View Recording: Intelligent Operations using Microsoft & ServiceNow

Bryan Schrippe 1:30 So I’d like to take a moment to just say thank you to everyone that has come to our intelligent operations webinar today. My name is Brian Trippy and I am the lead technical architect for the entire ServiceNow practice here at concurrency. I’ve got 2 little over 2 decades in the ITSM. It operations and automation space. Uh, over a variety of ITN platforms. But ServiceNow is the most recent one, and I’ve been in that for about 8 years. We have concurrency have done over I’d say 150 deployments of ServiceNow across all multitudes of organizations. So we have a very deep bench with regard to what capabilities we have. And I’m also joined by Amon and he’s our practice manager for the cloud and DevOps. And even if you want to give yourself a little bit of an introduction, go ahead. Ayman Mageed 2:27 Yeah. Hey everyone, I’ve got about 15 years in the cloud network space. Really seen the evolution of the cloud space, but I actually had a stint where I was also overseeing or a big player naturally in the ITSM space, at previous organizations. And so this. Session was really a big discussion between Brian and I when we started talking about, you know, what is the evolution of each of our technologies coming together and how does that expand into what we call intelligent operations and bringing all of it to bear for both it for it as well As for the business. So looking forward to the conversation here and yeah, make everyone. Bryan Schrippe 3:12 Awesome. So here’s what we’re going to kind of walk through. So we’re going to talk about what is intelligent operations and I kind of framed this in the interactions and kind of evolution of where we’ve normally seen companies move in the intelligence operations spaces. So we’re starting from what companies are initially starting to do into more advanced capabilities into monitoring capabilities into forming the centralization of their service operations departments and then ultimately ending up in where we can start to predict and look at and future think and future cast our operations at scale and over time. So what is intelligent operations? It really surrounds itself by leveraging automation to do routine tasks. I’m starting to leverage AI and machine learning in some capacities through maybe proof of concept workloads or leveraging out of box capabilities that ServiceNow offers. Same thing with Microsoft starting to leverage maybe some copilot workloads leveraging copilot studio. Umm. And start garnering all of their services and interactions such that they can drive efficiencies not only from their employees, but also their business interactions through business process optimization and automation. Can umm to leveraging things like virtual agents and self service bots and then ultimately surrounding itself with the capability to be able to look at your internal data. Being able to ask questions of that data, being able to understand, maybe what your organization has from an information perspective and be able to organize that centrally such that not only your employees can access it, but also possibly your customers. And also integrating with other systems a lot of times when people stand up and ITSM solution, they’re really only looking at the ITSM solution, not thinking about it as a aggregation point for all of the tertiary tools that you have in your organization. That cannot only give your employees the ability to interact with those applications, but also give your analysts an internal IT folks an area to centralize and also enhancing your service delivery. So a lot of times when we’re looking at Intelligent Operations, we’re trying to understand, you know, how it is a business is delivering their services, how other departments in the organization are delivering their services and giving everybody a platform in which to showcase those services and have either employees or customers be able to interact with those services and also be able to drive efficiency gains and how we, you know, deploy those services, monitor those services, track those services over time. So that’s really what you know, service now and Microsoft is really trying to drive as far as intelligent operations are concerned. So here’s our starting point. Is a lot of times we’re always starting with employee or customer interactions and ServiceNow is a platform has a. Portal and not only on the customer side but also on the employee side and what we’re looking at here is employee center and it has become the aggregation point for a lot of companies to host interdepartmental. Groups to be able to showcase their services for the broader business to consume, and I’ll for a lot of companies, this is the real first entry point into trying to understand what their services are. So whenever we’ve done these types of engagements for different clients, we always start asking the question like what services does it provide the business and normally it always starts with it. But then once we deploy it is services to the broader organization. Then the organization’s that mass on the business side start asking questions like, hey, how can we leverage this? How can we utilize this and that’s where centralization of services starts to take hold and giving the that the employee center allows you to have multi departmental aspects to being able to deploy those services at mass. It really lends itself to being that aggregation point for all these conversations that we’re going to have as far as being able to drive Intelligent Operations in your organization as well. ServiceNow also lends itself to the AI conversation and the integrations into multiple different Microsoft products like teams and copilot and SharePoint and GitHub. And all of these other tertiary applications can all feed the employee center, which I don’t think a lot of people know now. Or if you looked at Knowledge 2024 this year, you saw a lot of Microsoft and ServiceNow really coming together, stories coming out of service. Ayman Mageed 8:31 Umm. Bryan Schrippe 8:35 Now knowledge this year. Ayman Mageed 8:36 Brian, I think I think one of the biggest things that we see when we’re talking to clients, especially actually in the M and a field as we talk about a divestiture and acquisition, we start talking about, hey, how are you going to be integrating your services, how are you going to be managing the various efforts and processes and workloads that you’re going to be running? How do you measure success? And we often you’ll often find this here saying the ServiceNow or an ITSM function is the heartbeat of the organization because it allows us to run these processes, but also to aggregate a lot of the KPI’s and metrics that will allow us to get a better look at how is your organization doing. Are we facilitating that acquisition as we expected? Are we currently operating from an IT operations perspective as intended or are there areas that we need to bubble up for attention? And so this is, I think sometimes overlooked as just another, you know, service catalog or another home page, but really is the portal as you mentioned to kind of what? How how do we know we’re doing the right thing? What is right look like in our organization? Bryan Schrippe 9:52 Awesome. Excellent point. And another thing that that the portal offers is, you know the agent experience, right? So ServiceNow just deployed their their now assist for ITSM and CSM and FSM and AIS proliferating itself everywhere. But what a lot of people don’t know is that now assist can also be extended with AI search to go and look into your internal SharePoint repositories. Go look into your external git repositories and as people are asking questions. If ServiceNow doesn’t find it internally, it can go to those external sources and pull that information back, which also assists in giving people actionable answers. Can those answers can be cited with direct information pulled from external resources and it just drives the efficiency to help have Employees start servicing themselves versus having to call or email or spend time interacting with an actual physical person? Well, we could drive a lot of those interactions through a bot or AIS sisted interaction. Now we talked earlier about automating all of the mundane tasks that from the day to day, from approvals, from tasking, from interactions with tertiary systems and the way forward with that is integration hub and it’s. Parent parent application flow designer and what that affords every enterprise is the capability to not only Dr Automation from the interactions, not only from the portal itself, but also from an agent interaction, but also Dr interactions into those tertiary subsystems. And if you didn’t know, I think integration Hub is up to 178 different out of box spokes that dependent on your subscription level, you can get access to which give you out of box low code, no code interactions and integrations into those tertiary systems. So things like copilot things like virtual agent things like. Rest in PowerShell and you have interactions into things like logic monitor and Splunk. All of these out of box spokes really afford you the opportunity to be able to take your services and drive automation such that you can decrease the amount of overhead for your not only your IT analysts, but also integrate into things like maybe you have a work day integration that you need to go have something from HR. You can take the work day integration and now you’re doing hour workloads inside of ServiceNow. Same thing if you had the HR spoken, you were doing all of your internal HR functions. If you didn’t even have the HR module, you could still surface some of those interactions with things like HR and accounting and facilities through the mechanisms of service now. But leveraging the benefits of automation, if you’re not currently leveraging and then currently or leveraging them just strictly for IT workloads cause a lot of times we’re seeing clients that are just doing it workloads inside of service. Now when they could be benefiting from having multi departmental workloads coming into ServiceNow and being serviced with integration hub as a form of automation. Ayman Mageed 13:43 Pick one of the benefits of doing that is even as a user, as an end user, I am not the biggest fan of having to say ohh what is that other application that I need to log into to execute this task. Bryan Schrippe 13:44 But what? Ayman Mageed 13:57 Whereas having it all through an integration and ServiceNow allows me to know that this is my goto hub for everything HR or if I want to get a peripheral device for my laptop I can go to ServiceNow. I know where to go for that. There are still some more advanced items where you might still have to go to say the work day, but trying to capture as an organization, the top called it 20% of the user needs on an integration and ServiceNow really improves user experience to a level that makes just life easier. Instead of having to drop to 20 different websites or applications. Bryan Schrippe 14:42 Excellent point for sure. So in here I wanted to just point out some integration hub use cases like connecting to internal home built applications. I you know, a huge one is always on boarding, right? Like and every client, we’re always doing some sort of onboarding automation and integrating those into different systems like AD and up to Azure AD and doing interactions through work day and other streams. But we’ve also done bidirectional syncs and integrations between different ServiceNow instances for just syncing information bidirectionally. I’m also, if we’re on the manufacturing side of things and we’re looking at the manufacturing floor being able to integrate into IoT devices for things like understanding what’s going on, on the factory floor or doing interactions of devices, this determine health and things like that, we can help interrogate those devices with integration hub password reset, always a big one. We’re always doing interactions with password reset and then we just wanted to point out that there are Integrations into Apache as well. If you are with those workloads. So when we talk about the next step up of where we see most clients going, so they’re they’ve got their generic port. Ooh, they’ve got their generic portal and they are actively going into the next phase of their ServiceNow journey. And where does that always end up for a lot of companies, it always ends up with the need to get all of their devices inside of service now. Right? And again, ServiceNow can help with this. With ITOM, discovery and ITOM health, I time Discovery is a platform where you can use agent and agent lists discovery to go out and search for all the devices and things inside of your infrastructure and bring that information back and populate your CMDB and a lot of times when companies first start off on their ITSM journeys with ServiceNow, they’re usually doing things like CSV imports and they’re just either migrating from one tool to another and just exporting that data, importing it to another, and with discovery you’re really getting that live daily sync of all of your. Data. Not only internally, but also accessing all of your Azure subscriptions and all of your management groups up in Azure. All of your individual tenants and virtual ENVIRONMENTS bringing all that information back and populating your CMDB. But if we wanna start moving up the chain and start working our way to Intelligent Operations, we need to start understanding how these devices interact with our services at scale. Right. And a lot of times this is always gets driven back from a IT perspective to understand things that maybe it is servicing up from an application perspective or maybe a business application is being leveraged by another department and we need to understand what that service looks like and what the health of that service looks like. But you can’t just do that with regular. Just discovery of your CI’s. We gotta take that to the next level. So what we do is we start doing, you know, just generic discovery to pull everything inside of the environment, but then we add a layer on top and that’s where service mapping comes in. So with ITOM visibility you get the next level up to be able to go in and take a business application or a business service and then start understanding where the C IIS are at in that service. And once you bolt on the secondary piece of this, which is ITOM health, you can start understanding the events that are coming into the environment. Having AI and machine learning correlate those events and help you understand the health of a particular device as it relates to its relationship of 1 service or multiple services. And this is how we start driving Intelligent Operations, because now from an analyst perspective, you can see a service in the concept of say, an incident where something could have an issue with say a server or a virtual environment. And from that service being applied to that specific device, you can then see what a the health of that service is or B take a look at all of the dependencies of that service to understand hey, well, maybe this virtual cluster is supporting our financial application and if that goes down, it’s going to take down our entire financial application and that’s going to cost us a XYZ dollars over a span of time. Amen. Ayman Mageed 20:03 I think this is one of those uh points there. I think we’ve had the age old discussion in the cloud area specifically on, you know, do I need to have CMDB discovery of the Azure footprint? Because if especially in incident management, as a cloud practitioner, you know I’m not going to ServiceNow to solve my cloud problem. I’m going to go to the Azure console. I know where all my Azure servers are and I’m going to resolve the situation there. I think you just keyed in on one of the areas of. As you move into that maturity level of I’m not just taking a CSV file and dumping everything into the CMDB, we’re actually, I think, almost always correct me if I’m wrong, Brian. Like we would almost always suggest that we do a net new discovery as opposed to plugging in an export of a file because we want to really know what are we seeing, what can we or can’t we see and and and resolve that. But going back to the cloud piece, umm, I think one of the most important things as a cloud practitioner to start realizing, I really do need to work with my ServiceNow counterpart or ITSM counterpart is the service mapping dependencies of other services or applications that my server might impact. And so I don’t see that view on the Azure console. I might see a a little bit of it, especially in a hybrid cloud environment where not all of my footprint is on Azure. It might be on another cloud or it might be on premises and so getting that visibility here is where I can finally the deliver the quality of of support that we really need to say. It’s actually, you know, this firewall perimeter firewall that’s on premises. That’s the issue or whatever it might be. Sorry to blame it on the network and as usual, but that that’s common. Anything and there, Brian. Bryan Schrippe 21:49 Yeah. And then the one thing you you hit on, which was a big a big case there is the multi cloud, right? So a lot of times when companies are looking at their cloud footprint, they’re really understanding one facet of it from maybe somebody who’s proficient in Azure or somebody who’s proficient in Google Cloud or somebody who’s proficient in AWS, right? They they may have their own specialities, but when you aggregate all of that data into one central area, we can start seeing how one cloud may interact with another cloud, which may interact with another cloud. And by mapping all of those applications and mapping how all of those top level services interact with all those other services, you can start seeing like, hey, maybe we have this one area over here in Azure that controls this or maybe we have this one area over here in Google Cloud that controls this or one area in AWS that controls this. And if you can see that from a math perspective and then throw ITOM health on there where you actively see live events that are happening for those devices across the multi cloud, there’s power in that and it may not be something for a cloud architect that would necessarily be their number one place to go look for something, but it could just be another tool to their tool chest or from a C level perspective, maybe we wanna start understanding the financial impact of a service over time. So how do we aggregate all of that device information and cost and financial information and roll that up to a service from a siloed knowledge base, right? A lot of times people don’t have knowledge of the overarching application, and it’s siloed between multiple people, especially from the financial aspect, right? But when you aggregate all that information, then throw financials into it. Now you can kind of get a C level executives here when you start saying, hey, this home brew application is costing us $1,000,000 a year. Why are we spending $1,000,000 a year when we can buy something for 100,000? Ayman Mageed 23:53 Yeah. And and here’s the business case. Here’s the business case to get rid of that tech debt. This eventually? Yep. Bryan Schrippe 23:59 Yep, exactly. Exactly so. So bubbling that up to Intelligent Operations, we can start to see how aggregating our an individual device up the value chain to something like a top level service and then adding in things like health and analytics and all of the the capabilities that ServiceNow can afford you, we we can start driving more intelligent conversations, not only within our internal IT organization but the broader business as a whole. So in addition to top down service mapping which maps all of the services from a top level application down, you can also do dynamic CI mapping. So maybe a lot of times we always hear the I need to know all of my Linux servers in the environment. I need to know what all of my database servers are in the environment. I need to know what all of my. Uh, you know Apache servers are and with dynamic CI you can group all that information together and really push out good reports on your information inside of your environment, which a lot of people have always had a hard time doing with other ITSM tools. And then again service mapping has a bunch of different options to be able to fit your particular use case. So you can do if you’re in the Azure world. You know a lot about tags, right? Azure Azure is like let’s tag everything, bring those tags in, we can consume them. We can help organize those into cohesive services that will make sense to your organization. Umm, there’s also machine learning built into ITOM. Discovery that can also Dr interactions to say that hey, we noticed this executable on all of these machines. Hey maybe this is an application internally. Let’s bubble that up and see if that makes sense to this organization. And then of always you have top down which is hey give us an entry point. Maybe it’s a web server? Maybe it’s a database server, maybe it’s an application server. Let us go and use the communication paths and use what we know from our multiple many deployments of ServiceNow across thousands of organizations to drive what could be the connective tissue to that particular application or that web service or that front end or that back end. You really have a lot of options when you start driving. Some of those interactions. So the next iteration on top of service mapping, so you’ve got your services mapped. We we understand what the individual components are of a particular service, then what we can now do is that add on the next iteration of where clients go with their ITOM journey, right and all of this is supporting that Intelligent Operations maturity path, right. So as people are continuing that journey, the health of a service then comes into question. So it’s like, how do we understand the health of a service and a lot of times? I used to come from an SCCM background a long time ago and with that came SCOM and everybody knows if you’ve ever heard of scam before that was a very, very, very noisy application, right? You saw events coming in like every 2nd and it was very, very hard to understand what really intrinsically was going on with a particular device or with a particular service. And with ITOM health, we take all of those individual monitoring tools and we can aggregate those into one centralized solution. And then, provided you have the licensing, you can throw AI on top of it to give you a next level enhancement on top of what generic ITOM health does from a correlation perspective to be able to aggregate all of that noise and give you actionable insights against the services in your environment and really be able to drive the understanding from a a general perspective, a lot of times when ever I had to look at a scam alert and it was this huge long string of characters to be able to understand what really is going on with. The device. What ServiceNow is doing is they are taking AI and leveraging the insights garnered over all of their ITOM health deployments over all of their customers. And they’ve built a model that helps them understand what the learnings are from that, only those events, but those error messages from what their what their other customers have seen from a resolution perspective and they give you those anonymous insights as a reference point to help you understand what’s going on from a health perspective. So we can see that we’ve got all of these tertiary tools that may generate events and all of those events come into service now and then we can do alert processing on them and do alert correlation and then tie those events to their specific devices. And then from the service model we can then understand the health of that device as it relates to the service that it could possibly be impacted. And all of this is gonna come to a head when we start talking about centralization and how this really comes into play when we start aggregating all this data and really giving an analyst or an admin or an architect an area to really come in and digest all this information from a centralized area. Ayman Mageed 29:43 Hey Brian, I have a question theoretical here of course. Bryan Schrippe 29:44 Sure. Ayman Mageed 29:47 So I’m using Azure. I have some, you know, Intune monitoring, probably going on. I have some Azure monitor stuff going on. It seems like there’s an external path to get into service now. Bryan Schrippe 30:01 Yep. Ayman Mageed 30:02 What happens when there’s a problem or an incident? Let’s call it right. Bryan Schrippe 30:08 Yep. Ayman Mageed 30:09 Is there a way to to get rid of the noise? Like is an event an incident or is an event not an and. Bryan Schrippe 30:14 Nope. An event event in this event is if I could say that right, an event as an event, right? But what happens is is when you take a look at the workspaces for event management, what it will do is it will bubble up events that are critical in nature that you need to pay attention to. That may have been correlated over. Let’s see, you have an event. Let’s say you have an event storm, right? And a specific device is just yelling right? Ayman Mageed 30:42 Umm. Bryan Schrippe 30:44 I need help. Ayman Mageed 30:45 Umm. Bryan Schrippe 30:45 I need help that would be bubbled up in your health dashboard and from there you can do things like create an incident or if you need to create a change on the go. Or you could even tune it enough to the point where it automatically does that based on a specific threshold, and then if it is impacted by a specific criticality of a service, we can then take additional automations to say hey, this device is critical to our financial app that is now going to cost us millions of dollars. If it goes down, let’s spin up an emergency change. Let’s get into a war room. Let’s start talking about possible, you know, solution scenarios. Ayman Mageed 31:28 Hmm. Bryan Schrippe 31:28 That’s that’s how it normally gets bubbled up. Ayman Mageed 31:31 So almost looking at it as a leading indicator for something that’s going to potentially occur because we’ve seen it before and now we want to get in front of it and have something that’s going to alert or trigger when we when it happens the next time. Bryan Schrippe 31:31 So there’s a couple different. Yeah, yeah. Ayman Mageed 31:47 So we can be a little bit more proactive. Bryan Schrippe 31:49 Exactly. And you can route that straight into the problem management, right? So let’s say this is something that you’ve seen happening over a couple of different occasions over a few months, right? Maybe there’s an underlying problem that you need to investigate, so throw that into a problem management and now you’re tying all of your outside interactions into your ITSM processes. And then correlating it with services and really getting an understanding of just your entire estate from a service perspective, which is really interesting. Ayman Mageed 32:17 And I think this is where I think this is where I’ve seen ServiceNow shine in my ability to go to the CIO for example, and say here are all the problems that we currently have, we’ve prioritized them in a way that are most impactful to the business or our Operations. Here’s why I need that extra dollar to resolve this, because if we can resolve this now, we don’t have to deal with 13 major incidents every end of month that affect our ohh book closing, for example. Bryan Schrippe 32:50 You got it? Yep. Ayman Mageed 32:51 And so this is going back to like what we had originally said at the very beginning of, you know, if you don’t have an ITSM function, how are you aggregating and getting this holistic picture more likely than not, you’re getting a situation where you’re your cloud or your infrastructure teams have their own Rolodex or Excel files of problems and prioritization and roadmaps that they’re dealing with. And each team likewise has very similar areas, and if they’re not, if you don’t have a function that is, that’s bringing them together to talk about holistic IT operations and support to the business, then there’s probably something being left on the table here. And This is why I’m a huge advocate of something like this that allows you to to promote from a leadership perspective, from an executive perspective, see the full picture, because there’s no way that you’re going to know everything in a single moment over a 30 minute meeting. Bryan Schrippe 33:31 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that’s that’s kind of that. That’s actually a good segue into this slide here, which is helping people understand all the events over maybe multiple disparate tools, right, like logic monitor and Azure and Intune and all these disparate tools, right? And bubbling them up into an area where you can start getting that holistic picture and. Understanding that they have things like being able to look at anomaly detection and things like understanding what incidents have come around that may be applicable to the issue that you may be having, right? So maybe this has been solved already. Maybe somebody already took an actionable. Of resolution towards this particular device. And then you have those insights, right? And right then and there. OK so. All right. So I’m gonna skip this. This is more along the lines of exactly how event management happens in the interest of time because I know we got a whole bunch more to go. Umm, but Ayman, I really want to get your opinion on some of this here, because I think this is kind of your bread and butter, right? A lot of times we go through and as a as kind of like a third world. Over here we have our development group and a lot of times they kind of operate in their own ecosystem and where a lot of companies don’t think about intelligent operations is how to take that development environment. Those pipelines that release cadence and pull that into their ITSM platform in order to. Really streamline operations and also give companies the capability to streamline their change management. Because I know a lot of times the things that developers hate is, uh, I got to spin up a change for this. But I wanna get I wanna get your thoughts because I know I know you deal with that a lot in in your world and I wanna see how it’s applicable to what’s going on over here. Ayman Mageed 36:01 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think I absolutely. I think one of my best moments was being able to come into an agreement with the ITSM function and the change management function about where my cloud operations is gonna operate. Sorry to use that word twice and what we agreed on essentially was we got to a level of comfort where we 100% agree that change management is a critical function. There’s a lot of security and regulatory requirements for us to maintain. Change it is just good practice. However, a lot of the words that we hear in an organization and all the the methodology that are coming out, you know, Lean, Agile, DevOps, all of these functions are functions. That meant that are meant to provide speed to business speed to it, speed to delivery, and then we have our folks coming in and saying, well, you need to put a change ticket in and to us it feels like we’re not being as agile or as rapid as we we need. And so there’s a balance between how do I release quickly but also maintain a level of stewardship to the organization and to my customers so that we’re not putting anything out that could be harmful or detrimental to the organization. Umm, a level of maturity step, but that maturity step was being able to federate the cab and say that within my cloud organization, we were able to get a bunch of ideas or or functions made into standard changes. So that as we were deploying cicd as we were moving in a more rapid of pace of deployment. Code we we’re finding ourselves in a situation where we can’t just go to the cab every time. We can’t go create, we create a change ticket, but ServiceNow integration allowed us to integrate part of our CI CD pipeline was integrating the creation of that change ticket itself and the approvals. So we’re already getting a pair a peer review for our our our code. So adding in a change to get review as part of that is very easy to do as part of no and automation. The ones that triggered a certain level of risk absolutely had to go to the cab, and so we knew that. Umm, I don’t have the the percentage off the top of my head, but it was a large percentage, probably more than 50% of our deployments could go through an internal review where I was the sign off or someone just directly above me was the sign off and we could operate in that manner and that was a trust that was created over time. We understood that if there was a series of events that caused us to be the problem child, that we would go back and start going into the cab every every single time we had, uh, specific change ticket that met those requirements or all of our standard changes would then go through the more rigorous change process. And so there’s that aspect of change management. I think it’s a critical piece from a controls and just to meet regulation, but it. Uh. A security background. You know that we have the the reputation of being called like the department of No and it’s not necessarily that we want to say no, it’s that we want to make sure that our organization is is as safe as possible within reason and that’s where the people skills and the soft skills comes into play. You can have the most technical folks, but having that discussion on where are the lines that we can come to agreement on enabling the business and where the lines where we say no, this actually has to get through some sort of gait or control. There’s there’s one aspect I think, Brian, I don’t wanna get ahead of myself. There is a piece about service catalog or some sort of automation coming up. Bryan Schrippe 40:12 Uh, yeah. Ayman Mageed 40:13 Umm, so I’ll, I’ll hold off on that. But I think to to kind of cap off what I was just saying from a cloud maturity perspective and infrastructure supporting the business and not just being an incident manager. Essentially, I see the beginning of cloud maturity starts after you’ve done your migration and you begin to implement a lot of those cloud native tools and those new evolving solutions that allow you to take advantage of what cloud has to offer. If you’re just lifting and shifting into the cloud and you’re not integrating with tools such as service now, or you know the other tools that are out there for monitoring, et cetera, then you may not be taking advantage of all the that there is out there for growth for the company and reporting to your organization for Leadership because ultimately we want to be able to give our leadership the appropriate information that they need to make the decisions that are gonna affect our user base. Bryan Schrippe 41:13 Awesome. Thank you for those insights. So I wanted to bring this in here because when we’re talking about our services and how we operate those services and the health of those services and our Operations, a lot of times the application and release pipeline really only gets interacted with when we’re talking about a change. There’s a lot of companies that understand, you know, the DevOps from the DevOps perspective. When we’re thinking of like GitLab or Azure DevOps, but when they’re interacting with change, it’s more of a manual effort right? Like, hey, we’re gonna do a release. We’re gonna need to get a change request because we’re changing this application with XY and Z, but if we’re really trying to get to Intelligent Operations, we need to understand a little bit more than that. So where where I they have seen this go is where we’re not only taking our Change pipelines from a CI/CD perspective. We’re also pulling all of our stories in all of our epics, all of our tasks, everything from those tertiary systems and then also rolling in things like release management and change management, then applying that to whatever application or service is you’re attempting to change that way. Now we have all of that relational data to be able to understand that, hey, we made a change to this application. It was tied to this release. These are the things we changed over here. I have this device that is now having an issue or I have this application that is now having an issue and from being able to look at that application from a health perspective from an incident perspective, maybe something came in. We can understand that this service had a change which was tied to this release, which was tied to these changes, and now we have answers. Instead of going to hunt, you know, maybe the Azure guy or maybe the developer, or maybe the architect to try to understand. Hey, what happened to the service or this application? Now we start having an or pulling in all of that relational data to be able to understand what is exactly not only happening or changing to that application, but how those changes may have impacted a service. And then you know, you can even track that even higher and go from a financial perspective, what maybe that change or issue impacted that application, which could have cost us financially. That’s why and dollars over a span of time. Right. So you can get all of that intrinsic information by creating a lot more of those operational relationships between the data inside of your organization, especially from a service perspective. So this is where this is where we were talking about being able to integrate all of those, you know, DevOps and CI/CD and changes where we’re creating a release pipeline and then we can automatically tie in the ServiceNow as various APIs to do things like automatically create a change, look at the risk of what that change is against the application that it’s being tied to, evaluate that risk to determine, hey, do I need XYZ change, do I need to go through? Ayman Mageed 45:04 Umm. Umm. Bryan Schrippe 45:22 Maybe you know every anybody that’s ever been a part of a cab knows that those can be extremely painful. Sometimes. So if we can, yeah, go ahead. Ayman Mageed 45:28 This actually goes back to Ohh sorry to cut you off breath this. Bryan Schrippe 45:31 No, go ahead. Ayman Mageed 45:32 This also goes back to the concept of like the context switching that we do in different applications or different websites all the time and allowing my engineers to be able to stay in where they normally are, coding in whatever repository that they’re part of, as opposed to having to shift over to ServiceNow interface and clicking, creating a change ticket. You know, so those are minutes, but those minutes add up. And so as referenced here, you can you can take a process from a very painful process to these somewhat streamlined acceptable use case and and and feel for the user. Bryan Schrippe 46:13 Alright. Amen. In the interest of time, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to make it through our service catalog example because I wanna get through the the centralization piece of this. Ayman Mageed 46:22 Yeah. Bryan Schrippe 46:25 So I think everybody’s gonna get a copy of the slides after this presentation. But what one thing that I really wanted to? The point on is the aggregation point, right? Like how? How do we aggregate all of this individual information and ServiceNow gives us a lovely spot to do that and that service operations, workspace and people may have interacted with this in the past. You may have seen this as an iteration in jumping off point from something that was originally leveraged called Agent Workspace, but now ServiceNow is giving everybody their own workspaces. In order to do their work on a day to day basis and service operations, workspace not only collaborate, the internal ITSM practices, but also introduces the ITOM and the health aspects of service operations and gives you a dashboard in which to surface all that information up. So it brings together all of that, all the things that we just talked about, right, the aggregation of your events into health of objects into services that you’ve discovered from discovery and organized into your CMDB and bubbled those all up into being able to manage your ITSM processes and giving you that one point to be able to say, hey, I’m a I’m. I’m in the server world and I’m looking at the health of a service. Well, I can come into ServiceNow. I’ve got an area where I can check on what alerts are out there, what those aggregation points are. Are there critical things that I need to look at now from that same workspace? If I see something that’s critical in nature and I need to create an incident for it, I can do that right from here. Likewise, if I need to create a change for something, I can do that within the context of this same environment. Additionally, this workspace also gives you a knock type experience if anybody remembers the knocks of old. Some companies still have those same Knox, where we have the grid of the green, yellow, red of the services that you might provide or the devices that might be out there and the help of those devices you have that aspect to service operations workspace where you can see the actual health of a particular service and understand whether that is healthy or whether it’s not healthy. And from that dashboard you could even surface that information up to your portal where you’re actively now letting users know the health of said services, such that if they have an issue with an internal application and they go to the portal and they say, hey, I have an issue, they’re in a big widget on the side of your portal is, hey, we see that this application is currently unhealthy. We don’t need your incident. We we already know, right? So now you’re reducing that that workload, so being able to aggregate all of this information into one centralized area is hugely important just based on an efficiency perspective and being able to have our analysts be able to do things as fast as humanly possible because as everybody knows, efficiency is the keyword for 2024 it seems. So the faster we can do things, the more efficiently we can have them do things and with greater precision we can have them do things as a paramount importance. Do most companies nowadays. So like you can see, we can come in here. We not only do we have access to our entire ITSM suite, we have also have access to our entire ITOM health and ITOM Discovery suite. From there we can also start tying in now assist in agent intelligence and being able to proactively have information surface to us like if we’re inside of a specific device, we can start seeing different information like what are the related incidents, problems, changes, what services are, is it tied to, what are the impact of those services against other services inside of the organization? If and, you can start going into the health of that device and understanding all of that, and if you need to create a change or an incident or anything that you would think from an IT or an ITIL perspective, you can do from this single pane of glass. So the build out of that is hugely important and what? Ayman Mageed 50:57 Hey Brian, I have a question and maybe you’re going to get into this, but as we kind of come towards the close, you know if if I am in this spot where I don’t know where I need to start with this like what is your recommendation as far as our like you’ve got a slide for already like what what is the recommendation for like where do I need to be to get to this level because a lot of this stuff is like ohh utopian idea of being able to get to this level. Bryan Schrippe 50:58 Ohh God. Sure. Here we go. That was a perfect segue. Yep. Yep, and that’s that’s where this slide I put this slide specific at the end of this centralization conversation because that’s a question I always get to ask is where do we start? What do we start with? How do we move to the crawl, walk, run that everybody hears inside of these same conversations that we have over and over again and I put this slide here specific to explain that right is when we’re crawling, we’re really doing our ITSM experiences, right? Our incident, our problem, our change, our major incident creating our uh CMDB, organizing our CSDM for a list of how we provide our services, what we provide, having that conversation with ourselves, that we able to understand, hey, IT provides XY&Z, what does this department provide? What does this department provide and being able to organize that just from a data perspective, right? Then we leverage a little bit more on top of that and that could be you know, the inclusion of discovery like you we see here, that discovery is kind of in the the the Gray area over here where it’s this kind of like the second to two and a half 2.5 of the walk phase where you want to start pulling in now devices to start organizing against those services and really start understanding what your IT state looks like from a service perspective. But you wanna take it to that next level? OK. What do we start doing and what do we start looking at there? But again, we go back to that Intelligent Operations conversation where we start automating tasks where we start interacting and gaining more efficiency from our end users with virtual agent or task intelligence, umm, we start leveraging interactions between Integrations between teams and maybe SharePoint or Git or taking a look at our health of our devices through things like event management, right. And that’s really our walk phase because with that we, oh, go ahead. Ayman Mageed 53:38 Hmm. There was a question in the there was a question in the chat. Uh, can you elaborate a little bit on CSDM? I think that’s four. Yep. Bryan Schrippe 53:43 Ah, awesome. So CSDM is a framework that is called the common service data model, and that is a. It’s a framework that helps you organize your business into different aspects of technicality, right? So you may have specific business services or you might have specific technical services or you might have specific application services. How do those all interact? How do those all intertwine? And it’s basically a way to help you express not only you a lot of companies use it for it, but you can certainly leverage it from a business perspective to also speak to your business capabilities as well. Umm, but it is a. It’s a. It’s a framework that helps you understand what all of that is, yeah. Ayman Mageed 54:39 If uh, if our so Brandon, our AI practice leader was here, he would say that every organization that is looking to move into AI rapidly always has the one thing one question that they always have to ask is do I have the right data set that I need to enable this AI function and if not, how do I get there? And it always almost always, always comes back down to the basic fundamentals of data hygiene and stewardship. And so CSDM is a portion of that of being able to understand your IT footprint and kind of what, how, how we as an organization and it differs somewhat for each organization, how we’re going to frame our mind around our services applications and CIS and the and the processes. Bryan Schrippe 55:30 Extremely well said. Love that. OK, I know we have 5 minutes left, so I’m kinda gonna go through this next part a little bit quickly, but the the tip of the mountain is what a lot of people talk call is predictive analytics, right? It’s being able to understand things at scale, being able to make predictions against data that’s inside of your environment, and also start leveraging machine learning on the back end to start doing things like correlations and different types of. Algos to be able to start understanding and consuming your data at a much broader perspective and what I wanted to point out here is ServiceNow helps with all this. They have a lot of built-in functionality that is inherent to ServiceNow that is given to you just based on your purchase at specific levels, right? So if you look here like predictive intelligence leverages similarity frameworks and gives you things like related incidents or recommended resolved cases. If you’re in customer service management, similarities frameworks for knowledge management like hey, what knowledge is similar to what I have inside of my environment. Uh, same thing. Like when we’re looking at incidents that are coming in via like a a storm of events, or maybe you have that setup where it’s automatically spinning up events on a critical path, right? Maybe there’s things that we have to do where it’s like, propose a major incident or propose a major case, or it will intrinsically service that up for you to help you understand. Like, hey, maybe something’s going on here that you need to take action on. That’s a lot more. Important than just something like an incident framework and it gives you that right out of the box and with just a like a a little bit of uh set up and deployment these things are active for you. And then of course, virtual agent integration, we talked about that before being able to integrate those frameworks and that AI experience into your front end of service now and again these are all out of box solutions that especially for the virtual agent and now it says you can have these things running for each of the different modules within 15 minutes because they have them so tightly integrated into their platform that it really makes the deployment of these products pretty seamless. And then one thing that is not talked about very much is skills prediction, right. Being able to understand and tie skills your employees and be able to route tickets to employees that have specific skills. A lot of times we’re trying to find, hey, who’s the guy that understands, you know, Debian, or who’s the guy that understands, you know, this specific version of C sharp or this guy who’s got this Java skill set, you know, being able to tie skills to people and a lot of times we may not know who knows things, but we might be able to understand by who’s resolving different, you know, issues in the environment or incidents. And we could have those skills suggested to us. So it’ll help us build out that skills framework for our employees. And then, of course, integration with a performance analytics. So as a the enhanced reporting, you have direct integrations into the enhanced reporting functionalities of ServiceNow too. And I want to open it up. I know that was a ton of information in it was an encompassing a whole gamut of things, but if anybody has any additional questions outside of the CSDM question that we have, please feel free to answer them in the chat or ask them in the chat and I’ll be happy to answer them. But one thing I wanted to get out before we actually close this out is our calls to action. So what we normally do is we offer a suite of different sessions that are offered for free. One is a service now environment. Overlook where we go in and we look at your ServiceNow environment, we can take a look at your licensing help you figure out what you’re using, what you’re not using, why you’re not using it, maybe discuss some Rd maps to get there as well. We also do cloud and DevOps. Engagements where we offer those for two hours where we can come in and help you look at not only your cloud, but your DevOps pipelines and help you understand what’s going on with those where enhancements can be made, you know future opportunities, Rd maps, all that good information that you know we have intrinsically the service, ServiceNow and Concurrency, as a whole. You know, we would love to have a conversation with you and be able to understand what you’re doing currently inside of your environments. I’m dictionary. You know, if you want to start operationalizing Intelligent Operations, right, and start understanding where you’re at in that maturity curve and being able to understand from a roadmap perspective what it would take to get you to a maturity where you’re being able to understand all of the different facets of intelligent operations, we can help with that. In addition to being able to deploy different proof of concepts across a multitude of different modules and ServiceNow, we can help with that as well. Additionally, build outs and we can help with all of that as well. So if you’re interested in any of the topics that we’ve talked about today, please feel free to reach out. And I really hope that you guys got something really good out of this session and I again, I appreciate you all for your time. Thank you very much for joining us and thank you for joining me. Ayman Mageed 1:01:33 Thanks for having me along, Brian. Appreciate it. Bryan Schrippe 1:01:36 Amen. I appreciated your insights and thank you. Have a good day, everyone. Bye.