Brad Paubel, VP of Internal Customer Technologies at Maritz, explained how ServiceNow helped his company navigate a cultural shift for their IT department, sitting with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante at the ServiceNow Knowledge14 event.

“We are actually going through a huge cultural shift,” Paubel stated. “IT needs to realize we are a service based organization right now. This time it’s all about the people. We are asking IT people to be more like sales people.”

The focus shifted to solving people needs, not business needs.

“Some people are receptive, some aren’t. What it takes is looking at the bigger picture,” Paubel explained, noting that IT is used to working on request while “customers care if you are solving their problems. We are bringing in tools, to automate their work and move IT into the business,” to have them understand and solve business needs.

For product to evolve, it needs ease of use, according to Paubel. The challenge is to get customers solutions like they have at home.

“IT people know the back end technologies to make that happen,” and get excited about them, Paubel said. “You need to put people in front of them to sell the service. You have to be able to sell your IT services, that’s what is all about.”
 

 
Asked what was ServiceNow’s contribution to this transformation, Paubel pointed out that “from a tools’ discussion, you want to free up IT’s time. You need to automate,” he said.

For Paubel’s team, ServiceNow is an enabler to free up IT time and put IT people in front of the business. Then it supports building service catalogs that are easy to use and can be sold through better processes.

Commenting of the challenge of aligning IT with the business, Paubel explained “you have to automate the activities you do day in and day out,” to free up the time, listen to the business needs, and then have IT people work on solving them.

In Maritz’s case, Paubel recalled that “it wasn’t easy, it was a very difficult transition, because you’re changing people.”

To be successful, Paubel stated, the company needed to find those things that motivated IT professionals. “They want to be innovative, they want to make a difference, it’s just guiding them along their path.”

Without this cultural change, an organization won’t thrive.

“IT in the future doesn’t compete, we complement,” Paubel said, explaining that if a company puts its services in the cloud, it will need to build a portal and let customers use it. “The customers of IT are driving this cultural shift,” he added.

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