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] you're listening to the Alis podcast service now series Our Guest today is Alex bichi Alex is the senior director of the service now platform at ICF Alex welcome to the show thank you I appreciate you being here it's exciting just seeing how many of these that you guys have cranked out through the years I'm just grateful to be a part of so many great people that are part of your uh program and we're delighted to have you I was very much looking forward to this one in particular obviously we we've known each other a little while now so excited to talk about the work you're doing at ICF but let's start with you Alex tell us about your background particularly your journey from where you got started what got you interested in technology some of the roles you've held along the way and What's led you to where you are today as the the senior director of the service now platform for ICF it's interesting I've always felt like my Journey's been a bit of a schizophrenic rocket I'll say that's one way to put non-traditional but I like it exactly so I spent a lot of time in the Marine Corps I went in as an infantry guy who found an opening as a helicopter pilot and that sent me on a road and about the time I was wrapping that up looking to do something different the Marine Corps offered me the opportunity to go back and get my masters and so I turned to my wife I said hey this is this it's a rare opportunity to be paid a full-time uh employee salary while going back to school so let's do it and I had so I was accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School where I got my masters in computer science and I will say that's what really started the whole journey of where I am today because from there I had the opportunity to go down to San Diego to a command in the Marine Corps down there leading a a support center for an entire part of the uh Marine Corps so it was focused on Communications and command and control systems for the Marine Corps so I I had a globally dispersed team that was supporting the Marine Corps with all of these very unique Communications and command control systems and I adopted or inherited as a part of my taking over a call it an itsm solution that was built on SharePoint and I had to live through I think it was like a 2016 upgrade or maybe it was a 2015 I don't know there was a series there was an upgrade that I had to survive uh going from one version of SharePoint to the next and then we're TR constantly trying to improve it and I constantly felt like I was taking the rock of SharePoint and squeezing it and squeezing every lot little drop of blood I could out of it and it just never felt right I didn't like it I felt like I was spending a lot of money on a technology that didn't support the organization and more holistically the organization so that sent me on a journey of trying to find the right solution and honestly I didn't know anything about service now at the time and I wasn't even looking at service now but they happened to come into our organization one day I was invited to a meeting very stereotypically me I was probably about 10 minutes late and I walked in very unenthusiastically and a very dear friend of mine now at the time is standing in front of in front of the conference table I sit down at the corner completely disinterested and he's talking about the service now platform and within I would say about four and a half minutes of him talking or me hearing him I was the most interested person in the room I'm like holy cow you guys can solve all of my problems with out of the box capabilities and you have thousands of Engineers working to support it and I have four SharePoint developers I want to done I'm want to be done chasing this game so that was talk about literally a moment in time that completely transformed my whole sort of Technology road map was that meeting and I was halfway out the door with the Marine Corps at the time so unfortunately for the service now sales team I did not get to close that deal and they still haven't closed it my command still hasn't my old command still hasn't bought it it makes me bang my head against the wall and but I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity as I left the Marine Corp to join service now and I supported the Navy Marine Corps team on the sales side there for about three and a half years and just fell even more madly in love with the technology I really I a believer in it and about I don't know eight or nine months ago now at this point uh ICF who ID had a really good standing partnership with in a series of accounts and they reached out to me and offered me the opportunity to take over the service now practice here at ICF and the perfect marriage of my time in the Marine Corps and the leadership aspects and things I learned there to tie it together with the technology that I absolutely admire and it was just the it was a perfect culmination point for me and so that's what led me to hear and now leading the service now practice really focused on bringing the the best and brightest to bear for our clients and give people an opportunity to make a difference in their own career paths as well it's so funny that very much of sliding is Thor's moment had you not have attended that meeting where would you be but we're happy that you did because you've landed where you are now so let's jump straight into it look a lot of people listening who are in the feder and go space will know who ICF are as a business huge organization but as a quick introduction for those listening who are maybe not as familiar with ICF tell us a little bit about the organization and then I want to jump straight into your role as the head of the service now platform you know it's interesting ICF has been around for a long time I think 1969 let's call it they have been focused on really they formulated out of the desire to grow small business and bring things together and bring opportunities together and what it's become over the last 50 years or so is I would consider it what's intriguing to me is it's very Mission focused in specific it's a large consulting firm 11,000 employees focused on mostly making a difference in the world whether that's environmental whether it's healthc care very specific focused opportunities and which is really cool talk about going from the Marine Corps and leaving that to where it's like trying to find a spot that is devoted to a a mission again so I would say ICF has a really great focus on the mission and back in 2020 they started their platform transformation Journey so through a series of Acquisitions they built the service now practice over the last three four years now and that what it really means is that we're marrying that mission oriented subject matter expertise with technologies that both support the business our ICF business as well as our clients business so bringing that mission Le Focus using technology to better support organizations so that's in a nutshell what it is we focus on a few key parts of the platform and really and build our business around those Mission areas as best we can as someone who's sat on both sides of the table in this conversation both the buyer and seller and now back to implementation again can you talk to us about what you've learned having been on both sides and when you look at the work you're doing day today where are some of the highest demands that you're seeing from icf's customer base for the service now platform lessons learned a lot of them so I would say my top one is that success is a three-legged stool so if you look at one leg being the client one be one leg being service now and the other leg being the partner I think that's where the magic happens when you get that laying risk out on the table being communicative weighing all of the options it's not easy to do a lot of times you're dealing with with Egos and and different objectives but really at the end of the day I think the good Partnerships that three-legged stool everybody's focused on great outcomes every when I was at when I was I'm a customer now and I when I was trying to be a customer I'm focused on my own mission I just want I want to improve the way in which we do things service now equally all I wanted for my clients and I think a lot of my teammates back at service now like all they want to do is have the technology used to provide value back to the mission of the client and then ICF and other uh key Partners that's all we want to deliver we want to deliver value at a at a speed that people can handle and a lot of times when success doesn't happen it's usually because one of those one of those legs is missing from the stool and it's not because people don't want to be a part of it I think it's often because the doors aren't open the willingness to collaborate isn't quite there and that's a hard one for people to get over but I would say that's the biggest lesson learned having been now on all three sides of it is every time I see success or every time I see a lesson learned where we didn't quite reach success it's because one of the legs was missing from the [Music] store you are listening to the alest podcast when you're looking to scale your team or if you are interested in showcasing your company in a future episode reach out today or if you're in the market for a new rule visit our website to view open positions www. aldis.com look given the role that you have and the position ICF hold in this space you've got a high level oversight of of who's needing what and within the service now ecosystem it's obviously gained so much traction and um attention over the past few years where are you seeing the demand for you and your team to come in and help your customers what are some of the main things that's stand out and maybe an example of one or two recent projects that you're particularly excited about so we break out our business into three what we call pillars so we have platform Innovation Enterprise Service delivery and digital portfolio governance so there's a series of Technologies of service now technologies that support that application sets in each one there's there I would say to me are this are the the iron is hot and platform Innovation is still all around custom applications I think that's still that's hugely important to every organization I use custom applications now to help manage our business things that don't necessarily fit into an outof the-box solution or are complimentary to an out-of-the-box solution but there's still 100% that demand that desire and I think as people think through and try to grow in the citizen development whether you want to call it that or some more Mission focused application sets that's a huge topic that's a huge area of of interest to a lot of our client base within Enterprise Service delivery itm is still there but I think it's largely had had its time there's still going to be new customers who need it and want it and those types of things but where I really see the change happening for me is in HR Service delivery the idea of modernizing the workplace experience that is the next itsm in the next three years I think it's going to be there's going to be a huge spike in growth in the HR space because I think everybody's trying to compete there but to me service now is the only platform that can do it all and do it well and so we're seeing a lot of demand from there and that's a huge Focus area it is now surpassed we have more certified h implementation Specialists than we do itsm it's our biggest area and then on digital portfolio governance I'd really say it's SPM with the sprinkling of APM I honestly think every client should start with APM itom and APM understand your technology domain so you can transform everything not everybody's ready for that though but SPM I can run any project whether it's an IT project whether it's building a ship whether it's creating an airplane and all of that can be run through SPM and so that's another area where we see a lot of traction and it's just getting them there also just G more generally is the desire to run it like a platform it's a platform for digital work so I think there's more and more organizations who are starting to understand that and actually do many different things on the platform but those three are kind of my focus areas right now thank you for sharing and and that a great segue into your role and and looking ahead you and I were speaking I think it was last week about the exciting investment that ICF is making at the service now and I suppose the workload that you've got for the year ahead so let's talk a bit more about that I know you're passionate about the the growth of service now and the the ICF offering so can you give us some insight into your outlook on 20124 what you've been tasked to to build and how that's going to translate to projects and ultimately opportunities for people to join you on this journey yeah I'm going to take that question a few different ways so one is from the talent aspects so one of our major Focus like I talked about the pillars is aligning our business strategy with our people strategy so there's a whole new Focus for us in how we recruit and retain our talent my goal from a talent aspect is that I want to put phenomenal people back into the ecosystem when somebody moves on from ICF or continues to stay either way I want everybody else to turn and go darn ICF always produces top talent everybody that goes there comes away awesome that's my goal from a talent perspective but it means having focus on what we're going to be exceptional at and where we're going to partner and then how we're going to grow our talent in the areas of where we're really really strong and it falls into those three uh pillars from a more of like an offering perspective though our F we're actually releasing I'm super excited we're releasing our first offering on the service now store starting in January and that is it's focused on Mission applications and sort of that citizen development movement and it's it basically is a subsequent 30-day roll out of a governance model within the first 30 days of how to do citizen development help people establish the right Frameworks and ingestion and analytics so they can make the right decisions about what ideas they bring to bear as a mission focused application whether that's citizen Dev or they have independent people who are building it um and then the next 30 days is all about putting an application through that through that Pipeline and getting it out on the streets getting it through production in inside of 30 days and then 90 days is replicating that the the next 30 days is doing it again so now it becomes that muscle memory so that's the first first offering that we're putting out on the store but where we're looking to the Future from an offering standpoint also is really around content packs so I'm not trying to become an application development partner our business model isn't set up that way and I really want to focus where we're good but where we see a lot of clients uh especially Federal clients across the board are always doing the same sorts of things over and over again we're having to do a lot of common implementations and so the content pack idea and service now creates these today and I just think it's a it's hugely successful it's very beneficial to our business model is creating specific sets of of update sets and configurations that are packaged as a Content pack put on the service now store for download and basically convert some of the outof the-box functionality into the things that like a federal or a large organization needs to adopt quickly so it's prepackaged ready to go and it's where we see those common things so from each of those pillars that I talk about our goal my goal is to release a Content pack within each of those pillars as a starting framework for 2024 so that's that we're centering our whole business model around it um as a as an organization very cool one of the things you twitched on there was was talent and given the success ICF is having within the service now space we're see more and more companies move towards it all the time you and your team are going to be very busy in 2024 and part of what we talked about was the the growth opportunity so I I want to finish on talking about the talent component in particular the difficulties in it is in attracting Talent within service now because of the the supply and demand shortage so as a leader of a service now division when you're speaking to people about ICF the the mission the environment the culture what you're building building what is it that you tell them that gets people excited enough to join ICF over some of the other great companies also trying to hire the thing that I really liked about ICF when I was on the service Nows side is there was everybody I talked to was like I felt like they were experts I just generally connected with them as a passion for the technology but also as people too and so the thing that I love about it is you get to work with some really fantastic people and a in a very large diverse organization focused on really good Mission sets and for what we're trying to accomplish like we're trying to grow talent and unique and special ways and I think that makes us a differentiator we're not trying to be the body shop we want we want people who take ownership of their career who understand the platform and know what what they want to really be good at and we want to Foster that and then because we're a large organization like I peers who deal in other platform Technologies and so you get to also work with other Technologies like you're not just going to be solely service now but you're going to be focused on service now but touching into other Technologies as a part of it so as a technologist at Heart Like that's one thing that I love to see is like how are we connecting different things together what proofs of concept are we are we bringing to our client base so that they can go ahead and then Implement those things as well we can help them do that so I think from an ICF standpoint I like to think it makes this different I don't I don't know all of the other partners out there but we really do have a focus on specific Mission sets and we try and build our business in alignment with our talent so that at the end of the day everybody wins whether you're coming here for a sh short stint and you just want to cut your teeth on some service now certain expertise you're going to get that you're going to be a much better service now technologist by coming here because we're focused on driving those outcomes for our clients and building the talent that we need and you're going to be doing it while you're focused on really cool Mission sets I think that's what really to me sets us apart that's that's sales saw it coming through in Spain there what a great summary Alex you've convinced me but seriously though obviously you and I have been speaking for a while now I was very excited to get you on the show because your background is so interesting and the work that ICF is doing in within service now is incredible and is only going to continue to grow so we want to get the the message out there for our community many of whom within the service now space that ICF is a great place to advance their skill set and work on Amazing projects so we appreciate you coming on and telling your story we wish you the team and everyone at ICF the best of luck in the months and years to come and we look forward to having you back on the show again in in the near future thanks Alex yeah thank you thanks so much for allowing me to be a part of this I love listening to the podcast so I really appreciate it today thanks for listening to this episode of the oldest 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 w ww. aldis.com to listen to more podcasts view our open roles and stay up toate with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very [Music] soon