hopefully everybody is enjoying fed Forum so far lots of uh wonderful sessions meetings going on um and it's a privilege to be here to talk about service operations with everybody my name is Aaron Zuber I'm Global area vice president responsible for service operations and we got a lot of exciting things to cover today I'm I'm lucky enough to be joined by RJ um and Steve so RJ runs uh our itm business he's our general manager and Steve is on the product side for itom so a lot of the presentation that that you'll see today uh circulates around the messages that these gentlemen want to share with you um pertaining to service operations and how that sets a foundation for what we're trying to do with the service now platform holistically so not just about itsm and itom but how does this enable you to be Mission focused and to accelerate through those different objectives that are very very important to you and your strategies so before we go any further one one thing I do want to do is I want to talk a little bit about Safe Harbor uh some of the things that you'll see in here today and we'd love to have conversations there will be a Q&A um later on after the session and we'll try to move through the material uh in short order so that we can get to that but you're going to hear some forward-looking statements and I want to make sure that the expectations are set that this is where the Mind share is going but it's not necessarily a commitment that some some of the things that you're going to see are going to be in production anytime soon so I just want to make sure that we get that out out uh in the open and and hopefully you're excited uh to learn more about uh what those might be so um real quick just to take a step back what is service operation service operation sounds pretty General so when when we say service operations what do we really mean so service operations it's it's a technology enabled approach and the goal is to unify IT services and it operations which two historically disparate groups sometimes entire teams built up around these different practices with different technology Stacks we want a more collaborative and intuitive interaction and strategy moving forward to make sure that service operations is the focal point and serves as a foundation so the goal is uh technology Excellence uh in the delivery uh of your services so that you can have always on digital business services so kind of a mouthful but what are we really trying to solve for here so there's there's a number of different themes three in particular that we wanted to highlight and some of their uh some of their challenges that are associated with them one is to optimize productivity and reduce Tech debt so if you're thinking about how many tools that you have how many silos those are creating um what that does to your ability to automate so how can we Auto automate when we have a string of pearl products that are stretching end to end of the organization what does that do to our chain of communication a how does that impact the the speed at which we can deliver services and that was something that Chris Bey talked about this morning about being a differentiator in the marketplace is our ability to deliver at speed so Tech availability and satisfaction do do your constituents do they subscribe to the services that you offer because they don't have a choice or is it because they know it's the best place to get what they need and it's enjoyable and it's fast and it gets them what they want so they can focus on the important things that they're in the position to do to begin with so um you know making sure that this is uh it's on point with uh with uh availability and satisfaction and what does this really do for Innovation and business growth so if we're not focused um like Chris was talking about the patent process if we're not focused on the mundane things and we're not subscribing to that and it's more enjoyable how does that free us up for more creative and Innovative approaches to the things that are that are meaningful to us and what you're going to see here is is uh in fact um you know two two different sides of the coin um and and RJ and Steve will be talking about these but in the center is is your customer employee constituents um and traditionally the way things are set up it makes it very very difficult for them to get what they want it also makes it difficult for services and operations to communicate and collaborate in a way that delivers the services and those and those commitments to your customer in the way that they would expect and there's a lot of talk around consumer grade um service services and and and how can we make the things that you work with daily um within the environment more to that expectation level so um a quick visual here what we're trying to do with service operations is we're really trying to expand technology um the services while you're reducing cost so I'm I'm sure that's something that you're all familiar with you know doing more with less um it was something that I was familiar with uh I was um Marine Corps myself um and it you never got to a point where you're like hey we got we got more than we know what to to do with and we have more resources that we know what to do with um it was always the opposite you so how can you do more with less and and then at the same time you're asked to deliver extraordinary experiences um and prod and productivity um without increasing that overhead so you have this you have this growing Tech estate and you're trying to reduce costs and and increase efficienc efficiency at the same time which is um can be conflicting to say the least um with those different goals and as a result of that um that expectation is also that you're trying to drive faster Innovation to stay ahead of the curve stay relevant um stay ahead of the competition um or other nation states in this case perhaps so with that what I wanted to do hopefully that that sets at least a broad um understanding and expectation for service operations so how are these capabilities really knit together and how can we see acceleration capabilities like gen AI come to the equation and start to give you the acceleration that you're expecting so I'm going to turn it over to R.J to talk a little bit more about how that can uh work in the environment with uh service operations thanks Aon um so let's take a look um at what's possible when you bring service and operations together and I'll showare sort of this example that we call AI powered service operations and uh through this you can scale your teams to handle the sheer volume of incidents that get created in a digital first world right so on the left side in terms of you know for things like that are people generated incidents you could leverage uh Automation and AI to handle mundane things like password resets you know surprisingly as I talked to uh customers a lot of what the service desk agents are handling our password reset right and so you can deflect a lot of those mundane requests coming in um you could leverage virtual agents again to provide more self-service to your end users so again deflect that work from hitting your team and your your service task now when work does need to get escalated um leverage capabilities around predictive intelligence and task intelligence to Route the work intelligently to the right person so it gets done right the first first time um for developers leveraging change automation to be able to create the change tickets through automation rather than having to come in and populate a change form right and then uh in terms of the work that the your agents and operators do leveraging gen to really help them become more productive right so this is by providing them summarization for the incidents that they're working on so they can understand the issues very quickly uh helping them generate resolution notes um a lot of times I hear that hey our agent simply write done or fixed and not really what the resolution was you can leverage gen uh to really be able to capture what the solution is and also U from a Knowledge Management perspective be able to generate meaningful knowledge articles that again help in that uh self-service um on the operation side Leverage I and automation to automate all the common tasks common operations and then also to be able to predict outages before they happen and prevent them and uh this is by leveraging AI to be able to correlate the events that are coming in reduce the noise and then be able to triage troubleshoot and determine the root cause more quickly to be able to restore the service and produce your mttr um and so typically the way our customers going of start the journey and we think about service operations around modernizing automating and accelerating the outcomes and so it starts with the single Cloud platform that service now provides you um with the best-in-class market leading it service management processes like incident change uh Etc and then also leading Capal from an operations perspective Discovery service mapping and so typically the first step there to modernize your um practice is really creating that data Foundation right bringing all your Cloud on Prem assets into service now bringing all the application uh and really populating and having your CIS there and then once you have that data Foundation then building your service management processes on top of that right so this is your structured workflows um through which your end users can interact um with your services so this is you know incident request catalog all of that but it's all based on top of that data Foundation that becomes really important to continue to deliver additional outcomes as you mature your uh your practice and and kind of grow your journey the second is on automation right so Automation and this is is really leveraging Ai and automation to deliver those extraordinary experiences to your end users uh improve your service resiliency as well as increase the productivity and and so this is where things like virtual agent to be able to provide better uh end user experience um leveraging task intelligence which just became available in in the il5 environments so um that the Washington release you know Contin keep making more more of these capabilities available in your um Isle 4 I 5 environments and so um and then leveraging the uh capabilities around automation to be able to then correlate the alerts that are coming in prevent the outages um we also have capabilities around process Mining and uh Workforce optimization so process mining is all around finding out maybe in your incident process or your change process you you may have sort of the as designed workflow but really you know your end users are doing something else right or your agents maybe be doing something else and so process mining gives you that x-ray vision into what's actually happening with your incident process or your change process and what are the opportunities to uh remove the bottlenecks and similarly with your your people Workforce optimization makes enables you to have training so that your agents have the right skills based on the work that they need to do right and then finally on the accelerate piece this is where you can really kind of turbocharge your journey leveraging gen to make your agents more productive and then also deliver a better um experience to your employees um and also um start becoming more proactive right so in the sense of rather than just responding to end users reporting problems get ahead by actually understanding what's happening on the end user devices and become more proactive so I'll kind of walk you through three small three quick features that give you a sense of what this means from a product perspective and the capabilities we offer so the first one I'll call out is uh service operations workspace we call it s so and and so this is a tailor made uh interface designed for your agents and operators which brings together the things that they work with so if you think about incidents changes alerts logs all of those in one experience so that they don't have to swivel chair and switch out you know and look at different applications and different experiences but really brings all of the work together in one place for your agents and operators prioritizes that work for them so that they can work on the most important things and uh it's context Rich it draws on the information from the cmdb brings it all together in one place so that they can troubleshoot and get their work done faster we launched this back in San Diego and we're continually adding more capable ities to this s experience second I'll call out is on the virtual agent so in November we launched our gen powered virtual agent um and uh this really takes the end user experience to another level in terms of it's much it's conversational right and and if all of you have played around with uh chat GPT or copilot you can basically talk to the virtual agent and natural language it understands the user's intent and then produces answers so you don't have to click around a lot of different knowledge based articles but really synthesizes the information for the end user so they find what they're looking for and also exposes your catalog your knowledge base all of that and one of the things that's remarkable about the genap powered virtual agent is unlike the prior technology where where you had to train the model on utterances you had to create your topics and all your flows and and your virtual agent was only as good as the flows that were created for it right um which is also it was a heavy lift to get that outcome and a lot of times when when I talk to our users they say hey you only have about 10% of our catalog items exposed because it just takes so much effort to build these topics now that this new gen powered virtual agent it's very fast because you simply point it to the catalog items that you want to expose you point it to your knowledge base and it becomes available to your end users so you don't have to go and create all of those topics and flows Etc so the time to value is we're talking orders of magnitude difference than the prior technology and then finally I'll talk about proactive uh end user experience so this is a product that we're going to be launching later this year uh digital end use experience Dex for short and uh with this it helps your uh it teams become proactive to serving the end users and this has probably happened to everybody in this room which is you have some problem with your device and you just deal with it because you don't want to have to log a ticket you don't want to have to talk to somebody in it and so you just live with it right you're frustrated but you make do well what we're doing now is um we have our agent CLI collector ACC running on end user devices Gathering all of the information in terms of key metrics memory CPU what installed applications are running what's being used and we bring all of that information back into service now and so when your end user if they have a problem and they contact your help desk your help desk actually can see what's happening and they can um solve the problem but even better if they are frequently occurring issues so for example your Office 365 keeps crashing um those kinds of information become available to your it teams where they can proa actively push out a remediation right maybe it's the old version that needs to be updated so they can push that out to all the end user devices so it really helps it teams become proactive and so it's a really good example of kind of service operations um delivering an outcome no presentation here will be complete without talking about jni so I'll I'll have one slide I'll talk about and and really we're leveraging jni and service operations to deliver outcomes for your services teams your agents your help desk and level two level three and really this is about better search so they can find the answers they need um helping them create knowledge as well as making them more productive at summarization going of help me write resolution notes those kinds of use cases delivers a better outcome for your employees with better self-service and then also for your operations teams where it can help them with summarization and and uh going of help them understand the alerts that are coming in and so with that I'm going to hand it off to Steve to tell you more about uh service operations from an Ops perspective thank you RJ and thanks Aaron for that great talk as well uh so hey everybody W it is great to see so many people here right give yourselves a big round of [Applause] applause so uh so so I work in outbound product management so what does that mean right it I'm I love meeting with our customers to understand how you are using our products but I also love being able to tell you how our products can help you drive better value across your organizations and we heard a lot about the The Human Side of it right the human generated incident now we're going to talk a lot about the system generated incident as well as other it operations functions so for you know for service now we have three areas of it operations management um as an IT operations leader here your goal is to keep your services running 24 by7 right and it's very hard to do and we're striving to help you do that with our itom Solutions so starting off with visibility we help you gain complete visibility across your entire estate on premise Cloud your containerized environments and we help you put business context around that so you understand how those those resources align back to the business second area is our predictive AI Ops this is where we're helping customers predict and prevent issues to help you reduce your meantime to repair right and then finally we have Cloud accelerate well so how many of you here are are going through a cloud Journey right now great so our our goal here is to help you put some guard rails around that process uh and I'll talk more about how we do that in just a few minutes uh but from you know from taking a look at what you have on premise already to migrate to the cloud all the way through running day two operations now a a you know a a service now conversation cannot happen without talking about the cmdb right the cmdb is your data foundation for your organization but of course it's also the data foundation for service now the most effective cmdbs are what we call business aware so that you understand how all those resources that you've deployed align back to the business why would you want to do that you have to be able to make datadriven decisions not a human decision based upon things like you know for example if you have all these different monitoring tools telling you that all these you know systems are going down you've got you know critical severity issues how do you know what to work on first right so we could help you by identifying how that resource aligns back to your business uh and you'll see a dashboard of all these different things and you can say all right I need to fix my my Erp system first or you know the service that you know that provides so uh you know um like you know like DMV services uh so that's one example uh so another example would be on the change management side I was one to change manager you know in a past life and the first question I would always ask is how does this change impact the business right most of the time people could not tell me that answer right there they had to go research it go find out come back to me later on and and it might take a week right to you know to find that out so now you're delaying the change if you list a whole bunch of changes oh sorry uh CI inside of a change request there's a a process that happens called refresh impacted services and if you have your services mapped you'll see all the services that are impacted so you know who to notify you know who that you know then needs to approve the change uh and you'll of course increase your efficiency there uh and then finally um how many here have had an outage because of a certificate expiration yeah quite a few of you so we have a whole inventory part for your certificates we put them in the cmdb we generate proactive tasks UH 60 days prior to your expiration but the great part is if you have a business aware cmdb guess what you get to know how that pending certificate expiration is going to impact your organization um and we'll talk more about other areas here in just a moment so for visibility we talk a lot about your you know building a business where it seem to be we have a new application that's not new anymore but it's called service mapping plus we introduced machine learning capabilities to help you map services not just add connections to existing services but help you identify entry points and all the resources that belong inside of that service uh we call it automated service suggestion so it uses Ai and um and ml underneath the covers to identify meaningful traffic based connections uh and you can see there we have a dashboard so you can see your service mapping posture you see on the right hand side where that that Mouse pointer is is pointing at an unmapped Services widget every you know sorry un map servers every server that you deploy provides some value back to your organization so why shouldn't it be part of a map so we help you identify servers that may have weak traffic so perhaps those are not serving your business anymore or we have servers that are part of a service candidates when you start to map your candidates you'll see that uh and you can also attach existing uh Services through here these candidates to an existing service that that you have if you've done a lot of work on that already so you know great Innovation would service mapping plus uh anybody tried out service mapping plus yet highly encourage you to do so it's it's really great uh our second area is our predictive AI Ops this is an ey chart I know but really I'm going to walk through it very quickly and explain the value of it you've got a lot of monitoring tools today you've got the option to use service now as a monitoring tool for your servers you've got uh metric data log data you've got traces and metrics coming from open telem we can correlate all of that together down to the most actionable set of alerts to work on WE correlate it via three areas there time based uh text and tags and also your topology we then help you uh pinpoint or you know better understand the text that's coming in from you know from those alerts with AI and I'll get to that in just a moment and pinpoint the root cause so that you can then create automated remediation workflows so if you have common issues that you see and your confidence that okay to fix this particular issue we know that we always have to restart a service you could build a workflow include that inside of you know AI Ops and it'll it will automatically fire and you'll have now self-healing applications and servers and things like that so when it comes to you know gen right this is all the rage these days we just introduced the ability for itom it's called now assist for itom so how many of you here have have struggled to understand what those cryptic events tell you right it's it's it's really impossible to understand that you know as a human so what we're doing is we are simplifying that using our large language model and trying to tell you exactly what the error is in human terms and we're also trying to help you understand what to do next so this just came out uh this came out in March you know in the store release uh it's got gen capabilities you know service now um AI Ops has used Ai and ml underneath the covers for gosh how many years now like 10 years but now we're adding gen on top of that uh and then finally here we have cloud services catalog uh if you're going through a cloud Journey right now and you're trying to stand up a lot of cloud resources um you know typically everybody does that in a silo right and they don't really take into consideration policies governance how much it's going to cost we help you put guard rails around the process by offering up a catalog you know this is very aligned with it service management here right you guys in the room who care about it service management and and governance will love this because you're going to be able to offer up standard policies have approvals uh make sure that the uh tags are actually applied at provisioning application owner project and so forth uh and then also we'll be able to manage those in a day2 so once you have a cloud stack you can then manage that stack with day two operations uh and of course you don't have to use the catalog to actually process the requests through here you could use our API and of course we also Discover it upon once it's provisioned so Cloud Discovery ties in there as well so that's just a quick summary of the latest innovations that we have for it operations management we are really focusing on trying to help you streamline everything on the it operations side through AI ML and standardization with governance so you know with that said I'm going to turn it back over to Aaron to to to close us out thanks Steve um I'm going to move through this a at a pretty good clip because I want to get to uh some Q&A and I know there's some questions in the audience and uh so so real quick um the these are some of the results this is not an exhaustive list but if you want to take a picture feel free to do so um faster resolutions increased performance so when we talked about speed uh and delivery uh one thing that that is assumed but I I feel the need to call it out is that when we're talking about speed we're not talking about the sacrifice of quality okay so the the question is can you strike the balance generate uh the the desired results with the quality at a greater speed and that's really what we're trying to do build resilient productive and collaborative teams so we're seeing at least a third of a uh an improvement there and then we're trying to get ahead at the pace of change so all very very significant things another good to to snapshot if you want the the the results that I would uh instruct you to uh to uh train your focus on would be the ones that are bookending Key Bank and zoom um these ones are very very and they all are but these ones in particular are very uh automated focused so when we're talking about what are we doing in order to um bring an automation component so that we can achieve objectives faster these are stories that are very very significant I would go so far as to say geni and ni and AI in in in general um is is not uh the attempt to replace um a human uh working on that as much it is trying to return the humanity to that person so they can they can make better decisions with better data and like like R.J and Steve mentioned uh datadriven decisions are the things that we want to zero in on um this is this is a now on now story what this is see what you're seeing here is how internally we're uh resolving our own efficiencies so when we talk about agents versus the the type of population that they're serving versus the growth um it's you notice that there is that there is a uh uh that there is a split we're going in two opposite directions which is what you want to see population's growing services are staying the same doing more with less so more service operations benefits and the one thing that I want to say about this is again this isn't about itsm only it's not about itom only in fact our customers and and hopefully there's not too many in the room if you're struggling to get value back especially from one product set you're probably contemplating hey is this is this too expensive you know where is the value so time to value is extremely important getting service operations right the first time enables you to accelerate through the different areas of the business through the different workflow so very very critical and we want to make sure that it's impacting things like security like end user management like devops and like your governance risk and compliance which is very very uh uh important to your overall risk management uh posture so I want to leave you with three things and we'll get into the Q&A and Yolanda can you raise your hand real quick so everybody knows where she is if you have a question just a couple things um uh three things in particular to ask yourself could you achieve agency or command goals easier uh if service and operations teams were working together key keyword together more effectively how would AI improve this and then where do you have siloed tools so you can focus in we can get um some directives on those so just a few questions to ask yourself internally um and I'm going to thank you for your time but um in the meantime let's go ahead and move right to Q&A good morning and thanks for all of the information I think my question is for RJ you mentioned um regarding AI could um look at our current K well can it look at our current Ka before generating a new Ka and what if the KA are outdated right so uh the question is you know what if the knowledge articles are outdated um and so we are working on um essentially helping you understand the usage of knowledge articles cuz and and you know we've talked to customers where they say hey we have 3,000 knowledge articles and then they have a practice every year to go and review all the ka's usage and so on and then be able to scrub and and generally it ends up that about a third of them get um get Shel and so we are looking at how to automate that work because it is fairly tedious to go through and and and uh ascertain that and so we will come with capabilities that not only help you generate the knowledge articles but also then be able to easily understand the usage and the outcomes they are driving and then be able to manage and maintain them so that is something that we are working on providing because also I think the goal is to avoid duplicity so we don't want to duplicate but we also want to make sure that during an automation that you're modifying what you currently have and lessen the manual which also leads to additional mistakes absolutely yeah absolutely and and also you know in terms of knowledge creation there's sort of two ways to think about one is you the KCs approach which is you have your agent but they resolve an issue but we're also looking at how do you look at sets of incidents and understand what are the knowledge articles Associated to them and then be able to update them so thank you so much for the question I'm sorry what was your name Sheila Sheila thank you for the question we have another one over here hi I want to ask that the now assist that you basically Is the Gen AI has it been s u fair Ram approved so has gen been fed ramp um we're working on getting it fed ramp approved and I believe right now it's a June date for the first availability I think that's in the GCC Cloud we're working towards that so basically that will be fair Rams certified in the in the June 10 time frame timeline so the first availability would be June I think we could take a followup in terms of the exact kind of available to which environment um that might be relevant for you okay thank you awesome thank you for the question we have maybe another one over here front row thank you so if we have relationships manually created in our cmdb and we want to turn on the service mapping plus how can we make sure we are successful what should we do with the old relationships great that's a great question so with service mapping plus uh so the question is if we already have relationships built out right manual services um if you can there's a process you could actually look on our doc site to convert manual services to automated but then if you have good Discovery data that has good TCP data and good process data our machine learning algorithms will suggest candidates to you you could then attach those candidates to existing services so you can keep everything that you had in place and keep you know the the full life cycle of those Services you're just at enriching those services with with actual data that we found thank you we have time for one more yeah and and I just want to say we we'll be hanging out out here we have about 40 seconds so why don't we go ahead and why don't we close it up if there's questions feel free to come up thank you everyone for your time hopefully this was useful to you I got you thinking a little bit about service operations I'll see you around have a great rest of the FED forum