All right, Corey, what are we talking about today?
All right, dude. Today, we've got a very special guest with us. We've got none other than the service now magician himself, Chris shoe.,
we definitely got to ask why the magician.
it's a pleasure to be here. A longtime listener, first time guest. So, uh, I started out, oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I started out in it right after college in the late two thousands and. While working at a help desk, I always wanted to perform magic. So I started practicing a lot and, started doing magic, at a fairly young age, early twenties, and eventually landed a gig performing and consulting for a magic distribution company based out of San Francisco.
I was lucky enough to tour the world and do several stage shows all over the place and performed in India, China, Panama, um, yeah, very lucky, very grateful for that experience. Came back to Canada, based out of Vancouver and, wanted to kind of set some roots and started to get back into the IT world. Discovered ServiceNow in 2016. Right around the time I started to take a break from magic, just so that I could focus on the IT stuff. And, I was kind of worn out from it.
So it's a bit of a, a long and a lonely journey to travel 200 days a year, stuff like that. And, return to the magic side of things after doing the CMA program and having an idea to do a magic show that illustrates the Now Value framework,
Ooh,
through some stage illusions or stage tricks, whatever you want to call them.
Is that a thing that exists now or is that a thing you're working on?
It is, so I did for the Vancouver release, I did a private showing, which was like the first dress rehearsal in front of real people. And I think. Beginning of November last year, and, believe it or not, I did apply to do add knowledge and I'm not doing it in knowledge. So you can take take what you want out of that. Um, but, uh, he, that was not my decision. Uh, some people's change throughout the application process.
So I've been in talks for months over it because I need a stage and a few other things. And I think it was more. Technical, at least I'm going to tell myself that it was more technical and that I just didn't get, rejected like a young Shaquille O'Neal. So, I'm now looking to find, snugs and some of the other forums and stuff that they hold and go to those or even dev meetups and start doing the show in those arenas.
And I'm also actually just in discussions to do it for a private ServiceNow partner at their company annual gathering. Later in October, so I know right now doesn't mean I know forever and you know, I'm always gonna keep going.
I love that. Keep pushing. Right? There's a comedian or an actor or somebody or maybe it was an author. I can't remember. He was Steven, uh, King who kept track of like all the knows that he got before he got a yes. you know, it just goes to show you, right? you do often get rejected before you make that breakthrough, and when we're talking about like breakthrough, we're only talking about, you know, you being performing magic at knowledge, right?
We're not talking about the success that you are in the ServiceNow ecosystem as a whole, right? Cause you've already done that,
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, even just with the previous experience in magic It was you know, probably sometimes a hundred knows to get one Yes, that was a good thing to learn and to go through and even to offer to come and travel and do the show for free at no cost. And all you got to do is give me a mic, some stage time. No, we'll pass. Okay. You have to kind of become a little numb to that. So, and, and move forward,
Did you have any, techniques or anything that you develop out, developed out of that to increase your resilience around being tilt now?
Just repetition, honestly, put me into a complacent piece and then allowed me to manage expectations when I would submit stuff. In the beginning, you kind of feel like the young actor, like, Oh, you know, Hey mom, I might get this big part or something like that. And eventually I got to a point where I would only start telling people once it was locked down and once a deposit was paid, so, you know, even stuff falls apart in between now and the show. So that's why it's like, okay, this is.
With the current state of where I'm at with this discussion, and the next step is this, and I'll update you when that comes.
Everybody applies their past to their ServiceNow career, right? And I've always thought that some of the most interesting ServiceNow resources, didn't come from IT backgrounds, right? they had something else. And they came to ServiceNow and that informed their ServiceNow life. So is there anything that you took from your, like learning the art of illusion or mentalism or working a crowd that really informs your ServiceNow journey today?
I would probably say the presentation skills, and being able to speak at a pace that can resonate with people. I took Toastmasters for years, so that helped drop the ums and the ahs and All that stuff. And I was able to leverage that, not just in the professional world, which I took it for, but also in the magic world, which was a nice bonus out of it. So those elements really helped. And then also being able to just get up and present in front of people without sweaty palms anymore.
At the beginning of the magic journey, I'd be in a mall near my place. And I would go up and want to approach strangers and just say, Hey, you want to see a trick? And sometimes my hands would shake or sweat so bad that I had to back away or I'd walk up to them and be like, I'm sorry, nevermind. And awkward. And eventually I wanted to do it more than I had the fear. So I kept at it, kept trying and the shakes got better and better over the course of a couple of years.
And then eventually they just don't happen anymore.
Gosh, Corey, I got to tell you, I'm sorry. We're gonna take this opportunity to talk about a sponsor of ours.
Sure. Go ahead.
The shakes, man. like, I need my caffeine get through my day, but I hate getting that post caffeine, withdrawal, or getting so much caffeine where you get the shakes. You guys ever get that? So I want to talk about our latest sponsor to the channel, Magic Mind. I got to tell you this stuff is awesome. I'm on it right now. It's, it's three 30 in the afternoon. This is usually a time where I'm like borderline unconscious. And,
ha ha
and I feel fantastic. This is stuff that's got matcha in it, adaptogens. Utropics and at the worst part of my day, I think it's like an hour ago and I am in complete flow state. yeah, sorry for the interruption, but
No, that's
I, I gotta preach. They sent me a free sample kit. And, if you're CJ and the Duke listener, you can get a 20 percent discount. If you check the link below, I highly recommend this. And I wouldn't do so if I hadn't been using it for a few days already. It is so good.
So when you,
fantastic.
when you say so good, what does it taste like?
Oh yeah, the taste. I was talking about the feeling, but the taste is Yeah, no, the taste is fantastic. it's kind of like a papaya banana kind of sweetness. but it hits the back of your tongue kind of like a, bubbly sparkly drink. It's not effervescent, but it kind of like hits the back of my tongue like that but it just goes down real smooth. A nice, pleasant, single taste and it is done.
that is super cool.
gosh, you ever had to drink bad coffee just to get your day started. It's, it's none of that. It's just one and done. And, a few minutes later it's flow state. It's awesome.
like bad coffee. Ugh. Don't don't get me started. Nice.
Mm-Hmm.
I don't think it's going to replace my coffee, but I think it's like I can reduce my coffee intake by a lot. and then just in the period of time where I normally have a withdrawal, this stuff makes it the peak of my day rather than the trough.
Yeah. I could see it working for me in that early afternoon, late afternoon thing when I want that boost, but I don't want the caffeine side of it, of a cup of coffee or tea or anything like that. That's cool.
So Chris, tell us what your favorite part of the ServiceNow platform.
Oh, wow. There's always a special place in my heart for service catalog, because that was my first experience with it. And before that, I was in request management, in a in-house built tool for a telecommunications company.
But I would have to say my favorite module would probably be event management, because it combines large scale operations, consolidates them into one system, so all of your events in your different event management system get consolidated into one, they're triaged automatically, and then they are actioned based on your conditions. So you can decide, out of all these events, do I create an alert? And then out of these alerts, do I consolidate them?
And then do I take an action from there, including even something as sophisticated as automating the restart of a server, if you know that resolves it. And then they've got this new thing. Well, I don't know if it's still considered new, but where they layer in AI ops. And honestly, this is one of the best uses of AI that I've seen where the old method of detecting things was if my CPU goes above 85 percent usage, I want you to trigger an alert or an alarm and go call somebody.
But sometimes I might have a scheduled job that runs that takes me to 87 percent every Friday. Let's say that job fails and I never get to 87%. How do I detect that? Well, AI is purpose built to detect anomalies both above and below thresholds, so it could also say, oh, we didn't get to 87 percent on this Friday, but every other Friday in the last year we did, I need to call somebody. So it catches both sides of that coin and. And automates a lot of the responses.
that's one of the coolest pieces of service now that I really like, of course, you need to mature your discovery and your CMDB and your CSTM to make the most of it, but those happen to also be some of my other passions in the platform, is that the answer you're looking for, or
What's your answer, man?
yeah, so
Yeah. Yeah.
aspect of this. That kind of caught me off guard when you were talking about it. I didn't expect to hear AI is now looking at your, event history, and being able to predict how to resolve something and whether or not something, is outside of spec.
ops is a, a fairly new, like I said, product. and it's got. A lot of great features so you can do your data ingestion and your anomaly detection is one of the coolest things that I like to see so it will comb through all your historical event data and monitor your incoming feed and it tries to identify markers and understand what's going to happen in the future because that's, you know, kind of just like predictive intelligence. says, here's your next three months based on your historical data.
It's trying to do the same thing. So eventually you're able to detect emerging issues sometimes before they even happen. So let's say it starts to notice anomalies like your CPU gets to 60 percent and then, you know, it goes back down and then it gets to 63 percent and goes back down. It can detect all those things and start to take actions or send alarms Before it crashes and goes to a hundred percent based on that historical data.
So they've actually got use cases where they showed, Hey, if you had AI ops installed and we're using event management and had your CSTM and everything aligned and everything paid for, then you can, you could have predicted this outage three days in advance. And you could have had a change request happen within your change window that would have addressed it, and you could have avoided it. those are real world scenarios. the original demo for it was based on something quite similar to that.
So that's one of the coolest things. I saw a presentation from a guy named Maurizio at ServiceNow. he's involved in event management and the apps. Segment, so, the other things that they've got are, a new service health dashboard that allows you to manage and take action from things like that. And then. Your automatic remediation is also one of the mature side of things, but once you get there, you can really handle a lot of issues very, very quickly.
And in some cases, preemptively, so that moves you from that reactive stage to the proactive stage, which is what we all dream of.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I used to be a, network on a train. Um, um, you sell on a network monitoring platform in a form of life when I was, yeah, when I was doing, it. And so I, love to hear about like this AI, anything ops, right? Like AI ops, right? Like event management. That whole thing, right? because like you said, it allows you to take this big aggregate, this big pool of data, right?
And, and then aggregate it and reduce it down to something that's a lot more manageable, from the level of service, right? That we're trying to get to, which is making something consumable for the average person utilizing service now. So I just love focusing and talking about this kind of stuff, right? Because I, I know some folks are like, what? But if you've been in the trenches and you've done this stuff before, you realize like just how valuable this is.
Yeah. Well, we've all tried to trace that event that caused the server to go down
Right.
comb through. Okay. Well, you know, what does this system say? And what does the server log say? trying to find that 1 needle in the haystack. And sometimes you're searching millions of records.
Yeah,
this simplifies that so that a smaller team can do more and, offload that Administrative effort to allow them to focus on more strategic directional. Initiatives
man. Cause I can riff on that one too. Like it's isn't that the point of service now, Like it is to allow that smaller team to do more with the, do more period. And in their day to day job. And I just think sometimes we lose track of that when we're doing, I won't say when we're doing deployments, but sometimes like in the ecosystem, when we're collectively doing employments, I think sometimes we lose track of the goal.
I think sometimes we lose track of what our clients goals are and how we're aligning the system with those goals. And forgive the pun here, Chris, but the magic they're supposed to feel when we walk away, right.
that's right. And that's that speaks to the power of the platform. And that's 1 of the things that I love about it as well. Is that. you can really invest in it and not have to expand your team. And at the same time, when you invest in it, you're not also looking to decrease your team.
You're looking to say, Hey, all that stuff that they're doing in the off hours, all that other work that's getting pushed because an incident has come up, or they have to troubleshoot something, or they have to go in and hunt for the cause or do the root cause analysis. All of that becomes automated so that they can guide the company through the strategic journey that they're going towards. And trying to reach those goals, rather than being down in the weeds, doing that nitty gritty work.
Not that doesn't add value, it totally does, and it is necessary. But there are much more efficient and accurate ways to do it. I'm not going to be the best person to go and find that one error log entry. You know, I'll hunt for 10 minutes, but after a while, honestly, I Tune out because it's so hard to find it.
Can I ask a dumb question?
No such thing, but go
Having, having not had an ops background, my first foray in it was the ITSM tools and managing those, how much of this stuff remains, even though everybody's rushing into the cloud, I would imagine, like, an event management system is really there to monitor servers that you've got in a data center, isn't everybody going to the cloud? And if so, how much of that remains that you've got to manage?
Well, all of it remains. So just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean that I don't have infrastructure that delivers that business service. And now that CSDM talk, right? So I've got my business service and then underneath that all my business services support or roll up to a business capability. And if that goes down, my business is impacted. So having that visibility, no matter where it is, and it can be outsourced, you know, Salesforce.
And having the full Salesforce stack and your CMDB and ServiceNow is adds tons of value to understand that, Oh, if Salesforce goes down, I can't manage my customer relationship. Man, my CRM system is down. I can't do this. I can't track all of my sales and their progress until that's up. So we need to have that visibility from even a strategic portfolio management perspective. So it does feed into that. Now, does that mean you're going to send Your network technician to go fix it?
No, but it would help you understand. Oh, this business service is impacted because. Somebody called in and said, I can't log into Salesforce. You can then look up in service. Now, how, who to call based on that CMDB data. Is
Yes. I'm vibing with you there, Chris. You and I seem to share similar background. So just wondering, for somebody who's, Like you said, the first time you touched it was like, right? Like, how do these things, I think it's a unique perspective on how it works from the eyes of someone who is.
IT savvy, but from a different background perspective, Like, how do you approach this, some of this stuff when you get down to it and start to talk to the customers about like, you know, what ServiceNow can do for them and how it can do for them. And, all of this sort of thing.
Question for me
Yeah, question for you, man, on the spot. You're on the clock.
man. Well, I never I'm always, I never want to like, um, what's this right checks that my butt can't cash. I'm very careful about what parts of the platform I talk about. I'm not a huge, I Tom discovery ops person. I'm usually like not playing there. I'm talking about, how do I make the platform lab, like the architecture type stuff and also, SPM and PA and that kind of thing. I would love to get a lot more into.
Like the eye Tommy bits, but I just don't have that server network data, the data center background.
Yeah,
That's fair.
yeah, I was gonna say that too. It's fair. I think, though, what you bring, to, that process, though, is that you have a killer reporting and performance analytics background,
Oh yes.
Yeah, and that is so much of this. I'd say that's probably half of this process, right? Because servers are, you know, in the opposite environment services throwing off data like all the time, right? Like you were saying earlier, Chris, right? They got CPUs up and down, up and down all over the place, whatever, right? 60 percent 20%. Like, how do you make like heads or tails of that stuff? And how do you know when things are moving in the right direction versus the wrong direction?
And you and I have talked a lot about, uh, on the show about, about this and how you configure performance analytics and even more, how you have that conversation around those things with your clients about counters and what direction they should be moving. And you know what I mean? Like
Yeah. I mean, it's easy enough to talk about, right? Cause you talk about like, how do you know this stuff? It's not like an organization is completely blind to like, how do I know that I'm completely out of space on the servers? Like somebody knows there are, we've spent bajillions of dollars. On infrastructure to detect and monitor this stuff. but where is it? Who knows how long does it take that stuff to get into service? Now, if it ever does,
yep.
right.
you know, and so how are you rolling up to make better decisions about WTF is going on in our environment, or you just, everybody siloed up and kind of just dealing with their own realities.
See that, right? And I think that part of the process, is something that, that we're, you can sometimes miss when you're digging in the trenches, when you're so deep in the actual I. T. aspects of it, right? Like, you know, I, I can build the server from scratch, right? Like, Chris, we can do that, right? We can build a server from scratch. We know where the things are. We know what the individual granular counters and all that kind of stuff.
And sometimes you can forget about the user at the end of the chain, I think you come in and you think I'm not, you're thinking about the user organization, and probably because you come in with a different perspective because you probably can't build like that windows, data center from scratch.
Well, first off, I don't know if I could build a server anymore.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Just being fully honest. And secondly, yeah, the reporting and the performance analytics piece is at least 50%. Of that project, but it's probably forgotten 80 percent of the time. So having that skill set will allow you to showcase. These are your pain points in the organization. These are your most vulnerable things within the structure. And these are your most vulnerable business services will enable that C suite to make those.
Strategic investment decisions, you know, if they could have a server go down 100 times a day, but if the impact of the cost is 10 bucks each time, then the value is not there to upgrade it. But if they have a server go down once every 6 months and it costs them, 600 grand because of the productivity impact, perhaps. Having that understanding would help them say, well, this is the word we got to spend our money.
have wrestled for the better part of two decades on how easy that is to say,
Mm hmm.
but what makes it so hard for people to deploy? Can we have an honest conversation about that maybe?
Yeah! Yeah!
I mean, Corey, just last week, remember that call we were on with that customer? And it was just like, a customer so big, it would shock you. That brand doesn't know what's going on. And it's just, they do discovery, you know what I mean? They've turned all that on, but the most complex thing they can answer is like, show me the servers. Not what do these things mean?
Mm hmm.
that these things exist.
Yes.
And so why is it so hard to go from that to, Oh, because I have this server, you know, don't worry about that one. That one stores the menus for the lunch rooms at that location
Right.
versus that one means we don't get paid.
Well, that speaks to, some of how the projects are sold and then implemented, if we're being honest. everybody can come in and say, Hey, let's implement discovery and your CMDB is populated. Great. You have reached the end of stage one and your CMDB, you know, what's in your infrastructure and it's automated automatically.
Then you have to operationalize that, meaning after day two of your operational, project has ended, we're now in the operational phase, how do I maintain this data and keep it updated and accurate so that my foundation remains strong?
right.
Then you have to build on it. So a lot of people skip that operational step. You know, I've, I worked with one customer that implemented discovery and didn't touch it for four months. And guess what we're doing again. So, you know, sometimes I find the joke of there's never enough money to do it. Right. But there's always money to do it twice comes, comes into play. And, you know, it's not like they're bad or even unique. This happens a lot. And I think.
Starting at that initial project level, when you're doing that implementation, there needs to be that operational and that reporting piece baked into the project. Now, I know there's a lot of external pressures because of the costs that would go up as a result of that, but weighing that against, doing it twice, You know, do you want to save money in the long run or not?
Well, I always tell them, don't forget the M part of CMDB. Right?
Yes. Yeah. That's right in the name.
Because it's, it's a verb, it's not a noun, it's a verb. you know, thus EMB, of course that's a verb, but the, the management thereof is the verb of the noun and it's just like, but who is going to do this?
that's
Who's going to do it?
And so Chris, since you do have your CMA, I'm going to use this to get some free consulting, right? Um, how would you advise your, clients in this scenario? when you say like, don't forget the performance analytics. Don't forget the reporting part. Don't forget operationalizing, you know, that does add, add Costs to the project. so would you advise them to shrink the project and be more complete with what they deliver? Or would you advise them to puff up the entirety of the project?
And it'll acknowledging that it'll now take longer and be more expensive.
That is a great question. And I'll give you an excellent CMA answer. It, it, it depends.
Oh, I knew it.
So,
Oh, man!
but you don't end,
I got consulted!
you don't end with just, it depends. So it depends on what their goal is and what their strategic vision is. So. Example 1, I need a system of record to retire a legacy CI tracking tool or something of the sort, and I got to move it all into service now just to get reporting level data. I need to know how many incidents are logged against the server, etc. Then in that case, your number 1 priority is the completeness of the number of CIs in the CMDB.
And then you operationalize that versus the reporting performance analytics side of things. Whereas if I don't need to do something like that, I want to bring in in stages. Windows servers and then maybe switches and routers, and I want to do service mapping so that I can do total service costing. Then it's more staged approach and you go service by service in that way. So what's your highest priority business service? What's going to cost the company the most if it goes down?
I used to work for an auctioneering company. And if an auction went down at, at the same time that the CEO's laptop died, the CEO would wait because the cost of this was higher.
Right.
And I always admired that company for that culture, because rarely do you see executives put themselves aside in that manner, right? And it wasn't just the CEO, it was anybody.
It's new outside of bread there, but there's buttered on right
Mhm. Right. And it was all about focusing on supporting that. Another example is I did work at Best Buy, and during the holiday season, they would make the majority of their money, and if, a credit card machine went down, that was a higher priority to store than, you know, a director's, they also had that same mentality and that was a culture thing in the company, which was really cascaded throughout the entire organization.
on. This is,
appreciated that side of things.
this reminds me of a topic I love talking about. When you're doing implementations and you get the partners that all they care about is their best practices that they've discovered over the course of however many implementations, but they're not paying attention to those nuances of. What business is being done here? I worked in the advertising industry and if you called into the help desk saying this projector didn't work.
and it's at any other company that's like, whatever, call the AB club, you know, get your teenager on, but in media and advertising, it's like, black helicopter commandos, running up the side of the building and smashing through the glass to get into the room as fast as they can to fix that projector. Cause that could be a multi million dollar pitch is going down
Yep.
for an ad campaign. gosh, I'm dating myself that they even did those on projectors. But,
Little, little bit, little bit.
but it was anything that was the interaction stuff we do every day on zoom. Now they had like these telepresence rooms and stuff like that. And it was just the most white glove service you could ever imagine, but you'd never know because it's just a big corporate entity. And then you get healthcare and they talk about, you know, some of the devices that nurses carry, or some of the databases they have. And it's just like, who cares about anything else? The cost of failure here is lives lost.
or lawsuits that we're about to get, entrenched in you know, rather than talking about, Oh, what's the best prices for incident category tree. Um, I love talking about the things that make that company stay up at night worrying,
Yeah, right. I guess about what the company's North star is, What their missions is, And how do you align the product with those things to ensure that everybody's moving in the right direction?
yep, exactly. And then you add in the calendar factor. The payroll system going down when there's 10 days to payday isn't as high of a priority as if it goes down the day before payday.
Right.
companies need to have first that CMDB's foundation strong and operationalized, Then they can build upon it and grow it. And then from there they can build their service models out and have that total service understanding of everything that underpins it. And then they can prioritize to their little heart's content and invest in the areas that they need to. But they, I always looked at that CMDB and CSDM frame the framework as like the largest launchpad. 'cause it feeds so many things.
in the platform. And then when you can layer on sophisticated reporting and advanced performance analytics, like you can bring to the table, Duke, you'll have just an unbelievable advantage in visibility alone against anybody. Your industry or not, your competitors are not just against. Anybody, but you have to invest in it and you have to work towards it and you have to work and commit to maintaining it.
And those are the, the areas where I think a lot of companies struggle to is, especially with that maintenance piece.
man, we're like, we're like 60 seconds away from 40 minutes to record. Like,
That's what
how could we have possibly ended better? That was like, you've been guiding us towards this all the time. Chris, you pulled a magic trick off.
Ta da!
can get that pitch in right at the end. That's amazing.
No, absolutely. Chris. this has been great. it's been awesome talking to both a magician and a, and a CMA. Right. And maybe that's what the M stands for. Um,
I guess maybe it's C M M A
yeah, there we go.
now I sound like a fighter, and I'm not a fighter, so. Well, I hope you guys are going to knowledge, and I'll show you some of the magic stuff.
will
definitely are.
Alright, well, Yes,
and gentlemen, this has been Chris Hsu. thanks so much for listening and I guess we will see you on the next one.
for having me.
Absolutely.
Still no outro though.
Still no outro.