good afternoon everyone caresoft technology would like to welcome you to our servicenow federal Tech talk cmdb or Asset Management which one first a debate or a foregone conclusion joining us today from servicenow we have Arun Iyer and Marcel Shaw before we get started I'm going to launch a quick Poll for you all if you wouldn't mind submitting your responses while I run through a few housekeeping items that would be greatly appreciated you all should be able to see that up on your screen now and I'll go ahead and get started with the housekeeping items so please note that all lines have been muted to reduce any kind of background noise during the presentation if you have any questions throughout the webinar please use the Q a pod on the bottom of your screen and we will do our best to answer by the end of the presentation or follow up with you offline this webinar is being recorded and a copy will be emailed to you just to tell you a little bit about caresoft we are a trusted government I.T Solutions provider supporting public sector organizations across federal state and local government agencies including education and Healthcare markets we'll give a couple more seconds on this poll and then I'll go ahead and hand the floor over to our speakers for today hey thank you very much thank you very much uh and thank you all for joining us on this uh afternoon and um you know taking your time away from your busy schedules uh to engage with us on this discussion so my name is Arun Kumar Arun for short and I am a field CTO and a principal executive architect forget the titles what I really do is I try to help customers with value realization on the platform uh and that's where we are you know in this debate that we're talking about uh I've been in service now for two years and four months almost to the date uh but I've been in the service now ecosystem for more than 11 years I started on Berlin and I've been an implementation partner and instructor a customer facing a lot of the challenges that you are facing with the platform and now in my role I do executive engagements I do Vision alignment uh I do a transformation Blueprints and architecture design but enough about me uh let's see what my co-presenter and my colleague and friend Marcilla Suave I am Marcel Shaw I'm an advisory Solutions consultant and I work with Arun here at servicenow and I have also been at servicenow for two years and four months and I also and uh I've been around service management for a long time I started working on a help desk 29 years ago so I'm dating myself there um and uh a little over 10 years ago I started blogging at marcelshaw.com about service management and asset management and I've written for several magazines and everything and this is one of the topics uh that uh I'm passionate about so um you know when Marcel said blogging I economic immediately triggered something in my head but I don't want to go any further without making our legal department happy uh this is our Safe Harbor statement which says that a lot of things that we talk about here are sometimes our own opinions and things that we are stating forward looking and do not base your purchasing decisions on what we're talking about here and do your due diligence uh and that's what this particular slide says but I want to kind of bring about the the the triggering thought that Marcel got me into uh he's a blogger and you know he was writing a Blog about cmdb or asset first and we were discussing and I was reviewing his article and we you know we got into a uh agreement of disagreement so to say because uh he had an opinion and I had an opinion and we said if you and I are having this uh Dilemma on which one first then quite likely our customers are also having the same one and is not relevant until you put a certain context to it and the context is what we are talking about today in this slide right we're talking about you have limited funding you have limited availability of resources and then there are these operational goals and then there's a cost avoidance and then security all of these things are placing a certain frame of reference within which you had to make certain choices how do we navigate through some of these things and why do we want to make these choices the reason we want to make these choices is we have you know a lot of you know process efficiency inefficiencies or we have a lack of cost visibility and we're always reacting to things and a lot of our processes are manual so when we look at these kind of challenges they're saying how do we make those choices how do we make a delusion between what is operationally important to keep our business running and what is the cost challenge because remember we are going to go back into that budget cycle and ask for money and we are going to have to fund these programs so that's where this whole thing came about and that's where we said let's share this with our audience right and uh I'm going to let Marshall talk about this yeah everyone so you know when you bring in assets into an organization uh and into an agency there's a couple of different perspectives that are or the is there's a couple of different perspectives that we use to look at those assets um we look at it from a cost risk in value and we also look at the assets from an operational perspective the cost of some value we're looking at things like um are we utilizing the asset what contracts associated with it um are we are there any pending renewals or upgrades things like that from an operational perspective we are looking at things like is the asset running right now um what are what is the asset uh providing as far as Services what other infrastructure works with a particular asset and these are also generally two different groups of people that are looking at the assets from the operational perspective and from the cost risk and value one of them is more financial one of them's operational yeah so um I'm gonna do one thing that you know just so that we do a quick check with our audience um is this something that you're facing in from the polls I saw there was a strong leaning towards one side of the versus the other and I'm not going to reveal that yet but does this make sense and is this why you're here uh quick check on the uh chat there uh and Heather if you can assist and let us know what people are saying yeah so Arun let's talk about the uh the you know what is it Asset Management just a little bit more so when you think about it it's a photo it's a focus from the finance side right and that will that will typically include life cycle management Inventory management and license management the assets are actually owned by the organization and the benefits that you're going to get from it Asset Management come in the form of cost control so if we move uh so if you move on to the next slide there cost control you get risk management and the Strategic decision making now I once went into a department store with a debit card around and I thought I had a certain amount of my bank and you know bought some clothes and guess what I did I overdrew that that card when you when when a lot of organizations make a purchase of their assets a lot of times they do it blindly they don't really know what they have so when you have an asset management system in place you're actually able to make a better uh educated decision because you know what you have it's kind of like knowing what was what would in my bank account before I went into that department store another thing about Asset Management which is really key is uh there's there's multiple stories uh that I've seen out there about uh what happens when an asset goes missing for example uh people's Social Security numbers and and I don't want to name any organization but a lot of the security breaches we've seen in the past are really from assets that aren't properly tracked or assets that have gone missing you think about this during code but a lot of people took assets home their laptops they probably maybe multiple laptops and they got refreshes while they were at home uh what happened to those other assets uh do we know where they are what what's on those assets and uh and what happens if we have to report that missing that can be a big embarrassment to a federal agency and it and it can also um you know cause be cause an agency to have to spend a lot of money to rectify that yeah so I I do agree with you on the whole Asset Management perspective but let me kind of recant a story of something that I was associated with um and in the context of the configuration management database but before I go there I say what is the configuration management database right anything that is important to your organization operationally that you want to track manage and monitor changes to is going to be an infrastructure item in your infrastructure that you want to know about that you want to track that you want to manage and the reason I cannot say this is because I asked I work with a lot of customers and the questions that I asked the customer uh to assist their maturity is I say when something goes down when something happens in your organization do you consult your configuration management database and based on that answer I can assess um what is the maturity of their configuration management database and why do I say that I'm not trying to be difficult or trying to be hard-nosed about it but practically being in a situation where I have seen uh where there was a compromise in an organization and the systems are compromised and we did not have a mature uh configuration management database what happened was there were the network folks who had a set of spreadsheets and they had the latest information and everything that was happening in the network we had the applications teams who had all the information about the application where the database teams what everything about the database but guess what it was not connected it was not linked there were no dependencies and we spent a lot of time and I'm talking about days and weeks trying to get that information on which system to bring up first what was more important to the organization so that's where the cmdb became really core and Central to this whole discussion and saying let's track all the CIS let's manage the dependencies let's look at what changes are happening in the organization because you know what the cmdb and you you have an opinion about this Marcel I'm going to let you yeah I mean yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a question here roon um you fly have you ever sat at the gate at an airport and they said we're going to have an equipment change oh yeah sure they're changing out the playing tip typically right that flight number that we are uh uh is associated with that plane but they never change the flight number do they so they must be tracking two things here they're tracking the airplane that has its own number and then the uh the flight actually represents the service so if you take a look at your example here with the email server there are two ways we could look at an email server what what is that how is that email server providing us email service I mean there's software there's a database there's a routers attached to it that's an operational view of it but there's also the actual server itself the physical server uh you know how what licenses that associated with um you know who owns that uh is it available is it assigned of course it's assigned into into the configuration here so we're able to do if we had to do a change management procedure to change out that server the actual service may not need to change uh because the configuration item itself is representing a service yeah so Marcelo I think I think you kind of validated that point saying what we present to the business and what we have is infrastructure are I don't need to be Associated need to be linked right and when we're looking at the cmdb we are kind of coming to a point where we're saying you know what we have to identify and inventory what we have in the infrastructure okay and we have to populate the cmdb because that's the repository that we have on the platform and we might bring application Performance Tools we can the devops the infrastructure and we want to kind of harmonize and identify and reconcile all the entries so that we know what we're talking about and we want the relationships amongst them so that we have the dependency dependencies established but it really cuts across all different functional areas in the organization so you know we talk about uh the itsm where incident problem change all have these Ci's bound to them so incident happens to a certain CI change happens to a certain CI problems are associated with the CIS but we also have item it operations management you have ID Asset Management all of that connected extreme right platform we allow our customers to build their own apps on the platform but they can use the cmdb as well because it's a core platform capability right so we we have this thing available but then we come to this point we're saying okay what comes first well your own so some might say that uh the its management has to come first because I have to have all my assets kind of in place and to be able to populate the configuration management database and without that I don't know what I have plus by the way I talked about that security risk before I would think that you would want to know what I.T assets you have and especially what you're putting on those assets um right from the start so you want to track it from the day you buy it to the day it's gone so that you can reduce that security risk yeah so I'm going to take the cmdb side but before I do that I just want to take a sidebar some of these light-hearted Graphics that you see here thanks to Marcel's daughter who drew us these nice graphics and you'll see the theme kind of following through where we're appropriate so this is pretty cool it always brings a smile to my face uh but this is Nicole the cmdb you know the playing the role of the um the operational side so I want to kind of introduce a whole new thought here saying you know what we don't have to be so swim Lane driven saying itsm and the cmdb or item and the asset management servicenow provides applications for both okay but we have to be uh cognizant of the fact that from a business perspective they're not looking at your uh Solutions as itsm or item or item they don't care about all of that they need to know that their business is protected that their operations are protected that their assets are protected and servicenow has an enabling functionality I just want to bring that up here uh I will apologize to those who feel like this is a little too Technical and there are going to be a few technical slides here uh although we're trying to keep it as much business focused as possible well Arun I'm going to stop you before you get too technical yeah are you are you going down the path here and saying that servicenow can actually manage the the asset from two different perspectives like it's a single asset so yes and thank you for bringing me back on track um so the the part that I'm talking about here is that servicenow uh asset management is on the platform service now cmdb is a core part of the platform but there is functionality that we have a technical enabler that says we can synchronize the CIS and the assets so that we maintain a consistent view from both the operational as well as the financial perspective so see pointed out that email server sorry bro if I'm changing out that email server that's going to make it a lot easier right because when you change that email server you're changing an asset but you're changing a configuration item as well so now it makes that process much easier and and I and I totally agree with you from a process perspective from a business perspective but from a technical perspective I do want to highlight there are two business rules that manage and maintain that relationship and when you insert a configuration item through various different processes whether it's manually whether it's through Imports whether it's to our Discovery process you can also create an asset into the asset uh database uh but all this is based on The Logical mapping so there is a mapping that you have to go through in terms of the business and then it will maintain and manage right you can leave you know get into a place where there are all from CIS or orphan assets but you know I'm just trying to make a technical Point here but from a business perspective yes it's possible to answer your question um Marcel that yeah we can take a CI and an asset associate them and maintain the consistency for both the perspectives so this is kind of a key part of our discussion saying you know you thought cmdd or you thought asset but you can synchronize does that answer your question Marshall yeah absolutely yeah so so this functionality kind of harmonizes the assets and CIS but let me kind of put it into a different context and we are talking Federal space here we we call this the federal Ted Talk most of our customers in the audience that we have here are all you know in the federal space uh so when we look at this and we talk about the zero trust architecture challenge what does that really mean okay the scissor model uh of the maturity it talks about pillars it talks about devices and networks and applications and data all of these in their sense are assets so you and I can talk all kind of geekdom about something being a CI and something be an asset but in terms of zero trust and when the scissor looks at it when the CIO looks at it then the CTO looks at it they're all looking at assets they are protecting and they're protecting against access from the outside which are the signals that we're talking about whether it's users with internet of things whether it is devices and they are all accessing assets uh in their mind there's physical facilities there's databases there's cloud services there's all kinds of I.T infrastructure and they're trying to protect for that Aaron are you saying are you saying in your in what you just said that assets that participate in a zero trust environment are actually coming from the two different disciplines both the cost risk and value side and the operational side absolutely absolutely because when we're talking zero trust and we're talking the organization they are not parsing these specific definitions right so we have to address that and that's where we start looking at this mission criticality driven strategy and what do I mean by that so let's look at some of the considerations the cmdb itself is neither a project nor a process and it's not like it's implemented once and it's done because it's going to be an ongoing foundation for the Enterprise the asset management is we already talked about very closely tied to the cmdb because uh not all CIS are assets and not all assets are CIS but there is a certain interest that we have across both okay and software Asset Management has been proven to be a great source for harvesting cost savings remember where we started we said we have to address the operational goals and we also have to look at Cost savings so we want to kind of get to both but we cannot do this without the participation and sponsorship of our mission partners you mentioned software Asset Management there I want to just take a little sidebar here and tell you I once had an experience with a big Power Company here on the east coast and they put in a software asset management system and they looked at utilization in that software aspect management and they paid for their software asset management system in uh three months by recovering assets that weren't being used so when you started out this presentation day and you talked about uh some of the challenges people have are the costs or they they are they perceive as the cost I think there's a huge benefit on that software Asset Management side yeah so and I I do see some uh some uh comments in the chat and there are people already taking sides but here here's here's where I want to kind of try to bring that into context and you know somebody said how do you bring these assets uh or the cmdb uh CIS into the order so we are not really looking at product and functionality but there are so many ways you can bring the CIS into the uh cmdb you can have a discovery bringing the information in you can have manual entries you can have import sets and you can automatically create an asset when a CI comes in basically oh wait wait stop there stop there so what you're saying is one Discovery tool brings in both both sides yeah I I said that without saying it but yeah so why duplicate it right why do them separately why do one before the other is that what you're saying so so you have to do it in context though so you know from a technical perspective we can say as soon as the asset the CI comes in there's an asset but I'm going to switch gears a little and let me kind of present my case here so I'm my prompt here says what is important and what I kind of posit is that not all systems are important to the same level to the mission so what I mean by that is that there are certain systems let's say you are in the federal government and you run a benefits program and it's the snap program in USDA or you're running some permits from another organization or you are DHS and you're running some benefits uh or the applications for uh the uh um you know the the people coming into the country or the refugee program there are so many different programs and you're running those and those are your mission critical uh systems or applications and then you also have the backend systems where you have somebody running time sheets or some other uh social applications and if you don't separate them if you don't give them the level of importance you're going to treat them all alike so my position is that let's identify what is more important to your organization and how do you decide that there are different criteria and I have just listed a few here is it the number of users is it the data that you are storing and protecting in terms of Phi pii some other Mission sensitive data or is it the service level agreements that say that you have to have something available in a short turnaround time otherwise some needy family is going to go hungry you have to think of that context and that context is going to allow you to tear the systems so you are going to say let me identify my mission critical systems and let's steer those and say tier one is this x amount and I'll just picked a number 10 here saying 10 critical systems and I'm going to populate the CIS and hence the assets for those systems but end to end so make sure that there is coverage end to end everything that needs to keep that system operate additional and financially viable is all available in that relationship and uh I got it I gotta say I'm listening to what you're saying here and I'm thinking to myself look put aside whether its management or cmdb comes first if somebody goes there's a lot of people out there that say Hey I'm going to build my cmdb so I'm going to I'm going to do servers first then I'll do routers next um I'm what I'm hearing is something different here you're saying that's not the right way to do it yeah so I think you know I got a little passionate about my Approach and and I think you kind of caught me there so I do agree that you cannot start with all servers because if I go and give an assignment to a group that's handling service and say populate the cmdb for all the servers they're going to make that their mission and they're going to just populate all the servers and they're going to publish all servers without any context without any logic without any relationship to what is important to the mission and same with the network and others I'm saying let's not do that let's make everybody aware and that's where I talk about the people the processes the Technologies everything in the organization to make sure that those top tier systems are fully provided for and we address those and we exercise our organization with those uh people process and technologies that means that's then what you're saying is that you have to build out a common service data model really you should good before you start populating that infrastructure in the cmdb you know if people didn't know it they would say you're a plant because that's gonna that's good that's what I'm going next uh but you know you know we're talking about operational and tactical dashboards that's that's good because that's uh uh that's kind of uh presenting the data but yes we want to start with tier one we want to look at everything and how do you do that where do you do that and that's where we're saying start with the common Services data model okay and I I'm going to apologize ahead of time for some of the people who feel what I'm going to do in the next few slides is a little too Technical and geeky but I just want to keep you in check though okay you keep me in check all right so the common Services data model this is something we in servicenow are converging towards and it's actually a two-part a two-word phrase right it says common service data model so what we are doing is we have so many different solutions on our platform so that all of that works cohesively and there is a certain uh lineage and transparency and uh and a uh traceability right through all of what we do on the platform we have this thing called the common service data model and I'm going to simplify this this is just so that it's complete and people know where I'm starting from but if you look at it more from a data model perspective we're starting with the capabilities that an organization has and presents to its uh its users right and then there's a business application which is then connected to an application service which has Technical Services underneath it and the technical services then further have other infrastructure items you know below that the reason I kind of present this in this way is to show you that there is a relationship right from the business capability to the actual infrastructure item and that can be traced right through and there are different use cases in your organization on the platform that are all going to use the and I'm going to let this transition come out here so this is kind of giving you a full landscape but what it's doing is if you look at the the middle layer there which says cmdb on the left you see the business capability and you see the whole link is right through through the infrastructure CIS and what this is giving you is the capability to capture what is Mission critical in certain records within an application inside the cmdb and that's where it's going to be stored so let me summarize this let me summarize this for you Arun what you're saying is that identify from the top all of the different missions or businesses that we have right at the very top and then the technology or applications that support that business and then down below that the infrastructure and that to me sounds like it'd be quite handy for any business owner um and and it would also be quite handy for it to have for the on the operational side yeah so I I will I'll spend a few minutes saying um we talked about the fact that you want to identify a mission critical systems and our mission critical systems typically expose or offer a certain business capability to the constituents to the outside world to the end users and that's what that is and it is supported by a business application uh or a set of business applications underneath that and these business applications uh have have a certain lineage back to the technical services that are offered underneath it which depend on infrastructure CI so I gotta I got to tell you something you know I was uh I was doing some research research about uh four four or five years ago and I saw uh Gartner had was predicting in 2022 2023 they said I.T objectives and business objectives would align and uh and basically what you're explaining right here seems to be what's happening we're aligning all of the business and I.T and we're presenting it through the cmdb it's really like Google maps of your entire infrastructure yeah so uh so I I I'm gonna say yes but I'm also going to say that you know a lot of board beers talking about here is not flip of a switch it's not something that is going to happen overnight right ah and it is something that we have to get our mission stakeholders together and have them see this big perspective uh I don't think we should um although we kind of keep using the words and terminology saying business and I.T I think business and ID is the same thing because the it is only the enabler for the business so we have to change the way we look at these things and we have to address it like that uh because once the business is able to express what they need the business or the mission and uh the enabling technology is able to um kind of capture that you know and you know again apologies to those who are non-technical and were moved from the mission side but I just kind of communicating that this is how all of this is stored inside the cmdb there are relationships there's the CSM tables Etc but what it allows is the business uh the mission and I.T to get a full View of how the mission critical systems are actually implemented and how their dependencies flow down right down to the lowest level CIS and you know what I see as a benefit of this around think about this a router goes down and uh I can't get the email and a lot of people can't get to email so hundreds of support incidents start opening up I can't get the email I can't get the email and now we've if I don't have something like this in place I'm probably going to start with my email server when all along it's a router so I see the benefit of this is me is me not only getting to a root cause really quickly but being able to consolidate all of those incidents that have just been opened up based on that router issue yeah so I'm going to kind of since you kind of brought that up I'm going to take it to a a different discussion or a kind of next level of this discussion um so what you would do is you know I started with this question when there is an outage in your environment do you consult your cmdb that's on the back end uh but when there's an outage in your um organization are you able to disseminate that information on a portal saying your system is down and all this is Possible only if you have this whole lineage established and the relationships established and the dependence dependencies established and if you put it on your portal somebody who's coming in to report that something is down already sees that and you're automatically deflecting incidents you know we had a power outage uh last week in fact uh I had a leak in my roof from that thing um but you know what I call the power company they said we are aware of an outage in your area and uh they told me the estimated time it would be fixed so you're kind of telling me that uh that's what it does at an impact level yeah so so that that's that's one of the that's one of the benefits of this um uh the fact that you can see upstream and downstream wherever you start so if you say email server and you go look up who are the people or who are what are the systems that are affected or impacted by this email server you can see that and what is the email server running on is it here is it outside is it Office 365 it doesn't have to be owned by us remember we said cmdb is not always owned by us it could be anywhere in the data center or in the ecosystem but you know it and you know who to call you know what to do and a lot of times you know you and I have been on these Bridges where there are 40 people on the call and saying oh this system is down and everybody is kind of scampering around trying to find where the problem is once they find a problem it takes only like five minutes to fix it but finding it is a problem and the cmdb is going to help you on that right I do want to address a couple of the questions that came up in chat somebody wanted my background it says you know that yeah but I see Renee and uh Renee says uh love it curious how you can clean up the cmdb with this in mind once you have already populated having data quality issues pure bori says Echo Renee so uh um I think uh if you are in a place where you have uh the uh cmdb populated or the assets populated you're already in level two or level three of this discussion because you already brought these things in and there is no doubt that there are situations where you land where you have orphan CIS where the CI exists but there is no Associated asset or you will land into the orphan assets where you have assets they don't have Associated CIS this is a very practical situation because the CI is coming through discovery and assets uh either are Auto created if we do the mapping and we do the insertion of the asset based on the CI but if you have uh assets that are brought in from procurement because that's where assets get procured invoicing comes in you're receiving it and it's now in your asset uh but you don't have the associated so you can definitely run queries to resolve that right and kind of clean up that uh in terms of the data quality I think that was one of the questions that somebody had about uh said um uh data quality somebody said um how does anyone out there populate and manage service to service relationships uh so the the uh the fact that you brought in the uh CI but you don't have an Associated uh asset or you have not you have lost the connection to that you can definitely run queries uh and we have this thing called the data certification module on the C on the on the cmdb where you can run the you can have this whole data certification setup and send out tasks to certain uh owners of these certain classes of the CIS so that they can inspect the data and they can resolve this as tasks there so don't think that this is just querying and Reporting on it but there is a follow through and follow-up of it where you take a look at the data certification module and you assign tasks to people so they can remediate but not only that they can actually periodically certify that the data is good there is nothing worse than having a cmdb that you depend on but it's not accurate so you've got to kind of take it take that into mind when you're selling this up right I hope I'm answering some of your questions uh as is obvious there's a lot more discussion uh that we uh you know we need to kind of get into uh around these uh and Saji says uh I agree with your own defining the level tier level is critical I I will recommend those criticality levels should be a part of standard policy of an organization or should be approved and published uh I do know Saji uh professionally and personally and he's done a lot of good work around the itsm area so um I value that uh contribution so tearing off the applications uh and Mission critical systems is definitely important data simplification model is out of the box I think yes don't quote me on it I'm not a licensed guy I'm not a product guy I'm more of a Solutions guy but we can find out the answer if you want to send me an email we can definitely provide that Marcelo or I can provide that and uh John Fraser hello um thank you uh from the Veterans Affairs I see uh thank you for participating in this and Marissa he says yes our teams are doing exactly that thank you for that validation uh I'm really uh happy with the levels of engagement on this um uh chat uh and I appreciate that uh I know we are going to be running out of time soon so we talked a lot about cmdd but I want you know the what we set out to do in this session is to try to kind of bring a happy medium a common ground a way to address both cmdb and assets and I'm gonna just quickly go through some of the things that we have in terms of a cost saving approach you know so we talked a lot about cmdb and all the operational goals we have but there's also the the um the asset management side where we can get some quick benefits from this so value realization um and you know specifically we go to the cloud we are doing we're implementing a lot of software there's a lot of challenges that we have around this uh you know we have a lot of the disconnected tools we have cost visibility that's not uh you know evident in most of what we do and we always are in fire drills and we are reacting to things so assets get lost we don't know who has what and you know a lot of these manual processes and we're depending on heroes in our organization and I think we can avoid that so here's a laundry list of things we can get uh outcomes quickly from right in terms of reducing costs in terms of reducing risk in terms of improving efficiencies and we have various different options um and as you can see the theme of what we are talking about mostly here is that let's not try to boil the ocean let's not try to do you know just because our product and our platform provides all this functionality doesn't mean that you can take advantage of everything on day one and it's not uh there is a certain participation from the organization that is required so that's where we're saying let's look at software Asset Management hey Marcel you want to talk a little bit about this yeah there's definitely a cost savings and I talked about it before you can uh you can look at the usage I think that's just such a key and then and and there was some stats you know I've looked at over the years of the cost savings just from that there's so many people that uh over purchase on their licenses and then they they under utilize those licenses so when you have an asset management system in place and you're tracking your software assets you can track your spending you can automatically track your uh demand uh through Employee Self-Service requests you can identify overlaps and it's funny because we were talking about Discovery today um I've worked with several service management products and usually the cmdb just comes with itsm uh the what people charge for generally is Discovery and that's uh that seems to me it would be an overlap if you try to do both disciplines separately so um yeah you can over you can identify overlaps uh when you have a software asset management system in place you can also use it to detect vulnerabilities uh when things go out of service um you know I I had a customer once that uh when we did a discovery on the network their email server was out of compliance and uh they weren't getting any updates uh and they also had older versions of software just because you have a version let's say of adobe today that's fine it doesn't mean it's fine in six months from now sometimes there's vulnerability in the applications that you have and so if you're tracking those you can make sure that they're up to date and by scanning or keeping up to date on what's on the machines you can verify that you are in compliance and that you don't have any vulnerabilities on the network um and also uh with software Asset Management a lot of organizations uh over purchase by an average of 10 to 20 percent because they're they're definitely afraid of audits and so with the service catalog you can not only uh with with the asset management track all the system but the service catalog you can divvy out licenses and keep track of who has licenses uh so that you don't uh go over your license counts or at the same time um you can keep track so that you're not under utilizing it uh the assets as well hey uh I I do want to talk about uh the uh benefits of software asset management but I I see Pierre bori uh asking a question uh and I think uh it uh we can have a little discussion and maybe we can follow up after the session as well saying this conversation makes an assumption that asset management and cmdb are or are or will be set up in servicenow says can you talk about impacts of value of cmdb without Asset Management being set up in service now but imported from another system um so um I'm going to make some assumptions here uh Pierre and I'm going to also answer your question hopefully um so in the uh the whole platform the way we look at it right we always think that uh yeah we we are we we are a little partial to having everything on the platform but it doesn't preclude us from having something outside the platform uh and that I I say that because um we have these strong Integrations to things that are outside the platform and when we talk about automation engine and the integration Hub and the spokes we have for the um for the uh systems of record that are not inside of service R and it's very common whether it is the workday or the Oracle at CM for HR or whether it is the financials or the sap or various things I would treat the cmdb that is not implemented inside service now like one of the systems of record first of all let me pause here and ask if that is a reasonable way of looking at it if you want to chat on the put on the chat and because I'm asking I'm actually responding to your question directly because I think this is that makes sense he says okay okay thank you thank you thank you Pierre so when you look at it like that we have different um uh strategies for integrity right so one of the ways we look at integrating with anything outside of service Towers we say does the data need to be inside service now is their benefit right and this is more of a solutioning kind of a discussion uh but I think the the audience here will benefit from this that's why I'm kind of going in this direction so we can bring all the data in but that would mean redundant data so I'm assuming you don't want to do that because uh you already have a mature cmdb somewhere else so the next option becomes let's use the data where it is relevant for the process in the stage you know in the whole workflow how would we do that is by integrating using rest apis with a you know Json payload and bring the data with it's reasonable and needed uh for that particular situation and we have various different uh solutions from remote processing to you know looking at it as tables outside of service now versus just using a on-demand rest API so there are different strategies to use it where needed functionally and so I'm not saying that this is required to be inside the servicenow um uh platform but one of the big advantages you have having it inside the platform is you're not looking at only those Point Solutions so for example if you have a cmdb that's outside or if you have an asset that's outside and you have these 15 different processes that are all making these Point connections to refer to the data outside of cmdb I mean to the outside cmdb then you're incurring that overhead of making all those Integrations on the other hand if it was inside when whence inside the platform we don't even call it integration we're just referring to that data inside of the platform so that's how and and I'm sorry I'm not going to give you an answer one way or the other but I'm just giving you the pros and cons and seeing how it could probably facilitate pause peer did I answer thank you for a great explanation thank you thank you Peter yeah because I I mean these are the things why we do these presentations because and Marissa said in addition to bringing the data into the cmdb io uh and also to import and leverage the right service now product to help them such as APM for application portfolio management which adds logic to the data CMD is a database of data it matters when we apply logic such as other product areas do such as APM um uh very well said Marissa and I think uh the whole csdm conversation we started was to bring all that into context because when you get into csdm whether it is strategic portfolio Management in PPM or project portfolio management or APM in application portfolio management or the digital products planning all of that is using that same model and you're now able to cohesively manage your organization let's um as we start to wrap up here let's just um go back to that question we asked what comes first cmdb or item why don't you summarize what our conclusion is yeah so I will do that um and you know we talked enough about Sam so I'm going to say here's the way I look at it right um uh I I don't think that uh we have to make a a binary choice because we can achieve both but it has to be in context and the context has to be that it is Mission driven prioritization and what I mean by that and I think some of the people on the uh in the audience kind of uh validated that saying you have to tier the systems you have to start with the mission criticality should I bring up a timesheet system first or should I bring up the um you know the e-permit system or the things that is more of more importance to the organization whether it is service to the citizen or whether it's Revenue producing or whether it's something that keeps the slas in place so you start with the tier one and then you iterate it I don't know what tier one means for all of you in the organization but each one of you has a tier one that is either seven systems or ten systems or 15 that you is it's a manageable number use that and then use the synchronization of the cmdbn asset again if you bring in cmdb through Discovery uh the Cs using Discovery you're going to get a whole lot of CIS and you're it's not in context but if it is in context of the mission critical systems used by the mission critical systems you're going to focus on what is important to you and the associated assets with that and when you look at the cost savings that we are talking about so we cannot just say oh operationally we have addressed the goals we are also you know we are to stay in business and when I say we I mean us as in the federal agency we're going for budgets we want to show that we are implementing things that are bringing us value and we are going to show to our leadership show to our teams that we are benefiting from implementing Solutions on the platform and software asset management is a great way up to it don't try to do everything pick two uh Publishers maybe you're you're you have Microsoft Visio that you're providing to people who are always not using it and then one or they have one use and they're done or maybe it's Adobe or maybe it's Oracle I don't know which one is your most important publisher use that to harvest the cost saving and your solution is going to pay for yourself for itself and you can exhibit that to your leadership to go back and iterate to do more of the same solution and in the meanwhile you have exercised your people your process your Technologies because remember it's the whole organization that's going to be affected by it and that's where I think it's important to kind of take a breath first view rather than a depth first where I think Marcel you said uh you know shall we do all servers yeah do officers and then what no no let's start from top down start from the business and then you know close out of that it really what you're really doing at the end of the day is you're providing a real intelligence around every asset in the organization you know why you have it and what it's doing um and and and you're able to uh really apply your business rules and and and and uh your change management processes uh to that asset and yeah I think the multi-prong approach and focusing on a mission is is critical uh and I love I love that we kind of came to that conclusion as we debated this yeah I I know there's not going to be a yes or no or a binary answer but I think there is a very uh practical and logical and a mission criticality driven way to do this thing so thank you everybody for being a part of these uh this hour with us and hopefully this has been informative uh we have enjoyed it uh and I love the interaction on the chat um so we're gonna throw it open for a few questions if there and back to Heather thanks everyone uh like you mentioned we are going to open up the floor for questions so if you have any feel free to throw them in the chat or the Q a pod um we do have one in the Q a pod it is can either cmdb or Asset Management be implemented without implementing the other if yes what are the consequences hey Marcel do you want to take this one well it's kind of reversed it's kind of a reverse way of we've been of what we've been looking at but really there's a cost risk and financial consequence if you don't do asset management and there's an operational consequence if you don't do configuration management um the risk of uh of not tracking your assets throughout their entire life cycle uh the biggest one to me is there's a security risk you have to track them how many people have uh laptops at home open your drawer if you you know and look and see if you have an old Blackberry in there why isn't that why wasn't that Blackberry returned uh I've run into a lot of customers who have a Blackberry in their drawer believe it or not or old old devices that the organization should have so there's a consequence of not doing asset management but at the same time how does somebody run their business uh from an operational side and and really not know what the infrastructure is that supports it all the way up to the top of who owns that business uh and who all the smes involved and what's the impact levels of that service that you're providing uh so there's a consequence of of not having the configuration management set up so a multi-pronged approach by focusing on a mission a critical Mission first without trying to boil the ocean makes absolute sense to me in Marcel I think you sent some people on a Time Warp when you said Blackberry yeah I think some of the people um on the call like what's that I think it's some frozen yogurt place which happens just on the Lighter Side hey but uh I think let's see if there's any other questions here I don't see any other questions so I think if you guys want to go ahead and wrap up we'll we'll be all set thank you thank you very much everybody on the call and this has been a really good uh hopefully we have given you a perspective and you know and I definitely like all the contributions people have made over the chat and thank you very much Marcel I'll let you close it off I I yeah I would like to thank everybody as well this has been a great uh session for me as well just working with the room here and uh and his knowledge on the configuration management database is amazing um I I'll finish off by saying I've worked with competitors I competed against servicenow this platform is absolutely amazing it's a gold mine um and it's the future it's a platform in the cloud uh I think that uh there's so much that can be done with it and and and the configuration management database is such a center point of all of it thank you all right everybody thank you heather thank you guys we hope you all uh we hope the information you received during this webinar was helpful if you have any further questions or would like to request more information please feel free to reach out like I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar this meeting was recorded and it will be emailed to you uh most likely by tomorrow so yeah thank you again and have a great day everyone