The ServiceNow Knowledge14 event being held this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco has thus far welcomed clients, practitioners and executives within ServiceNow’s ecosystem. Dave Vellante welcomed Frank Slootman, the President and CEO of ServiceNow, shortly after his keynote address.

“One of the themes you struck hit home to me,” Vellante stated. “And that is transforming the IT department from a cost to a value center. So, how do you see the role of IT and the CIO in the future?”

Slootman lamented that the worst of all scenarios he could foresee is that which values an IT department as a commodity or utility, saying “As a result, [companies] want it to get cheaper and cheaper to operate.”

Slootman believes many companies simply tolerate the costs associated with their IT departments because a company has to have basics like e-mail and collaboration. But he believes it is the responsibility of the CIO to turn that perception around and shift IT into a center of innovation.

“I ask CIO’s, ‘What have you done in the last 12 months that has blown people’s minds?’” He believes IT should be viewed as the go-to for how to improve the operation of the business.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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Slootman, who is soon celebrating his third anniversary as head of ServiceNow, claimed that the company has yet to reach top potential. “Despite our scale and growth, ServiceNow is still in its early innings,” he said.

One of the primary values he sees, as ServiceNow’s expertise migrates from the IT department across the rest of the enterprise, is in helping companies achieve a leaner bottom line.

“Managing service is just essential in terms of economizing and saving money,” he claimed. “Human resource organizations have been able to dwindle their staff by 50 percent once they realize their inefficiencies and can address them.”

“Doesn’t that scare people?” asked Vellante.

Slootman responded by citing a blog post he had written on the topic recently. “We are definitely going to see that happen. We can resist but that’s not realistic,” he said.

The importance of a single system of record

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It was at last year’s Knowledge event that ServiceNow announced their application creator. “I was struck by the number of applications you have available,” stated Vellante. “Can you relate the importance of operating a single system of record to the success you are seeing in your application offerings?”

“When you have applications or services that relate to each other,” Slootman began, “the single system of record is important. The applications have to be aware of one another. What you don’t want is the applications living in their own universes,” he said. “That was the world we have lived in. ServiceNow said ‘We aren’t doing that anymore.’”

With ServiceNow’s applications, when you bring up an asset, each data artifact throughout the infrastructure that relates to that specific asset is visible to that application. “No one else can do that,” Slootman said. “You get a data gravitas so that the more data that is there, the richer the application is.”

Slootman is adamant about now allowing ServiceNow to repeat the practice employed by legacy providers of having individual applications siloed. “After you create patches and hacking integrations between applications, you are spending time maintaining those patches,” he said. “We don’t have that.”

The ServiceNow Knowledge14 event continues through May 1, and SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE will be presenting live coverage each day.

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