hey good afternoon everybody how is everybody doing good thumbs up all right hey so um this is a pretty compelling story and I find that the power of the service now platform is best told by what our customers do um we're joined today by somebody who has sat in the middle of ongoing change has advised uh the people he serves on how the platform could be leveraged to accomplish some pretty amazing things in a short period of time so before we introduce him uh my name is Gus I am the director of sales for Creator workflows so anytime you or your customers are building applications and integrating those applications uh from service now uh externally you get to talk to us so today I'm joined by Bob Bob do you want to do a quick introduction of yourself sure good afternoon my name is uh Bob Jennings um I work at an organization called the defense Counter Intelligence and Security Agency um I work within our chief strategy office has many responsibilities of one of which is to drive transformation across a newly formed agency and there's one person that you see on the screen here who's not with us right now he got called away for some work uh Kyle is the link between Bob and service now um and he serves as the account management in that capacity so if you have any questions about this story just let us know um raise your hand when we come to the questions uh question and answer section at the end um and we certainly appreciate your time so thank you all right um Bob I think it would probably best to start with uh a little bit of a story or an explanation of who dcsa is and what are the missions you support and and really what's the function of your organization sure great um so we like to refer to ourselves as the nation's Gatekeepers and before I get started uh my colleagues my fellow Gatekeepers if you can raise your hands please Gatekeepers they're going to ask all the hard questions they're going to see how good I do later so we'll see how that goes um um I have a few notes just because I want to cite some fun facts but uh um I generally won't follow that for the most of the day um but we were an organization that that was uh formed in the midst of covid uh we were born in uh I want to say 2019 uh and as the nation's Gatekeepers uh we're responsible for vetting Personnel uh ing industry uh conducting Counter Intelligence uh selected Counter Intelligence not not all Counter Intelligence uh and training uh the the the everybody who is in the gatekeeper role on on the various functions that they perform be as a an agent or as uh somebody who's responsible for protecting critical technology or or protecting against uh foreign ownership control and interest uh our organization was uh again created during the the midst of Co um I call that to your attention because it's an important part of our story uh we also were an organization that was was bringing in uh several organizations from across not only the defense department but also the rest of the federal government so so we were tasked with bringing in in several organizations with several different processes sever different cultures uh several different ways of doing business um into a single unified organization in the midst of a pandemic at the same time we were responsible for uh making sure that we did not break what we call break Mission um so just to give you an idea some of the things that we do uh anybody here have a security clearance right so there's a good chance that that you had a relationship with our agency in one form or another so we conduct uh approximately 2.4 million 2.4 million background investigations on on a yearly basis uh if you're familiar with the concept of continuous vetting or trusted Workforce uh we enrolled more than 3 million people into trusted Workforce um we're responsible for giving uh clearances to 12,500 uh facilities throughout the United States um we're responsible for for certifying for compliance from a cyber security perspective over 5,000 uh 500 it systems U we're responsible for conducting as many as 3,400 reviews of individual organizations at the same time responsible for protecting critical technology uh uh managing against the foreign ownership control we do that with a Workforce of approximately uh uh 10,000 people government and contractor spread across about 160 offices throughout the United States so that's dcsa and a nutshell and and uh there's myself and others are more than happy to tell you a little bit more about what we do um our acronym is probably not welln um interestingly as a gatekeeper we somewhat you know have an important role that we want folks to know about but we also as our former director used to say um they're never going to be a movie about dcsa um but we play an important role in National Security that's uh that's true I guess I don't so um you know it's it was interesting so Kyle and I were talking a couple months ago and he was like walking me through the story of DC dcsa and its formation and I was thinking to myself well how can this newly formed organization have workflow issues how can they have issues with disaggregated work when um there's no prerequisite for that problem and so interestingly enough as I started to learn a little bit more about how they had all these different organizations they had to pull together not just the processes but the culture they need these they needed a few key components those components are repeatable reportable and reliable workflows that provide insights and analytics so they can be more efficient over the course of time and some of the things that we've seen Bob champion and do within his organization with the support of his peers is nothing short of impressive so um Bob it's you've chosen service now as your low and no code platform what are some of the reasons that you've uh chosen service now and leaned heavily into that sure um so so um first off let me start with uh we we're an agency that really from a uh in a corporate setting found ourselves where we grew extremely quickly um the the agency that that all the dcsa kind of fall fell under it was a small organization called the defense Security Services um it was about a 800 person organization with a very small footprint so we were almost like a a company if you will that just grew tenfold overnight uh and so we recognized that as the agency was coming together that the way we were doing things under what we call DSS was not going to work in the future uh so we really had a a business need not unlike I've heard forums like this from commercial clients that that you may have where they talk about having explosive growth then having a challenge of keeping up um keeping up with the pace of change keeping up with the pace of Technology Etc so there they in light are kind of our fundamental business problem and of course you're all Fed so how did we get the service now um through a competitive process uh so so uh our organization had seen various parts of dcsa and our predecessor organizations using service now but they were kind of just very much activities because we had different organizations that that had been experimenting that fell under this one umbrella um so what what the what the agency did what my predecessors did was basically did an analysis right we wanted to have a low code application platform um we wanted to have really a lot of what surface now has to offer you all know you have competitors um we we basically went through a a process to figure out what was the best fit for our agency we ultimately landed on service now and then of course we went through the the procurement actions to to bring bring the contract in place yeah I mean service now is immensely valuable but I think one of the things that make it most valuable is your ability to re-engineer and then consistently reimagine um getting good is one thing but constantly getting better is a totally different story and that's one of the things that I get the opportunity to sit back and witness is our federal customers constantly improve through the use of tools um tools that I'm passionate about in the developer side of things so so um would you be so kind as to talk about some of DCA dcsa guiding principles um and how you maintain a responsible development uh methodology on a low and no code platform and you know before you before you do I I think one of the cornerstones of this and it is a little bit of a commercial is governance from the ground up purpose built everybody wants to talk about a lot of Builders a lot of Builders bring a lot of opportunity but managing that opportunity at SC scale is pretty difficult and that's where service now being a role-based system if you trust us to deliver the right services to the right people at the right time based on who they are their job their role their function then you trust us to turn that inside out and deliver the right developer tools to the right builders in the right apps at the right time so Bob if you would just kind of share a little bit about what some of uh your guiding principles are with the platform sure uh so so first off um over there in my backpack I'm one of those geeky kind of people that carries around our agency strategic plan um I should have brought it up here so I could wave it all to you but nobody would have cared um as a newly formed agency because it's required by law I might add we built a strategic plan uh we had a a a couple of goals um one was tied to this uh notion of having a digital ecosystem so really looking at the various technologies that that dcsa basically inherited and and how to turn that into something a little bit more stated the are um also a goal which again kind of was factored into the analysis I mentioned earlier of operational effect Effectiveness um so using those two strategic goals that our director had set um uh we leverag that to really kind of say okay now do we what do we do with what we have with service now so it was a almost uh nine months ago we were out in Vegas at the the Vegas conference whose name I can't recall by memory sorry knowledge thank you irony and and uh uh we really you know sometimes they say you know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and uh um so in this case that's not the case myself and a bunch of others through the various workshops and the after hour activities said we need to we need to take another look at this like we need to see how we can drive transformation so I think I said something obnoxious and then suddenly we coined this term we need to have delighted digitally enabled Gatekeepers and so tied to these strategic goals and we need to make sure that that everybody that has an experience with dcsa has the best experience possible um and we use that as a as a Cornerstone to build a road map which really gets into what your your guiding principles are and so we set out to do a couple of things so first off there was many activities going on across the agency with service now and and uh we saw a lot of enthusiasm with it but what we didn't see it was all being kind of tied together and nested to our strategic plan uh so that's what we try to do is like okay how do we start funneling everybody towards what the agency is doing um and this is where we we got into to building a road map uh we made a commitment to to build a road map uh within a 90-day period um our goal was to hopefully that's not me um our goal was to have a road map uh uh developed and presented by by Memorial Day of last year and we didn't build a road map that you may think about where we said in this release we're going to have X and this release we're going to have why our road map was was a little bit of a different approach and and so what we came up with first off there are things that that are we want to do that are very transformational at the agency that can only be driven from a top- down perspective so what we call top- down transformation we said let's take our most skilled developers and and let them help Drive some of the top- down transformation um though I mentioned we had a fairly significant budget and a lot of employees so you all can appreciate this as Government people um we also had a lot of vacancies uh so we were not fully manned as an agency and uh the com controller types in government were saying gee you got a lot of vacancies you're not spending a lot of money we'll just take that money back so we really had this like we got to get these positions filled right we need these positions for our mission um but when we looked at all of our HR processes we we saw that they were not as optimized as they could be somewhat of a function of the merger so we really took an effort to to focus on as a kind of a Cornerstone um kind of leveraging the hrsd capabilities and and really looking at some top down HR transformation Kylie's here somewhere unless she left um but we worked with our htmo office with our program office with my office really to kind of drive that that transformation for and we're on the cust of actually getting all that capability um at least a first set of it fielded here in the next couple of weeks um the second thing we did is uh uh we continued to say where where from a value perspective that that can we drive the the biggest end to- end transformation let let's find out what all those things are and just really start thinking about what will it take uh so so we've identified a a number of activities that that we're going to follow through with right after we we get some of this HR transformation going on the other thing we recognized is is uh as much as we wanted to have the delighted digitally enabled work Gatekeepers we needed to to spend a little bit more time on on on to use an industry term upskilling the workforce um and not so much because uh we had skills for sure our program office and our and our it people certainly understand what what these capabilities are and how to use them but what we had this realization is that the customers The Gatekeepers the people who are going to be leveraging these business processes may not uh so so we we we took a very concerted effort to what can we do to upskill the workforce and uh one of the things that we did is uh we we we said well we need to make sure that the people at dcsa actually have a clear understanding of of what it is in this product that we built um one of the things that when I went to knowledge last year that I had heard that really resonated with me was when the CEO of the company got up and one of the plenaries and said you know the biggest feedback I ever get from all of our clients is gee I didn't know service now could do that um so we wanted to if we're making the investment the point was we're making the investment let's leverage the investment let's make sure everybody uh understands what that investment is and so the way we attempted to upskill is uh we came up this one of those Vegas things again with what we called um Innovation day um so so uh um you some of you may know them as uh the industry term is a hackathon um we threw that word around for a while but because of the mission of our agency and if you look at the history of our agency we have a lineage do an OPM breach so you know hackathon is probably not the best term um so we came up with the idea of an Innovation Challenge and and what we did is we brought people from the workforce um not only in our headquarters offices but throughout the country our program office people and then our our service now partners and some of our contract developers we basically said bring us a business problem um and let's see if we can take that problem kind of noodle through it and and get a capability delivered in in what I said days and and weeks versus months and years uh so we use that as an opportunity to to not only upscale the workforce but also to show the art of the possible uh and and uh to to make it a little bit fun uh we also decided because uh because we could let's have let's let's let's uh let's just not have a let's let's let's have a contest right so so we we said we're going to call this the gatekeeper Innovation Challenge um we're going to have kind of kind of P like a shark tank or kind of some of the TV shows you might watch we're going to have a panel of Judges we're going to have all these teams come in we're going to have them present their business problem how they fix it display it and then the judges are going to uh decide which one was quote unquote the winner uh so so we did all that I think we we we we've we've done that a couple times uh not surprisingly we we made a few mistakes long the way um we learned some things that worked and didn't work we're still learning um but what we ended up doing is really getting our our more integration um more understanding and and more more acceptance of the art of the possible um and then the the one of the things I also picked up from service now is it's Mark Hogan over here I think I was in a meeting and and I said you know we got to eat own dog food we always say that in government and and uh Mark said you know Bob at service now we don't eat dog food we drink champagne okay works so as part of the Innovation Challenge I said okay let's have some fun with this we're going to have a trophy so we we call it the innovators cup we introduced it at the first day we put it out on the the table and we said whoever wins whoever wins here is going to get the trophy and there's going to be a special surprise uh and and uh we we we did all that we went through the challenges we had all the briefings we pi the winner we handed out the trophy kind of Stanley Cup style and then we broke out a big old Magnum of champagne and said let's celebrate uh so so uh that was a big thing of our road map of really again kind of top- down transformation looking at other opportunities upskilling the workforce bringing in this idea of an Innovation Challenge and what we're really trying to get there which what the last part of our road map is how can we find solutions to those everyday nagging issues that all of us in Civil Service get frustrated about right it's like why can't we just fix this right so we're trying to do enabling through a low code application platform trying to move us towards citizen development for the easy stuff and let the pros handle the hard stuff so I that was a that was very eloquent I don't think you're doing it justice though um so let me say this to someone who sat on the outside of the gatekeeper Innovation Challenge um it was one of the most impressive things is the excitement that was in the room for this um you could tell that you had people who were invested in positive steps forward they were invested in outcomes and they were invested in upskilling themselves uh the energy in the room was palpable and one of the things that we did as service now is we actually produced a video and I'm not going to show the video so don't worry um but the video was about bringing some level of excitement to what's what's going on because if you tell people like Hey we're doing this thing it's kind of like a hackathon and it's just going to change everything okay I've been in it for 10 years I know it's not that long but I've heard that every year for the last 10 people make these Grand open-ended promises about how you change culture and the way that it was done over here is something that's sustainable and impactful so not only did you force competition you brought you forced competition around uh common workplace narratives that everyone can identify with and then you you continue to maintain this Workshop uh Innovation Challenge type of narrative not one time not two times not three times not four but in a regular Cadence and you do that because this goes back to one of the last jobs I had um at pivotal and pivotal was very popular for how they taught people to Revolution re Revolution revolutionize their own software development challenges and one of the things I learned there is you don't change Culture by doing it at one time and expecting success you change Culture by finding a champion teaching that champion giving them the flag to carry going with them to the next battle and then when they're competent and coherent and what and what they're advocating for that's your front line you keep pushing it forward from there you start to see people bring joy into the workplace because they can accomplish things there's problems in my every day and I work for service now I got to go between this system and that system and do this in email and send a text over here a teams message there it's a mess you guys are no different but empowering users to take technology into their hands to create something to manifest something it's powerful and that's how you change an organization it's all about the culture and I don't think you did it justice because it truly was uh my I get goosebumps when I think about it when I watch the video to see what Hogan and Kyle orchestrated in conjunction with the leadership from Bob and Tim and others was um again nothing short of of impressive and and I personally learned a lot from that so thankk you so how have some of the outcomes that you've delivered and some of the ways you've engaged with your key stakeholders Mo for a lot of back office type functions um how has it strengthened those relationships maybe it's the understanding that people have of the platform their ability to bring better requirements to you maybe it's just hey leaning into to infr or it teams and having trust and faith that you can deliver their need because you now understand it and by way of the gatekeeper challenge they Now understand you but what are some of the things that have really just like really strengthen that Bond and brought you guys together so I think to kind of expand a little bit more on the gatekeeper challenge since you said didn't do it enough Justice keeping in mind that we we were coming out of a pandemic we also saw this as an opportunity to to answer your question here is to get our Workforce to know each other better again we came together in the middle of a pandemic so the people in the Omaha office have never met anybody else at the agency so one thing about you know and it sounds kind of Mickey Mouse but I think sometimes we just forget it particularly in a world where all this technology the value of a face-to-face interaction cannot be understated um to get people in the room together to solve a problem um and to recognize and and uh it takes time right to make sure everybody's actually agreeing to solve the the the same problem um I actually also am responsible for our continuous process Improvement program at the agency uh so actually had was in a in a good spot to as we train our green belts and black belts as part of a lean six program to to Really uh understand what kind of the problems are out there and how to bring people together um so just the notion of of bringing people together for a common purpose is is probably the first step of of of a creating a relationship um me personally I I like to describe myself as annoyingly collaborative um like like want every's input and I want everybody actually to disagree with each other so we all come up with the right solution together uh so to just kind of get everybody aligned on let's let's be collaborative let's understand everybody's intention let's work together to solve the problem um and then from there it's really really understanding like like what what is the art of the possible our objective was to to to have a create an environment where the problems sitting outside the door that we could automate through service now and other technology would greatly exceed demand that that we we were demonstrating to our Workforce that there's there's a there's a way out of some of these bureaucrat bureaucratic processes that are annoying and inefficient that that they would want to come to us as opposed to taking the approach where a corporate kind of comes down and tells everybody how things are going to get fixed um so I think you know at the end of the day the partnership in terms of just uh uh uh the biggest thing is getting people in the room together second biggest thing is taking the time and space to to build the energy um third thing is is is just just the you got to try things right and kind of put it out there see what works and what doesn't um there's there's an untold story about all these Innovation challenges we we've had which is the part of things that worked well and those where we um in the hot wash every every after every event it's like well that didn't work what are we going to do next time right and just not you know just keep plugging at it to keep getting better and better and better I like to call it my colleagues know this let's Get Next Level right so let's let's get something done let's see what worked what didn't let's go next level so we've been in here for 25 minutes now and we haven't mentioned a single product all we've talked about our outcomes all we've talked about our service now MH I think that is uh one of the one of the strongest ways to uh to advocate for technology and that's when you know it works is when the products and the SKS are behind the scenes service now is the catch all to solve problems um and it's it's been in a a fruitful and productive relation ship for both sides uh I represent a a product I represent a business unit I don't represent the link between service now and our customers that's what Kyle and Mark do but I also do get the opportunity to sit back and watch core sellers that's what we call Core sellers that link um and customers across the entire Spectrum run their businesses in different ways and one of the things that I've grown to absolutely love about working with Mark and Kyle is the strength of partnership that they have with their customers and when my peers come to me and they're like hey what's going on over here I like hey don't talk to me go talk to those guys they've got it figured out I'm just a I'm just an observer I'm I'm grateful to be around it but their customers are equal participants in that and you know Baba I think it's important that we all find ways to get better service now as sellers customers as customers to hear from people who have uh really figured this thing out so I was hoping you could expand and spend a few minutes just talking about the importance of that relationship with service now um what you have learned about how to get the most out of your account teams and and just really where um where why it's important to you guys sure um so I've been in defense procuran and and it space for a long time and some of the dcsa folks have heard me say this um one of the frustrations throughout my my career has been When government goes off and and buys a makes a huge it investment and and then one of the first things they do is stop talking to the the software vendor uh and as a defense guy I like to say you know if we buy a plane from Boeing the first step we do after we take delivery of the plane is not thank Boeing for their service they're there with us for a lifelong relationship um so one of the things that that I really pushed our our agency to do was really to work together and there's no entity that knows the service now product better than service now uh so so that was a very important thing for me to help kind of Drive the transformation that as we were transforming ourselves we were truly understanding what what the product can and cannot do um which is a second thing it's not directly related to your question but I've too often seen us try to make software do things that it wasn't designed to do in the first place and then we get frustrated with it uh so we we very much tried to focus on on uh um leveraging the outof thee box case capability uh our our agreement that we have actually gave gave us access to the impact squad for those of you who don't if you have that I'd encourage you to use it um let let the let that service now and your contract Partners uh um um um advise and assist you and at the end of the day you know I think the biggest thing about the the having to have a strengthened relationship you have to start with a relationship right and start building that relationship and and and be both everybody really having the the the courage I call the moral courage to want to change and they want to change together and to want to accept the fact that some things are going to work great some things aren't going to go so well and and uh you just kind of keep plugging at it and and just to create the environment where candid conversations can occur um with the idea that this is all about getting better um I think sometimes in government sometimes we we put our regulatory hats on too often and it's like you know we want to protect ourselves and we want to make sure you know who do we point the finger at if things don't go wrong um my job I'm I'm part of the leadership at dcsa so I'm like well just point it at me right let's just figure out how to get things done but I think the biggest thing about the the the strength and partnership was all sides really from our our our folks who are participating in Innovation day to our program office Personnel to to to um folks in my office we're we're all all about wanting to get better and wanting to do it do things together yes sir so I think the the lesson here is lean in right uh set boundaries set expectations both sides but in and that's how you get the most out of each other um we are tasked to do a lot as a vendor and a vendor that supports you and you are tasked to do a lot often times with not a lot um look at us as an extension of your team we may not be able to do everything that you can do but we can certainly give you some ideas and sometimes ideas are are where the magic happens um Bob I want to thank you for spending time with us today uh it's been awesome just to hear you talk through your journey um and again the important thing here is we have not talked about product we've talked about the value of a platform to a business that has a problem that is powerful so we have five minutes that's pretty good man right with five minutes um we have five minutes to take a few questions so if you guys have questions raise your hand up we have somebody with the mic it's going to run it up to you um and we are happy to take any questions comments or concerns okay we must have done pretty good oh we got one all right open the floodgates hello my name is Dan Hawkins with the l so I just have a quick question so you said the success and now he a former senior executive in the in the government as well so are these contractors that are doing this work that you're so successful with or they government employees that you're so successful with good question it's all the above that is fantastic okay no more questions for me right but it's it's an you know I'll say that that it is all the above it's like bringing everybody together that knows what they're good with to to kind of work towards a common problem um you know someday we are hoping that that our our Gatekeepers are going to be able to do a lot more of this type of work on the by themselves right and so I think maybe some of these other enhancements that are coming out they're going to allow that um but but uh because I think it's a challenge in government particularly we were talking about some of the stuff upstairs with the it skills is the government can't pay at the same is industry when it comes to some of these things so I mean I think that's something that that uh has been actually been impressed upon me today like we got to Noodle through that some more right and I think that road map I was talking about I mean I already know I got to look at that upscaling lane because I think there's a few more things we need to do but yeah it's a partnership and and we brought everybody together we got another one oh he's loud he doesn't need it the AIO so with your successes uh did you strictly stick to out of the box no customizations or did you allow some sort of customizations yeah um well again the agency came together and there were various pieces of of service now implementations that were were in effect that's why I mentioned about looking at the the you leveraging impact if you have it um we actually I glossed over this on my my question about the road mapping guiding principles for all of our delivered apps um we we actually asked the impact team it's still ongoing to take a look right look under the hood see how these things were do we configured are we aligned with best practice or not um I also didn't mention we we recently converted to an Enterprise license we had started under filler model so so we we knew we were using different license types probably not the correct way um so yeah we there are you know I think it's it's an interesting question and it's almost like a point in time our goal is to leverage out of the box right but I can't tell you that it's completely that way because that's probably not true so there's a there's a difference between customization and configuration and I think it's an important distinction to make I hear it all the time everybody's like don't customize like yeah don't customize get out of the global scope stop messing around down at that level however configuration scoped apps nothing wrong with that uh and Bob and his team they they've certainly threaded the needle on how to do right by both sides of the equation and it's not about buy or build it's about the power to choose either one whichever is best for you regardless of what you're vendor says service now included pick what's best for you the customer so any other questions so I want to know that have you ever run into the problems like that you use a lot of service now uh platform pro products right do you run into the cost for the licensing cost versus the like tightening the budget I think every agency has a Tighter and Tighter budget so want to know that's what's your take on I mean have you ever encountered that your budget have been cut and then but your licensing costs have been rising and how do you address those issue if you encounter that so the your question is is kind of how the the in all it cost keep going up versus as opposed to the the the downward pressure on the budget like basically service has a fantastic product right if you use a lot of product that mean that you use a lot of license uh and then which you have to pay for it and then with the increasing like the budget scrutinies I mean have you ever run into the problems that you know that your budget have be decreasing but you buying more service now product your licensing cost have been increasing mhm yeah no it's a good question so again we're we're a fairly new agency uh to geek out on budget a little bit uh we actually are funded with appropriated funds and working capital funds so some of our kind of you know the underside of what we're our journey is actually figuring out how to cost share um because we have service we have things that we do as an agency that we charge customers for so we actually have a means if you will to generate Revenue under the working capital fund or revolving fund um but then we also have appropriated funds and then you know something a government audience is very interested in is making sure we not use one for another purpose right um so so uh uh our working capital fund uh is is is uh you know it's a it's a rate base and we have to go through a defined process um so I'd say right now as a newly fored agency that the short answer is is no but but I think we're going to face those pressures in the future um but think the other thing is to kind of to to tie on to that and it's something that that we still need to work on within our agency is if we make a big investment right we need to leverage that investment right to squeeze as much out of it as we can right and so and that's that that's that's kind of where I am um as as we if we jumped in that's been kind of a theme today um we're trying new things we want to get better we're making this investment so so uh as as long as we have this investment let's leverage it and try to squeeze out of it as much as we can so that is it um but this is service now and it's fed forum and I can't miss the opportunity to at very least say the word gen AI one time during this conversation so thank you for coming we appreciate you have a good day