Jay Anderson, the CIO of ServiceNow, was brought in to make sure that ServiceNow was able to maintain its internal business during a period of rapid growth. “We had to become more efficient,” Anderson told TheCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at ServiceNow’s Knowledge15 event in Las Vegas, and he’s “using ServiceNow technology to do that.”

Putting ServiceNow into action at home

Anderson’s main goal at ServiceNow is to “address unstructured workflows all around the organization,” he stated. This means reaching beyond IT and into what he described as “case management for HR, facilities,” and even into procurement and finance.

The company runs its sales team on ServiceNow and even built its own CRM. Anderson said the CRM is “integrated deeply with SAP.” Especially with the ServiceNow store, the CRM enabled them to easily juggle the “multiple financial flows converging on the financial engine we’ve built.”

System of record vs. system of engagement

In IT, Anderson explained, “we are the systems of record,” but “when we move into finance or HR, we don’t want that role.” Instead, he said, his goal is to integrate with the other systems. As a “workflow engine built around tasks,” ServiceNow is “where employees come to do work.” It’s not the system or record, and instead enables workers to “push and pull information from the systems of record to allow you to do the work or after the work is done.”

Anderson cited a specific example: “We pull the ORC chart out to Workday … If I want to route something to [a customer’s] boss, it helps if I know who they are this week.” It’s easy to “get that our of Workday.” It becomes simple and quick to “navigate the work chart, and then when I’m down processing [a customer’s] request, I push the result down into SAP.” All the data ends up in SAP, “but the work gets down in ServiceNow,” Anderson explained.

This system makes it a breeze to “engage the employees through this workflow tool, and then put the data where it needs to be, or pull the data to inform that.” In particular, he described the system as cutting edge because it addresses all needs across the business.

Dealing with unstructured data

One of those needs is handling unstructured data, particularly when it comes to leads. It’s why ServiceNow made their lead engine “eloquent,” Anderson remarked. Instead of building their own system, ServiceNow plugged in the “best of breed” from other companies and then integrated it, making it easy to “bring the data in and start doing work with it.”

The Cloud has ushered in a “new wave of productivity”

While Microsoft tools “helped [ServiceNow] tremendously to be more productive,”  the cloud will ring in “a new wave of productivity,” according to Anderson. That new wave is based on “building structured workflows” and “having a single source of truth,” which relieves people of “all that work of trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s in the system,” he said. ServiceNow offers “another lens into that data” and “real-time information that’s accurate,” Anderson explained.

Watch the entire interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.