What’s in a name? For Chris Bedi, who joined ServiceNow as CIO in September 2015, it’s a lot: the company recently gave him a new title, chief digital information officer, and renamed his IT team “digital technology.”
“The rebranding is an acknowledgment of how the role has changed,” he says, but is also intended to reinforce the different mindsets he wants the entire team to adopt.
When Bedi joined the company, his primary mission was to enable “scale-for-growth.” Back then, he says, the company had about 2,800 employees, a quarter of today’s headcount, and was still seen as an IT solutions company because its other workflow management products hadn’t come out yet. .
His role includes familiarity with responsibilities for IT infrastructure, network connectivity, cybersecurity, delivery of collaboration and communication tools for existing staff, and provisioning them for new hires so they have they need to be productive from day one.
Another big part of the job then, he said, was keeping the information needed to run the business “at our fingertips.” These analytics tools are basic apps, but not essential, he says.
AI and machine learning were just beginning to enter the analytics discussion in 2015, and the ServiceNow team dedicated to the technology was small.
“At the time, we had a three-person team dedicated to AI and ML that was mainly — this is 2015, you have to remember — just running AI and ML experiments,” Bedi said. “No one knows what to do with it; no one really bought it. But it’s data scientists thinking about the data, making some insights.”
That changed in later years, of course.
Digital brain
A milestone for the analytics organization came in late 2018, with a shift in focus away from dashboards and KPIs and towards becoming a digital brain. “We play with the name: digital brain, central nervous system – for organization,” he said. “We have said that our mission should be to ensure that anything rated, recommended or predicted in our organization is enabled by an AI and ML recommendation.”
That mission soon evolved again, helping each person make more effective decisions, and now results in more than 3 million recommendations per day, he says. “It’s great coming out with AI and ML recommendations, but unless we’re also prescriptive in terms of the actions we want people to take, and give them a closed loop, someone in the loop, to tell the us if those suggestions are useful, we are missing the mark.”
The way the analytics team evaluates its own performance has also evolved, from the number of monthly active users of analytics products to focusing on their satisfaction with the recommendations they receive. “It should be, ‘What is the percentage of actions recommended versus actions taken?’ That’s a big change,” he said.
Bedi’s responsibilities also grew in other ways. While his team is not responsible for the Now Platform infrastructure on which the company’s SaaS offering runs, it maintains the Now Learning training platform and ServiceNow Impact, a customer success app for helping clients to track their digital transformations.
Cybersecurity is no longer just about protecting the corporate IT infrastructure, but also the company’s revenue-generating cloud, and even ensuring that customers use the company’s services safely to reduce reputational risk.
And company scaling has shifted from simply supporting more employees to getting the most out of existing staff. “Its goal is to drive an incredible employee experience that helps our employees be more engaged and productive,” he said. “If I zoom out, the role has changed from being largely internal, scaling and reducing risk, to being very externally focused, critical to driving our strategy, critical to driving growth, and viewed as more strategic than in 2015.”
Embracing citizen developers
Bedi says he is a voracious reader, but also has a strong bias for action when it comes to acquiring new skills. “Let’s do it and figure it out as we go,” he said. “People use the term ‘fail fast’ but I prefer the term ‘learn fast’.”
That’s his approach when it comes to adopting low-code development tools within ServiceNow.
“We’re having one of those debates that doesn’t have a finish line around citizen development,” he said. Pros want to see the benefits immediately; battles fear an accumulation of technological debt in the organization.
In situations like this, he says, there are three choices as CIOs. “You can try to block it – but you’ll never win that fight,” he said. “You can ignore it. That’s what you’re doing now, whether you know it or not, because people already have point solutions. The only logical choice left, and this was a conversation I had with my team, was to embrace it. So, we embraced it.”
ServiceNow employees have also embraced it, with more than 400 of them active as citizen developers, 100 service applications, and another 100 applications that should go live in the next two months, Bedi said. .
As progress gathers momentum, he has some advice for other CIOs preparing to embrace citizen development in their business. First, he says, keep management light but adequate. One way to do this is to provide trusted data sets for things that citizen developers are sure to want, which must be done properly to prevent things from breaking — like an organizational hierarchy and a directory of the employee for apps involving approvals, for example, or a cost-center hierarchy for anything related to spending.
Second, he says, avoid discouraging new developers by limiting the reasons for rejecting a project: no duplicate apps (although replacing an app with a better one is allowed); no getting in your head (so if an interesting idea seems too complicated for the citizen developer, his team members can help); and no handling of highly sensitive data (but if the idea is good, his team can do the project).
His third recommendation is to make it easy for people to get started. His team did this by offering an introductory class — “It’s short enough where people don’t feel discouraged,” he says — and holding office hours where citizen developers can call for help.
Finally, he advises, boost success by celebrating the applications of citizen developers. “I have a vested interest in starting this program,” he said, “because they help one of my main missions: digitize the business.”
If citizen development is managed correctly, and if CIOs, CDIOs, and CTOs can embrace all these people, says Bedi, we can eliminate the term shadow IT and its negative connotations.
And maybe it will help with another problem he and CIOs like him face: the lack of skilled software developers. “I can never get enough of them,” Bedi said.