[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 it's Mark Kelly Chief Chris Maron co-founder of all this very very welcome to the podcast today we have got oric christon who is a service now lead at gouty and he is based in Copenhagen in Denmark oric thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today thank you tell us a little bit about your background and your current role as a service now lead fori I've been in management consulting for about 20 years start at IBM and deoe and I've been doing HR Transformations for basically as long as I can remember um the red threat and what I've been doing since I started is basically I've been looking at how to get business value out of your investment in in technology and uh we can see that's probably even more important now than it was when I started out a long time ago uh what we see being the core of all this is really how you get the organizational transformation as a result of the technical implementations that you do and um yeah basically my career taking me here has been the traditional one right starting doing implementations then doing more more leadership and eventually being responsible for for sales and for the implementation teams that we have here in gudy um why am I doing service now well it's probably a slightly different entry to uh to the world of service now that most organizations or the most um Business Leaders most Partners in the ecosystem have right now because I started with HR and HR technology and if you go back 10 years 15 years and you started saying service now in relation to that people would say why are you considering an itm platform related to to HL why is it part of that picture um but with the product maturity and employee work flows and especially the HISD module we can see that now it's an integral part if you don't have it already implemented at least it's on your wish list that that's basically how I ended up here h i saw all of a sudden that all the HR clients we were talking to started thinking about service now how do we get value out it how can it solve some of the problems we have and I um I jumped on that Journey about six years ago with um I think London or Madrid and have been dedicated um focusing on how to integrate service now in the HR platform uh road maps brilliant thank you very much for for that for that overview and I love the the HR example because everyone remembers their first day at school their first day at work their last day of work and it's very very important to get that onboarding offboarding right and getting some transparency consistency around us tell us a little bit about your offering that you offer offer to customers kind of your your your services and you why is HR so topical now such a Hot Topic within the world the service now or just in general rather I think the main thing when we look at why service now suddenly entered the H arena is um fatigue and disappointment a lot of organizations have been through a cloud Journey they have implemented one of the big Suites they have implemented success factors they've implemented workday Maybe maybe one of the other ones they have tried and often at least not gotten all the way that they wanted to uh to go the benefits they had been basing the business cases on the the the value the efficiency the productivity the employee experience they they thought they'd get out of it um it helped but it did not nearly take them to to where they wanted to be and they could see that that could not be addressed by just pouring more effort into optimizing inside these solutions they found out there was some processes outside they found out there was some glue between the different Niche products that they needed after all and there was some customization or some personalization that could not be delivered with the existing tools or at least it would be a lot of customization on top of them and service now is the perfect fit for that to go in not to replace but together with existing core Solutions make sure you had full automization of the processes and not just the ones that were a good fit with standard functionality and also integrating the rest of your support functions so it facility the payroll team anything else that needs to work together with HR processes so it was that disolution M about the cloud Suites that that needed to be addressed in some way and service now was that the perfect uh time the perfect place to do that when they started expanding sideways and saying we're not just doing it service management we are an engagement layer we development layer we have uh the the the building blocks you need to build the the rest of your HR processes so it was uh it's a perfect timing really for them to to start growing Beyond just the IT service management Market yeah because it it's funny when when I speak to customers and we speak about onboarding and offboarding like what you said a lot of it can be very inconsistent you know if I start a new job with a with a colleague and and I get my laptop I'm ready to go I'm setting I'm doing a Microsoft teams meeting with my team on a Monday 9:00 a.m. and the end of the call I'm feeling pumped up excited and it's it's consistent process first my colleague that maybe gets a laptop that's dirty the codes aren't there they have to use uh documentation to read over for 48 hours because they're trying to buy time try to get the process it's Wednesday before you're actually on board it correctly and you just got a bit of a negative feeling to your onboarding experience and we've seen in the F in the past and you I guess in the future that the statistics will show people are more likely to leave in that first 6 months if their onboarding experience isn't particularly good or consistent or maybe you've got customers where they're trying to log a ticket or log a new vacancy and they don't necessarily know how to to do that or manage that vacancy because the organization is so big and there's La lack of transparency or inconsist consistency uh within that because I believe people want to be productive in their work each day rather than you know unproductive and you know you have to ask for morale tell us about some of the customers that you're out you're helping and supporting and you know if you had any some case studies or bring that theory to life it' be lovely to hear so we had um last year a global Manufacturing Company we're talking 35,000 employees 150 countries and onboarding and offboarding was a mess massive headache even after having success factors in place they even had the HD Pro solution in place but still things weren't implemented in a way so that you got the benefit of the two solutions together so we had um people joining the organization without a laptop managers and HR and IT sort of sitting pointing fingers at each other we had a substantial amount of laptops that were unaccounted for after people left the organization again uh not necessarily of course because people stole them but just because there was no transparency there was no support uh for um for the different support organizations and the managers and the employees to effectively work together so what we did together with these guys was we U did like the the right way to do design so design thinking end to end across Solutions end to end across the processes we were looking at and then said okay what would people want what would they like what do they need in the situation they're in step by step going through and then after that deciding what do we do in which environment how do we integrate them and how do we RAB it and automize it so that we get one integrated uh HR facility payroll um HR onboarding process and what we ended up doing was actually the entire it equipment ordering was fully automated so in the old days managers had to step in twice manualing service now to make sure people got the right it equipment and excesses what do now is they don't need to do anything the only thing they need to do is just you know ask to have the right guy hired into the right position type and the entire it on boarding is fully automated of course that's a huge relief for the managers and employees because they will get stuff in time and they don't need to remember uh to to order this but it's just as important for HR and for it because they they don't get the the Panic situations where no one told them and all of a sudden they have to go down into some uh some story storage room and see if they can find a wiped um computer same thing for the for the termination and the offboarding right um they had no asset visibility even if they actually might have had digital information about the assets that been handed out they didn't trusted and they didn't have easy access to it so what we did was very simple actually it was more sort of a culture and an awareness issue than it was a technical solution but the result in the end required us to to train people who responsible for asset collection how do you get it done what do you do if you're working at a site where they don't have a place where you can just drop it off so um it's um it's a perfect example this uh onboarding uh redesign here because it's um it's exactly the same we're doing with all other clients and opportunities that we do endtoend design integrate the solutions and we build automation where it makes sense and it has has the same benefits right efficiencies and operations Securities you get controll information your devices um um your your audit Trails productivity and employee experience every single time it's the same thing we get out of it of course the concrete instantiation will be different in each time right but it's it's the same high level value we get out of it and the way to do it is uh is also uh the same right to uh to work big picture design thinking and employee experience and then have the capacity the capability to work with all the different solutions you need which is one of the things I really enjoy about the the way we deliver stuff in gy which is we um we we can do design and we can Implement so you don't either end up with you know a solution no one needed or wanted in the one end that may be beautifully configured but it's just not fit for purpose on the other end you end up with some PowerPoints that just can't be translated or at least never will be translated to a to a technical solution or implementation so that's what we enjoy to sit down with our clients figure out what do they actually need and then work closely with them all the way through until we have something implemented in the end um the onboarding example is a usual one I have not yet met a single client who's happy with the way the onboarding is working so that's that's massive potential out here and and there will continue to be yeah and it's it's a funny one that you mentioned your onboarding and then we've got offboarding and this this is consistency across all industry and this is this is one that's you know every industry seems to have a challenge with it and the design Tinky is very very important because you're leading with empery and you're going on that journey and this journey has now changed because of the world of Co before now people work remotely as you said at this at the top of the show where you're working and delivering across Madrid and and Global but you're still based in Copenhagen so from people may not know but if you're hiring an employee or you're putting a potential offer out to an employee if you're there's a major delay in getting that contract to that employee or prospective employee they will not start so that means that the interview process that could been three four six stages is all for nothing because the last part did not do its job so you can imagine how frustrated people are at hore if this process is not closed off and the person is not then ready to to to start on that journey and when you talk about working with the customer understanding what they want rather than actually doing it to them doing that statement of work to them and just taking that box you're going on the journey with them because it's important because they need to feel like they're confident around what's being shown to them what's the experiences because if they really believe in it then the rest of the organization will really believe it and that's going to get more Buy in and then also future adoption for people to actually engage an additional service now product projects as well are there any particular trends that you're seeing potentially maybe in Ai and automation that have helped kind of fast track some of these solutions that you're looking to to add yeah so um one of the reasons I love doing what I'm doing is it's uh it's always changing it's never dull right HR technology over the last 20 years has been reimagining itself again and again right and it's not just uh it's not just an attempt to keep keep selling stuff it's it's real changes in the world around us that means our customers the businesses we're working with has new requirements new demands new challenges new opportunities and we then get to help them solve that so it's um it's a constant Innovation together with the clients and you're absolutely right that um what we see right now new releases new functionality um citizen development ER the the the hyper ation Trend and the generative AI it's all part of the answer to what we're seeing out there right now constant demands for being more productive being more efficient in your support organizations being able to deal with hybrid work where we have U employees sitting you know maybe at home maybe in partner ecosystems uh at least very far from just being able to drop down by by HR and IT to get uh get help so the building blocks are there and and they will continue coming I'm sure from from service now the and and that's exciting and great and I'm really uh looking forward to some of the new features like the the skills and the recruiting and how that's actually going to pan out because clearly we stepping into an area here where we are saying they they are sort of face Toof face competing with um other vendors that may have somewhat similar functionality so that's going to be super interesting this year but I think my my main interest on my uh my I'm not sure if it's a worry but at least my main concern right now is as we move into these areas it becomes incredibly important that we as a partner ecosystem are able to help our clients deal with it because the functionality is there it can be built but if we can't advise them in the right way or if we don't actually deliver on the promise we've given them we will have problems and I like to use sort of the the goldilock metaphor right that you shouldn't have the purge too warm or too cold you need to find the right balance in the middle or need to combine it in some way so that when we um when we work with the customers we can be technically proficient but we also need to be able to inspire and guide outside the sort of the old traditional platform features because only by doing both can we actually make sure that they don't get the same disillusionment with the offerings that we've seen with the old cloud-based Solutions in the HR Suite we need this time to actually um deliver on the promise we need to go in and help them get the proper value out of the technical features but if we can do that um yeah I I can't see an into this uh this journey here it's uh there's many many years of um of good useful uh optimization and enhancements we have in front of us it's really exciting how Ai and automation is helping to remove friction but from the human in the loop and working with the machine is is about delivering value where you're giving the customer what they need at this moment in time however you're also looking at the potential for growth for the future where they'll scale and need additional functionality so you're not overwhelming them but you're allowing them for a road map to add different things because the cheese is always moving there's different applications there's different features that become more relevant into that customer and then you need to guide them to actually share insights on that because there's so many opportunities there's so many different ways you can go but if you're going to be that guide to Shepherd them to the process you know I always think of that Mountaineer you're you're telling right we're going to rest here we're going to dash here we're going to actually reflect and like so there's so many parts about being that guide thank you very much for your time we've been speaking about oric Christensen and Ori is a service now lead at gy he's based in Denmark and he's been giving us an overview about some of the work that he does in hrsd and some of the benefits of rolling out human resource module within service now and the most important aspects is leading with design thinking and trying to deliver solutions that really add benefits to the whole organization but also allow the opportunity to bring in new features uh in the future thank you very much for your time or thanks for having me thanks for listening to this episode of the AL this 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.al this.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 soon [Music]