Chris Pope, Director of Product Management, ServiceNow, discussed the Service Automation Platform, business process automation and security for ServiceNow’s cloud-based platform with theCube co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante, live at the ServicesNow Knowledge conference.

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.