[Title slide 1. Blue CAI company logo with tagline “We power the possible” appears in middle of screen. Company website www.cai.io appears at the bottom center of the screen]? [Title slide 2. Multi-color background with text centered in the middle of the screen that reads: “Virtual Event: CMDB and ITOM: Journey to operational success”. The white CAI company logo appears underneath of this text towards the bottom of the screen] 00:00:08 - 00:00:40 Will Young Hello and welcome to the CAI Learning Series: The How and Why of CMDB. I am Will Young from CAI and I will be leading today's discussion. This learning session called CMDB and ITOM: Journey to Operational Success, is one in a two-part series that covers both boots on the ground realities, and the leadership strategies for making the CMBB work for you. Today we'll talk with Steve Emerson from ServiceNow about what it really takes to understand your infrastructure landscape. And Stacey Pevec from Newell Brands about how her team actually made it happen. 00:00:41 - 00:01:11 Will First, a little background about CAI and myself. CAI is a global technology services company with more than 40 years of experience running and delivering IT services. I lead the SACM Center of Excellence, which sits in the Enterprise Service Management practice, along with our elite ServiceNow consultancy, infrastructure team, and service desk practice. I've worked in IT asset management in the industry for about 12 years, both as a practitioner and as a consultant. 00:01:12 - 00:01:40 Will As an asset manager, I was introduced to ServiceNow and I fell in love with the platform. I grew my career along with ServiceNow, transitioning from service management into ServiceNow development, architecture, and consulting. I currently lead the asset and ITOM operations at CAI, and I manage the ServiceNow CMDB and integrated features, including Discovery, Agent Client Collector, Event Management, HAM Pro SAM Pro, and all the integrations that feed into it. 00:01:41 - 00:01:56 Will Joining me is Steve Emerson, a senior principal outbound product manager at ServiceNow. Steve helps organizations on their transformation journeys like the one I took as an asset manager a few years ago. Welcome, Steve. 00:01:57 - 00:01:58 Steve Emerson Thank you, Will. 00:01:59 - 00:02:03 Will Steve, do you mind telling me a little bit more about yourself and what exactly you do at ServiceNow? 00:02:04 - 00:02:29 Steve Yeah. Sure. So my role is similar to yours. I came from the customer world. So I worked in enterprise IT roles for about 20 years, and I know what it's like to be in our customer's shoes. I've got experience with IT operations, ITSM, project management, product management, you name it. And I joined ServiceNow back in 2017 and transitioned into this role where I am today as an outbound product manager. 00:02:30 - 00:03:03 Steve So what does that actually mean? I focus on two areas, which are ITOM Visibility and ITOM Governance. As an outbound product manager, I get to work with customers to help you realize value faster. And I get to listen to you as to what your challenges are. I also I'm responsible for training our internal teams as well as our partners. And I help customers transition from not knowing what they have, to knowing what they have to achieving a complete end-to-end cloud transformation. 00:03:05 - 00:03:39 Will So I think it's fair to say you probably know a lot about the CMDB and all the complexities? Yeah. I see that all the time and that's why I like to call it today's technical unicorn. It seems like many organizations know what the CMDB is, but actually getting that trustworthiness or strategic value out of it is always out of reach. Do you think that that notion of a timely, strategic, accurate CMDB is something that's actually achievable for customers? Or is it really the dream that you reach for that helps you start on that journey? 00:03:40 - 00:04:18 Steve It's definitely achievable, Will. And how you get there it's a journey. It's not a project. And the best way to achieve that is through a level of automation with technology. But you also have to have an effective team that has bought into it as well as a process to properly manage that. So it's definitely possible to do that, but there has to be commitment at the highest level of an organization. And with our products, of course, you can help get to not only a healthy and trustworthy CMDB, you can get to one that is business aware. 00:04:19 - 00:05:07 Will A lot of my clients say they hear conflicting advice in this space around how do you get results from your CMDB? How do you get return on your investment and your efforts? And we know that there's a lot of advice that's different because everybody has a different journey, a different path that they can take, different outcomes, different levels of support. I also tend to think as a technology person, that's only part of the picture. We definitely have to have all of those pieces, but some tools do better than others at populating the CMDB or pulling it in. Or at the very least, the data in those other systems and tools has to be right for your CMDB to be right. How much do you think there is a balance between choosing the right technology and having the right team and process and support? 00:05:08 - 00:05:28 Steve Yeah. It's really that three-legged stool, as I started to talk about earlier. Is you've got to have the right team. You have to formulate a team of people that are committed to keeping the data accurate. You have to have a process that that team follows in order to make sure that happens. But most importantly, you have to automate the population of the CMDB. 00:05:29 - 00:06:36 Steve Now, at ServiceNow, we provide technologies for you to use, whether that be discovery in an agentless method, which you're probably used to doing, or our agent, which is a push-based method that you can fill your discovery gaps with. But of course also service mapping, making your CMBD more service aware. But you also have your own tools. These tools that you have, have valuable data to enrich your CMDB. And we always like to recommend to our customers to start with ServiceNow technologies such as our discovery solution, our agent, because these technologies are written with configuration management in mind. If you're familiar with that term, that is very important to have the right data in the CMDB. And then enrich your data with these third party tools, and we have certified integrations for that as well. So it's definitely possible to achieve that holy grail as you talked about earlier or that unicorn. But it's got to be a commitment of the three pillars of people, process, and technology. 00:06:37 - 00:07:08 Will So it sounds like you're saying regardless of which technologies you bring together, it really is about that collaboration, the planning, the effort that you put together. One great example of this is Newell Brands. They're an organization I've worked with that really understands this, at least now after a lot of the journey they've been through. And that's why I'm happy today to have Stacey Pevec with us. Stacey has been both leading and in the weeds, as we say in new old CMDB journey. And she has a lot of lessons learned and successes to share. Before we dig into those, Stacey, do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? 00:07:09 - 00:07:38 Stacey Pevec Sure. Hey Will. Hey Steve. Nice to see you again. Thanks for having me. I'm a Senior Manager at Newell Brands. My team is responsible for the delivery and execution of IT services. I have more than 25 years of experience in infrastructure, IT operations and application engineering. Right now, my team and I use the ServiceNow ITOM suite of products to provide support to the CMDB, service mapping, the NOC and disaster recovery. 00:07:39 - 00:07:58 Will Awesome. Great to work with you again. You and I were first introduced a while back when you came to CAI with some help for your CMDB health initiatives, but I think your CMDB journey started long before that. How long have you been using ServiceNow and what made you take special interest in your CMDB? 00:07:59 - 00:08:30 Stacey Sure. I started personally using ServiceNow about three years ago when I started in this current role, Newell had already implemented ServiceNow and they had been using the CMDB for several years. My first initiative was service mapping and event management. Those were my first projects. It did not take long for me to realize that we had some underlying foundational issues with the CMDB and we had to put the brakes on and get ahold of those before we could move forward. 00:08:31 - 00:08:52 Will Definitely sounds like establishing that trustworthy CMDB is really a challenge for organizations of all types and sizes. Steve and I started talking a little bit earlier about there being three pillars to successful programs, the people, the process, and the technology. Which pillars did you feel like you had to pay the most attention to in your journey? 00:08:53 - 00:09:19 Stacey Actually, it was all three. So starting with the people, digging into this CMDB, we really started to understand that people, they didn't really understand their role in the support of what they were really responsible for. So we established class owners for the principal classes and we clearly defined the responsibilities. We basically put the accountability on the class owners for maintaining their data. 00:09:20 - 00:10:11 Stacey In terms of process, we really weren't managing the CMDB as a process. We needed to put some formality around it. To do that, we established regular monthly recurring meetings where we used the CMDB dashboards and the key metrics with the class owners and they had to look at the data. It really forced them to become accountable. In terms of technology, we had all the ITOM stuff working and it just seems like no matter what we did, we'd run a service map one day and it looked great, and then the next day it was not working. So we needed some help with the guidance from CAI and ServiceNow. We made some changes and that cleaned everything up and we've been healthy ever since. 00:10:12 - 00:10:13 Steve So Stacey, with that said, why did you choose CAI to work with? 00:10:13 - 00:10:39 Stacey We have had our fair share of great partners. We've had some not so great partners. We've even had situations where we try to look at the knowledge bases and the learning and the blogs and try to figure things out ourselves. And we're not the experts in everything and neither are all the partners. So it's important to find a consultant or partner that has the expertise in what you're trying to solve. 00:10:40 - 00:11:07 Stacey And when we met with CAI, we interviewed them, if you will, on some big issues, and they were able to come back with great answers. I was very impressed with their technical depth, and so far they have been experienced in everything that we have tried needed solving. So it was a really good relationship and they're there for us when we need them. 00:11:08 - 00:11:48 Steve That's awesome. So Stacey, tell me, so you mentioned service mapping, which we know will help organizations understand the impact of all the applications and the servers across the business. And when I see customers try to start a service mapping journey, sometimes I see them start without clear goals in mind or outcomes that they're looking to achieve. Which of course results in poor adoption and a failed project, because people aren't going to use the data that you spent all that time working on. So what I'd like to understand from you is what outcomes did you guys pursue and what was that journey like for you? 00:11:49 - 00:12:37 Stacey Sure. One of the biggest thing that caught our eye for service mapping was business continuity. So my team manages disaster recovery. We do two full DR tests a year where we fail over our production environment and give the app owners an opportunity to test their DR plans, make sure everything is working. I used to manage those with a spreadsheet. So you can imagine 200 applications, 600 servers, owners, load balancers. Everything was maintained in that spreadsheet, and the change in each application was obviously quite a bit. So maintaining that spreadsheet was somewhat of a full-time job. And it was still wrong. So service mapping seemed like a perfect fit for us. 00:12:38 - 00:13:12 Stacey We started service mapping all of the services because we had the spreadsheet that listed the servers and what made up the application. So we would do the service map, sends the map to the application owner in the form of a task for approval. They would approve it or reject it with comments and we would fix the map. And then we were off and running. So now our disaster recovery exercises, the whole recovery list is built based on those service maps. So those being correct is pretty important. 00:13:13 - 00:13:48 Stacey This has improved the efficiency of our DR tests so much that it used to take a full week, over a week usually to get through a full test. The last test that we did, we finished in three days, and that's over 100 people working full time. So that was a huge efficiency and it has also helped us with our comfort level in terms of our disaster recovery program. If God forbid we had a real disaster, we now have the confidence to know that we can recover and meet our recovery time objectives. 00:13:49 - 00:14:29 Stacey We also use it in other areas. We use service operation workspace. Our service desk uses this tool heavily. So imagine you have users calling in saying they can't get to their application. So the service desk operator will go right to service operation's workspace, enter in a couple of letters from the application and pick the tile, and then they can see right there who the application owner is, where is it located. They can see all the servers and devices that make up that application. And hey, by the way, there was an out of memory exception on the database server and it blew up and there's an incident open and the DBAs are working it and providing real time updates. 00:14:30 - 00:15:11 Stacey That level of integration right there has saved lots of hours and getting to resolution faster and lots of poking around trying to figure out who owns what. So it's all right there for you in service operation's workspace. We also use it in change. Our change process has progressed because of it in terms of impact. So if you create a change and you can use the impact assessment and then right there you can see how that application is going to be impacted by the change that's being implemented. So that's another area where it's helped. 00:15:12 - 00:15:24 Will It sounds like you've gotten some really significant return on investment, for lack of a better term. But for all the effort that you had the team members and bringing them together, the process, the technology, you really got something out of it. 00:15:25 - 00:15:26 Stacey We did. We do. 00:15:27 - 00:15:42 Will That's awesome. I know that ServiceNow has several different approaches to service mapping. Steve and I were talking a little bit about it. What method did you use and what are you discovering in your service maps? Are you doing cloud and local? Tell us a little bit more about your setup. 00:15:43 - 00:16:28 Stacey Sure. So we use a combination of top-down and machine learning. So that's basically all of our maps. Once we got our CMDB healthy, it took us about six months to get through about 200 service maps, and it was just myself and another girl doing it. We had no experience with service mapping before this engagement. So we did engage with a consultant who would meet with us for about an hour a week for three months, and we saved the harder maps for him to step through them with us, and then we put that into our knowledge base. So that was super helpful to have a partner that you could trust and help get through that. 00:16:29 - 00:16:39 Will Did you ever get stopped or stalled along the way or hit a point where you weren't sure if you were going to make it to this rainbows and unicorns land where it actually does work together for you? 00:16:40 - 00:17:18 Stacey Yeah. Got to be honest, there were times when I was just really confused because we did have a lot of underlying issues. We had problems with our mid-server design. We had problems with discovery. Events would come in and there was no CIs to bind to, so the knock would be scrambling trying to figure out where the alert should go. So the whole process broke down. There was other times where like I mentioned service maps errors. One day it would look great and then the next day it was broken. We need those things to be correct for disaster recovery and it's pretty important. 00:17:19 - 00:17:55 Stacey So once we got those issues understood, it was okay. But there was times when I looked at it and I was like, what is the root of problem and what is a victim? So in terms of our mid-servers, we had mid-server timeouts. Discovery jobs wouldn't run. So it was hard to understand what was being caused by the other item. So that's when we reached out to your team Will, and you guys were super helpful in terms of trying to peel back the onion and figure out what the root cause of our issues were. 00:17:56 - 00:18:47 Stacey Once we got our mid-server design down pat, we determined that we had some discovery issues where we were missing credentials. We implemented a tool called discovery admin that allows us to create incidents for the teams that are responsible for putting the credentials on the machine. So once we got those two things nailed down, again, we established the monthly recurring meetings with the CI class owners and held them accountable for the metrics. And one thing that I found was pretty interesting when we started working through those health checks, it was obvious that the class owners didn't really know how to manipulate or move around the data. So going through those health checks, it was like a little training session for them. 00:18:48 - 00:19:07 Stacey And once we got through those things, I can't tell you the last time I had the knock sending emails trying to figure out where CI belongs. So the hard work, yes, it was, but we are in a great place now because of those things that we put in place. 00:19:08 - 00:19:31 Steve So Stacey, that is amazing. Just big round of applause for you. You are doing some just simply amazing things with service mapping and you're seeing such great outcomes and you've got such an awesome story. Because every implementation requires that journey. Can you tell us about what is next for you guys now that you have mapped those 200 plus services? 00:19:32 - 00:20:35 Stacey Sure. So next on our list, we are going to start doing some cloud service mapping. We'll do the tag-based mapping, so we'll get into that area. And then we also have to expand our service map. So it's great that we have our business critical applications mapped for the use cases that I mentioned. But we also have another use case for it that is becoming extremely important in terms of security and vulnerabilities. We need to know who the owners of all of our applications are, not just the critical ones. We need to know about Sopra, Dev staging because they need to patch those things and they need to know who the owners are. So we need to start service mapping everything. So we'll be taking advantage of the service mapping 2.0 functionality where it goes in and finds the processes that are running and allows you to service map right there from the console. 00:20:36 - 00:20:55 Will That's awesome. And I can't wait to hear a little bit more about it, just a little bit of a preview part two of our series. We're going to hear more about what your team's been able to accomplish so far and then how you're using that success to drive these upcoming initiatives and show the business some return on this investment in the time that they're putting in. 00:20:56 - 00:20:57 Stacey Yes. 00:20:58 - 00:21:22 Will Awesome. It looks like things are going great at Newell and seeing return on that investment. Stacey, if you had to say what is one of the most important things for somebody considering starting on their journey that really was that pivotal piece for you? Getting help or looking at the docs or finding out a service map issue, what was that thing that you wish people would take away to make their CMDB journey a little easier? 00:21:23 - 00:22:03 Stacey Making sure that you have the guardrails in place to get a handle on your CMDB. So it's that recurring monthly meeting that we have with our class owners where we actually look at the dashboards and the widgets and make sure and take action on the things that are not looking correct. So by doing that, you'll keep your duplicates and your still CIs under control and your CIs that are missing attributes that are considered important. That was key to get to providing the foundation for service mapping and event management and probably all the other products that sit on top of the CMDB. 00:22:04 - 00:22:12 Will Yeah. That's a great takeaway. And Steve, what about from your world? What's something that you wish more clients understood that they could take away to make their lives easier? 00:22:13 - 00:22:45 Steve What I wish customers really understood is that this is not magic. The technology is fantastic, but anytime you put data into the CMDB, it has to be managed. That's number one. Number two is, just because you own ServiceNow and you might be a whizz at creating things like catalog items or workflows, IT operations management products are a different animal. And Stacey was able to achieve a lot on her own with her team members, but they also got help from a partner. 00:22:46 - 00:23:12 Steve And we always recommend that customers at least enlist the help of a partner to get started. Maybe you know ServiceNow really well, but you don't necessarily know the infrastructure and application world that well. And our partners do an amazing job of knowing ServiceNow and how our products work with service mapping, discovery and so forth. But also understanding the disciplines that we are trying to discover. 00:23:13 - 00:23:32 Steve And they will work with you. They will put together a plan. They'll share knowledge with you so that you now are able to support that going forward. So that is my one wish is that I wish customers would leverage the help of partners more frequently and not think that it's a magic thing that's going to solve their problems right away. 00:23:33 - 00:24:08 Will That's fair, and I see that a lot with clients. It has the capability of doing some magic things, but it is not magic. Pour the water on the beans and they go into the bean stalk, doesn't work that way. We know that. I guess I would throw in online too, is the road mapping. We talked about this a couple of times. You brought it up, Steve. It's having that plan for where you're going. What are the steps of maturity to get you there? There's nothing wrong with taking those steps and those smaller initiatives to build that long-term success. With that, I think I'm ready to wrap up. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Stacey, for joining me today. 00:24:09 - 00:24:10 Stacey Thanks for having me. 00:24:11 - 00:24:12 Steve Yeah. Thanks, Will. 00:24:13 - 00:24:49 Will If you want to learn more about how CAI is combining talent and technology for these type of lasting CMDB results, check out our website cai.io for articles, client success stories, or to set up a discussion with someone on our team. Don't forget to join us later, October 19th as we continue this discussion in part two of the CMDB, How and Why. Newell Brands will share more of their CMDB success story. Thank you. [Closing slide 1. Blue CAI company logo with tagline “We power the possible” appears in middle of screen. Company website www.cai.io appears at the bottom center of the screen]?