[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] hello everybody is Mark Kelly chief cooster officer and co-founder of all this Welcome to our service Now podcast series today's episode we have got hes heon TR and hes is fij Jitsu North America director technal lead for the service now practice Tes thank you very much for joining us on the show today yeah thank you Mark a pleasure meeting you so I'm really excited to have you on the show because what's really interesting is you're working with customers but you're also a service now certified Master architect and you know I think there's only probably around 200 of them if I'm not mistaken and I've done some basic work in the kind of sis admin space and I'm in very very basic work so I could only imagine the working that you've had to do to get into this starter space so it' be great to hear a little bit about that but before we do that maybe give us a little bit of a run through of your career and how you get into the world of service now yeah sure Mark um as you said it you know my name is t hant Raj I live in New Jersey um I work for Fujitsu North America as a technical lead director um for the service now practice uh I'm also a service now certified Master architect and I started my career about 12 years ago uh primarily looking into the uiux design and also as a web developer and I was lucky enough to get into a project where a client was one of the early adopters of service now and um I think it was Aspen release and that's when my service now Journey started so I started as a developer consultant and eventually into this role and tell us a little bit more about the work that you do after your Jitsu what is your role in CIT yeah so my role is primarily twofold um so I'm a director um so I'm responsible for the service no technical practice for North America within Fujitsu U which is focused on Innovation um so I lead a a team of subject matter experts and primarily involved in implementation but we also work closely with all of the different verticals within the service now space uh which is pre-sales or helping with the sales enablement and also with the uh center of excellence and as a service now certified Master architect I also help customers with strategy um road map implementations and advocate for best practices and guide them in their transformation Journey so my purpose purpose is really to uh help simplify technology because the world that we live and technology is getting complex every day so it's best to uh stay current stay relevant and also to simplify it yeah I love the way you've kind of got your finger on the PS from the technical aspect then you're comfortable working with customers because I can only imagine in the world that we're in now you've got a customer that says I want to use generative AI on this or I want to be able to solve this problem by you know drawing some type of machine learning algorithm with us and sometimes in that case there's the chance of over engineering a very simple uh solution so how have you kind of navigated the the service now platform I know you've been doing it over six years now how are you kind of finding it currently and you know we've obviously got new tools such as now assist how are you finding them yeah so um not a lot of people realize that you know Fujitsu is also a product company at heart so we manufacture one of the world's fastest supercomputer and um we spend more the more than $1 billion doar in R&D and uh we have our own AI platform talking about AI uh it's called kuchi AI uh which allows customers to uh run a POC and and to also see value across multiple AI Solutions so I've been with Fujitsu over a period of six years and it's great to see how much we have evolved uh not just as an organization but also the practice um so I started um we started uh the service no practice in North America primarily around 2017 um um earlier we we had like a much more larger team across the globe uh but we didn't have that much presence in North America and then we started to expand from that and right now we have a fairly large team uh that supports many customers across US and Canada tell us about some of the customers case studies and work that you're helping them with and maybe some of the challenges that you're helping them to overcome yeah so um we help customers across multiple um um areas so primarily it's either itm or itom which is the Baseline most of the customers actually start with start their Journey with itm and itom implementations but we are also helping them in a lot much more larger scale across Transformations so Fujitsu has been doing um Consulting for over a period of 30 years so we bring in all of that expertise but Al also we have spread across multiple areas within the cloud platforms as well such as sap and Oracle and we bring in collectively all these expertise when we go with the customer so for us when we do the implementations um service now is just one part of the implementation but primarily it's across the Enterprise we help them transform as as an organization so we talk about itm and itom just those those kind of starting blocks and a lot of people know service now for that but as it's kind of 52% um of the business you've kind of got huge aspects now for additional modules to bring through where you've got you know human H kind of that kind of hator SD aspect you've got asset management and a variety different different different areas are you finding more people now looking to expand and actually take on additional modules to kind of have that kind of for S yeah absolutely Mark I think um I would say there was an ERA where service now was primarily being looked at as a ticketing platform but right now it's a much more than that and it has so much more to offer um so with all of the Innovation and a lot of what the the customers has started to see the value of the platform and uh they're starting to look at other modules as you mentioned and so what I'm primarily focused at least for this year I'm seeing a lot of customers adopt towards GRC which is governance risk and compliance or integrated risk management that's their primary focus or seops and slowly um looking into other modules such as SPM as well as CSM uh depending upon what type of uh industry vertical that you belong to so yeah I mean the overall the trend has been you know across not just itm and itom because yes that is the foundation of it and also coupled with csdm once you have all of your foundation elements in place then it gives you um um a platform to you know go forward so we know service now the plat we already talked about some of the benefits that people can get from it what are some of the the challenges that people who maybe are new to the platform they're not taking advantage of us you know it's quite a significant investment to do that what simple advice would you offer those people yeah so very good question mark because I see mostly customers um although they are paying for the platform they are not taking full advantage of it some of the features for example are you have a visual taskboard it's a beautiful dashboard it's always been there but not a lot of customers actually take advantage of it the other thing is you also have virtual agent you have service operations workspace um and and multiple other capabilities within the platform itself such as reporting um some organizations think well reporting is always has to be as fancy as powerbi well if you have all of your data within the platform and with all the AI capabilities built into the platform you might as well start leveraging those capabilities as well right and um think I would also suggest or recommend that enterprises should start thinking about uh areas um and processes where you can simplify your workflows as well as bring in more automation so you might have a lot of customers doing time consuming or labor intensive activities so think about how you can actually use service now uh to be able to guide you with that and also start looking at um lot of the Homegrown Solutions as well I've seen many customers have um a specific use cases or business case where they have developed these Legacy homegrown applications and they have maintained it over a period of time so think about migrating these to service now it'll give you the same flexibility uh the access control and the platform is always available and you don't have to worry about any of the maintenance or the operational costs of upkeeping that application and lastly you know I would also say now that you know you have the trend of generative AI many organizations want to start with uh the AI adoption but they don't know where to start so I would say or recommend that service now is the platform that you can also start thinking about um implementing AI because you have your um it takes care of all of your day-to-day activities from an employee standpoint but you also have service now touching upon on multiple different areas across your Enterprise as well as the operations of it so what's a better place to leverage service now um and and the other thing is AI is not new to service now they have been having predictive intelligence platform intelligence from over a period of time and we have seen uh it best leveraged in uh itom AI Ops um and yeah of course you know I think service now is good is a good place to start if you're considering starting with the a yeah it's great it's great advice because I think unfortunately with media different applications come true you can get a kind of a warp view for what it is and ultimately what AI is is data and its algorithms kind of bring bringing it together and if you don't have good data uh it doesn't really matter what type of AI you have it's going to be very challenging to kind of fully reap the benefits of that and as you rightly said servers now have been in this space for quite a while and you they've been acquiring companies in the world of AI for you know at least eight years that I'm I'm aware aware of and then kind of bringing it and fine-tuning that into their offering and if it kind of felt like the last 12 months they've really kind of hit the ground running but there's so much going on in in the background there which which which which is great to see and people want to have self- serve they want to be able to add value themselves they don't want to be waiting on a customer chat line or engagement that's going to take time out they just want to be able to do it when they want it and actually apply that so you've been in this area for quite a quite a number of times time and we want to kind of get a good understanding of the advice you'd offer your younger self you're starting out because we've got quite a few people coming up from the riseo program who are listening to the podcast and want to kind of get some good insights about their journey and what better way to kind of reflect and actually take time out to maybe ask you ask sure sure absolutely so I think the key is gaining the functional knowledge and process knowledge um early on I think that is critical I did realize this um at the very initial stages of my career and I started to um start honing in on those skills and starting to focus on more of those um um skill sets but I do see a lot of Consultants today um they have a great technical skill set but I think they're lacking some of the functional and the process expertise but having this combination of Technical and functional knowledge will definitely take you um so that's the advice for service now Consultants out there and also uh think about the user engagement uh versus the platform enablement um of course both are critical um and equally important but I think you should always look at whenever you look at implementing an application it is important to look at it from a user um usability perspective and user lens perspective and the other thing is um a service now has been growing and evolving and it's getting better every day so whether you're a customer or a consultant you know stay committed and invest time in learning as I mentioned and uh keep up with the latest technology trends because you never know which technology might integrate with service now and um next thing you know you're doing an implementation on it t Haz mrra from fici North America it's been fantastic to get your insights today and your experience as we said really great to get your perspective because not only you're kind of a director and Technical lead for the service and practice you also come from that certified Master architect experience which you can kind of keeping your fingers on the P so it's great to get your insights and your advice on the show today yep thank you so much Mark thanks for having [Music] me 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 podcasts Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www. aldis.com to listen to more podcasts view our open roles and stay up to-date with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very [Music] soon