Three ways IT can stay relevant: what I learned from you this week

[dturchin]

I'm on the plane home from an incredible few days visiting the Midwest contingent of our Product Advisory Council (PAC). PAC is twenty customers hand-picked to guide our product strategy.

I shared our roadmap and asked them two questions in exchange: what is ServiceNow to you and where would you like us to be investing our dev dollars? I met each customer separately and yet the replies were amazingly consistent.

Here's what I heard:

1. Every company will soon be a software company. Every customer is increasingly dependent on technology to run their core business. For example, IT at Enterprise Holdings, the rental car company, supports self-service kiosks that eliminate the need for humans and paper in branches. As a customer, that's why I'm loyal to National! It's an incredible customer experience. Harley-Davidson (...thanks for the joy ride!) supports the systems that process orders from distributors and suppliers. IT is no longer a technology traffic cop. It's the owner of technology experiences that create competitive advantage.
2. Business speaks the language of service. Business leaders can't relate to the old language of IT. Ping times, CPU utilization, and paging file sizes are worse than meaningless to end-users. They erect artificial barriers that perpetuate cultural stereotypes about IT and prevent the CIO from having a seat at the strategy table. Allstate Insurance says their biggest challenge is making sense out of what's in their CMDB. What they need is a way to communicate health of services to line of business executives. Communicating health of infrastructure at the level of CI metrics is counterproductive. As an aside, every customer I met shared a version of that feedback and cheered our acquisition of Neebula's (fantastic!) ServiceWatch product which builds and maintains service topology maps via top-down discovery.
3. More apps, more changes, and more data make managing infrastructure more challenging. Infrastructure is changing more rapidly than ever. Distinguishing signal from noise is increasingly important and, unfortunately, legacy monitoring tools are increasingly ill-prepared to operate at cloud scale. At World Wide Technology, IT operations monitors infrastructure in the company's Advanced Technology Center (ATC) which is used to showcase the company's product innovations to external customers. At Discover Financial, Netcool OMNIbus is keeling under its own weight and they need a migration strategy. Every customer shared some tale of woe that involved needing a scalable strategy for managing operations and massive quantities of information. They provided invaluable feedback on the Event Management application we released in Eureka and why managing events on their ITSM platform is essential.

It's incredibly intimidating to be reminded of the challenges our customers face daily… and incredibly motivating to know we're on the right track.

PAC midwest customers: thanks for 72 hours of high-energy geek nirvana. I have plenty to digest but promise to return soon… with new features in tow and the same requests I had this week: keep pushing us, keep educating us, keep inspiring us.

P.S. Jim, hope you get a commission on my new hog!