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] Finally, thanks again for joining us. We hope you enjoy today's webinar. Now let's get started. Hello, and welcome. My name is Jon Lim and I work in product marketing, supporting strategic portfolio management here at ServiceNow. I'm super excited to be here with all of you on this webinar where we'll be discussing strategies for successful change in transformation. So before we start here today, a few important announcements about this webinar. First of all, yes, it is being recorded. So it will be available on demand for watching later and for sharing with your other colleagues. At the end of this presentation, we will also have a Q&A. So please put your questions into the Q&A session. We have some great teammates who are also on the webinar who will be answering some of these questions live for you as well. And then finally, we have assets available in the resource list on this topic, such as e-books and solution briefs. So please feel free to check those out while we're in the webinar. So again, as I said, my name is Jon Lim. I'm a Product Marketing Manager here at ServiceNow. And on this webinar, we're joined by several experts in the SPM and transformation space, will let introduce themselves, starting with Sankhadeep.

Thanks, Jon. Hello, everyone. My name is Sankhadeep. I'm an Advisory Solution Consultant at ServiceNow and I've been in the PPM and the SPM space for more than 16 years. And I am sometimes also go by another title, which is the friendly neighborhood SPM evangelist. And with that being said, I want to hand it over to the star of the webinar today, my good friend, Mr. Peter.

Thanks, Sankhadeep. Yes, my name is Peter Dijkstra. I'm from the Netherlands, working in ING, experienced in portfolio management more than 20 years now and a long-time user of ServiceNow SPM. So I hope we can enjoy the webinar today.

Thanks so much gentlemen. So we'll take a look at our agenda for today. First, we're going to take a look at some of the current trends in the enterprise space for this topic. Then we'll jump to Peter, who will talk about ING change, transformation journey. We'll then look at that partnership between ServiceNow and ING and what's next in that journey. And finally, we'll have a Q&A section. Over the course of this webinar, we will have 2 polls where we really want to hear from all of you about what's happening in your organizations. So let's get started with some of those trends. So we see on the screen here from a recent HBR article, it's a stat that says 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategy successfully. And when we think about it, that's a pretty astounding statistic. Gaining the competitive advantage in today's market really means delivering value faster even in the face of constant change, right, the way organizations optimize how they plan, align resources and deliver products matters now more than ever. And what organizations are really trying to figure out is how do you capture those business needs, make the right investments, lead the transformation curve and measure and manage that business value. So we know that enterprises are complex, right and change is going to be constant. It's very difficult to maintain alignment been strategies, investments and the actual work that's being done which, like many organizations struggle to optimize their return on transformation initiatives. It's a process, continuous improvement in the face of accelerated change across industries, technologies and teams. As organizations really get deeper into those transformation journeys, they look for additional ways to make transformation more efficient and effective. So as you can see the statistic, it's a poll that KPMG did that said significant number of transformation leaders say that transformations have become continuous or nearly continuous, right? And knowing that fact, the importance of having a solution that is collaborative and contextual across every level of your business cannot be overstated. So we're going to jump into our first poll question here. You should see on your screen, the question, what is your base challenge in driving change and transformation across enterprise. So when you select your response make sure you submit it in the bottom right. There's a small button that says submit. Otherwise, your response will not be recorded. So on the screen, we have these responses here, resistance to change, change fatigue, lack of alignment, lack of leadership buy-in, lack of measuring success and then resource constraint. So again, you select on your screen and then just click submit, we should get your responses. [Voting]

I'm curious, Peter, and Sankhadeep, what do you guys think people are going to say. What were the most common ones?

Yes, indeed, exactly. And I was really wondering if there is an option to select all off these. So Peter, any guess, what would be your most favorite option here?

I think D and E, yes, it's not 1, it's 2, by the way. But yes, I think the other ones are always happening when starting change. But yes, I think in making it successful, I think, is the most important part, at least on our journey, right? So I think that's very valuable and at least making the achievements you want, meaning that, yes, you have to measure your success, right, otherwise, you don't know if you're there or not.

Looks like we've got a lot of response coming in, so I'm going to close the poll now. I'll move on to the results. it looks like it's pretty split across the board. Yes. Looks like resistance to change was the biggest one in terms of the biggest challenge but everything got a pretty even sprinkling. So from there, I'll pass it over to you, Sankhadeep.

Thanks, Jon. Now I have known Peter and ING since about 2 years now when I joined ServiceNow. And I remember the first interaction with Peter, where he helped me understand how ING is using SPM so that I can deliver a workshop do some of his stakeholders. And over the due course of time, the more I understood ING, I was convinced that this SPM story should be brought out and presented on a more global platform. So all of you can imagine why we are all super excited to bring forward this ING story on how they manage change and transformation initiatives using ServiceNow and strategic portfolio management. And I'm sure by the end of the session today, you'll be inspired too. And you will hear from Peter, not just how they're utilizing our platform but also about the strategy behind taking certain key decisions about driving change across the organization. So without further ado, I would like to hand this over to our friend from ING, Peter Dijkstra.

Yes. Thanks, Sankhadeep. Yes, I think maybe some of you were at Vegas in 2019. That's the last time I did a similar or at least less bigger presentation than this one, looked at the kernel of the ING story. But I think like Sankhadeep said, I think for ING, it's very important that we change on a continuous basis. And indeed, ServiceNow helped us in the tooling part how to get that done. Now of course, as you know, if you are doing these kind of presentations, it always starts with a little bit of information about what ING is, although I cannot imagine that there's anybody who'd never heard of ING but anyway. And so we are a global bank with a strong European base. And our purpose is to empower people to stay ahead in life and in business. I'm not going to read all the text on the slide, it's more like that you know what ING stands for. Also important to understand, especially when we're talking about our journey is, where ING is in the world, right? So we, as you can see in this picture, right, I already said we are a global bank. But looking at this map and you can really see that we are a global bank and we are in a lot of countries across the world, which also makes managing change across those countries, something you need to cater for. Now how did we solve that and that's a little chart about how we are organized. I'm not going to read it all out in detail but it's good to understand, by managing change globally in a large organization like ING, it means that you have to have a proper collaboration with the people who are doing it but also you need to have close alignment to the Board, which are the people who are setting the strategy direction for us, which means that we, as a change and transformation team, report via the CTO and there is a Change Transformation Officer, which is a double-headed role at the moment but part of the Board of ING and that makes change an agenda item on Board meetings. And I think that's very important in this matter that you can see that we have a central change and transformation team but that we also have decentralized change and transformation teams, which are, by the way, hierarchically all under the same hood. At the bottom, some explanation about what our role in the organization is. As you can imagine, right, we are steering our change portfolio but we're also making sure that change happens with our change professionals but also that we're building capabilities across the bank to make change happen. Having said that, Sankhadeep, continue.

Yes. So Peter, thanks for sharing this. And I'm sure the structure may seem familiar to many others in this call today. Now I do have an important question at this point, which is, what was the strategy and thought process behind driving change at ING? So what I mean by this is, did you go bottom up or top down with support of your management and leadership team? So can you share what was your experience on this?

Yes. Sure. I think there's also later on in the slide how we started because at a certain point ING, it -- we grow over the years, right. So also expanding in more countries. And the strategy was really making it fast and delivering. But what then happened is that we really deviated from a standard solution across the bank. So when our Board member, -- our new CEO, came in a few years ago, he asked. "Can I get an overview of all the change initiatives in the bank?" And then we had to say to him. "yes, you can but it will take a while." And the problem, of course was, we did not have 1 centralized view on all the change initiatives. It was scattered all over the ING with no combined view where the Board could look at, in this case, the COO. So we also said to him. "yes, if you really want to do this and really want to manage change across the board, then we also need to standardize across the board, not only tooling wise but also process-wise, people-wise, organization-wise." And then, of course, we had a good conversation with the Board about it. And we recommended that they should install at least a centralized transformation office to cater for a proper lineup of information towards the Board. So -- and by doing so, right, I think, did we do it top-down, bottom-up? I think it's -- it -- answer is in the middle. Of course, we need the support from the top, otherwise, you will never make it happen because then they will have their own agendas. But you can also not do it without people in the countries or in the functions we have, right? They need to deliver the information. We comprehend that they need to deliver it and it needs to be right. So it's a combination of both, I would say, a little bit leaning more to top down than bottom up.

Thanks, Peter. And I believe at that point, the solution of choice for ING, when we began the journey was ServiceNow SPM. And I guess, Peter, you must remember that we were previously known as IT Business Management on ITBM solution. So for people in the call who may not have heard about our solution to a great details. So we empower organizations to be more confident in delivering their business outcomes. So in a sense, we are helping customers like Peter, establish their control tower for transformation, connecting strategy with delivery to provide 360-degree visibility of all work. And this leads to greater planning agility, optimum user resources and teams more effectively collaborating across any work method to ensure the desired outcomes are delivered at scale and pace. And we support this not just by providing capabilities but also by giving you a very powerful framework to deliver value to your customers. And when we want the whole organization to deliver value to customers, we ideally started the strategic planning layer, since that's the layer that sets the direction for the organization. And this is the layer where goals, funding strategic priorities and setting strategic road maps are set by the executives or the Head of Transformation. And if you want to do it the right way, you need to involve the enterprise architects as well since they are the ones who will set the business, technology and data architecture providing architecture road map and guidance within the context of the strategic priorities. Now we move to the next layer, which is continuous planning. So letting planners balance their business portfolio, value streams and their products by collecting work requests, feedback and demands from different sources, all into one single planning layer. And when work is prioritized and approved, deliver it in a way which your delivery teams wants to deliver agile, waterfall, hybrid, you name it and we got it. And here recently, we have also introduced our collaborative work management, letting your teams to make these usually invisible work such as experimentation, Hackathon, et cetera, are visible and deliver the work when it is ready and connecting it back to the alignment and the strategized layer. And not just this, since we are talking about the whole enterprise, we also connect to our other solutions like ITSM, risk, industry workflows, ESG. So connecting all of these into that value delivering stream. And supporting these are some of the core capabilities that SPM has to offer. And this brings us to the reset of capabilities from strategic planning, enterprise architecture to project portfolio management and collaborative work management. All of them seamlessly working with each other since it is 1 solution on the same platform and sharing the same data model and not just the SPM capabilities, our customers get the access to the full power of the ServiceNow platform. So think GenAI capabilities, process mining, integrations, performance analytics, to name a few. Now for ING, Peter, I can imagine that you have not adopted all of these capabilities, also not when you have initially onboarded. So can you help us understand what was ING's journey with SPM over the years and which capabilities have you adopted all over the years?

Thanks, Sankhadeep. Yes. As you can see, it's a broad picture with a lot of capabilities. And one of the things, of course, which is important is also to get focus in having it done but taking us -- taking you a little bit along the journey we did. What I said is, when we started our journey in 2015, what I call, we were a community of islands with all their own tooling. That's why we call it global diversity. Nowadays a different wording than then if you look at tooling. But at that point in time, like I said, the COO wanted to have that information available and, of course, making it from Excel to PowerPoint, [ HP, CA, ] there were all kind of tools flying around. Based on that, we did the inventory, by the way, to start within Excel. And based on that, we informed our Board members and then we started our central PMO. But over time, of course, you don't want to rush into things like, oh, let's take a tool because we already had a number of tools in ING like [ HP ] but also clarity from [ CA ] and ServiceNow also, by the way, at 2015, when we started our agile journey. But we didn't want to jump into conclusions immediately. So we used an internal tool called [ true ], not internal but a tool -- the architects were using a lot, at least to get everything electronically recorded, right? By putting it in Excel and sending Excels around, it's not what you want in a big organization. So we needed a tool which could capture our first results. So that was [ true ]. Now in parallel, we did an -- request for information and proposal, as we call it in ING and to look for, okay, what would be the best tool to start with as a global -- in a global scale. Now also due to what I said about our agile journey was then started where we also use ServiceNow. So it was a kind of a logical step to migrate to that ServiceNow environment. Although, we were also looking, of course, at the extended capabilities it had. So at that point in time, we were very confident that the growing of ITBM at that time, now SPM could help us in embarking on our transformation journey. As you can see, it took at least 2 years to get everything into proper place, right? So because you have -- you're sitting on a lot of data but it's not -- that also comes back later on in the implementation part. And you also need to train your people to get it -- to use it. At the same time, we did an agile transformation as well, where people thought like, yes, if we're talking about projects and programs that sounds like waterfall, we are not waterfall, we are agile. And so we started also that conversations how to make that happen. And finally, more 2018 time, we really achieved a stage where we could say, "Okay, this is where we want to be and where we want to go, " however, still with a lot of complicated data points. And then we started, okay, now we really want to connect our planning work also with the delivery environment and really simplify the way we use it. And of course, like today, we are very much up to par and we're doing system upgrades almost within the hour without any major issues. So I think it helped us a lot by getting -- stepping away from the big complex data mining environment to a more standardized SPM environment, which supports our journey. Now to also a little bit understand that better. And it's also -- I get a lot of questions. How does that work in an agile world and this looks very a waterfall type of thing. Now we catered for that because we want to split the world into 2. And we did that because you really want to manage and the Board doesn't want to know which stories we are doing every day, right? They really want to know how does the journey look like towards the strategy we set and give us the progress on that strategy and the change initiatives we're running there. So that's why on the top part, you see that, that's why we are planning the work, which is really done by the transformation offices' teams as we have them in the various entities. And at the bottom part, that's where we really deliver, I would say, the agile delivery takes place. And for us, right, that's more a technical solution we did within ING. Due to our organization structure, we made a decision to do that in Agile DevOps, which really takes the tribe teams to specify their plans, they are going to deliver. Now of course, if you look ahead a bit, that also means that you have to explain people what do you mean with it? I'm not going to read everything on this slide but it's good to understand that we have really clear definitions of the artifacts we are managing. That's also one of our lessons learned. I will come back to that at a later point in time because otherwise, people will always refer back to -- yes but I thought it was this or I thought it was that. So we really want clear definitions on what people need to do and how to do it. And I see that someone is asking the question about, are we in the box? Yes, we are. And that's also one of the lessons learned later on. Looking at definitions, right? So it's not only the top part where we say, what is the program? What's the project? What is an epic or a milestone? Now we also do that in the backlog management environment. So we also know that because otherwise, people are creating epics all over the place for every nitty-gritty thing they are doing, that's not what we want, right? We want to have a good abstract level which we can report to the Board. So that's why we use the pyramid. It's not a real pyramid in the picture but the pyramid where you go from your delivery activities to your really strategic components you need to deliver connected to your strategy. Now last but not least, also answering a little bit to the question about, are you out of the box and what are you using? And the major capabilities and I think that's also part of this webinar is, right, how does that transformation is supported by the capabilities we see. And I think one of the most important part, if there is a strategy, it needs to be crisp, it needs to be clear, it needs to be measurable so that you can translate it into either KPIs or OKRs, dependent on the methodology you have in your company. But I think where we stepped in, a level deeper as of day 1, is that we really wanted to have a global road map of our change initiatives, right? So people think that it's -- well, that may be 10 or 20. Now it's a -- more than 1,000 initiatives we had at the start which we needed to manage and then take out what's important and what's less important. And of course, everybody says, I'm waiting for somebody else. So that's why we were very imminent on having the penalties as well in the system. And I can -- I didn't put a picture in because you can't read it anyway. But just for reference, right, we had an A0 on the wall with so many dependency lines on it that you could not even read the initiatives behind the lines, right? And that's made us think about, we really need to simplify this and really make sure that we can have a transparent global road map with change initiatives we can easily report on. Taking it to the next level because then, of course, right, it's not only about the tool we are using, right? It's very important that the tool needs to support the process, not the other way around. And of course, it's important and that's also one of the questions I saw coming by, right? How do you do that in an agile environment. People need to understand, right, that data can only be properly connected if there is a process linked to it, which we have on an annual basis, right. So every year, like I think the -- most companies have. We have a planning cycle where we define how much money we want to spend in the coming year or in the coming 3 years, depends a bit on which year we are. But normally, we do that within a 3-year cycle. Looking 3 years ahead, which is, of course, very difficult because a lot of people say, yes but I don't know yet what I'm going to do in this case, 2027. But it's about what you want to achieve as a strategy. And of course, based on that and you create your portfolio setup and based on that portfolio set up, you create your change initiative. And while delivering your change initiative, that's something we installed on a global scale in ING, is that -- and that's a very important part in our cycle, is the QBR. And the QBR, a quarterly business review. It's very important that on a regular basis, you look at your change initiatives of not only what you are doing but also what's coming, right? So we always look at an 18-month horizon in the things we are going to work on but also where are we working on. And of course, in a reporting cycle that we do that on a monthly basis, how do the change initiatives go? But really looking at your portfolio and your strategy, we do that on a quarterly basis. And then, of course, at the end, you also need to close the change initiatives because otherwise, you're never getting things done at the end. Now maybe before going into a kind of a wrap up part. Also some capabilities, which is -- and this is a simplified version we have, what you can see already here. It's a small world which I show on the screen and already a lot of lines and all the lines mean dependencies between initiatives. And so looking at that, for us, it is important that we can manage these dependencies but also the change life cycle of initiatives across the globe. Now of course, there's a different view. It's more like a program change view, right, where you see the milestones in time with their description. And unfortunately, it's not yet possible to create dependencies in such a view but for us, this works perfectly fine. And then last but not least, to give you also some flavor about the data points, right and how many people are working on it, as you can see it, I'm not going to read everything out. But we have 55 portfolios across the world because a country is a portfolio, a function is a portfolio. And of course, portfolios have portfolio managers. We have an agile organization, like I said. And so across the world, we have now, at the moment, approximately 300 tribes defined also in the system, right, with all their squads and areas and products in it. And of course, since we started in 2015 until now, we have more than 5,000 projects and 700 programs in the system, meaning that we also have more than 600 program and project manager, roles managers, all various names of managing the change across the globe. And next to that, it's not only the delivery of the change initiatives but also the financial part of it. And that's why we also have the finance controllers and their management accounting heads involved. And by the way, also looking a little bit of the question of -- out of the box. Yes, we all -- I manage it nowadays with only 2 engineers. And by staying in the box and you also have to say sometimes no to our business users when they want something. But by doing it, and there's always a good reason to talk about it. And next to that, also something valuable tip, I think, is creating training videos instead of big books people have to read. We rather make short videos of 1 to 2, 3 minutes, where we explain, for example, strategic plan of workspace, how does it work? Where -- how can I export my data into it? So really making it crisp and condensed for people to understand.

Peter, thanks for sharing this journey. And that was actually quite a journey for the complexity that ING as an organization brings in. And you guys have received quite a lot in such a short period of time. And I'm sure your stakeholders are asking for more. So which actually brings me to my next question. So what's next for SPM at ING? And every organization goes through changes in their operating model. And Peter, you said ING is no exception. So can you share some thoughts on where you think we can support you further as ING goes through its new transformations?

Yes. Thanks, Sankhadeep. Yes, like I said, it's never enough. People always want more. I think the topics we are currently working are really -- working on as we speak is that next to that strategic plan of workspace can represent road maps, like I showed in the previous slide. We also want to have a better view on how our organization looks like. We also -- our delivery organization, by the way and not our entire IT organization. That's where we have an HR system. But really our delivery organization, where are the people, how are squads organized, how many squads are in a tribe and also looking at numbers from the agility and the way we set up our organization. That's something we are currently working on. So how can we do that more from an organizational perspective rather than a real delivery change perspective? The other thing we are currently busy with is really going to release management. And so instead of saying we're going to deliver 500 epics a year, right, we really want to understand better the value people are delivering, more like the Apple model, I always say and so what people get when there's a new iPhone together with a new iOS. That's something which really is outspoken to people. It's also what we want to bring as ING. And sometimes, we have those big checks -- steps we're taking. Likewise, for instance Apple Pay or Google Pay, those kind of things are really the things we want to achieve but we really want to manage that better rather than from a lot of simple small change initiatives rather from a more release management perspective. And the third part, I already mentioned it a bit, is more like organizing but also making our change initiatives around products and value streams. And so what can we deliver to our customers in such a way that our products we deliver to the market are better than before.

Thanks, Peter. And I'm sure you will see success with ServiceNow on these topics as well. By the way, for the audience, if topics such as digital product management, value streams are relevant for you as well, please let us know in the chat if these are the topics that you would like to hear more about. Now let's go into the next section, Peter, which I'm really sure many of our new customers may have. So how to get started? So we already talked quite a bit. So apart from technology and platform, what else would you recommend for our audience on how can they get started with something like ServiceNow's strategic portfolio management?

Yes. Thanks. Yes, I always have to look back, it's quite -- it's been quite a while, by the way. But anyway, what you see, it doesn't never change the points I mentioned here, right? So it is not the case that if you start then with all this, then it's done, right? Even after you started, it's still very important. And I mean there is no particular order, right? So it's getting us a Board-level sponsor is not more important than define your end-to-end process. But what I was trying to say is, yes, really start with what you want to achieve. And of course, in our case and I mentioned it a little bit already, in the poll, which Lim started earlier. Yes, what's important, what's more important, how does change fail? Yes, I think if we did not define success at the beginning, it was very hard to say afterwards. "Oh, we did it very well, right?" It's a simple thing. However, people often start running without knowing where they're running to or to see if they're running the marathon or even if they know they're running a marathon, or just running. And so it's good to set clear goals. Also what I mentioned about the process versus the tool. It's very important and I -- often people forget it's not just the change process but end-to-end. And so where does it really start? Where does it totally end at the -- in the process? And not only that, yes, people deliver change initiatives, no. How do they start? How do you plan it? How do you allocate funds to it at the beginning of your process? And also and even also important when do we stop initiatives, right? People also tend to forget that sometimes. But you also want to stop a change initiative. And then, yes, that's also may be a familiar point, right but people have the intent of asking all kind of questions about the change initiatives. But we made a very clear demarcation in the beginning. This is where we report on and this is where we're not reporting on because people can think like, "Oh, now we are agile. Okay, let's see how many people are working on change initiatives." Yes, we don't register that as a data point anymore. So we can also not say it. And that was a very cumbersome conversation, I have to say in the beginning that -- you need to understand the questions you need to answer with the data you're capturing. That's also why we started with a big load of data and over the years narrowed it down a bit and kicked certain data points out, yes, because people were entering data but it was never appearing in, for example, in a report. Then why are you capturing the data if nobody is interested in it. And so also helping the people entering the data that they do it for something. And that -- making it a closed loop if people enter data that they know where it's going to and where it's used for. Yes. And then, of course, like I said, the work items, it's a little bit spin-off of the data point. But for us, it was very important project, programs versus epics was a good conversation we had in our agility transition. But also, how do we register it across the organization and how do we structure it. Like I said in the beginning, we were -- multiple countries doing it in a different way and how we really want to standardize to make things also comparable, right. And that's why we also needed the definitions. And most important and that's nowadays still a valid point, is making people accountable for their work items, right? We, in the transformation office are not responsible for the data, the people who are entering like program managers or tribe leads or product owners who will enter the data, they are responsible for the data. We only say. "Oh, it looked like a blank page because there is no end date in it." Or these kind of things. But ownership and that's also setting a bridge to the things we learned to start at the bottom then as a link to my last sentence, is that it's very important to monitor data quality as of day 1 and especially right, that people know that they are accountable for the data quality and not the system owner or an office at the center or the Board for even, right? Now the people who enter the data are responsible for the data. And that's why you need to -- we have proper quality controls, data quality controls in place. Another important one, I also mentioned a little bit already to really stay out of the box and out of box, meaning close to how the package is delivered from ServiceNow. Don't customize because your process is different. My suggestion would be change the process, not the tool. But there, of course, it's a trade-off, right? You cannot always change maybe your process but then, of course, call Sankhadeep and then he will help you with maybe another solution to work around it. But really, if you stay out of the box; a, your upgrades go much faster like we do. And I think by using a large community it also makes sense that you use the or reuse the capabilities other people are also using, right? We are not the only one using ServiceNow. There are more companies using it. And of course, right, we need to meet in the middle sometimes. But participating in the communities within ServiceNow also helps to show and tell what you need from ServiceNow at some point in time. Clear process, I already mentioned it. And I think also one of the questions which came by about training. I always say a fool with a tool is still a fool, right? You need to help people understanding what they are doing. And really -- and of course, in our case, people came from Excel, sometimes from PowerPoint, others from Clarity or another tool, HP. Yes. ServiceNow, I think it's easy to understand. But if you really want to make it a standardized tool across a big organization, it's very helpful, at least that's what I did. We created simple 2-hour training blocks in 1 week and simple -- invited everybody to visit that -- to our training block and ask questions to each other or to me. And it helped enormously. And after that, we created very small videos where people nowadays say they know how the system works. And now we do it with small videos. But training, don't forget about it, it's an important asset.

Great. Thank you so much, Peter. And by the way, since you mentioned calling me, I'm already getting quite a bit of calls from my customers. I'm just joking. So Peter, this was really awesome. So hearing from you about ING story, I am sure this has inspired many in the audience today to plan their change and transformation journey with ServiceNow and strategic portfolio management. Now, for me, I have 2 biggest takeaways. 1 is to get that executive level sponsor to drive change, why that is so important. And the second one is to consider and manage change end-to-end. Now it's time for our second poll. So Jon, how about we push that to the audience?

Yes. Absolutely, Sankhadeep. So the second poll question today is, where are you today in your SPM journey? So we'd love to hear from you where you are in the process, you're just being started. If you're already pro, which, if that's the case, that's amazing. So feel free to select your response. Again, remember to submit at the bottom right. And remember, when you -- after you are -- have submitted responses you can take a look. We do have those resources available on at that bottom of your screen. There is also a link to different on-demand webinars. We can review a range of topics. And after this webinar, we will also be having a survey that can be completed. We'd love to hear more from you about what you guys thought about the webinar as well as what you guys are thinking about future webinars we can provide you guys the best content for the future. So we've got a bunch of responses to this coming through. So let's give it just a couple more seconds while people submit. [Voting]

Well, after hearing Peter and all of its tips and trades, I'm really sure there will be quite a many people who will be choosing option C. So let's see how many of those we have got today.

Yes. Let's take a look. So we've got a lot of responses coming in. So let's take a look at the results. All right. So it looks like a lot of people are just getting started. So Sankhadeep, looks like a lot of questions are coming your way soon.

Sorry to draw you in that Sankhadeep but...

No, no, absolutely, fine. It was just a joke, Peter. So absolutely no worries, people can reach out to me directly.

Yes. That's great. So -- moving forward, let's take a look at our Q&A session. We've got a lot of questions that came through. Peter, I hope you're ready. So the first one that I saw -- that's great and I think a lot of people are thinking about is driving change is more challenging, especially in a remote or hybrid work environment. So any suggestion on how you consider these aspects when driving change initiatives?

I think from my perspective, I would say keep in close contact with the people you want to change, right? I think regardless if people are working from home or in the office, right, I think in the office, especially for us as a bank, with such a big global scale, right, we already did sessions via Teams or other tooling. The important -- our important part as of day 1 was that we; a, involve them in the change, right? It's not something you throw over the fence and say, this is how we do it. We invited a number of people from various places online but also face-to-face to really talk with us, what's going on and what are we wanting, what do we want to change? And I think, now a days, it hasn't changed a lot and we still do quarterly off-sites where we talk to people, some people are like, in a global bank, people from Australia, in this case, for example, will not fly over to Amsterdam for a workshop of a day, right? They're traveling 2 days to attend a 1-day workshop. So for us, it's more common now days to do things online rather than face-to-face. So for us, yes, I think it's more common than it was before. If that helps the question.

Yes, for sure. That's great. Sankhadeep, do you have any thoughts on that as well? Or did Peter cover everything?

No. I think Peter answered it pretty well.

All right. That's great. Cool. So another question that came in that I think, again, a lot of people are thinking about, just given the vulnerabilities and risk, can you explain how ServiceNow SPM supports risk management during the change process?

Well, for us, at least, we have a very thorough risk management process, as you can imagine, as a bank, as a financial institution. First of all, we have what we call a risk control self-assessment of change initiatives, right, where we record the outcome by the way, in ServiceNow in -- there's a specific module in SPM about risk management, right, so where we can cater that. But that's more from a change management perspective in the sense that the change initiatives we're doing -- and of course, our transition, our transformation journey was also change initiatives at the beginning, right? It's rather abstract or a high level. But still, there are risks to manage during your journey. But maybe Sankhadeep, you have something to add on the tooling part more maybe.

Yes. No, thanks, Peter. So indeed, so out of the box, what we also provide capabilities where project risk can be transferred over to your GRC teams and that is an integration that we provide completely out of the box, works like a charm. So imagine that you're running an initiative and you are managing a couple of risks which you are able to contain that within the change team or the initiating team. If that is that case, not a problem. But if you see that the risk needs to be taken or something else, or it needs to be managed by the centralized risk team because the risk itself is quite big or there are some additional aspects which needs to be seen, in those cases, those risks can be transferred over to the centralized team so that they can put in some additional guardrails. They can put in some controls and take some extra steps to -- in order to contain it. So that's already supported by the product and the processes that we -- these products bring in out of the box.

Great. And I think another question came in for Peter. And I know you touched a little bit about the training experience but this question was, what was your experience around training employees on ServiceNow SPM during the change initiative? And did you adopt something different outside of the norm?

No. Like I said, when we started, of course, we took a number of key persons into the journey to make it happen, which, by the way, we also asked the same group of people to be ambassador for what we were doing, so that they can also tell the success story to their colleagues. Very basic, right? Like I said, we -- I organized 2 or 3, I think, 3 global calls in the beginning of a 2-hour span, telling the story we wanted to tell, right? So what's going on? What's changing? What is the new tool? How does it look like? And then, of course, a lot of people jumped in like but how do I do this? How do I do that? So we really had a Q&A type of session with all the targeted users at that point in time. And they could really sign into whatever of the 3 sessions we had. And after that, we made sure that the ambassadors and because otherwise, you get flooded, like Sankhadeep will, you get flooded but with all kind of questions and requests in a small center office where we were. So we asked the ambassadors, right, to really talk to their own groups. In the case of questions, they had to share that in the community and making that community work in the beginning was very valuable for us. Which was, of course, nowadays with Microsoft Teams or Viva Engage, there are a lot of collaboration tools out there. But at that point in time in the beginning, it was very basic. And next to that, that's what I do now, like creating training videos with artificial intelligence and not really artificial intelligence to create a video. But instead of speaking myself and recording, I still have the microphone here next to my left top. Instead of recording a self-spoken video with PowerPoint slides, I now load them into a tool and there's an AI voice telling the whole story. So I would suggest, think out of the box when you're talking about training, don't fall in the trap and go to an e-learning or something like that and do it all yourself, now really make room and space for people to ask questions and be interactive with their colleagues instead of looking at the screen and listening for 1 hour. I think it's not working. My tendency would really be, make it interactive, either via communities or even via live calls like this.

Some great tips. And yes, obviously, AI is definitely going to help in some of those training aspects in the future. So we're coming to the close of the webinar, so I'll move on a little bit. And we've got some great in-person workshops coming up where you can grow your SPM and APM skills as well. We have couple of such in-person sessions that are in Washington, D.C., and Irvine, California. If you want to scan this QR code, this will take you to the microsite for not only these learning labs but other upcoming events for SPM, APM, as well as our newest product, collaborative work management. So take a second there, you can scan that. If you'd like to go to the microsite that will take you to some of those events. And then finally, again, just another reminder, you can check out some of our upcoming webinars in the link above, servicenow.com/events and on-demand webinars. So that brings us to the end of our webinar. I'd just like to say thank you so much to Peter from ING, as well as my colleague, Sankhadeep, for sharing their knowledge with me and with all of you on the call today. And a big thank you again to all of our viewers, you in the audience. We hope to see you again and we hope you enjoyed this webinar and thank you so much.