ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome and thank you for joining us for today's event. Before we get started, we have a few housekeeping tips that will help make your experience more enjoyable. First, today's session is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Now let's get started.

Hello, everyone. A big welcome to our ServiceNow webinar titled Fireside Chat with Finance of America, Tips for successful Service Operations journey. Thank you for joining us today. We're excited that you're here. My name is Suzanne Tylka, Product Marketing Manager from ServiceNow. And I'm joined by Meghan Sander -- sorry, a little bit of excitement in the background. I'm joined by Meghan Sander, Senior Technical Business Analyst for Finance of America. I want to start by saying thank you, thank you, thank you, Meghan. Thank you for joining us today. We're thrilled that you could be our guest here.

It's my pleasure. Thanks, Suzanne.

Let's look at our program today. This webinar starts by defining what is Service Operations, and then we'll dive into the Finance of America story. What is their business, where did they start their journey summary of outcomes. And then the best bit, we'll open up for your questions. As we go through these slides, ask yourself, how might I use this strategy to drive my business forward. And later in the program, you can ask Meghan your questions. As a starting point, let's look at how traditional IT service management and operations is set up. They're typically in different teams and use different tools, data and processes. With these silo teams, services and operations feel different pains. Services deal with frustrated employees over slow support, unmet tech needs and being overworked, while operations manage major delays, spotty service and slow innovation. Have you wondered how will these pains change? ServiceNow envisions changing things by bringing together service and operations for unified and siloed approach. This means both teams work together on the same single platform with the same data. By using this approach or strategy, you can accomplish powerful outcomes, expand your services by reducing cost, deliver extraordinary employee experiences and drive technology best practices. In summary, Service Operations is about a smarter, unified IT strategy compared to the traditional siloed teams with their own point tools, data and processes. We're lucky that today we'll have Finance of America describe how their Service Operations strategy has worked for them. You'll see their customer example and experience firsthand. Building on this strategy, ServiceNow sees 3 steps or stages of maturity for the Service Operations approach. The first step is to modernize your teams on a single platform. This creates your foundation for shared visibility, shared data and integrated processes across the team. The second step is using AI to empower employee self-service and to predict and prevent incidents before they happen. And the third step is to ensure that you can play the governance role. It's about continually optimizing your people, process and compliance improvements. Ask yourself, where do you see your company on this maturity curve? There is no right or wrong answer. But with this approach, you might see how to add value over time to your strategy. Let's stop here for a second and say -- ask Meghan, where would you see Finance of America on this maturity curve?

I think we are probably just at the edge between automating and optimizing.

Yes. So they've been a customer with ServiceNow for about 7 years now since 2016, and they have built up their maturity. Thank you, Meghan. And now that you understand more about Service Operations, let's get to the good part. Let's learn more about Finance of America. Before I hand over, I want to share a short story about Meghan. Meghan likes to post on LinkedIn about events that she participates in. So I was wondering what did she post about this event. She wrote, "Hey, you cool cats and kittens, I'll be cohosting a webinar. So you and my friend, are cool cats and kittens." And this tells you a little bit about Meghan. She's about getting the job done and having a bit of fun. So I think you're going to be in for a real treat. Meghan, I'd like to hand over to you now.

Thank you, Suzanne. This is probably my most favorite introduction ever. Okay. Hi, all you cool cats and kittens. Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today. So I have been working with ServiceNow for almost 8, maybe 9, 10, I don't know, a long time at this point. And through our company, we have kind of used a lot of the different platforms. We've started with ITSM. We've grown into ITBM, ITOM, and you're going to hear all about that journey today that we've taken over a multitude of years. I also am a cat lady, if you can't tell, I'm a Girl Scout leader. I volunteer way too much downtown, and I am also a Slytherin. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So just to set the theme a little bit, I'd like to tell you about Finance of America. And we have about 6,000 or so employees. We do various loan services such as reverse mortgages, home improvement loans, and we have indeed been a ServiceNow customer since 2016. It seems like an entirely different time at that point. So one of the cool things that I also really like to promote and share about our company is our beautiful Cares program. We donate so much money over the course of the year. It is mostly towards veterans, youth departments, home service -- human services, sorry. We have projects going on every month to help impact our communities in all the areas across the United States. It's a really beautiful program that you can go Google, and I hope it steals your heart as it has stolen mine. Okay. So I don't -- this plays out a little differently via webinar in this post-COVID world, but I do like to play a little game of never have I ever. So we're just going to all pretend for a second that we're in the same room, okay? Okay. Fabulous. So never have I ever had to explain the difference between an incident and a request. Never? Okay. Never have I ever had to take a ticket and transfer it to the wrong team because it was in-categorized and kind of thrown together and sent everywhere? Never have I ever wanted to just send an e-mail instead of working with a real person to immediately fix my issue. Never have I ever instantly had software put on my computer, hmm. Things to think about. So back in 2016, a long time ago, right, we had a lot of rapid implementations, things that the company just wanted the platform stood up. We bought it, we're going to use it. Now do it. Okay. However, because it was such a rushed implementation and everyone wanted to see the value too fast and just wasn't all set up properly, we ended up relying on e-mail ingestions over automation. Customers never received replies or follow-ups about anything and had no details about how to get to their tickets or how they were going to resolve their issues. All of these processes were incredibly ineffective, taking double and triple the time that it would normally take [Audio Gap] anything. The thing that hurt my soul the most was a custom catalog item that was built just to catch it all, and they called it ad hoc and everywhere you looked was the category of other, the subcategory of other and the service of other because that was easier than actually getting down into the nitty-gritty data, and it made it my heart really sad. So what did we do about it? Why we're here, right? First thing we did was remove the customization. I can't tell you enough folks the ServiceNow platform itself, it has so many capabilities within it already out of the box that just by following the documentation and going along with what is suggested, you don't need all the customizations you think you do in order to achieve the exact same outcomes. So once we remove those customizations, we were finding that processes were actually beginning to work smoother out of the box, the way we were expecting them to occur. We also, as I'll go through in a little while, relaunched our service portal. We wanted to give employees place to go for anything they needed related to technology, whether that was talking with the service desk or getting that instant software, I mentioned, a new computer or submitting a request for access or any such variety of things. We also really knuckled down and got the data needed for the CSDM and discovery processes. We started using the CSDM white pages that are published by ServiceNow in order for us to use the walk, run, crawl -- crawl, walk, run phase, oh lordy, if my team heard me mess that up, they'd hurt me, crawl, walk, run so that we could get the CSDM put together properly with all the right foundational data that's needed because we all know garbage in, garbage out. And finally, my most favorite and importing piece, if I click the button, is agile. We are a very agile team using Scrum methodologies. And the #1 lesson that I will touch on is that we eat the frog. So one of our most impactful things we did that I mentioned was trying to engage our customers, our users, our employees to come to this place for getting their help that they needed. This also helped us really nail down what processes we wanted automated first. Because of that crawl phase, we first identified areas where we knew that employees really wanted to help that was a lot to do with what's the status of my ticket; that was over 500 times in the span of 3 months search in our portal. So we finally worked with marketing, and we came up with a brand-new campaign and a brand-new looking field to this site that carried over some of the branding and marketing that we use on all of our other employee websites. So now we were telling all of our users that we have a new look. This is easier. You still get all the things that are out there, but you can actually instead of relying on that e-mail to send it over to the wall for the service desk agent to create the thing to do that, you could just get it instantly, by coming to our beautiful site. And here, also fun for me, the before and the after. You can see just by looking at this, why employees didn't want to come and visit the site, how it was so unintuitive for them to go and use all the available things that were there so that they could indeed utilize self-help. So what we did once we launched our new website. I started monitoring how many people were actually coming to that site. And you can see the day we launched this huge spike, we had over half the company walk into the site in order to check out what all the changes were that we had done. We then had to know -- okay, so we've got the audience we're driving towards here. How are we going to get things out there? How do we want to do the things? So that's where we talk about agile and that's where we're going to talk about eating the frog. So there's this guy, his name is Mark Twain. Mark Twain once said this thing. If you're going to eat a frog for breakfast, best to do it first and get it done and out of the way. And if you have 2 frogs, it's best to eat the bigger one first. What does that mean? Mark Twain, really who is that guy? So what he's saying is if you've got something terrible, something awful that you really don't want to do. If you do it first and get it out of the way, then everything else that comes after that seems like a piece of cake. So we took a really hard look at ourselves and our team and our platform. We took a hard look at our platform so that we could decide the best way to move forward and the best way to make everybody happy, even though you can never make anyone happy -- everyone happy. By introducing agile straight out of the box from ServiceNow, we used over at this point, 150 Sprint iterations, so that we could, in 2-week increments consistently pump out changes to the portal, to the catalogs, to change management, to all these different departments in order to satisfy the needs so that our tool could actually be used the way it was intended. Excuse me while I die -- I'm sorry. Suzanne, can you take it for me for a second?

Yes. Sure. Sure. And I think what's important with starting with the hard bits first, it's that you can -- you understand what the top categories are for your team's work, you try to get the big things done first and show some value to the organization and that allows you to build momentum with the process.

Spoilers, I didn't actually die. Thank you, Suzanne. Okay. So as you can see from this report that we pulled here, at -- the largest chunk of work that we needed to complete had to do around incident management, which was removing those customizations of a category, a subcategory, a sub-subcategory and a service. All those extra fields that we had added in there had slowed things down and became too granular, but the teams weren't even paying attention to those anymore. By removing those bits, and then allowing us to do the discovery that was possible, we can now instead of populating all those custom fields, populate the affected CI. So when we have a change record, we can relate those incidents as needed and also roll it all the way up from platform management. Okay. The next bit that we saw that we really had to improve upon was the onboarding and offboarding experience that's never easy for any company to achieve the onboarding and offboarding experience, especially when it comes to automation. What we did was took out everything. We worked with over 20 different groups within our company and all the teams that helped out with an onboard or an offboard. By putting together all of these different bits, we were able to actually workflow the whole thing from start to finish and pinpoint places where we could automate, where we could combine test, where we could say that we could have a bot give us the access for these things. We can automatically terminate access to the software if we have to. We had our agile and our sim themes so that we could then say, here's the 2 most important pieces that went out into the user base. And then we worked down from there. Now one thing that I did mention was how we worked with multiple different groups. So one of the lovely things about the CSDM methodologies and the white pages that are out there is that this is really engaging everybody in your organizations. And we have to break down the silos in order to understand, hey, this group is actually provisioning this access. But this group is the one who's giving it away and decommissioning it. Why isn't this combined? Why don't we work together with these groups? And then there's a lot of other folks who said, well, this isn't my process. It's so-and-so's and there's a lot of finger-pointing that goes on with it, too. Our team took ownership of needing to understand who is a service owner, who is an application owner and really getting other folks within the organization to own their bits of data so that we could put it all together into our CMDB and get the proper CIs listed that were needed. Along with also including -- so everything that we've been doing, we've been talking about is around the user experience. It's around wanting to make the tickets work better and faster for our company's employees. It's wanting to work together with the different teams in the organization so that we can get everybody included. And fun fact, the best way that we could possibly do that is actually having a lot of parties with your teams. So pre-COVID and then even we changed it up post COVID. Our team consistently gets together in person all the time and takes road trips and gets together and does all these fun things. And we're talking about ways in which we can innovate new things for the platform. We are consistently communicating to the whole organization, all the things that we're doing. We have -- so they know what's upcoming in our Sprints. They know that if something is a priority because we're agile, we can swap these things out and really focus on the areas that are important to the teams. And we are, by communicating with those folks and having all the right people on our team, we're able to get the support that's needed from the top of the chain to the bottom of the chain. Everybody needs to be in the loop so that anything can occur. If the folks at the top aren't so sure about why or how or what we're going to do with something, it's up to us to explain to provide the value for that. If we're not doing this to provide value, what are we doing it for? So if we're giving each of these folks, and we have the support that's needed all the way through, and we're all on the same page and there's no hiccups so that we all understand that really we all just want the best for everybody. Okay. One minute. Suzanne, do you want to take the slide while I not die real quick?

Sure. I think what's happened with the journey that Finance of America has been working on is that they have built this across different applications. And as we've mentioned, Service Operations is the ITSM and the operation side. So the service management and operations side, and they've also implemented asset management. And they see that having the single platform and the single data model allows them to grow these applications more effort -- effortlessly.

Effortlessly. Yes. Because we're all along the same platform because we're utilizing these areas that do come together so seamlessly and effortlessly, it all works out so beautifully in the end because we know that the process owner is seeing the same data as the business consumer, which is being owned by the application owner. Everyone has the same bits, and we're all looking at the same places, and we're all winning at the end of the day. Another good bit that we did do indeed along with launching our new portal and communicating the heck out of everything to everybody, we did also introduce the chat available so that users could instead of sending those e-mails, talk directly with the service desk agent. We are able to reduce the wait desk help time and see almost a 10% reduction in e-mails. That's a lot of time that we're saving, not having to do those things. What's beautiful about having the data put into this as well -- and with the chatbot, users are also able to give them -- to have self-help. So that if they go in and want to understand how to reset a password, there is a knowledge article that is out there and a bot that will help them reset their passwords. So we're not taking up time from -- in an agent. We're also able to get an increase in the adoption of the CMDB because of all the wonderful data and the things that we're taking. We narrowed down our very top-most business applications. And once now that we've worked through our top 10 list, we're seeing the next top 10. And there's actually a lot of teams who are finally raising their hand and saying hey, I want my data to be in there, too. I want this work flow. I would like for us to eliminate the time it's taking for us to do these things. Tell us how we can also be involved. So to sum it all up, in my hasty explanations here, we do -- we're pretty awesome. We are able to get at 2.4x faster request fulfillment than what's average because of our beautiful catalogs and the time we've spent world -- building out these outflows. We have simplified onboarding, and we have streamlined IT service delivery so that people can get the status and the transparency that they're looking for from any modern technology department. It's pretty gosh darned magical. And I -- it's all I got. Suzanne. That's that.

Well, I want you to take a simple water so that you can continue on this journey with live questions -- that ends our first part of the webinar which is really where Meghan has described Finance of America's Service Operations journey. But now we really like to open up and answer questions that you might have. Matt, what's the first question, please?

Sounds great. I do. I think Meghan as well get a chance to have another drink and hopefully catch your voice there and get it. We have some Q&A. So again, some questions are coming in already. [Operator Instructions] As you do that as well, I want to remind you at the end of today's webinar, there will be a survey that pops up that you have an opportunity to go out and rate the session of what you've learned along the way. So please do that. So we can always improve these sessions. And one that I mentioned that Meghan kind of said in passing, I think it was really important as you kind of said towards the end about kind of -- so I think it started a top 10 list and went to the next top 10 list. I guess one of the key things to think about is prioritizing what you want to do and back to you earlier point, don't swallow the whole frog first. Take little bites on what you can focus on is a good way to think about it. And one of the questions that came up was kind of several themes here was for you, Meghan, you're talking about different modules, kind of ITSM and ITOM, and even ITBM and the asset management. Are they managed to kind of a single core ServiceNow team, including governance administration? Is there a platform owner? Or how do you break down the different capabilities based on what you're using ServiceNow for today?

Yes. Good question. I wish I put a slide in here about this because I think it's one of the things that makes us so incredibly successful. Number one, we have an in-house ServiceNow team. We consist of about 10 members at this point. We have one product owner. I am our Scrum Master. We have the secondary Scrum Master. We have 1, 2, 3, 4.5 business analysts and configuration engineers. Then we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 developers and one system administrator. Between all of these folks, we have split our Q actually. So we have 2 scrum boards. One of them is for the sustained side. The sustained group is who runs the catalogs, they're maintaining our items. They are updating notifications and general workflows, those easy peasy one-point stories that we need to just kind of keep the lights on. And then we have the functional side of the team. They're implementing our new functionality. They are turning on new plug-ins. They are doing integrations. So we are simultaneously keeping these 2 teams going so that we can always be pumping out those stories every 2 weeks.

Okay. Sounds great. Another one came in kind of similar, but again, you have a platform team and maybe being separate from your Service Operations component, how do those teams typically work together in kind of a day-to-day environment or any examples you might have to help folks understand kind of -- we're going on this path of doing multiple things and trying to keep control? What's your experience today?

So food helps, not going to lie. Putting together a bunch of folks and saying, hey, we're all going to sit down and do a lunch and learn together, bring your snacks all going into the office together and ordering -- instead of doing a potluck and sitting down and talking about everything. Our ServiceNow team is in a little bit of a bubble. So when we want to work with the application owners or other platform owners, we're reaching out to these other teams. And we want to bring everybody together. So we tend to typically bribe them with food so that then we can begin those conversations so we can end up with the data we want. We'll share with them why we're doing this with you. We don't want to do it for you. We don't want to do it to you. here, let's come together and understand how we can all use the same things and take over the world.

Okay. A question came in earlier about your kind of the ad hoc catalog and you try to replace that. Was there opposition to this? What did you learn? Any tips or track somebody else has a similar issue, it sounds like?

I'm going to say just don't do it. Is that all? Is that okay? No -- go ahead.

Maybe fixing it, if you haven't already. How do you get consensus to replace that a little better?

So in order to take it away, it actually took me, I think, 6 or 7 months. I spent studying the data that we had in there of how many times -- what are different categories and subcategories, where did those tickets end up? What team needs to be going to instead using natural language filters? Was there any common denominators through these? And then as I noticed people were using ad hoc for processes that actually existed in the catalog already. For example, somebody wanted to get themselves Adobe so they would submit an ad hoc, "I want Adobe Software." So then we removed Adobe from ad hoc and we prompted users to go use the actual Adobe workflow that existed, and they were able to automate actually getting that. And then we subsequently took away all those different workflows that already existed elsewhere. And then we work with the teams that were saying, hey, is coming through ad hoc very consistently. It sounds like it's not really what ad hoc is, should we build the workflow for it, maybe? And then we would build something out and retire it out of ad hoc and then slowly but surely decommissioned the heck out of it.

Sounds good. I had a couple of questions here from multiple people. In terms of -- if you're going to do kind of a service request cleanup or do something kind of a new project, what lessons would you like to -- lessons you learned, would you like to share? In addition, any pitfalls to try to avoid as you go through the process.

Things to avoid when setting up and maintaining your catalogs?

Correct. That was one of the questions we had.

Yes. So don't go too granular with everything. But also, you don't want to just leave it blank and say, tell me what you want? You really have to -- I think it helps. We did poll our customers. We polled our employees and asked them what is it that they wanted to see. We were regularly meeting with our service desk teams and understanding from them how -- what issues are coming through, what is hard for the users that you're helping so that we can free up more of your time. And we started narrowing down the things that were actually impactful. We also noticed there were catalog items that had been created that were requested upon to be built and then never used. So if these weren't used within an x amount of time, we do decommission those items. We don't need them out there. Then we also -- to in order to avoid doing that, we ask our stakeholders what are they going to be doing with these items? So if we -- for example, to the database team, they have a workflow that they'd like built, well, how will the folks that will request this from you know this is out there? So we ask our stakeholders like the database team to please go tell your coworkers who will submit a request to you, they should be doing it via this catalog item. It's all about communicating to everybody else that's out there. These things exist. This is the fastest way to get it done. And we find a lot of the times that folks don't really want to do it the slow way after.

Okay. Great. A couple of questions coming in as well in terms of going through this process. Did you do everything kind of in-house or do you use a consultant or a third-party partner to help do any of these things?

So when service -- when Finance of America became a customer of ServiceNow back in 2016, there was a partner who helped with the rapid implementation. Actually, I think they went through 2 partners at the time. And that was shortly thereafter when I got hired, we went completely in-house. Every now and then we do work with some partners when we get a new application when we do want to do a new integration, we'll reach out for assistance with some of those with some of -- if we have a larger backlog of work that we need done, we'll reach out and do a part-time consulting work at. And our favorite is reaching out to ServiceNow Rangers and sitting down and talking with them as well.

Okay. Great. Another question was, how large is your problem management team and also the adoption of IT operations management and AI Ops, for example, how does that enhance any of their processes or make things better?

It's complicated. So our problem management team is undergoing some changes currently. But for the sake of conversation, let's say there's about 5 folks on that team. So there's about 5 folks on the team. They're utilizing -- they're really not just problem management, they're major incident management. They're doing a lot of other event monitoring that's going on. Once we worked with the proper engineering teams to get the data aligned, to have the proper CIs that shown in all the different records that they were needed. It was actually pretty easy to get buy-in from a lot of these teams so that when -- all it took was just to have the proper data there for a very, very long time, a lot of these teams, especially the ITBM teams, the ITOM teams, they would always say that our data was incorrect that we weren't actually discovering the right things, and it was all the ServiceNow team's fault. That wasn't actually true. We're trying to reach out to find the data once we work with the right people, and we had the data there, and we could say that with here's the receipts. We've got screenshots, guys. This is actually all the data you're looking to see. Oh, it is. Okay, great. And then they go and they use it, pretty magical.

Okay. Another one here, I think we needed your never have I ever, kind of like a false CI list came through. What was the kind of your process to smooth out or kind of speed along the transition kind of from the chaos to kind of a more connected CMDB using CSDM? Any thoughts on kind of that process or typically you have folks who might be have that same that issue you did when you started the journey?

Communicate the c*** out of everything. And that is the biggest lesson we've learned for all of it. You have to -- even if it doesn't seem like anybody is reading the e-mails, is reading the updates or doing the things, by sending out statuses by taking notes consistently and updating your records to here's your work notes that we're adding in here, those stay and live there forever. Here's the minutes from meetings where we did actually try to talk about these different things. We find that while we're out there having these conversations and then other folks would hear about it and they weren't in the loop with it, we can share all those resources with those folks so they can very quickly become to be on the same page as everybody else. So document the c*** out of all of it.

That's my favorite loaded question, I thank everyone for this one here. How long was the journey from kind of vision to go live? I kind of smile as I ask that because it's a pretty broad question.

Forever. It's never done, ever. So I'd say 3 years maybe? About 3 years Yes. By the time we actually sat down and we white boarded it all out, we knew the beautiful things that we wanted to achieve. We knew what could be from the tool in order to get the buy-in from all the proper executives to getting all the requirements documented and everything signed off on. It took about 3 years, which is usually about 2.5 years too long than anybody else wants to hear.

A couple of other questions came in kind of the -- it sounds like some of the challenges people are having trying other people to buy into the concept of making change and getting by on from folks in different departments. You talked about that earlier talking about some of the food tips and the communications, but anything else that you can help we get suggestions for folks who are trying to get people who might be adverse to making a change in the normal process is to buy in to what you're trying to do.

Yes. So it actually comes down to just being a person at the end of the day. it's hard for a lot of folks, especially because we're doing so many things virtually anymore, and you can't get them to sit around the table and share a meal with you. Folks tend to think that when you come to them and say, "I want to change this process. I want to make things better. You're doing it because it's a negative thing. We changed the mindset for a lot of folks that the stuff that we have, it's not negative. It's not bad. It's just not what we want it to be. And we hone in on the message that we are not doing this to you. we want to do it with you. By making it feel less of an attack on the process or attack on the folks that are trying to do the things when we are changing it to be more about a journey that we're taking together, folks seem to be more inclined to want to do the things. So if you find yourself challenged with another human who you just can't quite get across with, try changing your approach with how you are speaking to them, how you're writing to them, perhaps by understanding their way of thinking by understanding the way that they're reading your messages, maybe there are tweaks and changes you can find in order to make that message land a little softer.

Okay. One of the comments that came in here after the kind of the 3-year journey, I'm assuming that's because you have kind of a longer-term goal. It wasn't 3 years implemented solution. It was more kind of the full process. Let's move on.

Okay. Absolutely a little bit on -- No. It's just years to make it look like really extra shining and polish-y. Like so many folks that I've talked to over the years in the ServiceNow ecosystem, there's a lot of customers who want to be able to just flip a switch and, "Oh my God, it does everything I wanted to do, amazing. I didn't have to tell it to do anything at all. That's not true. You have to actually take the time to understand what data you need and want and the processes that you want to build. And sometimes, in order to actualize all of that, it takes a little longer than you want it to take.

Yes. Perhaps with a follow up on that one. Another customer came up with that kind of same theme. Do you typically try to stay mostly kind of out of the box kind of flow designer and spokes or how much custom do you do or try to avoid that?

Custom things tend to be bad because they end up not always being so great. I have never found a reason why we can't stay out of the box on something. And it's also really important to note there is a huge difference between customizing something and configuring something. There is so much that you can configure within the ServiceNow platform. You can add in those extra values that you need in order to capture something in your reporting. But there's very little need to customize it to make it do something that the tool doesn't already do. what we have found works very well, really, we'll typically have a stakeholder who comes to us and says, "I used to use this other tool that's not ServiceNow, and I want ServiceNow to do what it used to do. Well, ServiceNow does the exact same functionality just in a different way. So we will take the hand of that stakeholder and give them personalized one-on-one training we'll send them all the documentation and videos we can find on these different features. And then we ask that stakeholder to please work with the tool out of the box for 3 months. That is one full quarter of your work trying to do it out of the box ways. And then we'll do an evaluation again to say what is and isn't working. Perhaps you need a configuration here or there in order to make it work better for you. But we very rarely ever find the need that we have to move away from out of the box.

Fun question came in talking about being a finance organization, how much of the regulatory and governance impact you? And how do you deal with any kind of identifications between services down to individual CIs? Any thoughts on that at the high level?

Yes, that is my #1 thing to learn about this year actually. So as a publicly traded company, we do have a lot of SOX regulations that we need to follow. We have a lot of specific rules around our change management processes about our access requests. And there are a lot of things that need to be, I don't know finessed, let's go with 'finessed'. And that is something that I would like to follow up with the next time I do a Q&A with you at Knowledge because we are actively working with Rangers like this week on how we can implement those SOX controls and get value out of it and still maintain all those rules.

And to what extent you use Discovery today? What types of CIs are you discovering and looking at? And do you have any examples of value it's added to the organization to help make things run smoother?

Yes. So we are -- gosh, we're down to servers, databases, all our hardware assets I think there's a few more servers, the windows. We're connected through AWS. There's not a whole lot that's missing at this point off the top of my head out of it. And because we are able to add in all that data. So what we're seeing now is every change has affected CI on it. We're able to successfully use blackout windows and change controls to say when things are overlapping on each other. We're able to automate a lot of notifications to users while also not overcommunicating. We can say that your piece of hardware will be affected by this server change because we have those things mapped out. And we're only targeting the specific users that need to know about that kind of information. It's been a really nice improvement for those folks who would get an e-mail and say, this doesn't affect me. Why am I getting this? Now they are only seeing the information that's relevant to that.

That's another fun question I like. What do you think has been your biggest win so far? And they asked the question biggest failure, but maybe biggest opportunity to learn from so you don't follow the same path again?

Good question, good question. The biggest win was dismantling ad hoc because it hurt my soul that much. And finally, realizing that we've built out the catalog enough and we had finally communicated enough that we didn't need it. The biggest pitfall we found is -- it's probably not documenting things. I think that's why it's so important to me to tell everybody else, write it all down, make sure you are all on the same page so that you can share those notes and say this was my understanding, was it your understanding as well? Please let me know if I'm wrong in some way because so often these projects would get sidetracked or other things would become a priority, so we would have to pump it down. And if we didn't note down exactly where we were in the process, the hard things that we are facing, the things that we wanted to do, we forget about it. And it just became that much harder to pick it back up. So by making sure we wrote it all down and we keep it all in a single record of that story of that epic then everybody no matter what is on the same page and that makes it all much easier at the end of the day.

Okay. And I think probably one last question here. I know we took your voice for most of the day here today, but kind of a fun question for folks in terms of dealing with leadership and getting approval to make changes or to do something different, from your experience, what helps with not only managing folks down who are trying to not want to do change, but also managing up to the leadership to get their buy-in and understand the value of doing something like this?

So at the end of the day, everybody just wants to make it easier. We have, for senior leadership for getting the approvals to do the things automating and getting that visibility that your technology departments need is actually life-changing, especially now that we are in a world of business that requires everything to be digitalized. There are processes that just cannot be maintained anymore. And there are customer bases that are expecting to be able to have that unified app experience to have that excellent website experience in order to consume your products. Having this platform that covers everything the technology department needs is just getting your business that much more ahead of our -- of others that are out there because you are able to easily and quickly break down all the silos between all the teams. It's life-changing and silly if you don't.

Well, it sounds great. And we have a lot of questions come in today. I've been trying to go through pick and kind of combine those throughout the session. I appreciate your answers. For those of you we didn't maybe get to your specific question, you can reach out to us specifically afterwards, and we can get some details and some answers on some of those as well, either through Meghan or through other experts within ServiceNow on more of the ServiceNow capabilities. Before we do wrap up, a couple of things just to highlight. Webinars like this are a great way to learn, so definitely go out to our on-demand webinars at servicenow.com and you can see other topics like this. So you can learn both from customers as well as ServiceNow experts both how to implement and how to take advantage of some of the key capabilities within the platform along the way. In addition, as Meghan mentioned, we're excited she's going to be joining us in Las Vegas at Knowledge in May. We have about 700 different sessions going on. So if you haven't been to Knowledge before we hopefully can come out and join us in Las Vegas and see what's going on and hear from a lot of other customers have a chance, talk to one-on-one with them to see exactly what's going on and how you can again leverage the platform and take advantage of some of these key capabilities. Again, at the end of the webinar, you'll probably get a pop up with the survey. So again, please complete that survey. So you can give us feedback so we make sure we're hitting the target on what we're doing with these sessions. I do you also want to thank Suzanne and more importantly thank Meghan for her time and struggling through the topic with the loss of voice there for a while. I think people really appreciated that and had some incredible feedback coming through the chat. So thank you again very much, Meghan, for your time and sharing your story -- and I want to take everybody else for joining us for today's webinar.

Thank you, everyone.