hey everyone welcome back to another episode of titans of now I am your host Robert the Duke fedora and I'm super stoked about today's guests because I can think of few others who have had as big an impact to customers partners and consultants in the ServiceNow space now after either one of those a partner a customer or an indie consult you're going to want to listen to this very carefully and get to know this man ladies and gentlemen mr. Jeff nickle of GI tea Jeff how are you hi Robert pleasure thanks for having me oh man the pleasure is all mine you know it's really serious in that intro you've moved so much in the ServiceNow space but you know not a whole lot of people may know who JIT is or who Jeff Nichol is a JIT Jeff please introduce yourself thanks Robert JIT has been around for nine almost ten years in the ServiceNow ecosystem we originally started out as an IT SM consulting firm more third party neutral and platforms than anything else and in a very short period of time the first couple years we realized the traction service now had and was gaining over you know its competitors we knew where the train was going and we were able to focus on service now as a platform leveraging the single source of record single pane of glass perspective on a platform and it really took off like we could never asked for we ended up focusing all of our efforts in that short period of time in the ServiceNow space and not being a third party neutral anymore but JIT has had a unique position in the ecosystem where not only we've been a client we've been a services partner we've been at a systems integrator we've also supported at one point in time three quarters of the ecosystem so the large si is the mid-sized sis you know even small organizations that looked to ramp up and try and either build a ServiceNow practice or just look to white-label our services we were able to not only leverage a residency practice that had multiple options of staff augmentation and teams but also a solutions practice which is one of the more mature aspects of JIT today run by our VP of solutions Joe jog one of the top individuals in the ecosystem and we've really been able to leverage what we learn from many clients to be able to provide some sort of advice to companies that may look for that advice and I want to tell us how to do it but let us give them advice on how to implement the product and leverage it the best way possible so today we only have the two practices the solutions practice and a residency practices but again it's really an opportunity to gain information across the whole ecosystem the whole gamut of the ecosystem which gives us a lot of information as it relates to what clients are running into on a regular basis right right you so you still do a lot of the white labels labeling services for the for the other partners in the ecosystem right we do especially for the large sis and some of the mid-level sis we by default have a great deal of direct business which also kind of helps level out our experience we still do a lot of white label I want to make sure I make people understand why I've selected you for four Titans of now and this is one of those big things because I remember I do you remember how we met I do briefly yes well let's see if the stories match I was I was working for a major hospitality brand it was like my second job in the ServiceNow ecosystem gosh I guess we were like five years in maybe I was on the road anyways I get this phone call and it's you saying hey I'm Jeff nickel I hear your remover and shaker are you interested in doing any independent work and at the time I was maybe having a little bit of a chip on my shoulder but I refuse your offer but it's to this day it's remarkable to me I had never talked to you before but you seem to have this mechanism to find out where is the talent and you weren't ashamed about just going out calling people cold calling them and saying hey how can I help you and it's been kind of one of the hallmarks of our relationship is if I talk to Jeff Jeff's gonna ask me how he can help me if you're in the ServiceNow ecosystem if you've got the skills and maybe you're wanted to see what else can you do then I would say that Jeff is a very very important resource to connect with because Jeff is kind of a gateway to seeing what independent consulting life is like or just to you know if you really just if you're in it for the skills you know nobody can put you on as broad an array different jobs as Jeff can how do you do it Jeff how do you maintain that network of people you don't even know yet but have the credibility well it takes time first of all but and I do remember that time and you know over the years I've tried to pull you multiple times when you get great opportunities so corrections on those like mine apart one of our biggest values to the ecosystem is not only us just providing services but also being in integration hub for those independent contractors the ServiceNow ecosystem has matured so much over the years that you get a lot of very smart strong developer types of individuals that want to go out on their own because they know how good they're they know what they can do and they want to be able to do it on their own sometimes six twelve months in they realize that they may not want to do the sales side they may not want to do the back office side may not want to handle and manage the finances we have the ability to be that integration hub for those independents and we rely probably half of our business relies on putting those strong subject matter experts independent contractors into projects where they're needed and you know that's one of the reasons that people haven't heard of us as we do that with a lot of the large and mid-sized sis so they're typically like labeling our folks mm-hmm it's a great model we're really a delivery organization we're not we don't necessarily have a sales a large sales part of our organization because we have this intake valve to the ecosystem and it also keeps our costs down keep it and still keeps us relevant with great subject matter expert yeah I I've always told people JIT is essentially the bench of the industry in the US everybody at some point or another has used capacity that's yours so I mean ServiceNow is big and huge I don't think people realize all the different unconventional parts of the puzzle had to be there in order for service now to get that huge you know the reason you're on titans and out today is that you but you absorbed so much of the risk for the rest of the industry at a time when all the big sis and all the emerging partner were basically stuck with I'm gonna have to hire a junior resource and spend a ton of money training them to be capable so that we can put them out and do adequate consulting you know at a time where everybody was facing massive investment costs just to put talent into the ecosystem you already had the talent and you were taking the risk keeping the bench for everybody else they could use yours so thank you for that first of all I think everybody should know that yeah absolutely it's been a it's big value add for us to be that virtual bench for the ecosystem or for everybody including service alone so what was the hardest thing for jit on the way one of the biggest challenges is it wasn't just a JIT challenge the challenge everybody runs into if it's retaining your talent I won't call it a big challenge that we had over the years because of the way we treated our employees and our consultants and you know made them part of the family basically did everything possible to make their lives as painless as possible and the retention is always the hardest thing and in you know especially in the beginning days when the ecosystem was small you know people were trying to pull from each other and we tried to keep this model together so people didn't happen hold from each other necessarily make it dip into the virtual bench that was out there called the admit team and it's worked it worked really well over the years and we're still going strong let's talk about your bench a little bit everybody's had to have the ITSM capabilities throughout the years but have you gone wide while ServiceNow has gone wide in terms of the different implementation specialists yeah that's a great question so by default the core concept by ServiceNow is for everyone to specialize and we've had the benefit of being able to do everything across the board for so long that you know we've specialized in the majority of the product lines that ServiceNow hosts at this point moving forward we have five or six product lines that we're really specializing in not just one we don't necessarily want to be the you know we do at all types of people but for all intents and purposes we we have subject matter experts and almost every product out there on the ServiceNow platform we don't necessarily have full-blown Solutions practices in each of those products but we have individuals or team of individuals that are more than capable of being those product and certified product implementation teams we're basically the the largest si that no one's ever heard of because we have to put one or two onto a team or a team in through someone else's and help someone else's delivery is that something you find you do a lot of like your you're not just providing a resource but a team of resources the majority of the projects now especially the large enterprise projects mm-hmm you know people love the applications that ServiceNow provides right and you know it's like a kid in a candy store they they want to do so much and they want to do it in a 12-month period of time or they want to implement all of these applications of products and no one's really capable of putting that all together all at once so they may need help with suck-ups they may need help with CSM may need help with change or incident or you know what have you yes we have the ability to help them help fill out their project team and sometimes we end up having to put multiple people multiple subject matter experts in for multiple applications onto a team and sometimes we end up having to do it ourselves with a lot of our direct clients so right whether it's a team approach or an individual or coach our flexibility it allows us to help everybody with everything yeah you know it's something I've just started hearing about this year so I'll get calls from partners that have one specialized area of expertise like ITB em or whatever is something off this on my head they'll get in and entrenched and their customers will be asking them about something not ITB em and I'd like to offer the advice under their brand but they just can't but that's another just clear advantage of the GI T model is that I'm a data visualization partner and somebody says hey can you do quack-quack sec ops for me the first person I'm gonna reach out to is GI T because I want to be the provider of value to that customer but it's not my game one of the big benefits about using JIT is we were holes on the ecosystem whether it's direct business whether ServiceNow themselves whether it's some of the big s eyes small s eyes we know what everybody's doing because they come to us for resources so we have that bench that will allow us to tactically react you know what I talked to a lot of people in the financial industry about you know they're basically representing wealth funds or or whatever they're representing various funds and they're always asking me stuff about service now but if any of you guys are listening to this you may want to connect with Jeff as well just because of that pulse of the industry and I'll just ask a question just to prove Jeff's value here is outside of ITSM Jeff where have you guys seen the biggest hunger for delivery resources great question as I mentioned before we see it across the board but SEC Ops is big CSM has been probably one of the largest product takeoffs we've seen in the last 12 months custom maps is everywhere for the pure fact that everybody wants everything out of the box but then they realize that their business can't function with it the way it is out of the box we want to try and custom build a small workflow that we have that may not be done by tomorrow the ability we have to provide those large matter experts in each of these product lines mm-hmm huge but it's really it depends on the vertical industry the client is in what works best for them and we provide CSM suck ups I TBM traditional ITSM stack across the board and there's always going to be ITSM work because that's the core value of ServiceNow but it's grown into such a broad platform which is great that we've seen these other organizations go into HR and we've seen companies we work with companies and implemented companies that started with HR not even ITSM so think it's your question I would say CSM HR SEC ops custom apps are probably for the biggest apps that we've seen growth in outside of idea standard IDs them and just on the topic of service now going wide the the speed at which it goes wide and the either the platform capabilities or the new process capabilities it seems to be getting wider faster over the last couple versions so I'm just going to throw this out there and ask you what capabilities of the platform are you most excited to see in the night year to the the single pane of glass is really what everybody wants to some extent the wider service now gets the closer it is to you know your historical ERP platform and you know with it including financial management's and so many other applications there's really not much it can't do so it's really that single source of record that originally was one of the values of it and the single pane of glass for everything else that your organization does is the biggest value that anybody could look for on any platform if you could change anything about the ecosystem what would it be or would you just leave it I like the way the ecosystem lives today there it's always changing it's always evolving ServiceNow is doing a very good job of driving the ecosystem for the benefit of the ecosystem if that makes sense there's also so much maturity that's coming out of it now where you know it's kind of a double-edged sword New York release is a perfect example the double-edged sword part of it is they've really paid attention and put a focus on legacy apps instead of just going wide with everything else they kind of went back to basics mm-hmm literally dug in to some of the legacy apps and really helped mature those again which the double-edged sword side of it is that's a great benefit to mature the product but there's a lot of legacy clients I'm old releases that are gonna have to go back and look and dig in to their instance and realize what has changed yeah I had that just recently I did a an implementation of I TBM and we had to make a solution to track the days in a time card separate records we finished that up and then two months later the next version came out I think it was New York right I did the time card days feature and it's just kind of like well I'm glad I documented that he's called its call the customer back and said you know when you upgrade to New York you may want to decide if you want to get rid of the old customization because you know that's a thing now yeah absolutely and there's there's things like with change management they've automated the unauthorized change process which is a great ideas fantastic but a lot of people don't know that how it works yep to dig in and understand it a little bit more though this is why I'm gonna just ramp here for a second this is why we have to at least have executive summaries of all the major stuff we put into our instances because it's gonna be really easy to cross-reference that stuff with release notes so you can know where your back work is gonna be absolutely anyways and rant hey Jeff we're approaching time here so I'll leave you with one more thing because you guys fulfill a really neat gap between the customers the partners and the independent ecosystem so if you had a message for anyone or all those parties before we leave now is the time one of the biggest values that JIT truly offers outside of just having subject matter experts at your beck and call in each of the product lines is truly our solutions practice where we're finding that the majority of our work outside of you know a handful of new logos here and there is really what we call back to box and it's taking a lot of these three to five to seven plus year ServiceNow clients in some cases the maturity level of even the legacy apps now because of the New York release allows us to have so many out-of-the-box values for that client that they can take advantage of that it makes so much sense to literally bring them back to out of the box the way it the way it stands today and it's worth the effort to have it done so that they can take advantage of the maturity of the product so you know our solutions practice also has the ability to be white labeled by individuals big bars and things of that nature too but that's one of the big benefits that we have is our broad span of clientele but being slowly focused in the ServiceNow space awesome Jeff it was such a pleasure having you on the on the show today thank you so much for coming my pleasure thanks for having me okay everyone that was Jeff Nichol of jit resources remember the goal of the Titans of now series is to get an interview with the man himself mr. Fred ludie but I'm gonna need a ton of your help if you enjoy this content please push it through your networks every little bit counts if you know anyone who is a serious mover and shaker in the ServiceNow community or someone was saved wisdom or unconventional opinions who you think should be a Titan please get in contact with me via the displayed email address if you're a ServiceNow expert looking for a change or a partner needing reliable talent to white-label your brand or a customer that wants to go straight to the best kept secret in the ServiceNow space GI T's contact information is in the description to this episode if you're curious about what I'm doing lately check out the description for my latest projects and how to contact me thank you so much for watching