Speaker 1: 0:00

What ServiceNow is talking about is our issue. This is what we need to do. There is going to be a real shift and then, when the business goes holy, smokes like let's really see what this can do, because Welcome to Sell Me this Podcast, the show where we break down the art and science of selling strategy and success.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Today we're diving into the world of ServiceNow with Jeff Fosberg, a key player at Dyna Software, a company dedicated to helping businesses streamline operations and maximize the value of their ServiceNow investments. Navigating big software purchases can be overwhelming, and getting real ROI from a platform like ServiceNow requires real decision, the right strategy and strong governance. That is exactly what we're unpacking in today's episode. So, whether you're considering ServiceNow, looking to optimize your current implementation, or just want to hear from an expert in software solutions, this episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss. Let's get into it.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Jeff, welcome to the show, and we're going to dive right into things today. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and what led you to your role at Dyna Software?

Speaker 1: 1:08

Yeah, Thanks, Keith. I really appreciate you having me on.

Speaker 1: 1:10

We've known each other for a long time so it's exciting to be a part of what you're doing now. Yeah, I guess a little bit about myself. I've been in the technology sales space for geez over 25 years, started off with GE Capital and just progressed from there being from inside sales to doing some very simple solution consulting and then to most of my career has been spent in account management for large tech companies out of California. So it's been a great career ups and downs, like all things, but all in all, the world of tech sales has been really fascinating and it's been that's been a very good life.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Yeah, and so, without pumping up your ego too much, like I feel like when you say the name Jeff Vosburgh in Calgary it's almost like synonymous with ServiceNow.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Yeah, yeah, servicenow is certainly.

Speaker 1: 1:53

I had a really good stint with with NetApp back in the day as well, so I was there for about seven years.

Speaker 1: 1:58

But but really I think where my career flourished and really where I found my footing was really in the ServiceNow ecosystem. So I was with ServiceNow for about six years and then I actually took a sort of a global role with Deloitte, doing an alliance role with Deloitte and ServiceNow and really been in the ServiceNow ecosystem ever since and actually joined up with two of my former customers when I was at ServiceNow. So they ran the ServiceNow platform at Shaw and they had built this incredible application called Guardrails. So they ran the ServiceNow platform at Shaw and they had they'd built this incredible application called Guardrails and they had this company called Dynasoftware and about three years ago, just the planets aligned where we all it just made sense for us to come together as a bigger team and it's been a. It's been a fun run. We've we've expanded, we've grown, we've taken this, this, this technology, to a global audience, which has been fantastic for a small company out of Calgary. So it's been super, super exciting.

Speaker 2: 2:46

I'm super excited to dive into some questions, just even around how you've grown the platform, how you've grown your business, but at a high level. Obviously, there's a lot changing in the technology space. Servicenow is a rapidly evolving platform. Guardrails is a rapidly evolving platform. What sets you apart in this space and really what's the challenge you're looking to solve?

Speaker 1: 3:06

Yeah, and it's. It's a. We really started off and I'll be speaking on behalf of the founders.

Speaker 1: 3:11

The reason that they built Guardrails in the first place was they recognize the immense power that Guardrails that ServiceNow itself as a platform had. The challenge was is that there wasn't a lot of gates or measures in place in the platform to really protect customers from pardon the analogy, but if you get too much rope you likely can hang yourself, and a lot of organizations really struggled with that and they would actually hold back innovation. They would hold back on really driving business outcomes because they were afraid of the risk that it would entail. And it really became a big issue for organizations that were investing a ton of money in ServiceNow because they couldn't take advantage of all the service they had to offer. So they ended up spending, ultimately, more money than they should have been spending because they weren't getting the outcomes. So that's where Guardrails really had its birth was through recognizing that this was a major and a foundational challenge that all organizations have with respects to getting value out of ServiceNow. So Guardrails really helps them, as the name would suggest, provide guardrails.

Speaker 1: 4:10

So you think of it as ServiceNow is that Ferrari of an enterprise service management platform. But if you don't have the proper measures in place, you're pretty leery to take that Ferrari out of first gear. You're going to go very slowly and very methodically through the winding mountain passes, but. But if you put guardrails up, the metaphor holds that you can take your foot off the clutch, pop it in second gear, third gear, fourth gear. Let's really see what this can do, because you don't have the risk now of driving your car off the cliff. So, at a very sort of metaphorical level, that's what guardrails is all about.

Speaker 2: 4:42

All right, so we have a first ever on some of this podcast, which is we've had a mid-episode furniture swap. And Jeff, do you have a new chair? You're comfortable?

Speaker 1: 4:49

I feel better. Yep, yep. Okay, the slouching factor is better, so I can finally sit up with better posture. I'm good.

Speaker 2: 4:54

We're feeling good. I feel like you might win the award for tallest guest we've had so far.

Speaker 1: 4:57

So far.

Speaker 2: 4:58

But there's still many episodes left in the season We'll see how that goes. A large and exciting platform ServiceNow is, but there's so many directions that organizations can take it. There's so many different avenues and use cases. If I'm a business owner and I'm starting to think about taking some of those leaps and even evaluating is this platform right for me? From your experience, what are some of those first steps that they should take?

Speaker 1: 5:25

I think that it's a really good question, because I think that one of the challenges of ServiceNow is because it is so broadly powerful. If you ask yourself can ServiceNow do this? The answer, invariably, will always be yes. I think you can always guarantee that whatever use case or whatever business process or whatever workflow you have, yes, it could go on, servicenow. I think the question that customers need to ask, though, is should it so take the would, or could it do it and replace that with should, and not to say that you should navel, gaze over and spend a ton of time analyzing, but really think about where that core process is, where that core business outcome you're looking for. Does it belong in service now? Does it make sense to be there? I would argue that in most cases, it probably does. I just think there needs to be some awareness to how to do that work properly. Again, not to bring it back to what Garfield is all about, but that's really where we help customers as well. Is it?

Speaker 1: 6:17

A lot of times the CTO or the CIO, or even though the platform owner recognizes the immense power of what ServiceNow could be, but they're very reluctant to open that kimono up to say let's get multiple development streams happening. Let's get citizen development happening. Let's get distributed development, other partners on the platform. The challenge becomes really managing the complexity of the work that's happening in all the different groups, and that fear of that risk is probably one of the single biggest things that holds customers back.

Speaker 1: 6:45

So I would say, before any customer makes a big investment or takes the next step in service, now really take a look at your overall governance. Understand. Are we doing things the right way? Are we introducing technical debt that is going to come back and bite us two years from now, three years from now? Like most platforms, there's huge upgrades that happen twice a year. So if you've created a situation where you're not able to upgrade and you're missing all the new feature sets, you're really spending a lot of money for things that you're not using. So it becomes really critical that the customers take that governance first perspective and that's really where we spend all of our time is just helping reframe. Like it's all well and good that you want to build this massive castle or this massive complex with ServiceNow, but if your foundation isn't rock solid, you're going to have problems. So that's where we come in and have that.

Speaker 2: 7:33

I really love that you brought that up. But one of the things that I love to say is that technology is a great amplifier. If you have a bad processor, you have a bad. It's not going to magically solve those problems. In fact, it's probably going to make them worse. Yeah, and it sounds like it's the same in this scenario, where there's a lot of good that can be done. But if you have if you don't do that the right work up front, if you don't do the heavy lifting up front, you can really just amplify some bad things that already existed or maybe you didn't know existed within your organization.

Speaker 1: 7:56

A hundred percent and a lot of organizations recognize that they are creating this technical debt and they are creating this sort of this issue down the road and then it becomes a huge problem. It's this big issue that now needs to be resolved, whether it's going back to Greenfield type initiative. There's a lot of consulting organizations that are pitching and selling back to out of the box, helping customers get back there, and that's a huge expense. And it's not just a huge expense in consulting too. It's a huge expense in time. When that project's happening, really nothing is going to deliver to the business.

Speaker 1: 8:24

No one's doing massive innovation at the same time when you're doing a back to back to out of the box. So there's a real, there's a real deep value in that building, that governance early on.

Speaker 2: 8:34

Is that some people, is that one of the challenges that you see, where you get brought in lots of where they've maybe they've got really excited. They've opened the kimono, so to speak, and then all of a sudden they've turned on all these features. They're not quite sure what's valuable, what's not, what's connected's not how it all ties together, and they just put up their hand asking for help. Is that?

Speaker 1: 8:51

Yeah, you know ServiceNow has become a really, really powerful sales engine as well. They're known sort of the world over for all the capabilities. They have an incredibly talented and in-depth sales team to get the sales or to get the organizations excited about what ServiceNow can do. And what's happening a lot of times now is that those conversations are actually happening outside of IT. You know, ServiceNow is an amazing product for HR, amazing platform for CSM, for customer service management, for supply chain management, even some finance apps. So those conversations are happening in the business and then when the business goes holy smokes like what ServiceNow is talking about is our issue, this is what we need to do they go back to the ServiceNow team and the ServiceNow team. They're partially excited, but they're also freaked out because it's hard enough, as it is, to maintain the risk posture.

Speaker 1: 9:40

And then the last thing they want to do is throw on finance or throw on HR if they don't have that foundational sort of governance in place. And that's really where we see the sort of the, the, the dichotomy between customers. Customers that that that understand it can really um, put folks on their governance. They accelerate fast organizations that don't. It's, it's really. It's simple as that.

Speaker 2: 10:00

It sounds similar to security. I've always said security. Everyone always looks at security as the re, the, the reason you can't, the big no factor. I can't do security because of X, y and Z, but I firmly believe that with the right security, that's the reason you can do things right.

Speaker 1: 10:14

Bingo and the three sort of value pillars that we really focus on the reduction of operational overhead, the elimination of development risk and accelerated innovation. A lot of organizations, when they hear the word governance or they hear something like that they immediately relate that to well.

Speaker 1: 10:29

When they hear the word governance or they hear something like that, they immediately relate that to well. That's going to slow me down, that's going to be in my way, that's going to be negative, but it's exactly the opposite and I think to your point, it's the enabler for innovation. Once you have that in place, you then what used to take you a day takes two hours. So we really accelerate that because now they have confidence that every single piece of development that's happening is adhering to best practices is part of the overall story, as opposed to going rogue and causing issues.

Speaker 2: 10:56

Especially with what you just mentioned too, around how a lot of that innovation is being driven from not the IT team but the business, and there's all these different modules that can be turned on. And I won't name names, and I'm sure when I mentioned this story you'll probably know exactly who it is but there was one organization I worked with and IT was their smallest user of service now, and I'm sure there's more than one case on this one, but they used it in a whole bunch of elements of their business very sophisticated, a ton of automation, and their IT was used as a ticketing system. And I think that IT sometimes now can turn into some of those roadblocks that are slowing down that innovation, because maybe they understand the risks differently. They're the ones that might be left holding the bag at the end, and so governance, as you're mentioning, can unlock them.

Speaker 1: 11:41

I think that that's exactly the scenario. We've actually been very fortunate. We've got into most of the large Canadian banks. We just brought in a couple of US banks just in December as well, and the theme for all of them is so IT is where we're going, like we actually because it is Guardrail sits on actually a ServiceNow product that we built that's available in their store. So IT still has a massively important part in the conversation we have.

Speaker 1: 12:05

But in large banks, what's happening is that they're looking at what they're spending on ServiceNow, they're looking at the demands their business has and they're quite quickly realizing that there's a real bottleneck at IT, and so the business is clamoring for new things. But IT's like we just we can't the way that we manage things today. We can't grow to what you need us to do. So we have to think of something different, and one of the ways would be throwing bodies at it. Right, hire 10 more people, hire a bunch of people to go through all your developers code, really make sure that everything is good.

Speaker 1: 12:35

Or you look for a tool, you look for a product that automates that, that makes that happen. So really the catalyst for us in the larger financial institutions really is that using guardrails to unlock distributed development, whether that's allowing the HR teams to do their own development work, letting the supply chain folks do their own work, or bring in multiple partners. Maybe there's a GSI that does something really well and then they found a boutique partner that does something else really well. How do you have all of those players on your platform at the same time without causing conflicts? You need a tool.

Speaker 2: 13:08

And that's where we come in. 100%. You bring up a good question as well, even around the expertise side of things. So, with there being so many different avenues that you can take and utilize in the platform, I imagine that even selecting the right partners for some of those niche skill sets opens up a whole can of worms as well, and governance is one element to making sure that, once you've picked the right people, that they're able to stay in lockstep, they're able to adhere to what you wanted them to do as a business. But what about even taking a step before that and finding those right partners? How does a business even go about finding the right fit for their organization in that sea of ServiceNow partners?

Speaker 1: 13:53

Sorry about that. I think that's a bit of a multi. A lot of times the best partner for any particular job is the partner that sort of aligns with where the customer currently is. There's big global GSIs and then there's very small I'm sorry, what's a GSI? Just Global Service Integrator. Okay, perfect, Sorry. Global Systems Integrator.

Speaker 1: 14:13

So that would be like the KPMGs, the Deloittes, the Accentures, the big guys, the real big ones, and really I think it's alignment with what the business's expectations are. Every partner has great technical resources. Every partner's got abilities galore. Where I think good projects and bad projects diverge is just alignment to the overall outcome that the client wants. If there's a mismatch from the beginning, there'll be a mismatch at the end, and I would just encourage organizations to reach out and talk to their fellow colleagues and other organizations their experiences with each of the different partners. Every partner's got tremendous strengths and there's also areas where each partner probably isn't as strong. So helping you can do your own research and tap the market.

Speaker 1: 14:56

And there's lots of people that will be very happy to share that feedback with them.

Speaker 2: 15:00

Yeah, I wasn't going to make you name names or anything or pick your top three favorites, but that's really sage advice there. So when you think about starting to the scalability, flexibility, the innovation of the platform, you're seeing some of these changes come from outside of IT. How are they mobilizing the organization and having those conversations to be able to think about what's different? Because I feel like the technical literacy is increasing across the business but depending on the organization, there's still varying levels of maturity. Like, how are you seeing organizations tackle driving the innovation of the platform forward?

Speaker 1: 15:35

And it really does vary. When I was at ServiceNow for six years and it was always fascinating to me in seeing one organization and again you got to keep in mind every person who buys ServiceNow buys the exact same thing. Your ITSM product is identical to everyone else's, but there's such an incredible variance in terms of how well each customer is doing with that platform. Are they accelerating, are they getting the value out of it or are they struggling? And the reality is that it has nothing to do with the products, because the product is the same thing across the board. It really does come down to the organization's ability to handle operate, our organizational change.

Speaker 1: 16:15

I think OCM, like organizational change management, is probably the most under. There's just not enough importance put on that. You look at a lot of these big scale transformations. They don't live up to fully what they expected them to, and my belief in my experience is that it just came down to. It wasn't sold properly to the individual end users. They didn't understand the full vision. And it's hard to do too. These are mega platforms and these business processes are very large and complex, so it does take time to move the needle. I would say if, uh, you know, for any organization out there that's considering growing service now or really any platform for that matter really have a strong plan around your OCM, getting your end users, getting the the you know, the customers that you're serving hyped about what this technology is going to mean for them as well, and I think talking less about the technology and more about the outcome is also critically important.

Speaker 2: 17:10

I couldn't agree with you more. I feel like everyone. I don't want to say the technology is the easy solve, but sometimes I feel like the technology is actually the easiest part. It's the people that are hard part. I read a study recently from Gartner that talked about I think it was like 70% of those enterprise transformation projects actually fail and I think it's for that exact reason because people don't include the end users, they don't include their teams and their people, and then they just have this magic show almost where they just do this grand unveiling and all of a sudden, here's your new platform.

Speaker 1: 17:40

And I think it's going to become even more pronounced with as AI becomes more prevalent and more ubiquitous across the entire world. Really, I think there's going to be a lot of fear in that when OCM fails is because people are afraid of something and they whether it's intentional or whether it's subliminal they're not all in there and they're not going to put all their effort in to make sure this project is successful. And I feel that, with with how powerful AI is becoming, I think the fear factor of technology is going to become that much more, and I don't think that's going to be what holds it back. But I think that's going to be the opportunity for organizations to figure out how they can put their own employees' minds at ease. These new technologies are not here to replace you. They're not here to put you out of a job. They're here to enhance. They're here to help us solve the bigger problems faster. But without proper management and leadership, people's minds will immediately go. They're bringing this in to fire me and everything will fail because of that.

Speaker 2: 18:40

And I think people are latching onto some of those headlines right when you see some of the headlines and, ironically, a lot of those shifts are in the technology industry as well, but the numbers are staggering. So if you're talking to leaders about some of these big organizational changes, how are you coaching them to make sure that you're talking to leaders about some of these big organizational changes? How are you coaching them to make sure that they're going to bring in their people along with them rather than alienating them and making them feel a little bit afraid as they make some of these shifts?

Speaker 1: 19:05

I would be overstating if I say I'm having a lot of those conversations, like our product work, quite. But we do have a lot of conversations with the GSIs, like with the Deloitte, the KPMGs of the world, because we do have some very strong strategic partnerships with them and for them. I'll just parrot back what I hear them talking about. It is their singular biggest focus is how do we get the human engaged, how do we make this human connection with this technology, as opposed to having people feeling alienated. So I think a lot of it will just be also like opening the aperture of people's vision of what their own roles are. If you go to, if you go to work every day and you get the blinders on that this is what I do and this is the value I bring you will forever feel at risk because you're never opening that, that aperture.

Speaker 1: 19:46

And I do think that's an opportunity for employees because employee satisfaction happens when you feel there's so much I can influence, there's so much I could do, there's a lot of value that I can bring. But if you're very focused and very just myopic in your thinking, there are going to be technologies that will nip away at that myopic vision. Expanding that aperture is going to be a challenge for organizations, but I think it's also going to be very inspirational. I think we will see a little bit of a. There will be some shifts People will leave organizations and people will join organizations, but I think those that will succeed and really flourish in this new AI world are the ones that can look beyond the fear and look at this as wow, this is incredibly powerful stuff. This is going to change everything for us.

Speaker 2: 20:31

Yeah, I know this is going to change everything for us. Yeah, no, and I think a lot of the people that understand the technology have a little bit of apprehension, but there's also this incredible optimism around what can be delivered. I know we're going off onto a little bit of a rabbit hole here, but is there a common fabric you're seeing amongst these people that have that aspirational view towards AI and these people that are diving into some of these really exciting elements at the end user level?

Speaker 1: 20:57

It's those that I think the ones that are, that are inquisitive, that are excited and who see the potential. They're also everyone's reluctant. Everyone has a certain level of hoof. Like that sounds a bit risky. And now, with deep seat coming out, it's opening a. It's opening a real remarkable Pandora's box, for good or for bad. But I do feel like just having that optimistic mindset of one of the actually it's funny, it's the tattoo that I have on my arm. I only have one tattoo and it was as a kid.

Speaker 1: 21:26

My dad used to always quote a Socrates quote that said wisdom begins in wonder. So he passed along. So I got that as a tribute, but it's a quote that I use a lot and I impart to people a lot is that true wisdom and true understanding comes from wondering what will this lead to, and I feel like a mindset like that I'm not trying to preach that everyone should have that mindset, but the idea that you just open up and just be like what could this do? Sure it might disrupt what I'm doing today, but maybe what I'm doing today, but maybe what I'm doing today needs me to disrupt this. Maybe I can do so much more. Maybe there's way more that I could bring to this world than I am right now.

Speaker 1: 22:00

I know that's taking a bit of a leap of faith and I know that is scary for some people, but it's the reality. We're going the sweat routes. I'm sure there was the same conversation happening when electricity was first wired in, when the first plow got replaced by the first John Deere tractor. I'm sure there's a million reasons why everyone thought John Deere tractors were going to kill the world. And it doesn't. Innovation does spur on different things. It opens new opportunities. We are in a point of flux right now and a point of change. But it's scary, but it's also exciting.

Speaker 2: 22:29

Yeah, and I think one of the quotes that I love that kind of builds on exactly what you were saying. I love the quote of that you've shared here is the idea that to be interesting, be interested Exactly, yeah, and and some of the most interesting people that I know are the ones that are curious, the ones that want to turn over that rock, they want to look that step further and ask that extra question yeah, and that curiosity I definitely agree with you is something that'll continue to set people forward and apart. Yep, talking about the evolution of AI and what that means in your ecosystem what does that mean for Dynasoftware, what does that mean for the work that you're doing? And also, what does that mean for the evolution of platforms like ServiceNow?

Speaker 1: 23:08

Yeah, no AI. So I just came back from Vegas, was at their global sales kickoff and every conversation either started or ended with AI. It was that that is the topic. Maybe that's an edit.

Speaker 2: 23:19

We had some editing there, we're okay.

Speaker 1: 23:22

Where AI is really going to have a massive impact. It is really going to shrink the development time and the development effort to get things done on ServiceNow. Generative AI is really going to change what used to take hours or days to build that, to build that code, to build that complete configuration down to virtually seconds. There is going to be a real shift. I think that shift is going to affect the partners a lot Organizations that are building out large development centers in Philippines or in India. That workload might come down.

Speaker 1: 23:52

But what I'm also looking at it as if AI can do 40% of what's happening right now by people, then there's 60% other stuff. And again, if we take that opening the aperture sort of metaphor, if we're only looking at the size of the development opportunities as it is today, you take 40% away or 50% away for AI. That's disruptive, right. That's going to really affect certain people's livelihoods and things like that. That's only assuming that the bucket stays at 100%. There's opportunities to grow this 10,000%. So that's where I don't see this going away. This is only going to enhance and it's going to make some of these platforms that have always had the promise to be truly transformational but because of how heavy they were and how complex they were to actually develop on it held so much innovation back. I think we're at that inflection point now where a lot of those issues go away software plays than Guardrails plays.

Speaker 2: 24:52

I would almost see that it would become more important, because if the iteration time becomes quicker, if the release times become quicker, if the ability to deploy whatever pops into your head becomes quicker, I would argue that the role of governance only increases as well 100%, and what we're seeing is that customers are now also having multiple streams of developments and that just increases the opportunity or the need to have governance.

Speaker 1: 25:13

That much more we're also coming out with. We launched a product called Platform Co-Pilot, which is our Gen-AI product. So we launched that knowledge last year in Vegas. It is gonna be commercially available in this Vegas or this knowledge in May, and really what we've done here is that we've allowed the business, end users I'm not saying someone who's out in the field that's never touched a computer in the last 20 years, but the business analysts, the people that are working with it and working with the business to understand what do we need to do to get that next level, the individuals that have comprised those stories or comprise those the documents of here's what we need to do. We can actually ingest that and outright completely give the configuration so not just the code, not just the individual components of it, but the entirety of the configuration, which then can be pointed back to a service instance and it can be deployed.

Speaker 1: 26:01

So, we have something that we are really excited about and obviously it is going to be very disruptive, and one of the things you mentioned about going to market. Our whole focus as a small tech company that makes product is we really want to do this with partners. So my entire conversation has really been around helping other of the GSIs and the service ecosystem understand what it is that we do from a guardrails perspective and from the platform co-pilot perspective, and then what they're doing is they're building their programs and building their offerings around guardrails and platform co-pilot. So we see that as our sort of path market for the most part.

Speaker 2: 26:38

And that makes a lot of sense too, because, you mentioned it, the revenue streams are shifting right and I think that some of those traditional elements where partners might have made their money, that's shifting for better or for worse, and that happens, probably with or without guardrails, yeah, and the opportunity then to say, okay, here we're replacing this kind of scale component which is what you're I'm talking about from the either, the overseas development even if it's happening here, like there, these elements of scale are being less and less required and the ability to have true expertise, the ability to solve genuine problems, is really exciting.

Speaker 1: 27:11

And where I see the I see a real shift happening as well is that these GSIs like the Deloittes, the KPMGs, the Accentures of the world. They didn't start off as technology companies. They started off as auditors and accountants and really business people. That's what these are. They're 100% business-focused organizations. Because of the complexity of these big enterprise platforms that they've had, they've all had to become experts in that technology. Where Gen AI is really taking a big piece out of that is that all of that heavy technical work is actually going away. For a lot of parts Now, the really complex integrations AI is probably not going to solve that day one.

Speaker 1: 27:47

There's a lot of the traditional development that is actually going away. And where I envision this going is that the partner community will become less focused on becoming the technical gurus of anyone practice, but really becoming business experts in whatever it is their customer is trying to accomplish. So I think we'll start seeing some real and we already do. Each one of the GSIs has a lot of specialization. Okay, this is our energy vertical, this is our manufacturing vertical, this is our aerospace vertical. But I think we'll see more and more of that because all of the focus will be on business outcomes, not how we get there. It is what we're going to get and that huge amount of investment of the time, money and effort to do that intermediary development is going to shrink a lot. So those people will have to do something else and I think it'll be more focused on the business outcome part of it.

Speaker 2: 28:40

And so that deep specialization will become increasingly more and more important. And I think there's always been this aspirational nature in the technology and ecosystem to say we're part of the business, we want to be part of those business discussions right, and there's always been this aspiration to work alongside IT but also with the rest of the business. And it sounds like, from your perspective, some of these shifts that are happening really enable that to start to take shape and the technology isn't anything that needs to be solved for anymore.

Speaker 1: 29:07

Exactly, and in a lot of cases the technology was a little bit of the inhibitor. Sure, it could do all the things that the business wants to do. When the business does their requirements, then there's like a six-week or an eight-week or a two-month gap in between gathering of the information to even like a first version of the application. The businesses change their mind or there becomes a disconnect. So I think if with AI, the ability to churn out these business outcomes quickly and iterate as you go, we'll see innovation that we've just never seen before, like what took customers years to do, we'll be able to do months. And the closer that IT can become, sort of allies with the business, then you're really in that lockstep and that's where I think you'll start to see that innovation exponentially go up.

Speaker 2: 29:48

Amazing, and so I think that. Then, from your perspective, what does that do to the gaps between the people that are investing and jumping both feet into these pools versus the ones that are a little bit more timid and sitting behind?

Speaker 1: 30:00

So your example is are you thinking of customers?

Speaker 2: 30:03

Yeah, If we think about organizations that jump full force into adopting some of these enterprise platforms, adopt these new development cycles and jump both feet into them, versus the ones that are sitting a little bit on the sidelines and maybe they're going to stick with the traditional way of doing things.

Speaker 1: 30:22

Yeah, I think that's going to be really like the world of the have and the have nots the organizations that are able to really go quickly. And again, part of the story that we talk about guardrails is that in a lot of cases it's a trade-off If I want to go fast, I know I'm going to break things, and or if I don't want to break things, I'm going to go slow and I'm not going to need, I'm not going to be worried about the business. We have to help customers not make that hard choice, because you have to go fast, you have to be safe and you have to save money. So it's that trifecta which, in a lot of cases, you can only do two of the three. Right, you can go fast and cheap, but you're not going to get quality. But now, with proper governance, that is going to be what allows that no compromise decision. You can go fast, reduce risk and accelerate innovation at the same time. I might have lost my train of thought a little bit.

Speaker 2: 31:10

That's okay, yeah, and I actually have a follow-up question to that. So, in terms of the governance side of things, when would you recommend someone put in place some of these governance foundations? Do they need to be a certain size or scale or a certain distance down the path?

Speaker 1: 31:23

So, governance needs to be at the root of every conversation, whether you're been on the platform for 10 years or thinking about buying it out of the gate, where we typically fit. And this is just based on our business model. It's like the clients that we work with for organizations that are at that million dollar ACB a year with ServiceNow.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And just for the listeners ACB is Annual contract value For organizations that are spending $200,000 or $300,000 on ServiceNow.

Speaker 1: 31:45

The governance challenges that they have are oftentimes managed manually. You can do it yourself. You have one developer, you have a small team. You don't necessarily need to invest in a governance tool. Once you get beyond that, once you have a development team, once you have all these different tentacles, it becomes a must-have. Really, you can't do what you think you can do without a product like Guardrails, and we're very fortunate. We're really in a space that there isn't a lot of competition. There's other platforms, other tools that do individual pieces of what Guardrails does, but nobody has that sort of that end-to-end development infinity loop. So we really play on all those aspects and our conversation is not a technical one. Our conversation is usually a very strategic one around. You need to go fast with ServiceNow because now that you're spending so much money 10 years ago, five years ago, even big companies were only spending a million bucks. Now these big companies are spending $20, $30, $40 million a year. Now, all of a sudden, the CFO starts going. That's a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 32:41

These are big numbers yeah, what are we getting for this and are we doing? If I'm going to invest $40 million here, is that there's becoming more and more scrutiny and more and more awareness around. Hey, well, the service now has grown to. Now, like sometimes in organizations, their investment in SAP is not that dissimilar than their investment in ServiceNow. So it just becomes more critically important to have that foundational governance in place, and it doesn't matter what size you are.

Speaker 2: 33:10

So cost is obviously a huge part of this conversation. Servicenow is not a cheap platform. It's definitely. You mentioned a Ferrari at the beginning. It has an incredible amount of horsepower, but how is the right governance model helping customers control their costs outside of just their development frameworks?

Speaker 1: 33:28

Yeah, and a lot of it is. It really is. It is around the development cost. There's other aspects of governance that say maybe wouldn't be DevOps governance Buying licensing for people who would only maybe need to use ServiceNow once a month.

Speaker 1: 33:41

That's where you got to make the determination Is it worth it for me to license all these people? I think you will start seeing a shift from ServiceNow to make some of the licensing a bit more user-friendly. I think that as they've grown very quickly, their price book has grown equally as quickly and equally as complex, and I think there's opportunity for ServiceNow to maybe modify that a little bit or streamline a little bit to really help customers. Because one of the challenges is that customers will work for years to get that value realization and then all of a sudden there'll be another inflection point where they have to buy a bunch more licensing. So they're always chasing their tail around value realization and I think as the maturity happens, you'll start to see that sort of leveling out a little bit. So customers aren't always chasing that proverbial. We want to get value out of the platform.

Speaker 2: 34:24

That makes sense, and so I'll zoom out a tiny bit from ServiceNow specifically and maybe focus on some of these large enterprise platforms. And, to your point, these aren't a hundred dollar investments. These are things that are a million, 2 million, a hundred million dollars. When you're going in, let's say I'm a CIO of an organization and I'm about to start this negotiation or the sales cycle for some of these big items, what advice would you give someone on the customer side to make sure they're getting the most value out of that interaction with that organization?

Speaker 1: 34:54

Yeah, and you know, like I've been on, I've been on the on the the vendor side all the time in those negotiations and it is, it is and I and I think the I look back at the organizations that I was I built my career around being the advocate for my customer and I there are. There are some individuals that take a different tack, that, like I'm the vendor and I'm going to get the maximum value for my company.

Speaker 1: 35:14

But I've taken the approach that if I can always wear my customer's hat and always be focused on what they should be asking of me, or if I was in their role, what would I expect my vendor to do? I've always lived my. I built my career around that, so we've never really had super contentious negotiations. But the organizations that I was able to do the most for were the ones who were also open with me. And as much as I think a good sales executive tries to be open and tries to be earnest with their customer, if you can trust your representative and you can trust them, open up a little bit. Share with them what's going on For good, bad or indifferent. The more that they understand of your business, the more they can basically create their offering back internally.

Speaker 1: 35:54

Customers may not realize but there is so much negotiation that happens on their behalf behind the scenes and the way that I would approach negotiation was I'm your guy at that table. I need as much information and as knowledge as I can, and some organizations are reluctant to share that and I can understand why. But I think if we're truly looking for partnerships we have to be both willing to go into it with eyes wide open and that we know that we are going to be as candid and as open as possible and but then also find those people that you can genuinely trust, that you know that, hey, this guy's got my back, and I don't be afraid to call people out and say I don't feel this is accurate, like I want to know more about that. I think that's that's well within their rights to ask for that.

Speaker 2: 36:34

I think that's amazing advice and those relationships are so important. These aren't you're not buying a widget. These are your account team and your account reps and your solutions architects, and they're along with you for the ride for a while.

Speaker 1: 36:46

Yeah, and I think, like there, there certainly have been individuals that create this, us and them contentious, like it's a vendor versus customer. I think that's the old way of doing things. I think that's the old mentality and I know there's been lots of organizations that have been burned by that old mentality and they've ended up buying things that they didn't need and they ended up buying things that ended up being shelfware, and we've all heard the stories. It's not pleasant at all. I would just encourage all people on the customer side to really get to know your vendor and you get to them as people too, like they are truly just people they're working hard to to provide for their family, as they are, as you are for their family. So get to know them, build that trust and build a relationship beyond your rep, too. Get to know the product managers, get to know the sales leadership folks, because when push comes to shove, people want to work with people who they like working with and those relationships are very key.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Incredible advice, Jeff. I feel like we scratched the tip of the iceberg today, edit, yeah, so I might just start that. One Incredible advice. Jeff, I feel like we just scratched the tip of the iceberg today. If someone wants to continue this conversation with you, if they want to learn more about you or they want to learn more about Dynasoftware, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Speaker 1: 37:56

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I've got off of all my other social media platforms. Linkedin tends to be the place that I'm at. Obviously, you can reach me on my email.

Speaker 2: 38:05

I can put it. I'll link to your LinkedIn in the show notes here.

Speaker 1: 38:07

Yeah, yeah, and then I'd say just just message me on LinkedIn or reach out through that and would love to carry on the conversation.

Speaker 2: 38:13

Amazing. If you had one final piece of advice for people that are listening today, what would that be?

Speaker 1: 38:19

I think I've said it many times. And then, if I was, there's a book that came out when I was younger and it was basically like a how-to book for life, but it was titled everything I need to know in life. I learned in kindergarten and if you read a book like that, it really just gets down to the foundations of just being a good person Do what you say, what you do, show up on time, be the person that people can depend on and count on and be nice. I think right now the world needs nice and we're in a bit of a situation where anger and resentment and division seems to be the rule of the day, and I think all of us should choose the nice side and we'll get through all this and have a have an awesome year.

Speaker 2: 38:53

I love it. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jeff. This has been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to continuing chatting some more Indeed, awesome.

Speaker 1: 39:01

Thanks so much.

Speaker 2: 39:02

You bet.