This week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 Event, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, is the site of one of the two live broadcasts brought to you by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE this week. Joining Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick was the Senior Vice President and CIO for Intuit, Atticus Tysen. Tysen is also attending an ancillary session called CIO Decisions. Vellante began the interview by asking him to share his take on that side event.

“It’s about 100 CIO’s in attendance and we are discussing the future of the role of CIO. The big theme is the shift of IT from a system of record to a system of engagement.” This same theme was touched on in an earlier interview on theCUBE with VP of Product Strategy for ServiceNow, Matt Schvimmer.

The idea of turning the IT department from a cost center to a value center led Vellante to inquire if Tysen believed more and more CIO’s would be placed internally, as he had been. Tysen said the trend will continue and shared how he came to the position.

“I’ve been with the company almost 13 years,” Tysen said. “The main reason I joined the IT group was because I kept hearing that the main reason we couldn’t do certain things was because of IT. So, I figured don’t complain, join them.”

With the line between what is considered IT and what is considered product continuing to blur, Tysen’s goal is to establish a protocol for working within the new framework.

“One of the things I’ve been doing is making the IT group more like a product group,” he said. Tysen claims he’s learned far more from his team than he believes they have from him. “I’ve understood the importance of IT.”

What he never knew was that they wanted a more active role in the company, explaining that “they’ve wanted to make changes like [what we are now doing] for some time but they were relegated to traditional IT roles rather than being strategic thinkers in the organization.”

Tysen, soon approaching his first year as CIO with Intuit, headed engineering for a year before that. Upon taking the helm as CIO he created a sales care and marketing team among the IT group.

“That gave them the responsibility for creating the experience for the end user and agents, regardless of the technology they opted for,” he said. He wanted his team to understand they didn’t need to maintain an allegiance to a specific solution if it was no longer the best solution. Therefore, overseeing customer and agent experience allowed them the freedom to ensure the best options to achieve their goals.

Another innovation Tysen brought to the group was based on an existing program at Intuit called ‘Follow Me Home’, whereby Intuit observes the end user to make sure the product is designed as efficiently and user friendly as possible. Tysen’s iteration of this program saw his engineers doing site visits to their agents, ensuring their internal products were aiding in bottom line efficiency and ease of use.

Intuit is among the latest clients on ServiceNow’s roster, with its live deploy coming soon. Tysen sees the transition as being essential to creating a better user experience for Intuit agents tasked with resolving work tickets. “ServiceNow provides much better visibility end-to-end,” he concluded.

photo credit: Kaptain Kobold via photopin cc