It’s not me, it’s you…

Here’s one admittedly extreme example of a company’s refusal to accept any criticism of either their customer service or food quality during and after their appearance on a national TV show.

Two restauranteurs became the subject of Internet ridicule due to their wild attempts to repair their reputation after being abandoned by Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares.

Samy and Amy Bouzaglo argued with the TV chef after inviting him to critique their Arizona bistro. Then they took on the entire Internet of “punks” and “haters” after the episode showed the married owners of the Amy’s Baking Company bistro in an unflattering light. Much of this exchange was captured on Facebook.

First there was an implausible denial that anyone could possible question the quality, service or reputation of Amy’s Baking Company:

Then the insults started to fly as the owners lashed out at any and all criticism, even threatening to report names to the police:

As you can imagine, this small Arizona restaurant is now being besieged with negative reviews not only for their service and food quality but for their extreme and unacceptable reaction to criticism. I can’t share all of the details as there are several profanity-laced tirades but you can learn more by clicking on the following link: How Not To React To Internet Criticism: The Epic Facebook Meltdown Of Amy’s Baking Company .

Taking it on the chin                    

A much more positive example of accountability comes from a unique waffle sandwich restaurant in Chicago called BEL 50. This restaurant has clearly earned its 4-star reputation by accepting accountability when customer service is not at its best, as the following excerpt from Yelp highlights (click to enlarge image):

After working for a hospitality database marketing firm earlier in my career, I can tell you that this type of admission and response to criticism is surprisingly uncommon. But it is this type of accountability that earns loyalty and a reputation for service excellence, proven again and again on media sites such as Yelp. BEL 50’s owner won over several previously unsatisfied customers and turned them into brand advocates by taking this approach.

Both examples cited above are small businesses with one retail outlet. But being big doesn’t excuse accountability. The Twitter handles @VerizonSupport and @VZWSupport provide fast and effective support and information for Verizon and Verizon Wireless businesses, respectively. The responses and accolades from customers speak for themselves. @EMCSupport, EMC’s Twitter handle for customer service related issues, has begun to gain traction from both reactive and proactive standpoints. It also serves as a way to gain direct recommendations from customers and partners in areas such as our online support site.

One of my favorite marketing thought leaders is Scott Stratten, author, speaker and Founder of UnMarketing.com. I’d like to end with a recent tweet from Scott:

“Customers complaining about your business on Twitter is not a social media issue.”

Some companies, especially Amy’s Baking Company, haven’t learned this important lesson.

“The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC nor does it constitute any official communication of EMC.”

Commenting on this year’s Knowledge conference,  Josefsberg mentioned it had been an “all around incredible experience for us,” as existing and potential customers gave very positive feedback on the ServiceNow platform and SaaS offering. Explaining his role within the company, Josefsberg said he had joined about 20 months ago, when ServiceNow was on an incredible trajectory in terms of growth.

“We’ve had some of the largest enterprises in the world on our platform,” which created a need to scale out and mature theinfrastructure. “Now my focus is on where to go next, [..] where to take the company next. “

“In the cloud space we really see the infrastructure providers they are growing a lot, but their business if very different from what we do,” Josefsberg explained. Such providers sell compute, bandwidth, and storage, the costs of which are easy for CIOs to understand. ServiceNow has both an SaaS aspect and a platform aspect, as they sell an application development platform.

One of the main benefits of the ServiceNow platform is that it enables IT to sit at the C-level table. “For IT there’s a shift from managing the infrastructure to managing the business,” and ServiceNow focuses on enabling this shift. Sales, marketing, etc. “don’t care who runs the server, they care about getting business value.” ServiceNow empowers IT to drive business value and strategy. 

Exploring the architecture of ServiceNow, Josefsberg said its beauty was its simplicity. ”When it comes to large scale operations, the simpler it is, the cheaper it is to scale it out.” ServiceNow offers an application development platform that allows non-programmers to build apps. Mentioning founder Fred Luddy’s debut with the company, he said that ServiceNow started with an IT service management application suite, but “the underlying mission was to build a rapid application development platform.” It was a very powerful message, and in many ways ahead of its time, he added.

The application runs onto a set of Java virtual machines, a simple, scale-out architecture that is popular today, but was developed back in 20o4. In the back-end there is a database, everything is stored there, not just data and attachments  but also workload, business applications, everything related to the business processes a company uses.

“Our whole platform is based on open source,” Josefsberg said, highlighting MySQL and Java. ”The beauty of open source that I found incredibly empowering is that you can stand on the shoulders of others.” Compared to the closed environment, it’s incredibly powerful.

“To prepare for the future, we’re introducing a NoSQL approach,” Josefsberg stated. “We don’t use it in production right now, but we want to be prepared for the future.”

“If you think about the landscape of what we do, we started in IT service management, but we have adjacent areas that have incredible potential,” he explained. One of these areas are IT operations management – automation, discovery, etc. Another one that also has incredible potential is IT business management – the type of systems that IT leaders, CIOs, VPs of operations, use. It include compliance, regulatory type of applications and ServiceNow plans to expand its offering in this segment.

“The application development platform itself opens a lot of potential for us. We want to make application development approachable for the citizen developer.” IT development projects, explained  Josefsberg, usually takes 12-18 months. By that time businesses have already moved on and the app is useless. Time to market is a critical issue. “we want to enable them to build apps very very quickly.”

“We’ve been a ServiceNow customer for two years,” Glenn said, mentioning Agropur started like most new customers with the basic module, and is now looking at where the next steps are, with a focus on project management.

Merging IT departments across two nations

Agropur, a cooperative in Quebeck, it is owned by dairy farmers. It is a fast growing business  spread throughout Canada and North-East USA. “We’re constantly expanding,” Glenn said, noting that the cooperative recently brought on a new CEO and has completed a few mergers. The most prominent project of late has been to merge three separate IT departments into one corporate IT department, and in order to accomplish that, they have leveraged ServiceNow’s offering.

Talking about the specifics of the industry, Glenn mentioned: “there is not space to grab new markets,” it’s about developing new products in the dairy and cheese market. The amount of consumption is not changing in this market.

From the perspective of a cooperative, there are specific communication challenges, as owners – who have to be dairy farmers – and employees come from various locations. Another issue to manage is that in Canada, milk production is regulated, milk is distributed according to needs, so what is produced by the cooperative’s owners is not necessarily going to their processing plants. From the IT point of view, the challenge is to link the farms and the distributors.

“We had quite a few apps build in-house for Lotus Notes, which we’ve been working for 12 years,” Glenn said, but the cooperative decided to change platforms as it became much harder to find Lotus Notes developers. What he likes most about ServiceNow is that here are a lot of similarities with Lotus Notes, he sees their offering as a development platform. “We like being able to configure it and modify it to suit our needs.”

Importance of easy app-building

Speaking of ServiceNow’s benefits, Glenn said that there was no comparison with the ease with which one can develop apps on this platform. “You don’t need to be a programmer,” anyone can create the application they need.

Discussing ServiceNow’s benefits, Glenn agreed that it’s a hard sell to the CFO. He said that Agropur started to look at new platforms two years before and at that point “ServiceNow was a footnote in our presentations.”  The cooperative’s CFO was interested in their offering and it became their first foray into the SaaS market. A benefit hat weighed into the decision, apart from the SaaS model, was that ServiceNow comes with all the applications, there is no need to keep buying something new. “You get a lot more bank for your buck here.”

“When you are doing strategic planning, you want to know which areas of the business are well served” or under-served by IT, Glenn explained, and having all the business processes in one place helps. “what’s been a winning thing for us has been the configuration management aspect,” he said, talking about advise on implementing ServiceNow. If you have the time to consider structure and organization when implementing the platform then base everything on it, “you’ll have a great view of what you’re doing.”

The prototype, running on 16 Intel Xeon processor E7 family CPUs and 12 Tbytes of memory, is engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads such as supply chain, CRM, ERP, and data analysis. It leverages years of engineering and design across HP’s enterprise server business to create a system for customers who need the highest levels of performance and availability, where minutes of downtime can mean millions of dollars lost.

HP also announced a prepackaged, fully supported appliance for running SAP Business Suite software powered by SAP HANA s part of HP AppSystems. Designed to handle large amounts of transactional and analytics data residing in a single centralized database. It reduces latency and improves access to real-time, mission-critical data, cutting time for decision support analysis to near real-time in many cases. HP is making significant investments in rapid-deployment systems for SAP Business Suite applications. This complements HP’s current systems for SAP HANA and will help clients accelerate their transformations into real-time enterprises.

It backed this with the announcement of new enterprise services for the rapid development of SAP Business Suite software powered by SAP HANA and HP Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP applications. “Organizations deploying new enterprise applications need to be set up for success,” said Jules Beck, VP, Global Enterprise Applications and Mobility Services for HP Enterprise services. “HP’s deep portfolio of strategic cloud platforms and services provides clients with a flexible cloud model that maximizes the benefits of SAP solutions while providing data privacy and sovereignty, disaster recovery, and high availability.”

New services include:

• Application transformation services that provide the tools and proven methodologies to move and transform SAP applications to a cloud-based model.

• Deployment automation for customers who want to move their production portfolio of SAP solutions to a managed application model.

• IaaS services through HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Virtual Private Cloud for clients who want to lower their overall TCO and get the flexibility of a pay-per-usage capacity model based on their demand cycles.

• SAP Applications Platform-as-a-Service (APaaS) for customers who want application management support and maintenance, including support for configurations, interfaces, and master data.

HP manages the entire IaaS stack with an enterprise-class SLA that provides industry-leading high availability and the option for HP to manage the entire cloud stack.

KPMG is “all about the business of IT,” Kenfield said. “We think of CIOs as a CEO of a technology business.” While there is a renewed energy from the services perspective in the IT market, with cloud, virtualization and other technologies changing he industry, cost control, doing things smarter are parts of the decision making process that are not going away.

“The businesses are moving too fast, IT has to keep up,” Kenfield explained  KPMG clients are expecting new ideas and innovation from IT, they are not expecting them to be order-takers anymore. “The job of the CIO hasn’t changed, but the pace and the complexity are increasing.”

Traditionally, “technology organizations have not been good at ongoing innovation,” they have been good at periodic innovation and then go back to keeping the lights on. R&D investments, innovation have to be part of the DNA of the business.

“We communicate with clients around the concept of [the] business of technology,” Kenfield added. What businesses are focusing on is talent and the ecosystem- the capabilities and the tools they have to deliver a business services. Collectively, these varied tools and capabilities make up an environments that CIOs are responsible for.

ServiceNow’s benefit is that it  gives companies an automated environment that allows KPMG to offer ideas to businesses, also helping turn people into consultants to their company.

KPMG has a CIO Advisory division that is focused on enabling the business of IT, make it more effective, provide the right services,  and ServiceNow is a key part of its tool kit, Kenfield said. An important goal in working with clients is to make sure businesses have repetitive practices. ServiceNow allows KPMG to look at ways to automate and simplify processes. Clients – IT organizations – are extremely hard working organizations, and KPMG helps them determine the best things to do and then offer them the technology they need to achieve their goals.

“We firmly believe that the industry specifics are what makes us go from good to great,” Kenfield explained. While the industry specific details are what the company goes to market with, the 80 percent that’s common is very important too.

She agreed to talk to Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante as part of the ServiceNow Knowledge 13 event in Las Vegas this week, discussing new tech, the biggest mega trends in the business, and also offers some of her insight on the matter, free of charge.

After Working for over 25 years in the IT industry, at the end of 2007 Marina decided to start her own company, CIO Advisory Group, with an objective to work with corporate clients, private equity and venture capital, helps clients understand how to properly position their product offerings in the enterprise IT space and how to effectively sell to CIOs.

Just stating the obvious, Marina emphasized that the rate of new technology being delivered to the market is unprecedented. The time for start-ups to enter the market has been reduced by 90 percent.

Therefore, the biggest mega trends that she’s tracking for her clients are:

• - SAS and cloud – which are no longer emerging trends. From the strategy perspective, if certain CIOs are not investing in these new technologies, they are simply falling behind.
• - Mobile, and the consummerization of IT – with everyone carrying their own devices, BYOD is no longer an option for IT to deal with. Mobility is here to stay, and it is becoming huge.

What can CIOs learn from IT giants?

Vellante asked Marina Levinson: what can CIOs learn from the giants of IT? The answer is simple: they can afford investing heavily in engineering. Most businesses won’t have that capability and will decide to work with service providers, but innovation is endless. It is possible to rely on an ecosystem of partners, and ServiceNow is playing that role.

Leveraging the SAS and cloud by third party providers allows IT to focus on business capabilities. They can focus on building relationships with the business partners and on striving to understand what the clients want. This way, the cycle time is dramatically shorter. Back in the day projects should not have taken more than a year, then the time was 6 months and now 3 months seems like a long time.

The best action plan for a start-up is to start small, deliver fast, succeed or fail fast and then move on.

As for the shadow IT, Marina reckons it was borne out of the frustration that the standard IT couldn’t implement what the business wanted. In her expert opinion, CIOs and IT could partner up with shadow IT companies, helping and enabling their services instead of saying “no”. The marketing message of ServiceNow (The end of NO, the beginning of NOW) is a fantastic line in that respect, and can be applied to much more than just ServiceNow.

SAS and cloud enable IT to deliver faster and to say YES to many more things

As for the advice she would give to vendors targeting CIOs, Marina, whose firm also offers coaching to sales organizations, stated that technology vendors should understand the business problems they need to solve. “What is it that you need? What are your problems?” – are really unfortunate questions. Vendors should learn, prepare and make sure their business solution fits the problem the company has.

Be prepared, focus on making the CIO successful. Research is paramount, by all means necessary: Google him, find out his interests and what he is comfortable with. Adapt your pitch to the style of the CIO and forget the PowerPoints.

“We break it down into two distinct areas we focus on: time to value and amount of value,” Fitzgerald said, explaining the company’s approach to services. Customers buying a ServiceNow product or solution get value faster than they would with other solutions. “We push our custoemers to think of 90 day cycles” and what they can implement in such a time frame.  Acceleration aroundtime to value is a key interest.

As far as the amount of value across the applicaiton suite is concerned, the company focuses on educating and enabling customers to start to think about use cases that help leverage more of its platform.

SericeNow is focusing on the ecosystem through its great partners, Fitzgerald said. How to bring value partners to the ecosystem is a key area of focus, as the company aims to enable an ecosystem that lives up to its values. Thus it is targeting “partenrs that do rapid implementations that are high-value to our customers.”

“We deliberately want to be focused on enabling the ecosystem and being a well-respected partner.” Fitzgerald  added. “If a partner aims at an account, we won’t touch it,” other than enabling the partner to be successful. “We’ve also looked at what we’re good at and what we’re not good at.” Success for customers requires strategy, governance, people, processes and technology  he explained. “We want to provide world class training to the techmical team,” Fitzgerald exemplified, while also aiming to provide training to the process users and end users of its platform. On the other hand,  when it comes to organizational change, that is not a field ServiceNow excells in, as “it’s not a competence that we bring to the table,” and it relies on its partners to provide the needed support.

Asked how customers cume up with business use cases, Fitzgerald  explained that some customers implement partner-driven business cases. On the other hand, many customes “come to us with a toothache,” which is a great way to get an account, as it’s usualy around a need to change their platform, and then the business case is simple: “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of cost.” ServiceNow makes implementation easier and focuses on lowering the TCO.

Trying to showcase how customers can quantify value, Fitzgerald  mentions an instance where a customer doubled their customer satisfaction measure, reduced response time and reduced its helpdesk staff after implementing the platform.

The ServiceNow automation suite has a lot of applications. “Customers usually start with a subset,” Fitzgerald  said. When they begin to understand the platform is truly powerful, they expand their use of the provided applications. The goals ServicesNow targets with each customer implementation are consolidation, automation and consumerization.

Speaking about leveraging knowledge across their partner network and among employees, Fitzgerald  stressed the fact that “people want to be rewarded for when they do special work.” Thus the company awards innovation among employees on a regular basis as a means to  stimulate employees to generate value and bring it back into the ecosystem. As far as partners are concerned,  the company encourages its partners to adopt its implementation methodology, follow its best practices and put their IP around its methodology.

David Vellante pointed out that the real value of ServiceNow is that it allows companies to change the business process as they need to change them, while Pope commented that everything starts with a whiteboard. A company needs to determine the problem it needs to solve, draw it on a whiteboard and design a workflow that afterwards is automated by the platform.

“I work with a lot of customers, it’s easy to focus on the technology,” Pope said, but the key is to step back and consder the problem you want to solve, and then “we find a way to solve it and work it into the solution.”

That is why each new new customer implementation should start with the whiteboard. “It’s a framework, it’s great but where do you want to go with it?” Pope starts. “Be disruptive, challenge the way you’re thinking.” The solution is to sit down and try to solve the problem. Figure the what, and the why,: and only then deal with the how, which refers to the actual technology and ServiceNow can help implement it. “We try to make it interactive,” Pope said, as ServiceNow focuses on identifying what customers really want to do and then determine if and how ServiceNow can help. There are problems that their platform cannot solve, but that is where the company’s partner network steps in.

“Out of diversity comes triumph,” Pope stated, discussing the issues CIOs are facing and referring to incidents such as security breaches or technology failures. “CIOs have a short lifespan, so they need to do something disruptive.” When it comes to upgrading or replacing technology, ServiceNow’s competitive advantage is speed, as competitors take too long, up to 18 months in some cases.

Asked which were the risks involved with bringin in the ServiceNow platform, Pope mentioned that being a cloud-based solution, there were issues around trust an security, which are usually associated with the cloud. “We’ll put our security agaisnt our customers,” he said, to prove ServicesNow is quite good at what it does. There’s an organizational change that comes with implementing the platform. “It’s a mindset, if you can win the hearts and minds” and adapt the solution to their day to day tasks, you will convince customers. The more you enable it for how they work on a daily bases, the more successful you are.

“It feels uncomfortable and it’s different but it’s ok,” Pope added. Despite security fears, the facts, figures and features, show that “we beat our customers’ security,” he said, mentining the company’s federal and financial customers for whom security is paramount.

While “governance” and “audit” are usually “big, scary words” for the IT industry, Pope said that ServiceNow makes IT governance easier to tackle, as it offers a centralized manner of dealing with it. The platform has a governance process and the company uses its own technology to asses the compliance of data centers and other components of the framework.

“Think differently and be disruptive, take what works for you and implement what’s best for you,” Pope advised. “Focus on your real problem,” put it on a whiteboard, draw, make a workflow and then automate it. Companies should find a platform that handles the technology issues properly, so that they can focus on the problems they need to tackle.

Large enterprise IT shops typically run their multibillion dollar budgets on spreadsheets. Every process is manual, requests and complaints arrive as e-mails and IMs, people are on the phone all day. As a result, nobody really knows what’s going on, the CIO has no visibility into the overall processes he is supposed to be managing, requests get lost or forgotten, no one can identify problems with the process much less fix them to improve efficiencies. “It is astounding to me that corporate America — Coca-Cola, the New York Stock Exchange, Eli Lilly, etc. — have completely fragmented, sprawling IT environments. An executive at Citi told me, ‘We’re a global bank, but we don’t have a global IT organization.

As a result, Slootman told Wikibon Cofounder David Vellante in theCUBE from the ServiceNow Knowledge 2013 conference in Las Vegas, instead of driving the business, the ITO is being driven by it. The goal of ServiceNow is to get the ITO out of reactive mode and free it to innovate and create the revolutionary opportunities that are the promise of the new technologies.

“We’re trying to turn the tables here,” Slootman said. “The whole history of IT has been one big end around.” Client-server, for instance, was IT finally incorporating the desktop systems that business units and individuals had brought into enterprises a decade before despite IT non-participation at best and active resistance at worst. Cloud services came into the organization before IT realized they were there, brought in often by heads of sales or other business unit leaders to solve problems that internal IT was not tackling. “The CIOs aren’t running anything. They are being run by it. This lack of ability to drive things is unacceptable to those businesses.”

The tools of this major change are workflow and associated management automation technologies and, of course, the streamlined business processes they mandate. “The impact of moving from e-mail & Excel to a record workflow system on organizational efficiency is tremendous,” Slootman said.

The result in a sentence is that CIOs and ITOs move from constant reactionary mode, constantly putting out fires and working full time just to keep the lights on, to focusing on defining the structure and manner of delivery of IT services. It makes it possible for IT to restructure into true services and, through providing the platform and tools to support common, defined processes, supports those services.

It gives them the hard, up-to-date data on what is happening and how productivity and efficiency are improving okay single, central pane-of-glass, whereas previously that data, if it existed at all, was fragmented in multiple spreadsheets scattered through the organization, preventing meaningful central management.

So far ServiceNow has penetrated a mere 14 percent of its core target market of the Fortune 2000 customers. The street actually sees that as a positive, Slootman says. It means that as large and fast growing as it now is, ServiceNow has plenty of headroom for further growth.

“IT has reams of people on their staffs,” he says. “Large financial institutions have tons of people on their IT staffs because the processes require so many touch points.” Every time someone writes an e-mail that person should be thinking, ‘Could I be filling out a process request form instead.’ All those touch points need to be automated, and that is what ServiceNow does.

“You had better have a good reason every time you touch a process,” he says, “because every time you do, you go from the speed of light to the speed of a dirt road.”

The 15GB will be seamless in your ability to use it wherever inside of Google+, Drive and Gmail too. From the blog post:

So instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

Interestingly enough, Google is making changes to its Google Drive storage page, and those of you that were heavy gmail users this change means you’re no longer limited to a 25GB upgrade in Gmail. The overhaul of storage to “across the board” obviously now includes Gmail too.

I am going on the record as of the opinion that this is a direct shot fired across the free storage companies bow, specifically Dropbox. Let’s quickly rundown the free storage players:

1. Dropbox – 2GB
2. Apple iCould – 5GB
3. Amazon Cloud Storage – 5GB
4. SugarSync – 5GB
5. Microsoft SkyDrive – 7GB

Now of this list, I’d argue that majority of you are most familiar, both by name and usage, with Dropbox. Disclosure: I’m a $9.99 monthly 100GB Pro user of Dropbox, and 5.3/100GB. So it stands to reason that I could save myself $119.88 a year by switching to Drive, and its 15GB free offering. And there is the shot to Dropbox’s bow. Not only would Google Drive steal free users, because freeusers like morefree stuff, but because those users under 15GB that are paying for Dropbox could now save essentially $120 a year.

What portion of Dropbox’s users do you think fall in the 2GB-15GB club? I have to believe it’s the vast majority of its reported 100 million+ users. Could Google have a play with some kind of multimedia tie-in between Drive and Google+? Sure. There are plenty of other logical reasons for Google doubling the closets competitors free storage offering. But if I were Dropbox right now, I’d sure be sweating…