Service Request Playbook – Jeffrey Gore, ServiceNow

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone, welcome back here to techstrunk TV. I'm really happy to have one of our service now friends back with us.

Actually. I think it's the first time Jeffrey's been on our show, but Service now, of course is no stranger to text drunk TV. Let me introduce you to Jeffrey Gore Hey Jeffrey, welcome to techstrunk TV.

Hey, thank you very much for having me. Excellent. So Jeffrey look, you know you you're a first-time long time as they say radio, right?

But seriously, give people a little bit about about who you are and what you do and what you do at service now. You're very good. So, my name is Jeffrey Gore.

I head up what we call employee workflows product installation marketing and I also head up our teams that are responsible for communicating really any of our releases as we're going to be talking about today with our quarterly store launch a long time service now employee. I've actually been here for over seven years at this point originally coming in to head up our HR Service delivery product line get that off the ground get that built had various roles at service now over the past seven years, and now excited to be talking to you today about the quarterly store release. Absolutely and and if you don't mind I just want to you know though everyone's heard of service now and probably there's a lot of service now customers out here watching this I want to Kind of frame when we say a quarterly store release.

The fact is servicenow does a major platform release? Is it once a year or twice a year? Yes a year twice a year and they they're always named for cities or they have been recently.

Anyway, the most recent release was Tokyo. And that's right. Yep.

We did an extensive coverage on that. I gotta think that that was October late September something like that late September is correct. Yep.

and now this quarterly release kind of well, it's a quarterly release. That's the name quarterly, but it it builds on top of in this case Tokyo. That's a correct way to view it.

So our customers were asking for a more rapid Innovation cycle. So yes, we have two family releases a year, but you know by moving technology and Moving Innovation to a store we actually have the opportunity to deliver Innovations faster for our customers. And so you know while we want to actually speed up the rate of innovation you have to do it in in a structured way.

So starting in the May release, we actually bundled all of these Store updates into a single release and this is actually our second quarterly release Here on November 3rd. com and and these are updates that yes, they're tied to the Tokyo release. You may even find that some of the Innovations we are going to talk about have backwards compatibility if it a little further back than Tokyo, but but it is the spirit of the Innovation that we can actually deliver quicker we bundle it up in a logical.

For our customers via the store. Actually, thanks Jeffrey. I think that kind of lays out.

Because now we understand what the service now store concept is as well. All right, let's dive into it. What do we what do What kind of gifts do you have for us here in the store for this quarter?

Yeah, really good. So so to your original point, we're not changing our Innovation themes for the year 2022. So in Tokyo we were talking about experience.

We're talking about intelligence. We're talking about agility and the quarterly store release that actually came out November 3rd. It really really, you know, piggybacks on those overall themes the types of Innovations.

I'm going to be talking about today maybe are some new Innovations for your listeners one. We are introducing a new workplace scenario planning technology and I'll actually talk about that a little bit for let me just introduce three and then I'll then I'll give you a little bit about detail about each so we're first going to talk about workplace scenario planning. Um, secondly we're going to be talking about some Innovations to our eye Tom product line with automated service suggestions, and then we're gonna talk about some of our industry Solutions in this case.

sector Digital Services and service request Playbook Actually, I actually probably should just take a moment and introduce the first one then then that gives you sort of a flavor of some of the Innovations. We we have being delivered. Okay, so workplace scenario planning is actually a technology.

I'm very excited about because you look at the macroeconomic climate you look at what customers are looking to achieve right now as it relates to optimizing their physical workplace and this is a technology that directly delivers an experience to allow organizations to one optimize the space they have but two to do it in a way that actually continues to drive productivity within their employees and so quite simply this is a new module within workplace Service delivery that allows a space planner to handle a major move or a major reconfiguration process. So imagine a scenario where you have two office floors and you have both office floors partially filled this actually gives The space planner the ability to have a visual interactive drag-and-drop capability to say this is how I'm going to reconfigure the space. I'm still going to drive productivity within each of these teams, but maybe I can actually shut down this floor.

I can turn off the heat turn off the the services take costs out of the the physical space as well as Drive our sustainability initiatives. And so it's that type of scenario planning that type of capability that is that is net new and this would otherwise be done via spreadsheets and and just manual processes for any given organization. Absolutely, you know, I I learned a friend of mine in the VC world who I worked with for many years always told me the best business is when you can ask them.

Well, what's your biggest competitor and they say it's a spreadsheet? Yeah, that means we need to do something if you're using spreadsheets. It's probably not the right answer here.

Not that spreadsheets of bed mind you but It's not the right answer here. Well, that's right. And and then even further than that, you can imagine that as you're going through all these what-if scenarios and and trying to optimize the space at some point.

You actually have to take action. So yes workplace scenario planning is about the what if scenario analysis, but at that point in time you actually decide to commit and you're actually going to reconfigure the space think of all of the tickets think of all the downstream work involved with handling a move of that magnitude and so by having everything on the single platform, you can imagine you click a button and now it's kicking off an entire workflow where any individual that needs to interact with the process to actually complete the move is is tasked to complete those activities at a timely fashion. And so there's even this added benefit in terms of efficiencies in Time Savings by by having everything together and in one platform and by the way organizations might not necessarily get this right the first time Also gives them the ability to reconfigure re-optimize, you know continue to to make the best use of the physical space that they have.

Got it. Excellent. Excellent.

You know what else? I I want to mention and Jeff if Jeffrey if I have this wrong, correct me. Generally, if you are already a service in our customer with the platform these these store add-ons.

Are they're part of Parts, you don't pay extra for them, right or am I wrong? Yeah, that's actually a good way of looking at it. So for the store releases, if you go to store that service now that come and you actually look up workplace scenario planning.

It will tell you the underlying entitlement you need to utilize this but it is all enhancements to existing products. And so this is an enhancement to workplace Service delivery. So our customers that have the workplace Service delivery application suite are going to get access to this for no additional charge and that's going to be the case for the the other products.

I'm going to be talking about today good. I just want to make sure people realize that we're not You know looking to stick our hand in your pocket. Yeah and servants now customer in this comes with it.

All right, let's jump into some of the other ones Jeffrey. Yeah, very good. So the second Innovation that I'm gonna talk about is automated service suggestions.

Now, this is a new capability tied to our item product. So so once again to that to that that same conversation we just had this is an extension to another existing product and this is really about defining a service blueprint for your organization as your listeners are going to be well aware. We have a configuration management database.

We're actually tracking the relationships between various CIS and other CIS within within your organization and the benefit of that is that when you look at a business service, when you look at an application it lets you actually build the mapping and to Define. What is the downstream infrastructure that supporting that service? Now maintaining those those service Maps is complicated and in the spirit of intelligence.

We wanted to allow machine learning to assist a operations analyst in defining these service Mass maintaining these service Maps within the organization and so automated service suggestions is doing just that it's actually using machine learning to track Network traffic and to help build this map to say this application. This business service is supported by these pieces of critical infrastructure. So it is more most basic right if you are monitoring this network traffic and you see that the email service is degraded you actually have a real-time view into the infrastructure that supporting it giving you a much quicker mode to resolution.

We can actually go drill in get the details and and understanding you know, what servers what? Years, you know what what other aspects of the overall infrastructure are the the root cause of this degradation? Some example, but just imagine this like at scale you have all of these service Maps being built across your Enterprise using machine learning to actually help you maintain them is really going to assist the the work of some analyst that has to do this day and day out and keep these up today.

You know, look, let's be realistic. macroeconomic factors are roiling our industry right many Industries not just Tech and at some level if you're going to have less people. our scale isn't going you know the scale of the job the scale of the infrastructure the scale of what we have to manage isn't getting less because we have less people and so You know without harnessing things like ml AI ml whatever you want to call it, right and more automation.

There's no way that you will you can you know, it just doesn't equate otherwise, so I think we're gonna see more and more. Yeah, and absolutely kind of solutions. Yeah, I mean the move to hybrid working models is a critical factor of any of the technologies that we're talking about today.

Yeah, you know, you don't have individuals in the office. And so, you know using technology to help help map this out, you know, it's a net benefit to any organization. Absolutely.

Excellent. All right. What else do we have in the store today?

Jeffrey? Yeah, so the final Innovation that I want to talk, okay. Innovation I want to talk about the service request Playbook.

Now this is enhancement to our public sector Digital Services solution. So in our first quarterly store release, we actually launched a new product for public sector. This is really about non-emergency services and helping governments actually manage the work the intake that's coming in from their constituents.

So, you know, very specific industry solution, but something where you know, these particular organizations actually need something built for purpose and so this is about delivering a boat for purpose capability where I can actually take and take from some stakeholder within the community imagine things like questions around parking violations, or I need a permit to obtain for for some construction that I'm doing these types of just basic everyday services and Organizations and government agencies need the ability to intake this but they also need a Playbook to be able to actually complete that work. And so these could involve a complex workflow. They involve coordinating many constituents or many agencies within within the government service and having the Playbook a single place is instead of having all these discrete Services.

We're actually have to have a a citizen have to know how to how to navigate the government organization. I can actually take that initial request and I can handle all the discrete pieces of work in a single Playbook to be able to respond to that citizen in a timely way but all sorts of coordinate all of the different groups that are responsible for delivering that that overall service and so so that's what this Playbook does. It's a single workspace for.

An agent for lack of better term to be able to manage all of the work. That the citizen is requesting within one location and to be able to deliver that service at a timely and efficient manner. actually, and you know when we say public sector I have some experience.

You know in that look you have the federal space which is kind of a world unto itself. I forgot. The total fed it spend I was 20 or 30 or more billion dollars.

but then there's also the state and local government public sector which you know collectively is as big or bigger probably it's just, you know, not as concentrated around the Beltway maybe and but nevertheless, you know, this is not a niche kind of You know probably this time of solution really is going to be applicable to any state entity any local entity any government if enrolled wide, right just just us you're right. Yeah, exactly. I mean just the concept of responding to Citizen inquiries, you know, there's all of these 311 services in the US, you know, that's that's the right type of of use case for this capability that I'm talking about.

Sounds pretty cool. com. com, you'll even see a banner at the top talking about the November quarterly release and access to any of the resources that we just highlighted today.

fantastic so, it's quarterly I will we see another store release next quarter or actually, I should have mentioned this it is quarterly, but we have made sure that two of the quarters match up to our family releases right here. We'll have a new city. So you're gonna see Utah's next one is city is Utah.

I know I know my geography. I know this is actually the first time we've broken the mold. We're going with an entire state for this workout release.

Well, you got that that you know, we're moving up from cities to State this puts a lot of pressure on you guys. It better be a big one. Is going to be huge.

Jeffrey thank you much for coming on Tech strung TV today and telling us about the latest quarterly store releases that are available to service our customers out there and and look it, you know, if these really appeal to you and you're not a service now customer maybe it's a good time to go check that out. Jeffrey thank you for coming on thank you on anytime. You're like, all right, we're gonna take a break here on Tech strong TV, and we'll be back in just a moment.