What matters most when it comes to providing the better experiences for our citizens? Listen as Jonathan Alboum of ServiceNow outlines the importance of preventing information from getting lost in the sea of data. Episode Table of Contents[00:45] Moving Fully Into Better Experiences [09:15] Providing Better Experiences More Effectively [14:41] A Control Tower Approach Episode Links and Resources

Moving Fully Into Better ExperiencesCarolyn: We're excited to have Jonathan Alboum, who is the federal CTO of ServiceNow. He was formerly the CIO of the U.S. Department of Agriculture before moving fully into the service industry in 2019. I don't like that term, "moving fully into the service industry". When I read through your bio, I feel like you've been in the service industry your whole career. Jonathan: Good point, I began my career after college. I went to UVA, same place that Mark went to school, but he went a few years before I did. Mark: You had to point that out Jonathan, thank you. Jonathan: He went when it was really, really fun. I went when it was just fun. But you know, when I exited college with a systems engineering degree, I joined a professional services firm. I worked at Pricewaterhouse and I learned management consulting, and we were doing services. We were implementing systems and different technologies for customers. Eventually, I moved to a smaller company. I was working on the same kinds of projects, doing professional services, helping organizations do modernization. We weren't focused on this big grandiose term of IT modernization or digital transformation, which were the same kinds of things we were doing. We wanted people to have better access to data and systems so things could happen more efficiently.It's the same kinds of things we're doing today, even if we use different words. I was in a service role before the government. When I joined the government at the food and nutrition service part of USDA versus the deputy CIO and then the CIO for that agency. Providing a Strong Service and Better ExperiencesJonathan: We're a service provider to the programs at the food and nutrition service. So if the office of information technology at food and nutrition that I was responsible for wasn't providing a strong service, the programs would find another way to get their job done. We could be shut out of that conversation. That's a terrible place for a CIO to be at. Cut out of the technology or the core business processes or the budget. So I always had a strong focus on service and that reality continued through my career. As I moved to general services administration, or back to the department of agriculture, to be the CIO for the entirety of the department, you have to be able to provide a service. I eventually exited government and found my way to ServiceNow. I’d say the lessons I learned along the way are in terms of what it takes to provide a service that people want to use, and that they will partner with you on. Those things really informed the way I go about doing my job at ServiceNow. ServiceNow, it's a technology provider that supports this idea of service management. It's not customer relationship management. We have tools for that, but you have customers, you want to provide them a service. Well, you have to think about the end to end workflow. How does the person interact with the system and what are they trying to get out of it? You think about it comprehensively. I feel like I'm well positioned to do that based on these other roles that I've had. I've either been the creator of a service or the provider of the service. Now I can really think about it in a holistic manner.A Pioneer of Digital TransformationCarolyn: I like what you said about digital transformation. We didn't call it that at the beginning of your career, but really you're a pioneer of digital transformation. So not to call you old. You've really built your career, figuring out how to make things better and faster...