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Penultimate speaker is Steph Gray. Steph is managing director of helpful technology. Steph is a digital strategist and practitioner runs helpful technology, a specialist digital engagement consultancy, was formerly head of digital communications at BIS. Steph will explore why people should bother engaging with public sector organisations online and what can be done to build trust and enthusiasm for participation through radically rethinking the feedback and consultation process. Why bother? If Mary is a private sector SKP, I'm more of a public sector SKP. I was a civil servant until three years ago when I escaped now. As Andy says, I sort of do these things for other people with a small Mary band. I must have been on a bit of a downer when I thought about the title for this talk. This must have been a particularly grim Tuesday afternoon because I'm normally quite an upbeat kind of person. But I was trying to think about how government is using social media, how it's engaging with people, the consultation cycle, contrasting how government does that with the kind of amazing things you see at GDS on the IT side. And I ended up with this kind of rather depressing way of kicking things off because ultimately we live in very exciting times technologically. In the last few years we've seen technology in general and social media, social networking in particular, make incredible collaborations possible. So this is obviously from the Arab Spring where the tools of US mega corporations enable people on the street to form and to organise and to find each other and to investigate and to dig deep into what's actually going on. But it's not just about what's going on on the street in Cairo. It's about the fact that, you know, I can see some twitches in the audience, I can see some twitches. So I mean it was incredible is that a guy from Korea can make a silly dance and accumulate a billion YouTube views in just a few weeks. I went to a five year old's birthday party the other day and they can all do the dance, they can all do the song. It's incredible how that kind of globalised culture is made possible by the spread of these video sharing services. I mean it's still amazing to me. And a lot of us remember we can see a guy float up to the very edge of space and jump out of his little canister and float down and break the speed record. And 8 million people simultaneously watch him as he falls down to earth 800 miles an hour and sets a record. And not only can we watch him because we've been able to watch things simultaneously since the moon landings, but we can participate in that. We can ask the technical team questions, we can really get involved in it, we can follow the press conference, we can tweet, we can do all kinds of things, share with our friends. And that is new. And of course in a few years time we'll all look like this. We're not that many years time I suspect. Some of us probably will carry it off better than others. But Google Glass will kind of revolution, will have augmented bodies all made possible by the incredible combination of technology and the internet. And yet if you think about what a government policy making process, a policy document, a government consultation in 2013 in this era of incredible technology, they look like this and they still look like this and they've looked like this for years. They are incredibly tedious, they are 100 pages long, they're PDF files on the website and I've been responsible for my fair sharing government as well. And it's kind of depressing that this is still the best we can do despite all the amazing tools and the kind of example that's been set out there of that interplay between society and technology. So, to be fair, this isn't the limit of government's use of technology in terms of getting the public involved in policy making and ideas. But one note, SurveyMonkey is not radical digital innovation. I think a lot of government organisations, SurveyMonkey is seen as, it's online guys, it's magic. But it's really not in the context of people jumping out of capsules far above the atmosphere. So what we're seeing a lot of is organisations in the public sector and elsewhere. It's not limited to the public sector. Setting up social media channels and pumping out the same kind of things they would have pumped out through other channels through these exciting new mediums. So I'll pick on Argyll and Butte but this is true of many other organisations as well. Pumping out the traditional press releases, one after another, sometimes they've done a merry and they've automated everything. So these aren't even human beings tweeting, they are actually just machines. And I guess that's fine, it serves a certain purpose. This is a nice one from the, this is Great Britain's Facebook page. I don't know if you can read this, it's a nice picture of trifle and it says, trifle is a British classic. Are you a fan with a little link?  Susan Collins says, yes it is a nice treat. I think I want to become a trifle. So I mean this is lovely, this is what kind of social media is sort of about. And actually this is the government campaign playing the game of Facebook in quite an effective way. I mean in terms of volume of numbers this is great. And actually I'm being unfair because this is what this campaign is all about. It's all about celebrating Britishness. So you go on this page you'll see pictures of hunky men in kilts, of beef eaters, of the classic British telephone boxes and cabs and all that kind of stuff. It's lovely but it's not what I'd think of as engagement and I think there's too much of this sort of stuff going on. A channel feeding a kind of beast. And this is a visualisation of the beast which it is feeding from Bitly. So Bitly is the service that shortens links and they've done an analysis of the half life of a link. So how long you can expect your link to float around in social media. How many clicks you'll get in the time. How many hours going along the X axis. So within about three hours you've got the clicks you're going to get. And it's more true for some social media than others. Some social media that the half life is very short indeed. And this explains I think in graphon why we're in the pickle we are because we're feeding this beast of social media with content which is generating content for our channels. Now it's not all demon gleam and there are some attempts that have been made to try and use the technology available to harness the wisdom of crowds in the way that the case studies have highlighted. So when the new government came in they tried this thing called the spending challenge which sourced a lot of examples and ideas for how government could save money using just by being more efficient basically. And they saw thousands of ideas and a few of them were quite good and some of them were absolutely rubbish and some of them were people submitting beef stew recipes and all kinds of crazy things. I think what was interesting about this is it didn't generate a particularly great set of examples and what it did also do was it generated a headache for the civil servants on the receiving end of this. They didn't require it, they just got a spreadsheet full of random ideas from members of the public about ways to save money which were often entirely impractical and then were told to sort them out and see if they were possible. So in terms of numbers this looks very good. I think ministers found it a good vehicle, a lot of coverage for the laundry but in terms of actually changing how people, how government works and how government saves money it wasn't particularly effective. I think government has moved on since, it's become a bit more focused on how it does these things and that's certainly improved. The other classic, this is the Mumsnet web chat and I think another good example where ministers are getting out there they're tapping into these big online communities like Mumsnet and the student room and others and people meet in their tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and talk about the issues that concern them so kind of flipping the media on its head and they go out into these spaces and they answer questions and we all know what their favourite biscuits are as a result of these interactions with Mums and with students and with others. And it's a lovely idea. I think it's good to see politicians getting out there but it's still not getting to the hub of how to get feedback into the policy process from the public. It's politicians doing what they would always have done on TV or in the media just online and it's not transforming the relationship that's going on there. Ultimately it's not shifting this needle which is the key one I think. This is a chart just from earlier this week. Ipsos Moray survey looking at how much trust people have and how much confidence they have in the use of statistics. How much trust do you have in information provided by, amongst others, politicians? Nine out of ten have very little or none at all and yet we still put politicians up front in these interactions. That's the way the civil service has been designed. Civil servants are the munchkins. No offence. I used to be one. Behind the scenes working on all these things and it's the ministers who are up there as the public face who take all this but they're also playing the ministerial, partisan party political games as well and I think that's reflected in some of the scores they get for the trustworthiness of their information, the trustworthiness of them as individuals. So I come back to, seriously, why are we bothering? If nine out of ten people don't trust the information from politicians if we're using these channels, we're feeding the social media beast but we're not actually really achieving anything. We're getting people to like trifle. What are we actually accomplishing here? Ultimately you can settle a little bit kind of miserable, a little bit depressed to think about what's the point of all of this. But I think there are some reasons to be cheerful and there are some signs and pointers to a better way of engaging the public in policymaking and how to improve public services and I think here are some green shoots I suppose. Do you want to recognise this from the riots a couple of years ago? So the rioters themselves had organised in things like Twitter and Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to work out where they were going to go in London and what they were going to smash up and what they were going to steal and the more stupid ones then posted pictures of it on Facebook at least to go and find and go and arrest them which is smart. But the flipside to it was that the same tools which were used by the rioters were used perhaps to greater effect and by greater numbers by the people who wanted to stand up against some of this and actually clean up the mess and sort out their communities and this is the riot cleanup campaign which was started by an individual chap who started at hashtag. He got people together and with some help from the DLA they organised themselves, they got teams working around London and they actually did a really good job at sorting out what was going on and clearing up the mess that the riots had caused and I think this is a bit like we've seen on a more grand revolutionary scale in the Arab Spring, a good example of actually people coming together and using social media to do that. So there is still this ability for these tools to bring people together around issues they care about and I think the interesting thing about this is it's not, you know, we have this, perhaps we live in a time when people have a very cynical view of politicians and their trustworthiness but that doesn't mean that people think have drifted away from politics people still care about the issues and the political issues and you see this in the strength and the spread and the rapidity in which some of these e-petitions are growing so changed or recently had this petition to set up a petition for in Duncan Smith to try living on £53 a week after he, off the cuff said in an interview that he could live on benefits he'd managed and that reached, I think it's half a million signatures so far and it reached that over the course of a bank holiday we can normally it's pretty much. So people clearly feel very strongly about the issues they want to use and they do use technology to mobilise and to connect and they want to do something about it and they want to point this crowd in a direction and they will do something and this is interesting because we, you know, this has been a busy week news wise we're discussing the economy we're discussing our relationship with the European Union we're discussing all kinds of deep and meaningful topics and if you look at the most read story on Tuesday on the BBC website it was a 10 question grammar quiz which is actually really hard, I only scored 5 out of 10 on this and I think in myself is being alright on grammar but I think what this shows is that in a world where there's a lot of bad news out there there's crime and there's big political stories going on actually what attracts people online is a bit of light relief sometimes and the ability to do something which they can then share and talk about and engage with their friends around and that's something which we very rarely give people in terms of government policy and government services online. So let's have a think about what the government policy making process is about and how some of these tools might then slot into it so here's a very crude, simplified version of the government policy wheel where you know the top government thinks about what's gone wrong, it tries to identify and listen to the problems, it then works through the cycle of assessing some possible solutions, refining a policy that will actually address them and then implementing it, delivering a solution which hopefully works, getting some feedback and then the cycle continues and every stage in that process it's more than, it's not just putting up pictures of trifle on Facebook and actually we can do more interesting things with technology to actually listen, to get inspiration to test ideas with people and to explain and refine and to get feedback at the point at which people actually consume public services so we actually get a sense of how it's working in the wild get feedback from the service users and not just do, not just spend our time at the bottom of that cycle in terms of policy consultations but actually get feedback more generally more informally around the whole experience people have of dealing with public services So, I'm going to give you some five thoughts about what we could do to perhaps achieve some of this and one is, perhaps the most important one is to make use of social media and use of technology something which public servants do every day and not just the politicians I think this is where the civil service code is really helpful because it has this distinction between the invisible civil servants and the very visible politicians and actually to make these technologies useful I think they need to become basically part of the day job it's small C communication not big C communication and you need to kind of take the use of Twitter and Facebook and other things at work out of the comms teams who can still run the corporate channels but actually make it a tool on the desk and that's a job for people around the IT networks to actually recognise these are not people will connect with their friends they will chat but they will also do potentially quite interesting things to follow journalists, to follow the media to follow stakeholders and others in their area of work and actually potentially make some really interesting connections that improve public services as a result of using these tools in the workplace it's amazing how many public servants will use social media outside of work but never think about bringing it into work just don't see it as a work tool I think we need to change that the other side of it is we need to make it to make it something we can use every day we need to think about how it's consumed in terms of our audiences and actually the problem with the 100 page PDF is it's not an easy thing to read on a train it's certainly not an easy thing to interact with you can't fill in the 50 questions survey monkey survey in the same way on a train you'll see trains and carriages like this full of people on their phones and we don't design the interactions between people and government for these kind of context enough we don't think about the way in which people are actually going to be consuming these consultations and these opportunities to get involved with us so things which are about acknowledging that the mode of use are really important I think the next part of it and again practically important is asking people for the right things and recognising that there are multiple audiences here so there are people who will always respond to government consultations and we need to make it easy for them we need to make it easy for the CBI and the TEC to do their own internal consultations with their members to play that back into the policy teams and for that to go on but we need to recognise that for some policy areas there are much bigger potential audiences out there there are people who use the service there are people who are passionate about it there are people who live on the line of the HS2 or who would be affected by renegotiating our relationship with Europe and we need to ask those people not just for their analysis of the policy which is what consultations are normally about but for other things, for their stories their experiences of public services or their experiences of the world and how government regulation could perhaps maybe improve that this is a slightly old example of a consultation I worked on when I worked at the Department for Business where we tried to do some of that we tried to unpack a consultation about the regulation of store cards we tried to get rid of video from the Minister but we actually also had a plain English version so the policy team were willing to have us fiddle with their words and translate 100 pages into 10 pages to turn their policy proposals into a poll people could take part in if they wanted to just nip in and nip out but the single most interesting thing I think about this was the stories that came out of it and they were people like this so people who would never normally take part in the government consultation people like Ross coming in and saying I was managing okay I was helping to pay off some family debts but then there was a dramatic change and now I'm down to my last dregs I realised I should have taken out a fixed rate blah blah blah and this was the kind of story which in the old days perhaps this would have come out in a focus group but government doesn't do focus groups these days and these are the kind of first hand stories which is very hard government departments are often quite insulated from the effect of their policies and the powerful opportunities from technologies to bring those stories out they don't have to be written stories they can be visual stories this is a picture of the partner of somebody who's just gone back to Afghanistan on active duty and she's using a service on the phone called Instagram to take a picture of in this case something that's meaningful to her this is her state of mind this is how she feels about her partner going back she's missing him it's quite a powerful thing to have around the office what it means to be a business what it means to be a teacher what it means to be a student applying to higher education in the same way that GDS walls are covered in pictures of what they're doing and their users the ability to do the same on the walls of policy teams to visualise the impact of policy as well as making an analytical exercise and I mentioned GDS the GDS approach of using user stories to guide development and principle couldn't be applied to the design of how the public is engaged in policy making I think it would be a really good way to try and bring that out third idea is potentially to try and make policy making a bit more transparent and ideally radically transparent one slightly crazy idea would be for every policy team not just the progressive ones but every policy team to run a blog talking about what it's up to in the same way again that GDS and others run a blog 100 ambassadors around the world blogging about their work and they're not leaking state secrets they are talking about the work they're doing the people they're meeting the issues they're facing they're getting feedback in the comments from these people this is Matt Ball who's the ambassador to Somalia and his blog is incredible you can see here the second post down has tracked over a thousand comments because his blog has become a way to bring together quite a diverse range of people around the world who care about Somalia and they were missing this platform to bring it all together in a similar way in the context of Levison enquiry DCMS made their seminar series very transparent last year they published everything about them the agendas, the transcripts, the presentations who attended exactly what had been written about them they tried to make that entire process as transparent as they could in order to build trust in it and try and get some useful interaction going with people who weren't taking part in the events themselves fourth idea radical simplicity and this is where I sound like a GDS clone I'm certainly a big fan of a lot of what GDS is doing and no more so than in terms of how they rewrite content and how we rewrite policy content to appeal to a wider audience so this is an answer to the search question how much is that on the left is what HMRC will tell you on the right is what GOVUK will tell you and if you're coming to this cold you get a much, much clearer answer from GOVUK and I think the same can apply to lots of other policy areas too and finally I think the key thing is to think about humanity and the context in which people use technology you can post up all kinds of things on Facebook and Twitter but ultimately that stuff is mixed up with people's updates from their friends and you're competing with all kinds of other far more interesting things in those news feeds so one thing the fire brigade do brilliantly in London is to target their updates at young men so they are asking, they're talking to young men directly they're not telling them to check their smoke alarm they're showing them a picture of a hole in the floor and asking them what caused this fire and then they'll come back a day later and they'll answer the question in the meantime people have been trying to figure out was this a cigarette fire, was it something else if you can't be human partner with somebody who is the student room here is a great place for mature students to talk about what life's like at university Gav UK is a great place to put the official information about what you can get, the partnership between them can be really effective and finally I think one of the most dramatic examples of being human is the Obama campaign and the Obama campaign was driven by data and what you can see down there is the subject lines of messages sent out by email from the Obama campaign during that election and the things like hey hey again a loha meet me for dinner rain check, this is important I don't get to tell you this enough and you can imagine this is tested this is remarkable stuff to be getting from the office of the president of the United States and I imagine that some people raised eyebrows when this was proposed but you can imagine in the context of your email inbox getting these emails from somebody it's going to get you to open them and have a look at them and it's because you feel like you're talking to a human being and that's not the feeling you get when you read a 100 page PDF and as always as every good presentation should I think I've ended on the cat picture because one of the success areas that one of the most successful bits of content that number 10 have managed to produce in recent years is images and stories and the experiences of Larry the cat number 10's chief mouse capture and some of the material that him and his first anniversary at number 10 him sitting on the cabinet table as he is there stories about him where he comes from all that kind of stuff is what gets real engagement with their content and you could think we just ended back up on trifle again here we just pumping out stuff for the sake of it well I think what the opportunity here is to actually show that there are people there are human beings behind this policy making process and there is something we can do to engage with them and that Larry may be the hook into debates about something a bit more deep and profound so I think it's worth bothering thank you very much


ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Good day everybody from San Francisco, awesome city. We heard Frank Slutman talking in this keynote about the area, the San Francisco, the gold rush of California. We're seeing a gold rush of innovation. We're in the heart of innovation here in San Francisco and close to Silicon Valley. And we've been chatting all week and we're going through tomorrow through Wednesday at ServiceNow Knowledge. Walker White of Ceres, the Chief Technology Officer at BDNA, who's a partner of ServiceNow and experts in ITSM and CMDB and all the cool buzzwords in this space. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Thank you very much, Dave. We appreciate the opportunity to be here today. So Walker, tell us a little bit about BDNA, what you guys do and maybe a little bit about your role. Sure, absolutely. So I'm the Chief Technology Officer for BDNA. I've been with BDNA basically since we began. And BDNA is basically a data platform. We serve the role of consolidating and standardizing information from the various operational tools that are in the environment. And systems like ServiceNow, which are working to standardize and consolidate processes where they have these common data models, we feed in common data into those systems. So it's a very core platform. If you have to look for an analogy, it would be, we do for data what Java did for cross-platform development. We hide the complexity of all the information. We standardize it to a reference model and feed it into systems that require it. So how does that relate to this notion of a single source of record, CMDB? Are you ultimately that single source of record? It's a great question, Dave. But in fact, what BDNA is doing is ServiceNow is providing the service-oriented enterprise. They're consolidating and standardizing processes. They have a common data model. The problem is we want to get common data into that model. So the problem that they face, they're kind of threefold. You've got vendors without good information, good standards about their data. The data that they're providing is cryptic and very hard to understand. And then you've got the market velocity on top of it. So BDNA brings a catalog, an engine to normalize data to that catalog and processes that keep that information in sync with one another. So our customers get the benefit of basically improved efficiency and lowering costs, every process, improved decision-making in those processes, and improving decision-making. We're really resolving the garbage-in-garbage-out problems. So we're giving people really good data to drive these processes. So let me give you a couple numbers. 50% of our customers achieve full ROI with our solution in the first month. 75% of our customers achieve full ROI in the first six months. First month. First month, 50%. Raise your rates. So 75% in the first six months, 90% in the first year. 66% of our customers get a more than 200% ROI on our solution in the first year. And these are audited numbers, not taken by us by a third party that interviews our customers. What's the biggest driver of the ROI? Improving the decision, the quality of the information, right? So I mean, imagine the problem you would have, which is we have data, think about all the processes you're implementing in ServiceNow. You've got incident, problem, change, asset, configuration. We're feeding information in there, but if they don't have good information to act upon, all of those things start to break down. So imagine like the legacy systems where you had, some data over here for assets, some over here for configuration. ServiceNow's consolidate all that, and that's great, right? But now, if you get bad data in one place, it's going to percolate through everything. I love this discussion. It's like I said, it's an information quality. It's a data quality. You guys are like the data czar, if you will, right? And it's not something that we've talked a lot about here. We talk about it a lot at other conferences, particularly big data conferences, right? Because big data, this is so much data, you're now we're further away from the single version of the truth than we ever were. But despite the fact that you've got a single data model, you've got multiple data sources. And even, I mean, what percent of the customers that you talk to really truly have a single CMDB? Well, they will often have a single CMDB, but the data in there is not, they know what it is, right? They understand, kind of take it for what it is. So again, it's that problem. The vendors have no standards, right? The data that they do provide is cryptic, right? In the market velocity. I mean, this is the three horsemen of the bad data apocalypse, right? They just, you can't get good information on this way. So by filtering this information, eliminating the duplication, aligning it to a reference catalog, we're basically solving the garbage in, garbage out problem for ServiceNow and other processes and platforms that demand it. You know, this again leads to an interesting discussion of roles. I called you guys the data czar, but really there's a role emerging within organizations, certainly within regulated industries like financial services and healthcare and government and even big pharma, where there's a chief data officer emerging, independent of the CIO, often, more often than not, at least in those industries. But broadly, that's not the case. It's sort of part of the CIO's, you know, purview or maybe it's even a governance or audit type of thing. What do you see there is that role? Do you see that chief data officer, data czar emerging?  Yeah, absolutely. We obviously see, you know, it's something, I've read the studies, it's like 25% of Fortune 500 will have a CDO at the end of this year, this calendar year. I mean, that's a great target for us, it's a great person to talk to. And I think that, you know, from our perspective, being able to gain access to that individual and make them aware of the fact that the data that already exists in their environment, if we can be cleaned, if it can be filtered, if it can be duplicated, is likely all the information they need to be successful. So that's really where we're, it's a great opportunity for us.  MIT does a lot of work in this area. In fact, we in July will be at the MIT Chief Data Officer Conference in Information Quality. And it's really, they're doing a lot of interesting research there. You should, you know, check that out. So, okay, so the problem you're solving is really a data quality one, but you've still got all these disparate systems, right? So even with the disparate systems, can you take us through sort of an example as to how you, from a data standpoint, attack that problem? Sure, so let's give you one quick example, which is the Heartbleed Vulnerability, which just came out. So if you look into our solution, Jeff, for example, for the Heartbleed, we represent or have in our catalog 2,087 distinct ways that OpenSSL has been represented across these 40 different tools. So what do you think the chances are for all those entities that are out there that have tried to figure out what their OpenSSL exposure is, that they've caught all 2,087, right? The chances are slim to none, right? And Slim just got on a bus leaving the Moscone Center, right? There's no chance, there's no chance they're getting that information, so. So by basically having seen literally hundreds of millions and billions of rows of data and deterministically being able to say, this thing that your operational tool is handing me is actually this thing in our catalog and then being able to enrich that with nondiscoverable market information, that's a really powerful solution. Who's not a prospect for what you do? Who doesn't need a better day to call me? Someone asked this question, it's like what's the best ITIL process to use this for? And it's kind of like asking ServiceNow, the question of which process do you really want to automate? And the answer is, yes, right? There really is, what is wonderful about being this data platform is everyone has the same problem, right? They're all using the same tools to collect the information. They all want to feed that information into the same tools on the other side, but the garbage and Carbachow problem is just following them everywhere they go. And if you don't solve this problem upstream of where the issues are, it's going to percolate into every process, right? And that's going to drive down the ROI of all those solutions. What point do you get involved in ITSM projects? So people come to BDNA when they have one of three problems. They either come to us where they have a process problem, they have a project problem, or they have a data problem. And to be perfectly honest, the ones in the worst situation are those that arrive with a process problem, right? My CMDB has bad data, we're getting outages because we can't track what's going on. A little bit more mature customers will catch us at the project problem, right?  I just can't see it. I've got eight tools collecting data and it's all over the map. But the really mature customers come to us when they see the data problem. And this is why the chief data officer is going to be so valuable to BDNA because you'll have somebody whose curview will be looking at the Software Asset Management Initiative is going on and these guys are trying to clean up this data. Over here in Enterprise Architecture, I got another guy who's trying to build life cycle information. And over here in the CMDB, I'm trying to clean up, you know, other data still, right? And someone with that curview could be like, this is all the same problem, right? In various manifestations. So let's industrialize the solution to that and that's where we come in. That's where you get a data platform. Yes, that's interesting. So process, project, data, process, it's like, oh, that's a mess and it's broken. Projects sort of tactical, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm risking an Oracle audit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Help me. Yeah, exactly. We get a lot of those goals. You should have talked to Benioff. He had to spend about 900 million to solve his audit. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of threat problems. That's 900 million between friends, right? Yeah, that's true. And when those friends are billionaires. Yeah, exactly. But the data problem is really the opportunity. Oh yeah. Right, because that's where all the value creation comes from. Can you share with us some examples of folks that are that far down the maturity curve that are actually, we're hearing a big theme this week at the conference about turning IT cost into a value generation. Can you talk about concrete examples that you mentioned ROI before, people driving sort of that type of value with that single data platform? Yeah, so a good example of this. We have a, this is a federal customer. So we started with this customer with enterprise architects, right? So IT planners. And their idea was like, we need a catalog. And so we provided our catalog and they started using our nomenclature for planning tools. Like what are we going to deploy? What are we going to use and so on? Their software asset management team got wind of that and said, hey, that's a great way to represent your data. So let's normalize our data to this same language. Therefore, from an EA perspective, what you guys are planning is what we're deploying, right? And then finally, the procurement team got a hell of it and said, well, now that we know you're buying it in this manner, let's, or excuse me, now that we know you're deploying it with this language, let's rationalize all of our purchases to the same language, right? But then the CIO sees these three projects all in one organization and they're like, wait a minute, if we get every project to use this language, right? We're going to get rid of the frictional cost in the entity, which is that the EA guys having a different language than the SAM guys, than the procurement guys and on down the line. So once they bring that up to an enterprise level, you really get the accelerators. There's the force multiplier basically of using it across many, many more processes.  You sell a combination of technology and services? We have a solution which is our data platform, which is either an on-premise solution or a hosted or a hosted cloud solution. The only services we provide are for the implementation of our technology and the integration of that technology into things like ServiceNow and so on. Okay, so you're essentially a software company? We are a software company and Frank, you know, we're, you know, here at, well at Knowledge 13 here, 14, you know, we're a partner of ServiceNow, obviously as you mentioned at the beginning of this, but we're also a design partner in the design partner program with ServiceNow and the only ISV that's ever been in that program, which is typically allocated solely for customers. And the reason is that we're solving such a fundamental problem that we're really down in the fabric of the ServiceNow platform and the other platforms that we do this for. Now, yeah, so you're, I guess the concept, platform agnostic, right?  Yes, we are. All right, but do you have like a favorite child that you don't want to tell the others about? Not when I'm sitting at the Knowledge 14. You know, you don't have to answer that. Walker, it strikes me, this sounds like a massively giant problem, far outside the scope of just the ServiceNow implementation. Oh yeah, yeah, it's a huge problem. I think it, you know, the integration with ServiceNow, obviously, is just very elegant, right? They've got a brilliant, you know, common data model, you know, they just need common data for it, so the integration is very elegant, but I think the problem, it goes far beyond IT and this is where, from a trajectory standpoint, the medium A looks at the world, is that you can take this problem and it is a very small subset of the problem faced in medical devices. It is a very small subset of the problem faced in industrial equipment and then onto into the Internet of Things. Right, yeah, as I said, you know, big data and then, oh my God, the Internet of Things is right around the corner. Absolutely, and for us, it's just, it's all ones and zeros. They all have to do the same thing. I got a bunch of stuff, I got a reference architecture, I want to enrich it with, you know, in medical devices, it would be, you know, country of origin, FDA compliance as opposed to end-of-life dates and, you know, not a little wattage, but it's the exact same problem all over again, it's just ones and zeros, so. Can you talk about your technology a little bit, Fred, I love Fred Lutty, he talks about how, you know, technology should be like magic, you know. Yeah. So what's your magic, what's your secret sauce? Because the problem you're solving is very difficult. Yeah, so, you know, primarily, you have to look at kind of the history of BDNA is that the first thing we did was to develop this catalog, right? So we said, look, let's figure out what the world, what's the locus of the problem? So we enumerated, basically, every piece of hardware inversion in addition and we put that into a taxonomy and we shared that with customers, they said, wow, this is great, this is really, this is fantastic and I would tell you that as our Chief Technology Officer the greatest piece of intellectual property that we have is our ability to create, manage and curate that content at the rate of market change, right, we make about a thousand changes every day to that catalog. So. Actual hardware devices and software. Net new devices, new attributes about devices, M&A activity, you know, IBM pushes out a new release of a new piece of software that has to be enumerated and captured in technopedia in our catalog. So. It's like the master catalog. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And then, so after building that catalog, the customers were like, look, I love this catalog. Problem is, I've got all these tools and I can't align those tools to that catalog. So, how can you help me? And we said, well, we have this normalization solution that will basically take your data and translate it to this language. And then once it's translated to that language it's available to be consumed by virtually any downstream system. So, yeah, that's kind of the secret. Okay, and then when you implement it does a discovery. No, well we actually take data from existing solutions. From existing discovery solutions, okay. And then normalize it. So you're tapping into the cost, you're tapping into the cost and the effort and the skills and you know, all the vested interests that they have in the existing tools. So we just take that data out, clean it up and send it on its way. And where does it go? Anywhere. It can go into a CMDB. Exactly. Okay. So if you look again at our most.  Yeah, exactly. If you look at our most mature customers they'll have, you know, 10, 12 sources. Then they'll have our data platform and then they'll have that data will be going out into EA solutions, software asset management solutions, CMDBs. It will be go basically anywhere it needs to go but it all runs through this, right? It's a data platform just like Java is for, you know. Yeah, okay. Multilingual translator. Exactly. It's a Rosetta Stone.  Beautiful. All right Walker, we have to leave it there. We've got the next guest is here. Plains are backing up as they say. We've been going wall to wall here for two days. Thanks very much. Great, we appreciate the time. I appreciate the time. And congratulations. Thank you very much. Good luck. All right, keep it right there everybody. Jeff Frick and I will be right back after this.


So it's been a while since I've done one of these vids but I haven't asked this question a few times now and I figured instead of just typing out the same response a hundred times I'll just make a video explaining it once and for all. So to the question of do I accept freelance commissions the short answer is yes it's not my main focus but it is something I do I generally charge the industry standard which is about $35 an hour but I only accept jobs if I think they are within my art style which is stylized medieval fantasy photo realism and I don't make faces I make parts armor weapons clothes that's it I spent a lot of time creating a base body for a male knight a base body for a female knight both of which are designed specifically for the Unreal 5 mannequins and I use those for all of my characters at this point all I do now is create different sets of armor weapons clothing crowns helmets sometimes hair but not faces they take too long they eat up a lot of resources in Unreal 5 and this is actually why the vast majority of my characters have always worn masks or helmets or visors or something covering their face so if you want props armor weapons clothes or any hard surface thing really then I generally charge about 250 per part which is the cost of modeling retropology UV mapping and texturing and a part is generally something like a helmet or an axe or a sword or shoulder or torso armor usually it takes me about three to five days to finish a job and if you just want a texture job for example you already have the 3d model and you just need it textured then that's just going to be about 150 but if you want your stuff to have custom colorization based texturing meaning you want to bring it to Unreal and you want to be able to change the color of the different sections without having to go back and adjust the texture map that's a lot more work it requires a lot of planning color id maps color masks custom created materials so that usually runs about 500 per part it usually takes about a week or a week and a half the way this works is before any work happens you email me at the royal skies at outlook.com with the title commission every commission starts out as a consultation which is 120 bucks once I receive and can verify the 120 through PayPal then I reserve a slot of time for you so that we can schedule a discord call this call usually lasts about 30 minutes to an hour and the purpose of it is to hear exactly what you need and to figure out exactly how complex and doable the job is the consultation usually lasts about 30 minutes to an hour at the end of it I'll give you a flat price for how much I think it'll cost for the job and the reason I do a flat price instead of by hourly is because I really hate the little game that freelancers and employers play when it comes down to payment if you're an employer paying by the hour it actually incentivizes the freelancer to stretch out the job as long as possible so they can suck out as much money from you as they can I think this is dumb unnecessary and a really unhealthy relationship between the freelancer and the client so to avoid all that I just do a flat price because when we agree on a flat price you as the client know that it is in my best interest to finish the job for you as fast as possible this way nobody's playing any games you get your service done more quickly I get paid and everyone's happy now if you hire me I treat the consultation fee as your down payment for the service so let's say you hire me to texture a helmet for you which is generally about 150 bucks but you already paid 120 for the consultation so I will subtract the consultation fee from the job fees so you really only have to pay me an extra 30 bucks when I'm done to receive the file I think that's fair because the point of the consultation is really just to let me know that you're a real person who's serious about wanting quality service for quality pricing and I do technically also offer rigging services but I'll tell you right now it's a shitload of work most people come to me asking me to rig their character for a game animation and the topology is messed up the UVs don't exist the textures need to be redone and when you put all that time together a typical rigging job easily runs about two to four thousand dollars so I only rig Unreal 5 characters and I only work with Maya and Cascader so if you are interested in any of those services you know where to find me and how it works I hope that clears things up I'll see you in the next video and as always hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around