All right, there we go.
Alright, Corey, what are we talking about today?
man Duke today. We got some extra special guests here. We got the vivid charts gang. We're going to talk about man. It keeps showing up, dude. Like just knocking on the door. Like, what are we going to do? We let them in. They're good folks.
That's right. So as everybody knows, there's the platform analytics experience. It's more than a workspace. It's an experience. platform analytics workspace is going to be the new normal and sooner than you think, too. It's coming in 2025 and there is, expectation that we should all start migrating to it. I've been really focusing on it. This tool for the past week or two, I really love it.
Everything is going to be a okay, but we still can't discount the amount of work and preparation that we're all going to need to do in order to get onto this new normal. So I thought it would be nice to invite the team that has, in my estimation, spent the most amount of time trying to figure out Really what is it going to take? So I've invited VividCharts and Rob, Mitch, if you could just maybe give a quick introduction of who VividCharts is.
And then we'll jump right into your very special service offer.
Yeah. Thanks for having us on guys. Uh, appreciate it. I always love everything you guys put out. This is Mitch here at vivid charts. the co founder with Rob and I'm the CEO. I focus more on the product and development side, but really help anywhere and everywhere. And vivid charts, just a quick company background. We started in 2018, really to help customers. Do everything they need in platform when it comes to taking advantage of your data.
So this is the, this is what we've been grinding on since then. All the data, all the reporting all in platform. So anything that touches that is right in our wheelhouse, platform analytics, especially as a, in the wheelhouse. I'm sure we'll talk more about that later, but yeah, thanks again for having us on. And I'll let Rob give a background.
Hey, appreciate,, the opportunity to come back on the show here. Rob Walsh, one of the founders of vivid charts. And I focus on our sales and go to market efforts as well as managing our current customers. And like Mitch said, we focus on reporting solutions directly out of service now. So trying to tap into that rich resource we all have in our instances, the data translating that into insights, but more importantly, Thank you.
Duke, as you always talk about great outcomes that we can get from our reporting. So, you know, the upcoming transition for customers from out of the box reports and dashboards and performance analytics to the platform analytics experience is top of mind for our customers. So we're helping them through this transition and excited to share more about how on, uh, on the show today.
Actually, before we jump into the platform analytics experience, can you maybe give one or two examples of your core use cases where this is data that traditionally goes out of the ServiceNow platform, but because of your using VividCharts, you can keep the data in?
Yeah, without a doubt, though, we really like to think about reporting from a purpose standpoint and it could be tactical, it could be operational strategic. there's several different purposes and all of those come with different audiences as well. so when customers have us, to supplement out of the box reporting and performance analytics, you really have the full suite. We focus more on that strategic and operational. Purpose type of report.
So it's usually something that's happening at a regular cadence. You know what it is, you know who it's going to. And oftentimes that's leadership or stakeholders or customers. And so there's a quality expectation that comes with that from a presentation standpoint. and along with that sometimes the data you need to present, it's tough to get to directly from a table.
so some examples of that, project management, just the SPM space in general, very important, reports that come out of there and they go really high up the chain. So we do a lot with that. And, specifically anytime you need to take one template and apply it to hundreds or thousands of records. we do really, really well with that. We called that scaled report generation. And we see that applied in the IT area as well, the ITSM.
And we really went a lot to with managed service providers who are, contractually obligated to, produce these oftentimes 30 to 50 slide decks for every one of their customers. Every month or a quarter. historically that's taken a lot of manpower to manually brute force it. And with vivid charts, it's just happening automatically. They sent, their template up and those decks are ready to go whenever they need them.
As somebody who. Values, the recurring, nature of reporting, the visibility into what's going on, but is. severely, under talented when it comes to making anything look pretty when it comes to reporting, 1 of the things that I love about, vivid charts is how it can take the service now data. That is very relevant to the day to day and actually, transform it into something that you can elevate up the chain without necessarily having to be that PowerPoint guru, right?
and also without having to leave the system, right? those are the things for somebody like me, who I'm often in front of a executive level stakeholder, trying to convey the value of the platform and, trying to take that data and drop it in Excel, which I'm not good at and then dropped in and take that to PowerPoint, which I'm also not good at. You see what I mean? Like now we're two levels away from my strong suit, which is service now.
And I think, with vivid charts, like it really does keep you a lot closer to your specialty, right? Where your area of strength, which is the platform.
Yeah. When you said the PowerPoint guru, my mind immediately went to, well, that's just one part of it and you expanded on it, but yeah, we always talk about the three Ds of operational reporting, it's the data, the design, and then the delivery. So in the example you laid out, you're doing the data portion in Excel, the design portion in PowerPoint, and then you're probably delivering it, in a very old school fashion, probably just email or a hard file of some sort. So very applicable.
So you've got this fantastic platform. I'm not being paid to say that I actually worked for vivid charts for a time. But now you are structuring a new service for ServiceNow customers and it's new and it's very timely and I'd love for you guys to tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, it's very interesting because You know about VividCharts well enough. We are not going to be impacted by this migration. Like, we don't rely on ServiceNow's reporting, or anything like that. And that is a conclusion people jump to when they ask, why are you getting involved in this? What does matter to VividCharts is the reputation of in platform reporting in ServiceNow. We need that to have a strong reputation.
Because we're under that umbrella and what, we have slight concern about, but I think people are managing it well and we're helping them however they need us to is. It reminds me a little bit of ServiceNow picked up a lot of steam when Remedy forced its customers to migrate from their legacy system to their new system. And it was essentially a re implementation. I don't want this migration to be even a small portion like that.
And I don't think it will be because ServiceNow is a great migration tool for it. And we're trying to help with all of those other pieces, the cleanup, The strategy, the communication, which I think is the biggest portion and then the training on the backside of it so that these people's reputation when it comes to platform reporting doesn't drop even a little bit. It actually takes a step forward.
So that really is our motivation is we want to make sure there's always going to be a good reputation around the end platform reporting with ServiceNow.
part of the relationship we have with our customers. Is we're looking at reporting across the whole platform and their reporting strategy holistically. So VividCharts is one piece to that puzzle, but the nature of our conversations look at the platform holistically and how reporting is being managed. So we know very well the way a certain customer is managing reporting access.
How they clean up their reports over time, how they train their internal user base on how to use the reporting tool sets of the platform, vivid charts included. Those are a part of our cadence and conversation with our customers. So it's very natural for us to, bring information to the table on this upcoming migration and be a part of that conversation and dialogue on how they're going to move forward in a positive way with their user base. So they can take advantage.
Of the new functionality without some of the headaches that could come if you're not on top of it going in.
yes. And so what I'm hearing is that for vivid charts. This is more than reporting. This is vivid charts as your trusted advisor on reporting and data presentation in the service now environment and how we can help you, get from the, legacy to the new, without having to endure all of those struggles that typically, you encounter with any of these types of migrations.
Definitely. And any change is also an opportunity, right? You have this migration, it has to happen, but there are some things that, You know, hypothetical can gets kicked down the road from when it comes to reporting where think about the massive volume of reports that get built in any service. Now, customer instance, how many of those get audited on a consistent basis? are you looking at which reports are actually being used on a consistent basis?
What percentage of your user population is actively building reports on the platform even after you've trained them to do so?
So. Where we started coming at this, CJ, like you said, it's from that advisor and strategy perspective, where this change is something you need to be prepared for, but it's also an opportunity to look at assessing your current reporting environment and your reporting user base, starting to clean up some of the things that might be long overdue, so you're not migrating things that just aren't actually being used, they're outdated, it's time to retire or, just flush them from the instance, And
then for your user base, when they come over into the new platform, they need to have, training on how to use the new interface, your report. Consumers need to understand the new place they're supposed to go to get to, the reports they're used to and relying on to make decisions for. So it definitely ties into the strategy that we're building with our customers and taking advantage of the changes and opportunity for that kind of stuff. A
Yeah, you know that for me, it ties into a lot of what I've been seeing this year and what I've been talking about with my clients it's all about making the system easier to use for the folks who use it. And I think often there's a legacy I. T. mentality that goes into when we're designing interfaces and deploying code and setting up, processes, et cetera. Right. Like we say, all right, now we're done. Here you go.
We give, whatever we give them, which often looks like something that I. T. would be very familiar with. But we often we forget that, our audience isn't always I. T. And folks don't know what the native next step is when they get dropped at a page. And it sounds like what you're doing is setting them up for This is how you actually use the system when you get here, this is what you're going to do next. These are the places you want to look for action items that are relevant to you.
And this is how you want to visualize the system and put it to work and those sorts of things, which I think are always really key for a migration to be successful, but also more often than not missing. Yeah. I've.
here. So that user experience, if you don't have the education and start to communicate, here's why ServiceNow is doing it and here's all the benefits we're going to reap, as an organization or individually, if you don't have that, you might see that user experience impact within the users building reports today that have already gotten used to the current tool sets.
I wonder if we could zoom out for a second and sell me the service, if you could talk about how much it costs, what is going to be delivered, time to ROI, that kind of thing.
so our platform analytics, migration readiness audit, we won't do any work around the migration without doing that first, because it's helping you get an understanding of where you are today. it's tech enabled, but it's flat rate for existing customers, it's less, but new customers, I think it's right around 9, 000. And what that will come with is. We install this audit tool. we'll first run it in your sub production.
If there's any tweaks you want to make that are specific to your implementation, we can do that within the tool. We get it to production. We run it with your admin team directly there. We get the results back and then we put together a presentation that we walk through with you that lets you know where you're at, good, the bad, the ugly. it's usually in between, for customers somewhere.
and we lay out a plan for them, what to focus on next, whether that's with or without us, we say, okay, based on what we're seeing, here are the steps I would take, to start getting ready for this for you. I think it's going to be, you could probably migrate within a two month. Window for this customer over here based on your strategy.
It might be more of a five month window So you need to plan accordingly for that and once you go through that the great part about it is Typically the first thing we recommend is get after the data cleanup and this is a great tool that will be left behind with you for Perpetuity where as you're doing the cleanup, you can rerun that audit see where you stand and And do that every month. And then once you do the migration, you'll have a lot less things that are making its way over.
So it is both, some quantitative, data points that we capture through this audit, but also a lot of qualitative pieces as well.
Are we allowed to talk about things that. Might cause friction between where a customer's at right now and where they want to be with, the platform analytics experience.
I think the biggest friction point will just be the communication, the training. And the cleanup outside of that. I think, you know, once the band aids ripped off and people get in there and understand how to use it, I'm sure there'll be some friction points, but it's a great experience in my opinion. But I'd love to hear from you guys if there are specific ones, I'm not paid by service now, so I'm truly loving what they're doing here. I'd love to hear what you guys have.
I'm, allowed to talk about it.
so far everything that I've tried to do on it, it's just been a matter of, well, how do I do it here? And most of the time, once I got used to it, it was a lot better. let me think of an example. adding multiple data sources to a, data visualization is easy peasy. Now it's just, it's so, so good. Yeah.
Yeah. Like really easy.
yeah. Filters look ridiculously easy. now this is where I haven't gone too deep. Cause I've had easy conditions for filters, right? Get me the groups, but only groups that are active and have the type of agile team. But At least as PA matured, it can get some really, really, really goofy, complex filters. And I just don't know where those gaps are yet. Cause have I gone deep enough?
That's dark side of any reporting and analytics platform is by nature, it's broad. So by nature, there's going to be some broad applications applied to that platform. So there's going to be gaps that, people probably won't recognize until a year from now. however major or minor they are, that's up to the person experiencing them.
Well maybe we can just continue the conversation and about stuff we like having used it.
let's do it.
I'll tell you another thing that I love is Remember, it was like, Oh, you can build a report or you can build an indicator in PA. And when you added them to the dashboard, you got completely different interfaces on what you were doing. And before I got deep down into platform analytics, they told me, Oh, that's the same now, whether you're building a report or you're building a PA indicator visualization, it's all just the same interface. And I was like, what, how can that be? But it works.
Yeah.
Yes, that is a good one. I think the biggest thing I've been saying this since before I had gray hair, having to go to three different places to do things that feel connected. You know, if you're creating a report, go here. but by the way, you've got to do that first. And then if you want to put them on a dashboard, go somewhere else. You want to deal with PA, go over here. They've been needing to consolidate this for a long time and I think they've done it in a very great way.
So. For me, if I'm a reporting owner at one of these large enterprises, just think about how much simpler that makes explaining how to use the capabilities to a new user, to the platform. I think that is by far the thing I love the most.
I'll tell you what to remember that whole idea of you got to create the report first before you can add it to the dashboard. and that means you could have discord between who the dashboard is for and who the reports are for. So it like looks great for you, Mr. Admin and you push it to prod, everything should be fine. But then the stakeholders go to use it and you get the, like, you don't have permissions to view this. But the dashboard says that you do.
Yes, dashboard says you can look at the dashboard, but the dashboard isn't the report, is it?
Right?
Now you're like, trying to reconcile. So you're, for every single report on your dashboard, And people put a lot of stuff on their dashboard. You're like auditing the report versus the dashboard security, which is to me, that alone should be worth the migration.
Well, one thing we've heard a lot of positive feedback on, and we saw this early on as well as the ability to certify, data visualizations and certified dashboards. we have people going to different places to get what they think is the same information or, answer that they're looking for. But there's no way to tell which one is the source of truth, which one is the standard.
So that's a small, I guess, seemingly small one, but really powerful one for customers and more admin teams and centralized reporting teams to have a standard that they can put in place that's visible and provide more of a, hard fisted source of truth stamp of approval on some of these, visualizations and dashboards.
Oh yeah, for sure. And I loved how they made it so you had to have a certain role to do it. I think it's like report admin. And then report admin can, certify a dashboard. And it's, it's so simple yet so profound, I don't know if you guys remember homepages, they came before dashboards, but everybody could just make a copy and edit their own. You never, know what people were using. And so you'd make something more authoritative, more robust, but somebody could still be using one from the time.
Gilgamesh traded pelts for beer in the markets of Uruk. you just couldn't tell what they were using, and now you can just say, like, make what you want, but when we're talking about Insolent SLA performance. This is the authoritative report or dashboard or whatever you want to call it. Do they call them dashboards? I'm never quite sure now. Okay.
That's good.
is. That is another thing that, There will be a few terminology hurdles people will have to get over. One thing ServiceNow has published, a glossary that explains all of these different terms, which was really helpful for me when I first dug into it.
Where did you find that?
I could send you the link, they have a page, I forget where, it's kind of
Is it on the community?
Yeah, I think it's on the community and it's sort of just a catch all for a bunch of different resources. It's a link hub.
I know exactly what you're talking about.. I love that they're doing that. I wish there was a, an artifact, something that did that for the entire platform.
um,
know what I mean? Like ServiceNow people only telling all the advice on this version of whatever you're on and just a clearing house of true guidance for whatever app you're using.
Versus trying to like deconstruct it from docs and now learning and the occasional YouTube channel is just they lay it out So clearly for the platform analytics experience and by the way we'll have a link in the description below if you haven't heard or seen that it's super super useful you can definitely check that out.
think the glossary is especially important in a case like this where you have a deeply ingrained set of capabilities that is going away for a similar set of capabilities, but you're changing the terms and then at times having some conflicting acronyms. I think it was really important.
and here's where I go as we start to pull this thread of what are the things we love that feel a lot easier in this new experience, right? Putting multiple data sources on a single chart, the ability to certify a dashboard, the one place to do it all.
All of those are really positives of the new experience, but They're also, showing what wasn't so easy in the previous reporting tool set and maybe areas where you lost users that wanted to build reports on the road, this is where we come back to the audit and we start to say, data should inform your strategy around this because the change is an opportunity, right?
It's an opportunity to clean up your existing environment, clean out the things that aren't being used, but also an opportunity to go back to your user base who might have had pain points around reporting for some of these areas and say, Hey, we have this new experience. You can build reports in a much more effective way on the platform now.
And. with the audit that Mitch mentioned, that app that installs and gives you the data points to inform the strategy, you're getting things like how many reports do you have versus how many you thought you had. You're getting how many reports haven't been run in the last 6 12 months.
You're getting how many reports are run consistently, but are slow performing, but you're also getting data around how many users in your environment have the ability and roles to build reports, but haven't built a single report, So those are users that you might've lost due to some of these pain points of the disconnected experience. You know that factors in back to CJ's point, the overall experience of users on the platform. This could be a big driver and improver of that.
And if you have the data on, who hasn't built reports in a while or built something and then never went back, that can inform your training and change management strategy for the upcoming migration and the introduction of the new experience.
I didn't even think about it that way, who do you tell about this at your organization?
Who do you tell and like, what percentage of those users out there no, this is coming probably very little. I mean, we talked with admin teams that have awareness, but don't really even know the details. Your general user base absolutely is not aware and they will see benefits, but it's on, you know You as the platform team or the ServiceNow team to communicate those benefits And maybe that could improve, pain points they've previously had on the platform Um again, a big opportunity.
And that's where the data is in your instance that can inform this. And that's why we built the app. And that's why we run it. We give you our assessment, our recommendations, but we also give you that app going forward. So you can continue to run it and see, you know, when you've introduced the new experience, have the numbers changed at all, Did it impact, you know, did it raise the number of report creators? against the number that could create reports.
So it also allows you to measure the impact after you've introduced the new tool set.
I wonder if you guys are able to share any of, the surprising insights you gleaned from services that you've executed so far.
Yeah, let me pull them up. it's actually kind of fun. Okay. I'll use this one as an example. One of the fun things we like to do to highlight the feel versus real is before we even get into the environment, we do a, pre audit questionnaire that we have the customer fill out and we have them take some guesses on things. So for example, we asked number of unique reports. they were off by, I don't know, 800, 800%. Yeah. Uh, so
Wow.
there were a lot more reports in that environment than they thought that they were, the number of users who have created at least one report in your environment in the past year. They're off by 200%. So things like that, probably the most important one is the percent of reports that are actually used. We're seeing, it's like, if you have 40, 000 reports in your environment, it's likely that only 12, 000 of those have been viewed even once in the past 12 months.
So it really goes to show that we as a community really haven't built the data hygiene practices that are needed to keep this from spiraling because it's very important with the migration. Because every one of those things you migrate, you're going to want to validate them on the backend to make sure they do what you want them to do before you go give that back to the user.
And it's really not an exercise that should be all that painful to keep on top of, but along with that, every one of those reports that doesn't get used that's sitting in there, forget about instance performance and clogging up because I don't even think that's a big issue. If you talk about the user experience, they're trying to find a needle in a haystack at that
Right. No kidding. the all part of the reporting list, I've never understood that. I wish they had, some kind of experience. like, at the airport, they have those hotel bathrooms that's like, press the happy face, press the sad face. And I wish there was something that would just be like a big button that said, I was just curious.
it doesn't surprise me at all that the vast majority of reports that are in your system are things that were only ever used once, but they were critical in that moment. It was just satisfy a curiosity, hmm, I wonder if, and then never use it again. Because not every report is some sacrosanct thing that we add to our religious ceremonies every week. You know what I mean? so I wish it was just a big thing. Like, hey, I was just curious.
And it's just like, whoop, it just hides it from, you know, people. You know, maybe, maybe there's someplace you can actually get to it, but just in the meantime, just put it away.
Yeah, it's interesting because in our legacy platform, we had this concept called quick charts where you could go do that exploration real quick. And if you don't migrate it somewhere else in 7 days, it would get deleted. and I feel like we need to figure out a way to apply that to. The platform analytics workspace, but it really comes down to just the practices, even if it's setting a one hour meeting every month.
just to go run the audit again and say, okay, can we retire these things so that this doesn't happen again? I think that's something almost nobody's doing if we're being honest and Reporting's often an afterthought until it isn't.
And I got, I got to say though, right? Like reporting should probably be where you start on, you know what I mean? I'm like any practice, any process, right? Like when you, yeah. I mean, because how do you know how to design the process? If you don't know what you want to measure out of the process.
Right, like, you start with what you're looking for, and then you build a process, that allows you to capture those data points and, you know, aggregate them, you know, to turn the data into information that you can consume. And that's what reporting does.
It's, it's such a North star and gatekeeping utility for feature spam requests that you get as your service now, admin, builder, architect, whatever, Because if you knew what outcomes you're pursuing at the start, and you've got your solution up and running to pursue those outcomes. The validated outcomes that, leadership wants. Then when somebody says, Hey, can I get this thing? sure. How does that thing get us closer to these outcomes? Oh, it doesn't. Maybe it goes on.
I think we'll think about it. Pile.
Yep,
And this is probably going to be a, uh, thing that not going to resonate with everyone because not everyone is reaching this level of maturity. Right? But I feel like, a lot of folks who have been on the service now platform now have been there for a long time should be.
Either reaching or reaching for a level of maturity where, we're thinking about things a lot more from the process perspective and how we can use the outcomes of those prospects to go back into that continuous improvement loop and actually see the results of that rather than. I need to go in and just create a one off report that's going to, sit and clog up this system for the next 10 years. Right? And it's like, so how do we get folks to start, taking that next level of thought.
We've got this platform analytics experience, right? And you've got, we've got the trusted reporting partners here and vivid charts. How do we get them to take that next leap in thought that. Reporting is something that can drive all of your processes and therefore, drive the execution of your business goals and create so much more value for you. Like I said, is it is a multiplying force, right? Versus something that you do as an afterthought to figure out why things are broken. Okay.
100 percent CJ and from a reporting standpoint, like Duke mentioned, you have some reports that are point in time. They're ad hoc. I need to know this now. I build it and I never need to look at it again. Then you've got your real time, These are the dashboards that live more in the interfaces that you're working in. What do I work on next? What's come on into the queue in the last five minutes? You need to see that in real time.
What you're starting to dig into is more of those periodic reports, The weekly, the monthly, the quarterly look back. And that's where you do have to have a lot of that thought put in up front of what questions do we want answered? looking back at the last month. Did we get the outcomes we set out at the start? That's the maturity you want to have.
And you have to have a cadence behind it where you're looking back at a defined set of goals and outcomes and letting the data tell you if you achieve them or not. we see definitely in the service now customer base a heavy lean on the ad hoc in the real time, right? That's pretty well served in the platform. But there's periodic style reports where you're looking back and trying to measure against outcomes. Those typically happen in a meeting format where you're discussing it as a group.
And that's where our product actually really fits well for those periodic cadences. You're presenting, you're discussing and you're looking back. Did we get the outcomes we set out at the start?
That's it right there for me. It's the next level, where a lot of folks really need to go where, where they want to go, where their business is taking them and, and that they're often don't have the trusted partners, To help them contextualize it, right? They're just trying to kind of floundering around, trying to find it on their own. And I'm going
And I can confidently say we are the only ServiceNow partner who has lived in this for years. some people might do it here and there and we love teaming up with them, but this is like a very natural language for us.
All right, that's about 40 minutes of record. So, platform analytics experience is coming, folks. It is awesome. But do take this opportunity to really put your best foot forward on this incredible new tool. ServiceNow has given us. Please check out VividCharts new offering. We're going to have a link in the description below, so you can check that out and reach out to them. When you want to get your reports ready to rock for the new experience. Any final words, gentlemen?
thank you all so much for having us as always. Appreciate what you guys do. And, yeah, we're here to help. we know there's a lot you could be doing with the data you've got, especially this migration being a great opportunity to get your own house in order. And it's never been more important because you're probably pushing to get to gen AI, or you're being pushed from the top down to do it.
And you might have the hunch that you're not ready for, uh, X, Y, and Z reasons, and data is typically a big part of it. So, it is a very important time in the ServiceNow landscape to get tight on your data and your reporting and your reporting on your data. That was meta.
All right, guys, thanks for coming and we will see everybody on the next one.
Duke CJ, you're the best. Thanks for having us on.
Thank you.
you guys. Uh,
All right.