Overcoming Automation Challenges with Amit Saxena at ServiceNow Knowledge 2024

This is techron tv. Welcome back to ServiceNow's Knowledge 2024 conference. We're talking with Amit Saxena and we're talking about how well automation and how it's gonna evolve because we have robotic process automation, we have frameworks in the now platform.

We've seen the rise of ai, there's now this thing called process mining. Walk us through how all this stuff comes together. Is it all gonna converge or are they slightly separate and orthogonal?

When do I use what I, I tell you what, you know what? We've been talking about convergence for a while, but it's already happening. We have credible stories from our customers where they've started picking up a one tech stack, like integrations.

It start adding elements of RPN and then once they burn their whole technical depth, they start mining more bottlenecks using process IC technologies. Um, and then we have added something new as well. We got a stream connect with Apache Kafka offering.

So all those customers wanna bring in a huge amount of data into ServiceNow bidirectionally. They can tap into our newest offering called Stream Connect. We hear this phrase hyper automation.

Everybody has heard it at least once or twice, maybe a dozen times. They all nod their head, but I'm not entirely convinced that they all know what it means or just, it just means something different for everybody who wears it. Yes, I think this change of intelligent automation, half an automation, automation fabric, these are all interchangeable terms.

Effectively for me, it boils down to giving a choice to our customers to be able to pick the right technology for the right use case instead of trying to shove in some technology for a wrong use case. And that is, and we have seen plenty of that, Mike, you have seen it plenty around our customers. So hyper automation is truly bringing it.

The second part is how do you package it together? Because if you make all of this discrete technology separately, it becomes so expensive. Customers cannot realize that TCO over three or four year period.

Um, so giving a very intelligent way, creative way to package it together. Thereby they just get enough, realize the value and then they can expand with the consumption based pricing. So we have brought this all together and the final piece of the puzzle, which you've been hearing since morning, is generative ai, is how we can increase the productivity of people who are building those hyper automated workflows, right?

And with this journey I infusion, you have all those app build, app generation and a catalog generation. That playbook generation and a bot generation and integration generation. We are making it easier for those novice developers to work along with ProSight doubles.

Yeah. Who has the appreciation for the pieces? And I'm asking the question 'cause if I go asked a dozen people here about, you know, how does this get automated?

They all look at me and they go, ai, they have no idea what's happening underneath that. And they give AI credit for everything. Are these things gonna overlap to the point that maybe we do have something that we're not standing around going, Ooh, that's RBA and that's this other automation framework.

They're kind of just parts of the platform, their capabilities, Right? I think we are overly using AI than what it is. Um, now the thing about that is because of chat GPD and other things, people are able to understand and automation what it means to them.

Unlike any other, all these technologies which have been around for a while, it was very difficult for an end customer to understand because they were always in the background and doing their magic chat AI somehow they can relate to. So now they're giving a blanket, uh, term out to everything. They don't understand it's gotta be ai.

But underneath it, of course there is an elements of generative AI when you're talking about summarizations and cats. Intense generations try to understand a lot of unstructured data and getting a meaning out of that. Um, however, there is still a very meaningful place for technologies like integrations.

Today in the keynote with the bell, we are talking about service tower, able to search across all the enterprise system. Guess what, how it's doing. It's all APIs based integration.

And now if you're trying to unlock that data with Darknet and Java apps and legacy apps, you will need an RPA and, and so all of these technologies still have a way and that's where the service dollar ecosystem really flourishes because we have made all of these technologies as a capability instead of standalone be play technology. And that makes it easy for our customers to adopt it. Do you think we suffer a little bit from automation fatigue?

There are all these islands of automations out there that people have put together. It's hard now to go to the boss and say, we need one more because they go and look at you and go, the last 10 didn't quite do what we thought we did. Yes.

And now I have integrations about integration. So right. Do we need to take a giant step back and think about this?

Again, There is no easy answer for it. Um, however, if you start looking at where you want to be from two to five year horizon and start building a strategic roadmap for a company, you will soon realize the pace you've got to move is much, much faster is compared to what you've done the last 15 years. So then you have to work at a strategic vendor which allows you to move at that pace, at your own automation maturity.

So then you apply this to this customers who have this island of automation. First thing is, hey, let's give you a visibility of what you're doing. You know, I mean, you'll not believe a lot of customers who have this multiple COEs still do not have a single view of what all the automations are doing.

So we have invested in building products like Automation Center that gives you a single visibility. Now once you have that visibility, you can find out how many of your automations are already giving you the value you intended to if they were giving you value. You don't have to touch them.

Focus on things which are not giving you a value. Focus on those things. New organizational goals, which are hitting your point, that competitive pressure, especially on the top line, not the productivity.

And the bottom line, the top line goals, combat, and this is where you start looking at areas of exploration instead of fixing something, which is breaking every single week and luck just to keep the lights on, here is a time to retire them and move with a modern automation platform offered by service. I have often felt that the automation cart is before the horse. And what I mean by that is we have a bunch of applications and we add more and then we build the apps and we deploy them and then we think about the integration.

Maybe we should start with the integration thing first and then build the apps around it, because then the integration thing's extensible. And I think you have a very fine point there, but I would take it even further. What do you say?

I don't think so. We need to be technology focused at all because the moment you start picking up a technology, start building it around, you have lost your focus on the outcome. So you start with what is business users trying to accomplish?

Because there is a multiple ways to deliver that experience. But coming back to your point, you are right. What do you touched upon is what we call connected enterprise.

So connect your enterprises that, what do I mean is various departments have various workflows, they have different tools, different people, and different system of records. So first create a fabric to connect them together. And this is, we are not even talking about any automation, they're just talking with each other.

And once we understand each other language, it makes it much more easier to identify those automation opportunities and succeed in implementing them correctly, which is more future proof. So, so you are right, but I would still say, let's start with outcomes and not the technology. I once had a conversation with Abella and he was explaining to me all these integrations and he's, and and after a while I was like, you know, well that sounds like a bit of a mess.

I mean, how do you kinda cope with that? And he looked at me and he said, it's a mirror of the business. The business itself is a kind of a mess.

So I, how can you expect it not to be a mess? So do we need to have a conversation between the business and the IT side about what is the goal? What is the strategy?

How do we do this? Because one doesn't work without the other. This is going back to your earlier question and that is a lot of those automations and integrations were done point to point because a request came in, it was urgent for that time, needs to be delivered in a specific window.

And the folks, the COE teams, members and developers who worked on it had a very siloed view of the technology they had in hand as they used the technology to build it. So that became a point to point integration. Now any asset built using point to point integration is not reusable across anything else.

So that talks back to your patterns, integration patterns. So that's where the single data model, single architectural approach, because it avoids you to make certain mistakes which you would do otherwise. And if you invest into that right from the beginning, it'll be, it'll be good.

Oftentimes a lot of the customers think, Hey, it's a low code provider, we don't have to think through this. But at least for the first few integrations, it's good to bring enterprise architects into the mix just to make sure we are designing this right, because this would have ultimate lot of written. So you can have five ads the, instead of trying to just launch the application one week and claim it a victory because you may end up taking sort of shortcuts, which you have to redo it again, I feel like in a lot of ways the technical debt of the integrations is killing us.

Yes, you're spending, You know, the space 70% to 80% of our time maintaining the integrations, right? And we don't have enough energy left over our resources to actually drive some innovation. So do we need to take a look at this and kind of maybe measure what is our automation technical debt and how do we think about that?

That could be a one way, that could be a one way to take a look at it. The the other way could be, see if you look about maintenance, I think it all broadly categorized into two categories. One is just the upkeep, meaning things are changing, you just need to keep the lights on.

The other is error resolution and mitigation. Things oftentimes do not work the way it's designed to work. Automations fail then I, I'm shocked and appalled they hear that.

And when they come down, how, what do you do? What is your run to address it? How do you bring them up?

So it's a lot of that maintenance time you're talking about spent in just correcting those integrations. Now just imagine if you have a visibility tools of identifying the patterns of why they're failing and anything which is overly failing, instead of trying to automate fix it, you just redo the implementation, redo it on the right platform so that way you are not wasting time for valuable time of your automation COE team in just maintaining that integr, that approach comes from top down. The leaders saying, just emphasizing this new mentality of how to rally our series.

We over the years have seen uh, the rise of this digital business transformation officer. A lot of them are chagrined because they're not having the level of success that they thought they would have. They went out with Great ideas.

The vendor Promises. Yeah. Right?

And they run into this integration nightmare and then they can't quite get anything to work as quickly as it can and things that should take months now take years. How do we kind of reinvigorate our digital business transformation initiatives? Because today it feels like we're stuck.

I Would say first it comes down to, we have always from the last 15 years by Q and I, in fact we have talked about, hey guys pick up the best of the breed. And we flooded that message in the market and people responded. Even a lot of analysts wrote about it.

So that's where that island of automation problem arise because of that, right now, the best of the breed technologies often are not designed to work with each other. So then you are trying to build a custom solutions and then you bring in huge amount of time and si. So you lots Of consultants, Lot of consultants and we love them by the way, right?

But in doing so, very few people have paid attention to the enterprise architecture that connected enterprise, what you were talking about, right? So the one prop, so one way you can do is hey, well why don't we bring all this smart people with enterprise architecture to design it, right? But that becomes the whole BPM way.

Nobody has type patience has gone down. The second way is pick up a strategic vendor which is automatically connected with each other. And that's what the ServiceNow differentiation is.

The, we keep on honing it. Every single technology ServiceNow is adding to the tech stack or even an acquisition mayes re-platform on the same now data and architecture. So that problem you were describing does not exist, at least in ServiceNow technical stack.

You still have other systems, enterprise apps you're talking about. Now you take that approach, but you have reduced your bigger problem down to a much smaller problem which you can now address. I kind of see two types of leaders in it these days.

Um, and they're both on polar opposites. One is, ooh, new shiny object, go chase. Yes.

The other one is, you know, this is my thing. I'll use this thing. This is my hammer, I'm gonna go use it for everything.

It seems like we need to find some way to get to the right tool for the right job at the right time. Yes, you said it, you said our pitch very well than anybody would else. That's why are really excited with the way we have packaged our hard hyper ululation because pick up the right shoes, right tool, right tag for your right use cases.

Now we have to be also very clear about these leaders you're talking about. They have an average tenure of three to four years. They will show certain value.

So at what time of their career they are going through this transition also changes their mindset. If they get out, see the success go through before they're go to retire or move out of the job, it'll be less incentive for them. But the people who have already made mistakes and learned from it are much more open and adopting and and grazing new technology.

But at the same time they wanna do it right. And that's where they, if they realize they have internal gaps, they bring in certain experts into, and that would be right. Consultants, This sounds like being president.

I spent the first two years blaming the previous administration and then the next two years saying it's the next guy's problem. Right? Right.

And that's where we can really help educate because, oh well I'm here only for a certain period of time. I wanna show the success because my OKRs are based on that limited time. So show me the value within an 18 months or a year.

And that's where we are trying to say, well, time to value matters and if you really are interested about time to value, you might as well pick up a strategic vendor where you can save all the time. So you've worked with a large number of customers over the years. Are there anything about them that you've seen where they have attributes among the ones that that are successful?

Or do they have any common psychological traits or technical history or what leaps outta you about the people that you know who are making this work? I think it's less about the organization culture. It's more about one individual in this organization, which truly believes and can rally the troops around them.

These are the guys who would be spending a lot of time in the event like this in knowledge. These are the guys who will put together a pilots and prototypes to educate and they are passionate about ongoing learning throughout the year. Now you have to find these individuals inside the organization.

Sometimes you're lucky to find those other times you have to hunt for them, keep on looking for us. And these people, once you find them one and twos of it, they really fundamentally change the success rate of your overall digital transformation of business transformation efforts. And so it comes to all to these people, be really passionate about this automation technologies and they are able to influence the mindsets of certain leaders to a level where a seller or a people like you and me will not be able to do.

All right folks, you heard it here. Hey, sometimes we just need a hero. And a lot of times those guys are girls, but they're gonna be leaders.

They're gonna be the leaders. And that's what defies the next generation of leadership for us, for ServiceNow, for our customers. Thanks.

Pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you.

All right. And we'll be back in a minute.