ServiceNow首席信息官Chris Bedi的成长转型之路

2015年9月Chris Bedi加入ServiceNow并担任首席信息官，最近公司给了他一个新头衔，首席数字信息官，并将他的IT团队重新命名为“Digital Technology”。Chris Bedi表示，品牌重塑是对这一角色发生变化的承认，但也意在强化他希望整个团队接受的各种心态。

当Bedi加入公司时，他的主要任务是实现“规模增长”。当时该公司约有2800名员工，是现在员工总数的四分之一，当时仍被视为一家IT解决方案公司，因为它的其他工作流管理产品尚未开始。当时他的职责包括熟悉的IT基础设施、网络连接、网络安全、为现有员工提供协作和通信工具，以及为新员工提供这些工具，使他们从第一天起就拥有所需的生产力。

Chris Bedi说，当时这项工作的另一个重要组成部分是，让经营业务所需的信息“触手可及”。他说，这些分析工具是基本的应用程序，但并非微不足道。

2015年，人工智能和机器学习才刚刚开始进入分析学的讨论，致力于这项技术的ServiceNow团队规模很小。“当时，我们有一个由三人组成的团队，专注于AI和ML，你必须记住，这是2015年，他们主要是在进行AI和ML的实验，”Bedi说。“没人知道该拿它怎么办;没有人真正相信它。但这些都是数据科学家对数据的修补，产生了一些见解。”

当然，这在过去的几年里发生了变化。

一、数字大脑(Digital brain)

2018年底是这个机构的一个里程碑，重点从仪表板和KPI转移到成为数字大脑。他说:“我们玩转了这个名字:数字大脑(Digital brain)，中枢神经系统为组织所用。我们的使命应该是确保组织中任何有评级、推荐或预测的东西都是由人工智能和机器学习推荐实现的。”

Bedi表示，这一使命很快又演变为帮助每个角色做出更有效的决定，现在每天产生超过300万条建议。“提出人工智能和机器学习的建议是很好的，但除非我们也规定了我们希望人们采取的行动，并给他们一个闭环，一个人在循环中，告诉我们这些建议是否有用，否则我们就会错过目标。”

分析团队分析自身表现的方式也发生了变化，从统计分析产品的月活跃用户数量，到关注他们对所收到的推荐的满意度。Bedi说，“它必须是，‘建议采取的行动与实际采取的行动的比例是多少?’这是一个很大的转变。”

Bedi的责任在其他方面也有所增加。虽然他的团队不负责该公司SaaS产品运行的Now Platform基础设施，但他们确实维护了Now Learning培训平台和ServiceNow Impact(帮助客户跟踪其数字化转型的客户成功应用程序)。

网络安全不再只是保护公司的IT基础设施，还包括公司的创收云，甚至是确保客户安全地使用公司的服务，以降低声誉风险。华东CIO大会、华东CIO联盟、CDLC中国数字化灯塔大会、CXO数字化研学之旅、数字化江湖-讲武堂，数字化江湖-大侠传、数字化江湖-论剑、CXO系列管理论坛（陆家嘴CXO管理论坛、宁波东钱湖CXO管理论坛等）、数字化转型网，走进灯塔工厂系列、ECIO大会等

扩大公司规模已经从简单地支持更多员工转变为充分利用现有员工。他说:“这样做的目的是创造一种令人难以置信的员工体验，帮助我们的员工更投入、更高效。如果我缩小范围，这个角色已经从主要关注内部、规模和风险缓解，演变为非常关注外部，对推动我们的战略至关重要，对推动增长至关重要，而且看起来比2015年更具战略性。”

二、正确处理人的发展

Bedi说，他是一个如饥似渴的读者，但在学习新技能时，他也有强烈的行动偏见。他说:“我们去做吧，边做边想办法。人们用‘快速失败’这个词，但我更喜欢‘快速学习’这个词。”这就是他在ServiceNow内部采用低代码开发工具时的方法。

他说:“我们正在进行一场关于人的发展没有终点线的辩论。”赞成的人希望立即看到好处；反对者担心组织中技术债务的积累。

他说，在这种情况下，首席信息官有三种选择。“你可以试着阻止它——但你永远不会赢得这场战斗，”他说。“你可以忽略它。不管你知不知道，这就是你今天正在做的事情，因为人们已经有了点解。唯一合乎逻辑的选择，也是我和我的团队讨论过的，就是接受它。所以，我们欣然接受了。”

ServiceNow的员工也很喜欢它，其中有400多名活跃的开发人员，100个应用程序正在服务中，另外100个应用程序将在未来几个月上线，Bedi说。

随着进步势头的增强，他对其他准备在企业中接受公民发展的首席信息官们提出了一些建议。首先，他说，要保持治理轻而充分。一种方法是为公民开发人员肯定想要的东西提供可信的数据集，这必须正确地完成，以避免破坏-例如，涉及审批的应用程序的组织层次结构和员工目录，或涉及支出的任何成本中心层次结构。

其次，他说，通过限制拒绝项目的原因来避免打击新开发者:不允许重复应用(尽管允许用更好的应用替换应用);不要超出你的理解范围(所以如果一个有趣的想法对公民开发人员来说太复杂，他的团队成员可能会介入帮助);不处理过于敏感的数据(但如果想法不错，他的团队可能会接手这个项目)。

他的第三个建议是让人们容易上手。他的团队通过提供入门课程来做到这一点——“课程足够短，人们不会气馁，”他说——并设有办公时间，开发人员可以打电话寻求帮助。

最后，他建议，通过庆祝开发者的应用来扩大成功。他说:“这个项目的成功是出于我个人的利益，因为它们有助于实现我的核心使命之一:企业数字化。”

Bedi说，如果人的发展得到正确处理，如果CIO、CDIO和CTO能够接纳所有这些人，那么我们就可以摆脱影子IT这个术语及其负面含义。

也许这将有助于解决他和像他这样的首席信息官面临的另一个问题:缺乏熟练的软件开发人员。Bedi说:“我永远都吃不够。”

原文：

What’s in a name? For Chris Bedi, who joined ServiceNow as CIO in September 2015, a lot: the company recently gave him a new title, chief digital information officer, and rebranded his IT team as “digital technology.”

“The rebranding is an acknowledgement of how the role has changed,” he says, but is also intended to reinforce various mindsets that he wants the whole team to adopt.

When Bedi joined the company, his primary mission was to enable “scale-for-growth.” Back then, he says, the company had around 2,800 employees, a quarter of the headcount today, and was still seen as an IT solutions company as its other workflow management products hadn’t yet taken off.

His role included the familiar responsibilities for IT infrastructure, network connectivity, cybersecurity, delivering collaboration and communication tools for existing staff, and provisioning them for new employees so they have what they need to be productive from day one.

Another big component of the job back then, he says, was keeping the information needed to run the business “at our fingertips.” These analytics tools were basic apps, but not trivial, he says.

AI and machine learning were only just beginning to creep into discussion of analytics in 2015, and the ServiceNow team devoted to the technology was tiny.

“At the time, we had a team of three people focused on AI and ML who were largely — this is 2015, you have to remember — just running experiments on AI and ML,” Bedi says. “Nobody knew what the heck to do with it; nobody had really bought into it. But these were data scientists tinkering with data, producing some insights.”

That’s changed in the intervening years, of course.

Digital brain

One milestone for the analytics organization came in late 2018, with a shift in focus away from dashboards and KPIs and toward becoming a digital brain. “We toyed around with the name: digital brain, central nervous system — for the organization,” he says. “We said our mission should become making sure anything that has a rating, recommendation or forecast in our organization is enabled by an AI and ML recommendation.”

That mission soon evolved again, into helping every persona make more effective decisions, and now results in over 3 million recommendations per day, he says. “Surfacing AI and ML recommendations is great, but unless we’re also prescriptive in terms of the actions we want people to take, and give them a closed loop, a human in the loop, to tell us whether those suggestions were useful, we’re missing the mark.”

The way the analytics team analyses its own performance has also evolved, from a count of monthly active users of the analytics products to a focus on their satisfaction with the recommendations they are receiving. “It has to be, ‘What’s the percentage of actions recommended versus actions taken?’ That was a big shift,” he says.

Bedi’s responsibilities have grown in other ways too. While his team isn’t responsible for the Now Platform infrastructure on which the company’s SaaS offering runs, it does maintain the Now Learning training platform and ServiceNow Impact, a customer success app for helping clients track their digital transformations.

Cybersecurity is no longer just about protecting corporate IT infrastructure, but also the company’s revenue-generating cloud, and even ensuring that customers are using the company’s services securely to mitigate reputational risk.

And scaling the company has moved from simply supporting more employees to getting the most from existing staff. “The purpose of this is to drive an incredible employee experience that helps our employees be more engaged and productive,” he says. “If I zoom out, the role has evolved from largely internal, scale and risk mitigation, to very externally focused, critical to driving our strategy, critical to driving growth, and looked at as a lot more strategic than in 2015.”

Embracing citizen developers

Bedi says he’s a voracious reader, but also has a strong bias for action when it comes to picking up new skills. “Let’s go do it and figure it out as we go,” he says. “People use the term ‘fail fast’ but I like the term ‘learn fast’ better.”

That was his approach when it came to the adoption of low-code development tools internally at ServiceNow.

“We were having one of those debates with no finish line around citizen development,” he says. Those in favor wanted to see the benefits right away; those against feared an accumulation of technology debt in the organization.

In situations like these, he says, there are three choices as CIOs. “You can try to block it — but you’re never going to win that battle,” he says. “You can ignore it. That’s what you’re doing today, whether you know it or not, because people are out there already with point solutions. The only logical choice left, and this is a conversation I had with my team, is to embrace it. So, we embraced it.”

ServiceNow’s employees have embraced it too, with over 400 of them active as citizen developers, 100 applications in service, and another 100 applications due to go live in the next couple of months, Bedi says.

As progress gains momentum, he has some advice for other CIOs getting ready to embrace citizen development in their enterprise. First, he says, keep governance lightweight yet sufficient. One way to do this is to provide trusted data sets for things citizen developers are sure to want, which must be done properly to avoid things breaking — something like an organization hierarchy and an employee directory for apps involving approvals, for example, or a cost-center hierarchy for anything involving spending.

Second, he says, avoid discouraging new developers by limiting the reasons for refusal of a project: no duplicate apps (although replacing an app with a better one is allowed); no getting in over your head (so if an interesting idea looks likely to be too complex for the citizen developer, his team members may step in to help); and no handling of overly sensitive data (but if the idea is good, his team may take on the project).

His third recommendation is to make it easy for people to get started. His team did this by providing an introductory class — “It was short enough where people wouldn’t be discouraged,” he says — and holding office hours where citizen developers can call in for help.

Finally, he advises, amplify success by celebrating the citizen developers’ applications. “I have a selfish interest in this program taking off,” he says, “because they’re helping with one of my core missions: digitize the enterprise.”

If citizen development is handled correctly, and if CIOs, CDIOs, and CTOs can embrace all these people, Bedi says, then we can do away with the term shadow IT and its negative connotations.

And perhaps this will help with another problem he and CIOs like him face: the shortage of skilled software developers. “I can never get enough of them,” Bedi says.