions were confusing and why is this a drop down not a radio button we can start getting that feedback so that iterative nature you do it with a prototype you do it in QA you do it in production you can keep doing that and it's a great way to get feedback and include your users in the process so now you get users that are champions of the change which helps with change management so when you have users that are champions of the change it becomes a lot stickier right it's a lot harder for a new leader to come in and say oh you know I want to do the process on my own now you know or I want to rethink it well we have you have users that are champions of the change they you know that new CIO that new executive who comes in can you know get behind find it because you're on the you're on your way to a big win and it makes the team and the organization I think stand out you know in my experience relative to you know other groups in an agency or other teams that are maybe taking a more you know top down there's that collaboration uh is makes a big difference and it shows not just in support but it shows in the final product people like the thing that they have at the end because they've been working on it together and I think it's such a unique uh oh I don't say that it's Unique because I think people are doing it now but the the idea that uh we don't need technologists to necessarily lead a project or we don't need technology to get started you know those are ideas that I think if you if you leave here if you can remember those ideas I think that'll help you advance your your various efforts in in your agencies um AJ I wanna I wanna just follow on in terms of doing doing the project we know that this kind of work uh intuitively um you know in these efforts they they build trust between teams um they create value for organizations but uh I really want to hear your thoughts about how you measure those things to be able to prove to somebody that hey this is really good work we do have user support it's better today than it was before well there's more trust there's more interaction there's more whatever how do you show that yeah I can get really academic about this there are things like the system usability scale score that's a 10 question like your one to five thing that you can use to based on your current solution you can use it again with the Prototype you can use it again when you go to production and see how that number moves across your users it's a lot of work you have to administer it it's a lot of questions that people have to fill out um so you can do things like customer e-score which is something you might do after somebody fulfills over Quest on a site how easy or difficult was it to complete this task and you look at that how that changes over time but those are um I think those are what we call leading indicators they'll show you that something's great or not but what ultimately probably matters to your stakeholders are things like the cost of a service call right how does it how much does it cost us to change somebody's direct deposit information that might not be a good example well when everybody had to call or fill out a piece of paper it costs this much but now that they can self-serve because we designed a really easy workflow that integrates into the payroll system great it's much faster and now it only involves a user affected so if you go from those leading indicators of users perceptions of the experience to what matters to the agency like cost or like efficiency you can see how improvements of the experience affect the organization and I think it affects the way people feel about the organization and you know again if you think about it from an outside in perspective into government you know we know trusting government is low and we we also know that you build trust very slowly over time through lots of small interactions you can lose trust very quickly but you build it small in small ways over time and I I I'd suggest that every time that there's a positive interaction because you use the revised revised form or you use something like login.gov and you can log in one time across different kinds of applications you start to feel better about these interactions it's simpler it's it's less complex you don't have uh the same angst interacting with the government or with an organization you know we're building trust bit by bit by bit so you know that that's theoretical right you know you kind of know that it's there I I I'd like to you know talk a little bit more about how do we um understand the current state so we know how to measure to show demonstrable value like how do you how do you capture a baseline you know in your example with insurance or other or other places how did you capture what it what it cost you know today or what what the how long it took yeah so when I was in insurance right we had I think it was like Tivoli some product from Tivoli that would measure the length of cost and we could attribute a cost to each of those calls so calls were taking 14 minutes or seven minutes that cost us 89 let's let's make up that number so if we could reduce the length of those calls we had very quantifiable numbers of of the impact of the business and multiply that across 1500 call center agents that number starts to add up times how many calls per day and now you have real big numbers with lots of zeros at the end so that that's a very specific way and you do that with the current state and then you do maybe a pilot I know we talked a bit about you know how do you you build trust in drips but you lose it quickly so Pilots are great because it's a safe community that you bring an idea to that knows they're in a beta they they know they're maybe not going to get the best solution versus rolling it out to the entire agency and having a fail and losing that trust really quickly and you do that's another point to survey those users to get that feedback like you mentioned the VA did but you need something quantifiable that you can track over time so so you mentioned two words and I think sometimes there's I've experienced people can maybe we get confused to conflate them prototype versus pilot um to find the difference I've heard them I've heard them intermixed at times yeah so in the design world the Prototype is typically something that's not on the software technology whether it's a custom solution or on service now it's something built I mean shoot we used to prototype with sharpies and paper uh but it like I said servicenow our product design org uses figma it's a cloud-based design tool so that's where I build a prototype it's not real it's not real data smoke a mirrors smoke and mirrors right and this is a big problem I found in federal government because if you start being in real environments there's security issues There's real data issues figma you're not on the platform you're not using real data you're making up usernames things like that and it becomes a rapid way to get feedback but it's not real you're not stress testing the system whereas the pilot is built it's on the platform theoretically in a production environment but only available to a subset of users for a little bit of time and you're learning you're evaluating you're going to change it's uh and you can push it theoretically if things go well because you done a good job with iterating the whole way you press a button and give it to everybody right but you do if you if you choose to press that button give it everybody you're doing it with a lot of awareness it's not the big bang approach that I experienced at times on on you know custom built applications when I you know when I worked on systems development projects where you crush fingers and pray that it's going to work for everybody you have a lot more confidence you know and this and we've gotten a lot more feedback pilot participants again we talked about Champions right champions of change those pilot participants have been through that Journey with you they know you care and hopefully they're shouting to their colleagues use it it's so much better I was able to do you know my direct deposit change so much faster than last week when I descended through interoffice mail uh on on a you said champions of change I I worked on a project personally where we had change Champions these people that were identified from across the countries large organization lots of uh offices across the across the United States and different states had change Champions who they were on the project they they came to D.C they worked with the project team they went back to their respective offices and their responsibility was to be the champion for this new approach a new process and it worked pretty well because we had people that really you know dedicated and to AJ's point they're bought in because they were they were they were part of it so I've seen that work um quite successfully even on challenging projects you know where you don't always have the best uh the best press inside the agency because maybe the Project's taking longer maybe there's you know other attributes of the project that you know don't line up to what people's expectations were those change Champions were so influential in getting people back on track and and believing in the product of the project that we were that we were all working on um I want to just pause for a second see if there are any comments or questions out there we've been talking at you we want to talk with you I'm curious if the things you're hearing um are relevant to the way your projects are executing or you would you'd want them to be executing so any any thoughts or comments I'm not going to call on anybody but yes sir okay would you just mind telling us where you're from Facebook please I think so so in in service now one great example might be employee Center our Employee Service Center a few releases older so this is the employee facing self-service experience built on our service portal technology you saw that uh if you were in the if you were in Nick citizens uh keynote this morning you saw some of that highlighted on the screen great um we've done a lot of research to design a great out of the box experience there's a default taxonomy in there for how to organize your content but your agency might be different you might have different catalog items Etc so it's an out of the box Solution that's 80 of the way there there's a 20 Journey that you have to go on to figure out how does it make sense to organize your content for your agency not based on your agency's org chart but based on how your users understand that content you know direct deposit shouldn't live in payroll administrative systems because that's the name of the group it should live in my compensation because that maybe makes more sense to your agency and then even going beyond that I worked with I wish I had more Federal examples off the tip of my tongue but I worked with a car manufacturer that gave other HQ employees free car washes once a month so they needed to add a widget to their employee Center to support free car washes and show them how many credits and show them the next available opportunity we're not a car wash service management company we could be you could build that app on servicenow using Creator workflows but you we haven't done the research to figure out the best way to manage car washes so when you go to curated experiences I love that term you have to understand your agency's needs your users needs to go beyond what we're giving to everybody is that does that represent your question well and I love that we're talking about the employee portal because you know it can become the basis of the of the organization's Internet it's the place that I can go when it when my browser opens I could go to that and I can see not just the things that are you know uh that are inherent to servicenow I could be connected into a third-party Car Wash app right and I can interact with that data and that experience through servicenow it servicenow is not the core application to do this work but as uh Nick was describing servicenow is a is a highly empathic platform because we we know that it's a jungle out there in an I.T organization any organization the different Technologies I've been purchased over time the ability to connect them into the serviced out platform in this case in the employee portal and see the things that are relevant to your day to your business to your work to your team that's all possible you don't have to rebuild that stuff you just have to be able to connect it in which is not very hard to do right you talk a lot about this idea of Hub and spoke employee Center being the Hub and then those third-party apps or even other Solutions on servicenow being spokes off of employee Center but how do you represent that app in the employee Center is also an experienced decision you might have 800 data points in the app but what's the one or two data points that will tell you when you need to go look that's right is it a task is it a metric something like that again that those are the things that really require you to know your data you know your employees understand what those those workflows are and um and that's that outside in I talk about outside of government in the government sometimes it's outside of your organization at your agency into your organization no that's maybe more on the employee experience side versus a customer experience side but it these same Concepts apply which is one of the reasons again this idea of total experience and you know shedding uh uh you know the idea of employee versus customer versus you know User it's it's all the the same thing always remind people that when I was a CIO my customers I was in Customer Service my customers were the employees of the agencies I worked at but it was still customer experience from my perspective so you know we can we can use different terms but I always think it's it's so important to come back to what we're really trying to accomplish which is creating and providing great experiences to people the same experiences we want when we're served by any kind of of service organization um so uh yes yes over here if you just share where you're from uh right it's a gateway to servicenow Applications yeah thank you for sharing that I think that's a great topic if you're interested to have your client come to our Workshop Wednesday because we will talk about it's a big conversation we have one more question let's get to a workshop right right after that okay so I'm sorry there's a question here yes sir sure foreign because a lot of users tend to say well this I don't even matter if they can't be needed let's do it now in service now and then you end up absolutely passive so how do you provide guidance or how do you experience in the beginning so my experience is that you can only do these projects and get that changed when you can tell a story from the bottom up but you have from the top down for the administrator or senior executive uh this that individual also explaining the need for Change and it's driven from the top down but there's a positive story and it's made possible by the kinds of things we're talking about from the bottom up those things meet in the middle you can get people to change it's not in my experience it's uh it's so complicated so hard to get people who've done a process for 20 years and probably have done it successfully and their agencies work for them for the most part right might not be the best but it works and you need and and they they need to decide that uh be convinced that they need to do it some other way because you're telling them to do it you might be new it my experience it doesn't work well unless again there's top down pressure or top-down statements or direction that hey we're going to change and here's the reason here's how it impacts the mission and you know you can make it make sense for them um again not a technology thing I think it's very much a leadership uh in storytelling kind of kind of requirement but it's right on because that's a very real world example you know um and I think that's why if you're if you're doing this work uh in your agencies you you can't just be focused on your organization you have to be thinking about the totality of the agency and you need support to get up to the administrator to get up to a senior executive who can become your Ally and help drive that those ideas down that's the that's again that's the way I've seen it be most successful I'll share one thing and then I'll go to the workshop side the other thing I would say is it's not about asking them what needs to change it's about understanding how they're doing it today Steve Jobs would always say if I ask people or Henry Ford had to like fast people what they wanted they would have wanted a faster horse they don't know you know the Technologies but they know the process so it is about understanding their day in the life and then figuring out how do you map the tech to it yes 100 again that's why I I I'll just read it one more time I I hate it when I would hear people say we can't start the projects we don't have any funding well we have our brains and we have the sticky notes and we can do that thinking and those are the most important things you need to get started and now when the funding comes and it does come eventually I've seen it a million times and then there's a rush to spend it and what are you spend it on well your project is a quote-unquote shovel ready at that point because you've done the hard work in your best positioned amongst your peers in the agency maybe to get some of those end-of-year funds to begin a to begin an effort so uh workshops yep so workshops uh in the office on Wednesday and Thursday focus on the same theme of total experience these are in person because they're Hands-On I mentioned Sharpies and sticky notes you will be filling out Sharpies and sticky notes you'll be getting up you'll be meeting people from other agencies uh learning how to use the techniques I briefly talked on you can come to these Wednesdays for customers uh Thursdays for our partners I realize there's a picture of a link on the screen but not an actual URL to write down so if Pamela is still here maybe Pamela and I can be your touch points that we can sign you up so this is for customers and partners just separate days half hour half day workshops we'd love to have you join us in our office and uh participate in these there's no there's no charge right this is uh education and um you know we do these with some uh frequency in in different forms and fashion so uh if you can't make Wednesday or Thursday let uh let Pamela know let AJ know and they can keep you in the loop about when we're going to do one I'm local so doing for our fed customers and partners is very convenient for me yes ma'am but with you are already happened let's say um yes we'll talk a little bit about Journey mapping it's not an activity we'll get deep into but I'm happy to give you some information if we chat later yeah it's a great activity you want to say something earlier we have uh my my colleague Jeremy Wilcox from U.S digital service here I I saw him you poke you peeked up around Journey mappings or something you want to share um continuously um but one of the actually I had a question which was but how do you introduce an hcd mindset into agencies that maybe not familiar with it so for example they could be doing something for 20 years yeah I think part of it is what's in it for them to change you know we again we we uh and this is not just about government people you know people don't like change right we we know this so I think the the incentives are very important um human centered design is going to create better experiences it's going to create more trust it's going to create um a greater likelihood your mission gets executed effectively and with less fraud or uh faster payments or whatever whatever the things are that are important and I think you have to connect human-centered design to those incentives and again be able to tell their story but at the same time have a top level champion who can help push change we have the the Biden administration's executive order on uh on customer experience and there's a lot of intention very clearly articulated in the uh in the president's fy24 budget around customer experience and human centered design and requirements for agencies to take on these things and of course having been in the government I know these these has come out from OMB or or the the president we're all we're all very um focused on okay I want to do this but then there's no funding or there's no you know there's there's not the follow-through so I think you you this is an important one where we need to create follow-through we need to make it simple for people to begin this process and again sticky notes and Sharpies right come learn at a workshop take it back to your agency and think together and get ready for you know go be able to tell your story whether it's to the technology modernization fund or to your agency or a program office that hey you have a way to make something better you need the money and then you can go ahead and execute in the different ways AJ described but you need that champion at a pie and they might come if you can show them that shovel ready project that Journey map that opportunity to improve trust or improve on on payment accuracy or whatever those things are for for your organization so I want to I want to be uh I'm cognizant of our time we've gone over a little bit but uh I really appreciate the questions AJ and I are going to be here we're happy to field any other questions you have or if there's anybody who wants to stick around to continue the conversation I'm I'm happy to happy to do so uh but as we as we conclude the formal part I just want to thank you all for being here I um I uh thanks for coming to our breakout but you know really thanks for being at fed forum and you know being interested in the things we're we're doing as a company and the Big Ideas that we're talking about today um I know lunch is coming up very soon after lunch um I will be back on stage with a panel where we're going to be uh talking about Mission resiliency with the deputy secretary from the VA and the deputy secretary from DHS which I think it's amazing we have two depth sex at at this event and talking about something about Mission resiliency which ties back in to how we get our work done customer experience human centered design and all these ideas that those are things that help government work under under any conditions as we saw during covet so thank you all for coming and AJ thanks for the great insights thanks for having me Jonathan all right thanks everybody