[Music] the Aldis podcast is brought to you by Aldis International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the US and Europe today you are listening to our service now Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of service now and digital transformation [Music] welcome back to the Aldis podcast I am your host Mark Kelly Chief customer officer and co-founder of Aldis today we're joined by Derek Nar Derek is a tech veteran with 23 years in the field covering defense healthc care and now fintech off the clock he's a dad of tree an ice hockey Enthusiast and a regular in Las Vegas will dive into his multifaceted career insights of technology and how he balances work and family Derek you are also the director of service now at avaler and we're going to go into a little bit more details about that as well firstly Derek thank you very much for joining us on the show today yeah thanks Mark excited to be here so aera is a a leading fintech company specializing in automated tax compliance Solutions and it's got company it's got customers such as Zillow and Netflix and a solution embeds in platform like ARL net sweep and stripe and they have over 5,000 employees worldwide if you've used the trip point of sale you've probably likely interacted with the product is that fair to say yes it is so next time you go out to eat look and see what their point of sale is and then you'll probably use for one of our products yeah I love I love the kind of nitty-gritty of the the kind of the examples for the novices where you kind of start to spot these little type of things uh around either restaurants kind of going out and just buying something in a regular kind of store and you can start to see where Technologies is Ena for Success absolutely tell us a little bit about your current roles and responsibilities and what what does that uh involve yeah sure Mark so being the director of um service now at Avala I'm basically charged with the deployment of uh service now in all areas of the business with the exception of engineering and project management uh that includes itsm hrsd sa Ops irm itom itam even procurement so we have huge goals and the reason I was brought in is to make all of that happen and it's very exciting no pressure whatsoever not at all tell us tell us a little bit how did you actually get into the world of service now yeah sure so I think my my introduction to service now is pretty typical I came in through itsm uh my company uh took a use the selected service now to take over their it taking system so I was a user and and Mark I have to make a confession I thought service now was only an IT ticketing system for several years okay so that's that that's my experience and then fast forward a couple years and I was uh given the opportunity to uh to lead the service now team in my department so then I said well I have to dig into this technology and Mark I remember taking the ad class and all the puzzle pieces fell together I could not believe how much power is in this platform in just a simple form and a table so that like blew my mind and realized that service now was a super big deal and I needed to get after it so that's how I was introduced into this product yeah and J you say that is like a few years back it's it's kind of fair to say you know if you just knew that about itsm because that was their kind of core product and then kind of recently they've exploded with so many other different types of modules listen those modules were obviously there and awful lot of those modules were there but I believe it's like only 48% now of their their total uh collection that itm is and everything else is is it's growing obviously kind of employee experience Asset Management so there's so many other different types of modules going into that area not to mention uh generative AI tell us a little about some of the kind of the micro macr trends that you're noticing in the in the marketplace well sure I mean obviously everyone's trying to do more with less and trying to use automation to keep their head counts uh flat and also everyone wants to get work routed to the right person at the right time um you know employee experience is also very critical like we want to be able to extend the same experience that we give to our customers across the globe to our own employees giving them a one place to go request help and also providing them direct access to things that they are able to do themselves so that they can be more self self-sufficient and I got to tell you that AER we are committed to this entire platform like we aren't just implementing itsm and calling it good you know Mar service now is the market leader in this space and um and I'm very excited every time a new release comes out to see all the cool things that they're going to be able that's available to us every six months Mark I think there's no way that service now is going to be able to top what they just deployed and I'm proven wrong every single time so it's very very exciting yeah it is one of those things where you're sitting there thinking this is so customer focused they've really solved it h i needs to be scratched here this is going to add me significant type of value and to continue to do that uh is is some is some some Fe and I really kind of feel like The Best Is Yet To Come and why do you think that it is the platform of choice in your sector in specialization well so I've always say that service now is very much like Lego okay the more things that you have the the cooler solutions that you can build so uh service now is is the tool of choice at avalure because we're going to be having all these Legos we can be able to uh get all these Solutions built up and uh and across departments and Route work that way track it add slas and just make sure that we have we're staying on top of everything we want to do now Mark there's something else like you did talk about uh gender Dai and one thing that I'm very excited about is that Avala is one of two companies in of service now's customer base that was selected for an early adopter program for something called uh task intelligence so it is a generative AI solution within the itsm space and uh we have our own large language model built off of our own data and Mark I know you're an AI guy so um when I tell you that our predictive Fields were over 80% that is fantastic so that is the future and that's why I'm very excited for using service now at Avala uh specifically in this tasking telan space yeah it's it's well firstly well done on that because that's that that's really really exciting you know as a technologist you want to come to work each day to solve problems right and our the job is to solve problems and use technology as a as an advantage but boy you need to have fun as well doing it right absolutely absolutely and and this task intelligence is going to help that um it what task intelligence does is that it allows a predictive uh some predictions on some of the itsm fields based on your previous data so things like assigned to uh service configuration item the the the help dust doesn't really need to think about those things anymore so they can work on the fun stuff the hard stuff the complex stuff not this I think it needs to go this team to this team so in a noice example is that like kind of looking at you know you know thousands or t thousands of incidents and then kind of creating some knowledge reports where you're spotting Trends and then be able to actually dial up or dial down the the reporting structure to say here's the insights and depending on the audience that you have you'll be able to give either one yep that's right so we can we can play with the model and add different criteria in to see how it's going to be performing for versus AI versus human interaction and as we kind of tweaked our model we've we' we've seen that 80 80% sweet spot so um now we're just going to let it let our reps be comfortable with it and then pretty soon we can just continue to automate it as our confidence grows in the tool it's going to be really cool yeah and the lovely thing about that is to the feedback mechanisms you got it's going to be itative so you got to be able to play around that keep giving more and it's just going to get better and better and better so if we kind of get into the weeds a little bit maybe you can kind of give you some examples about where the value has come maybe Z Ops could be one that maybe come to mind and that we could be able to use yeah absolutely I mean eler is kind of youngish in our business we've been around here about 20 years but we're also some our our processes have been kind of fluid okay so service now has really provided a lot of structure and tracking mechanism to to our processes so that has been a huge benefit but some for some really fun examples like I know before about their SE Ops thing but uh deployment of SE Ops here at Avala has resulted in an unbelievable five FTE of improvement through um they identifying the risk and users closing it and then service now handles all the slas all the reporting all the ticking associated with those sorts of things but I also have to tell you in the itm space our Global service desk has also seen a lot of benefits they've been able to improve their slas reduce their time to closure and through automation keep our headcount flat Avala has grown by nearly double over the past couple years but our health desk has stayed the same so that is fantastic HR case management Mark I gotta tell you that was an email to a shared inbox okay now it's something in an employee Center I can go request what I need and that work is tracked so that's going to be super exciting and then I have to talk about irm for a second mark because um when they audit once it provides evidence to all the controls okay that is amazing a great timesaver for that team so they are so thankful that we're able to deploy that solution for them because they are seeing efficiencies there as well there there's quite a few there's quite a few efficiencies saved there right so so I think you know I could probably go through everything SLE one of them I think the the one for me is the shared inbox because I've been on that journey and boy is that a painful Journey duplication of effort have you got this have you got that and it's just painful and are always missed you can't sort into buckets you can't see what groups what what things are being asked what things we could potentially automate what sort of knowledge articles we should probably create to do provide direct access so yeah it's going to be it's really really cool yeah yeah it's fantastic so what advice would you offer to that kind of C SE Suite leaders who are who are going of going that journey and what you kind of learned yourself yeah Mark I I'll give you two okay uh the first is You' got to stay away from the SE word customization okay um like just because you can do it does that really mean that you should do it okay so service now has a huge customer base they mine for best practices and uh perhaps you're not doing things that are kind of industry standard or best practice like how would you even know so uh basically my number one recommendation is be open to blowing up your processes and sticking with out of the box things because that's going to help the platform Health it's going to help your adoption of new functionality and it might just actually streamline your practices because something that you might think is absolutely critical for the process may end up not being something that's needed at all okay now I'm going to put a big Cav out on that because like we don't have a blanket no customization out of the box Only Rule here we do smart customization okay so and here's an example in the itsm space that we actually threw a customization in because it was to advance a business goal okay so our help desk wanted to be able to make sure that each ticket had a customer facing uh communication every two days okay so great let's put this on the dashboard see which tickets haven't been updated but guess what uh the time marks are both for Comm customer communication and workn notes okay that's a problem okay you can't discern if it was an internal work Note versus a customer communication so what we did is we just did a customization through a unique field in in the table there was no form visible updates so now we can report off of this custom field for only customer facing uh Communications so that is awesome that's smart customization and number two my second number two Thing Mark is that you cannot set it and forget it okay you have to maintain even if it's 100% out of the box here at Avala we use um we use Partners to implement and that is fantastic okay but when they step away that's when your team steps up okay you have to you have to do process Improvement you have to check in with everybody and you have to make continuous Improvement on on the on the module otherwise your value is going to shrink significantly over time so set it forget it stay away from my customization are my big too great advice wealth of advice there don't reent the wheel I'm I'm liking it I'm liking it Derek from you know having a service out team H what's the advice of you know managing that team getting the most out of that team well Mark I'll give you another two I think I'm on the rules of two today for you so uh the first is number one is that one team cannot do it all okay your team the service now team cannot know everything about SE Ops irm it itsm hrsd okay we have to be open to giving uh uh permissions to people within their organization the people who know their processes and know their pain points the ability to have direct access into the system to do the things they need to do with with with within within the platform I call I call these people uh scale developers here and they are part of of my team they are are in our standups they are in our slack channels we are constantly like they're an extension of the team because we are all in this together so that's my number one one team can't do it all okay number two is that you really need to acknowledge everyone's strengths and roles to be able to lead a a a really great service now team we all have different parts to play and we all have different different strengths and we're better because of it now I'm going to tell you I'm going to brag for a second mark because like I have an amazing ba youv imp potty he is is so skilled at meeting with stakeholders and bringing them back bringing back actionable things for the team to implement so like he's completely different than me and then I got two devs on the team I got arpit ago and ambo Sharma and they're so Adept at taking complex like customer Quest and breaking into something so simple and out of the box and and simplicity is key so so I have to tell you building a great service now team is built on a foundation of trust um and you and I am blessed to work with with all those people every single day we all have unique skills and we're better because of it yeah I think like you're really playing to your strengths from what I can hear there yeah it's great Derek where do you see the platform going to well you know as I said earlier with task intelligence it's artificial intelligence what I saw at knowledge this year absolutely blew me away me being able to leverage the platform to be able to do these sorts of really easy repetitive things is going to be a game changer and I will tell you that the um the text to code um our pit threatened to resign because he thought his job was going to no longer be needed with us being able to just do text prompts in order to get in order to get scripting so that is going to increase the speed of development from the service now teams it's going to provide greater democratization of the platform to people who um aren't you know hardcore coders I mean AI coupled with all this low code no code stuff that we've seen over the last couple years is really making it very accessible for the process owners so that's where I see where're going and I cannot wait to get there 30 second last question if you were to do it all again what advice would you offer to you and yourself well Mark I told you it's a rule of two today apparently so um I have two things that I would teach my I would tell tell my former self uh the first thing is a is a quote I don't know who to attribute it to but I think about it often is that hard work will always beat out Talent which does not work hard okay so if you have talent and you work hard you're going to be unstoppable and the opportunities will come so that's my first pie piece of advice and the second piece of advice that I like to give my younger self is that uh company culture is absolutely critically important to your job satisfaction you have to to be sure you're able to bring your authentic self every day to to your workplace and work is such a big component of all of our lives like you just can't gut it out and uh and then in in in at age 6265 after 40 years of working all of a sudden become happy there's no magic Finish Line um you have to enjoy both what you do and where you do it so those are the two huge pieces of advice that I would give myself uh when I first started working professionally D nor director of service now a aala thank you very much for your time today Mark appreciate it have a wonderful day thank [Music] you thanks for listening to this episode of the all this podcast if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcast Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www.al this.com to listen to more podcasts view our open rolls and stay up toate with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very [Music] soon