Understanding the transformational power of Global Business Services

My name is Kevin Barnard. I'm the deputy chief innovation officer here at ServiceNow. Been with the company about six years. And then before that, I was sitting where you were, as a customer of ServiceNow's. So really excited to see that you're here and that we're in the last session of the week, also, so I will promise to end on time. Is anyone really excited about going to see Pitbull later? Is anyone really not excited to go see Pitbull later? 50/50? Okay, that's pretty good. So how many of you, this is your first Knowledge? Right on. Cool. Excellent. Welcome. I've been part of the community since 2008, and so I've really seen it come up over the years. And what's been very interesting, especially this year, is this conversation around Global Business Services. And so I'm kinda curious, also, are you having these conversations that, again, just show of hands, like are you having conversations around GBS at work these days? Are you more curious about it? Okay. Also, have you noticed the pendulum's starting to shift a little bit, right, toward more of a broader business-wide situation? Maybe, yes, no? Also, the thing I like to find out, too, is who does not like to raise their hands in large groups? It's okay, don't worry. You're never gonna see any of these people ever again. But Global Business Services, so tick that out 'cause I'm sure you've seen that a million times. I wanna zoom out for a second and talk about this idea of experience. And it's been coming up more and more. And, you know, good experience is like, it's a portal. And somehow, the portal is magically gonna make everything okay. And I'm here to tell you that that's not true, as those of us who have been around for a long time know, because what happens, you know, this was usually just the way it was. It's a good portal experience. We thought about that one UI, that one application and the right information. But the challenge is that it's not just about the human being. And, again, we're seeing this more and more because this is an interconnected conversation. And so it's not just the individual themselves, it's the business that they're part of, it's the ecosystem that we're with, and also the planet itself. How many of your organizations have ESG initiatives going on right now that you're being measured on? Yeah, I mean, this is something that's gonna keep coming up more and more. It is not changing. So as we think about the total experience, it's actually really important to think about the entire enterprise experience. And this becomes, obviously, critically important when we're talking about GBS. Now, as many of you know, how many of you have been running ServiceNow for more than two years? Okay, so we all know this, right, very disconnected. None of these systems were designed to work together. They certainly weren't designed to give a great experience. And so as each of these individuals is trying to get something done, it's the age-old story of swivel chairing, moving from, you know, urban legend, urban knowledge, rather, back and forth. And it's a very difficult experience, not designed to be seamless in any way, shape or form. The other thing that we recognize is that none of these systems are going away, right? Nobody's ripping out SAP anytime soon. No one's ripping out Workday anytime soon. And that is also something that ServiceNow, just as a brand, we understand that these investments are gonna be out there in the ecosystem. So what do we do about that, all right? We wanna start thinking about this single experience layer, not just the portal itself, but the interconnectedness, so that someone's entire whole work experience can be streamlined and optimized. You start to see where I'm gonna be going with this. Why is all that important? Because for every single one of those individuals, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of human beings, all trying to get stuff done at the same time. And this now starts to look at the GBS conversation. It looks at our legacy IT services, which we've been doing for a long time. And it also starts moving into the regulatory compliance space. And before I joined ServiceNow, my last gig at General Electric was at GE Capital, where I was running ServiceNow globally, and it was a too big to fail bank at the time. And now we have IRM on the platform, but rewind seven years or so, and didn't quite have those capabilities. But this regulatory compliance is so critical to everything that we do. And if you're looking to get started in your GBS journey, start partnering up with business continuity, partner up with crisis management, partner up with the chief risk officers. Anyone wanna take a guess as to why, even though I can't hear you? The reason why is because we're prioritizing business processes. It's a very different conversation than what is a high, medium or low CI? Now we're talking business processes. And if there's one thing that COVID taught us, that business is where it's at. Otherwise, we're not gonna have a job. What that does, though, is it allows you to start to look at things from the employee experience, all the way over to the customer experience, and looking at these same bits and pieces over and over and over again, which is your GBS model. But as you start to digitize those things, the entire value chain starts to become benefited more and more by the process. We have, still, a disconnected ecosystem, though, in the partner community, the vendors that we work with, the service providers that we work with as well. So as we start to digitize each of those individual parts and pieces, the entire network, again, becomes more and more seamless across the board. And, you know, again, we know this is not a big lift, it's not gonna happen overnight. But as we start to digitize these parts and pieces to get those integration pieces together, it's a seamless experience for all the external folks as well that our organization is supporting. And then, of course, we have the ESG initiatives. So I'm a big fan, actually, of leaning in to the regulatory and compliance stick, if you will, when you're trying to drive organizational change, because these are the kind of things that are gonna be measured on. There are new regulations coming out all the time around ESG initiatives. Europe, especially, is really starting to lead the way on this. We have to start thinking about these things as leaders, and plan for them into the long-term mission of what we're doing as we evolve this whole service management thing that we've been part of for a long time. It is a concentric model of these things that we have to consider. And, again, the reason why this is all important, I wanna take a step back for a second, is Global Business Services, even if your organization isn't global in nature, the concept stands. And so we really wanna be thinking about these things, centering the human being, centering their experience, thinking about how we can be most effective to deliver the services that they're trying to consume. Now getting into the GBS part of things. So in the Chief Innovation Office at ServiceNow, we're part of the strategy function. And the nice part about that is we sit outside of engineering, we sit outside of sales. We can look at the different trends that are happening across the ecosystem and across the market. And GBS has been one that we've been having our eye on for a few years now, obviously. And you're starting to see the shift, actually, into integrated or intelligent business service as well, because as you've been here all week, you know it's AI all over the place. The importance, though, is that we're still living in this disconnected world. And so we have IT. Most of us are there. How many of you are from outside of the CIO's organization? Yeah. All these functions, again, they're not designed to work together, right? And we think about a end-to-end business process. In a lotta cases, it's just what is sales' responsibility, what's, you know, marketing's responsibility, on down the line. We really wanna start thinking about these things holistically, to provide the most value to the business that we can, in a scalable and repeatable way. So as we start looking at service catalogs, the nice part about this conversation, and what you, as service management leaders, are primed more than anyone else in the organization to do, is understand service management. And at the end of the day, GBS is a business-wide service management challenge. So we think about these things that enterprise service portfolio catalog. Does anyone remember enterprise service management was a thing for a hot second? And then IT got their hands on it and it just became our thing. Well, now, the technology is here and can actually enable this vision that we've been talking about for a long time. But we have to think about the progressive way in which we want to move down the line because, again, a unified service experience. And don't worry, there's a build here. You're gonna get the whole thing when it comes. It doesn't matter if it's a customer, it doesn't matter if it's an employee, it doesn't matter if it's a vendor. That experience layer, that system of action, is really what we want to activate. And, again, it doesn't necessarily matter where the data is. We have the integration capabilities to do that. But thinking about all these different personas drives a certain kind of conversation. Why is that important? Because, as we saw in the previous slide, your organization is at some point in this maturity curve. And if I were to ask you, where do you think your organization falls on that, in a lotta cases, some folks might be D, all the above. And it's a continuous improvement process. So as you start thinking about the idea of modernizing, what does that look like? What does that look like for your organization? And how do you partner with all the different lines of business to move in one direction? Or at least to say, "Hey, we're gonna parallel process this thing and move together." We're always thinking about scale because, yes, you wanna modernize, but then where do you go from there? And before we could even start to automate something, we gotta make sure we're digitizing it. Is it the most latest and greatest process that we want to run? Then we can really start to think about innovating. And that's the part that everyone wants to get to, but we can't forget the fundamentals. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. And then, of course, that next evolution. So we are living in continuous improvement times. We've been doing this for a long time. But it's different now because faster time to value, iterating our way there, getting these small wins to build momentum over time is really what's gonna help to drive the adoption across the entire enterprise. So as we think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, process mining, knowledge bases, AI, large language models, remember that the machines are pointing at the data that's in our systems. And how many of you feel really good about the quality of your knowledge bases? Right, we haven't looked at those in a long time, right? Data governance really didn't get a lotta love for a long time. But now, guess what? Why has that become important? Because customer service representatives, whatever part of the organization they're from, are gonna be fed information from AI. But what happens when it's not good? So this piece about modernize becomes really, really important, that focus on the data accuracy, currency, accountability. And, again, that's why I say the governance process can really be your friend because it's what's best for the business. So as we start thinking about, then, the underpinnings of this, this is gonna start to look rather familiar to those of us who have been doing this for quite a while. This business service framework, right? It's a service catalog on steroids, but now it's business services. It's not just the infrastructure or even the application, but what is the service that we are providing? And then COEs. Show of hands, how many of you have formalized COEs in your organization for ServiceNow? How many of you would like to have one? Keep in mind, too, that as we're looking to scale across the different business functions, the COEs can be a federated model as well. So, again, we wanna make sure that the domain experts have the skin in the game, the agency that they want, but we're gonna have to scale out as well. And so thinking about that center of excellence, that continuous improvement piece as a process, also becomes to all of this conversation. You're baking in your business governance, your baking in your KPIs and the analytics, and that end-to-end service lifecycle. You know, again, like I said, these functions normally only think about their parts and pieces, but think about the new employee coming in on the first day of work. Wouldn't it be great if their laptop was there on time? That's not just one process, right? That's finance, that's HR, that's IT. And facilities, for that matter. Do they have a place to sit? So we don't think about the end-to-end process, but from the human being's perspective, that matters and that's important. Do I wanna be here or not? You've heard ServiceNow say this all week long. You've probably heard it from the moment you started talking to a rep. One code base. So any acquisition that we make, we replatform the code into the platform. One data model, common service data model. How many of you are using a common service data model? How many of you should be using a common service data model? The reason why is twofold. One is it's that consistency across the entire organization, but also, ServiceNow developers, we write our applications following that data model. And so, again, as we're looking for the machines to do more and more, they're gonna expect to find the data in certain places. So following the common service data model empowers and drives that AI machine-learning capabilities that everybody wants, but it also makes platform governance easier and it also makes your assets and integrations easier as well, because the model already accounts for those things. Now, common service data model can be incredibly overwhelming if you try to consume it all at once, so don't. Go function by function, go part by part, and even get smaller along the way, and just keep building it, right? Again, we wanna keep building on top of this to have that single platform foundation for consistency across the board. By the way, this works whether you have a single instance in your organization or multi instances across your organization. So don't think that these are mutually exclusive constructs. So then the question becomes, why is this important? Why should I be thinking about that? There's a couple of reasons. So, first of all, these focus areas, we can really talk about this to start upleveling our conversations into real top-of-the house discussions. A unified experience is something that HR cares about, it's something that the chief operating officer cares about, it's something that the CIO cares about. And, again, it's not just a single portal, but it's really about their experience within that over and over and over again. We're driving service excellence. Service agility. Agility is something that leaders are expecting more and more these days. They wanna iterate, they wanna move fast, they wanna get fast time to value. The days of the monolithic stuff that takes six to 12 to 18 months to roll out, it's not gonna work anymore. And so especially as you're trying to gain credibility across your organization, find the dumpster fire, right? Find the dumpster fire. That is, we know we can, you know, solve for it relatively straightforward on the platform, but that's gonna show that we have the ability and the agility to move forward very quickly and respond to what the business is asking for, all built on that same foundation. 'Cause now we start to have a strategic conversation. How many of you would like to start talking about investment instead of cost out and productivity? How many of you would like to get headcount? Start talking in this strategic language. Aligning yourselves to where the other business functions are going means that you're gonna need support to do that. Service excellence, again, it's that same piece across the board. But operational resilience is what really is one of the great outcomes that we can start to drive from these things. It's not a single, you know, single one-off over here. We are constantly making sure that the organization is resilient so that the next COVID that happens, we're gonna know where our assets are, who owns them, what is actually a critical business process versus some executive's printer somewhere that just happens to be, you know, listed as critical in the CMDB. Not that anybody has those. And then we're enabling value. And that is something that, for those of us who have been doing ITSM for a long time, talking about value is not normally something that we find as part of the entire lexicon. And so this piece of being able to go to a leader and say, "We're gonna talk about cost avoidance, we're gonna talk about top and bottom-line revenue targets, we're gonna talk about increasing efficiencies across the board," with this single repeatable model that you can implement over and over and over again and keep improving on. And so this idea of Global Business Services is great because we have the solution to the challenges that the rest of the organization, in a lotta cases, doesn't even realize that they have. But with these models, we can bring these things in place and very quickly spin up the solutions and get the organization to where they need to go. And I wanna start thinking about that, but then, also, I think that it's the end of the week. You're all tired of being talked at. I wouldn't mind asking if you, let's have some questions that we can share with the audience and see where we wanna go. Because chances are, someone else in the room, virtual room, is thinking or asking about these same questions as well. And so there's gonna be someone coming around with a microphone or something, I think. I gotta figure out how this headphone thing's gonna work. And we can ask some questions. So is there, first of all, I mean, is this resonating? Is this something that, you know? We wanna have an aspirational piece to this, and not just that same churn. So who wants to go first? I think there's a, over there. I can't see who's walking around with the microphone. Not yet? Ooh, lighting. What happened? That's a little bit bright. (laughs) All of the sudden, everyone's like that. You can just shout it out. I'll try to repeat it for you, if you want. Is there a mic? Is there? Yes. So the question is, does the GBS model support like the business service assets? So I make sure I'm understanding the question right. Yeah, so that's it, which is an interesting part of the, I'm glad you mentioned that, because we still have a tendency to think of applications on their own, and not the business services that sit on top of that or depend upon them. And so, yes, as we start to build that out, and that's really why I was talking about partnering with the business continuity folks. Because how many of you are in regulated markets? Business continuity, they have to sit across the table from the regulators who can shut them down, essentially, right? And they're like, show me that you have control over your environment. And so having that business service layer in there really starts to cascade down and tie everything together, and allows leadership to make much more strategic decisions about where do they invest, where are the priorities, how do we handle? You know, where do we put resource allocation, essentially. So think of that business service piece as what's gonna start to unlock the non-IT parts of the organization. And that becomes a cascading effect from there. Other questions? Yes. Oh, hang on. I know, I'm not used to this. Hi. Yes. So I think, you know, from my perspective, I come from IT, and pretty much what you said was very representative of our company. The question I have is that once we start spreading out into the other kinda silos of our company, how do you intend for the platform, the COE team, to expand themselves and to be able to usher in these other, you know, users who are not familiar with ServiceNow, not familiar with ITIL, not familiar with really any of this data model? You know, even with IT folks, it's taking a long time to train them on CSDM, et cetera. So how, you know, what is there to support sort of the COE in, you know, getting this phased out to the rest of the business and having them also be part of the platform? - Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would first recommend prayer. (laughs) I'm not lying. There is a cultural chasm that exists between IT and the lines of business. Always has been. Hopefully it'll be mitigated someday. But the first piece is, yes, while we do have ITIL, there's other processes out there, too, ISO 9000s. And we can have sorta that "South Park" battle, like my science is better than your science. But really, it's more about just being transparent, delivering that service. And as you start to scale out, it's partnership is really what it's all about. I remember the old days of, hey, look at this cool thing I just built for you. You know, it was kinda like a kid asking for attention. We wanna flip that around. You know, we know that now every single one of us, regardless of what your organization is, whatever your business does, is a technology organization. And there are technology assets all over the enterprise now that need to be brought into this scope and to enable the business services, right? They're kinda just doing it right now. So the first is trust. It's partnership and trust, right? Like I said earlier, finding a simple or a major issue that they are struggling with, that you know the platform capabilities can solve for, and go do that. Because then it doesn't just become us saying that ServiceNow is a great solution or us saying that our apps are great applications. They're gonna see it, they're gonna know it, and then they're gonna tell their friends. And so that's one piece. The other is, it's almost an opportunity to say what led us up to this point was great. We made the right decisions for the right reasons. But the world has changed and we need to start thinking ahead. And so it might be a new governance model, it might be a new operating model, it might be this federated COE piece. But, again, I caution folks all the time, don't try to do something tomorrow with the same governance model that you have today. It's fundamentally different. But what that does is offer you opportunity. Bring more people into the tent, right? And so I always say trust. I would say find something that, you know, someone really wants to get fixed. And maybe even the other piece, too, is empowering those business process owners. Like, hey, text to workflow is a thing now. Just go type it in, right? Start there. So it's really showing them how the technology can support the challenges that they're facing. That's really gonna be the first way forward. Yeah. Other questions? Give me one more. Someone's gotta have something. Going once. Pitbull's not on for another few hours. I mean, we have time. So one thing I wanted to leave you with is it can be challenging sometimes to reach across to the other parts of the organization, especially where those relationships haven't historically existed. Directors, senior directors, vice presidents, even CIOs themselves don't often have the relationships across the line to the lines of business. And so to really start bringing this, it's find good partners, right? Find good partners. Work and show the rest of the organization what good looks like. And then once you show the rest of the organization what good looks like, then you'll start to build momentum. Then you get the credibility from leadership, and it's a cascading effect. This does not happen overnight. It is a journey without end. But moving toward this model is gonna help to optimize the business, help to set you up for success and keep moving forward as you're going down your evolution within the organization. So stay tuned for more of this. ServiceNow is talking about this as a function. So don't necessarily expect like a new GBS product, per se, but the different capabilities that we have across the platform work to enable this model. So, appreciate your time. Thank you so much for making the investment to come out this week as well. Really appreciate it. And look me up on LinkedIn if you want to ask any questions, or talk to your reps, and we'll see you at an executive briefing sometime soon. So, thank you so much. (audience applauds)