GovExec TV: A Conversation with PagerDuty's Jennifer Tejada

Thank you for having me, George. It's wonderful to be here today.

PagerDuty is a public software company. We were a cloud-native platform founded in 2009. And essentially what we do is we use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help our customers automate the process of detecting problems anywhere in their tech stack or applications, orchestrating those problems to the right people in order for those teams to focus on triaging those issues and resolving them before they become big issues for customers or citizens, as is the case in the federal government. We work a lot with software developers and one of the things we know from studying and talking to developers over time is that developers spend about 60% of their time fixing broken technology instead of developing products and services, innovating, and shipping code on behalf of their end user. And like I said, in the public sector that is the citizen. And so one of the things that we've always worked to do is automate the way our customers operate in service of them being able to innovate more readily and more often.

Yeah, it's a pretty horizontal offering in that every organization, every agency has a critical mission that they're trying to deliver on and they're relying heavily on technology to deliver that mission in a way that their citizens or their constituents expect. When it doesn't go well, it leaves that citizen unhappy. It leaves somebody unable to access their health care benefits, unable to access potentially their tax payments, or in other cases could even create danger for war fighters. And so I think it's really important to think about that while we're trying to modernize our technology environments, we also have to modernize the way we operate. And that means embracing automation to do some of the heavy lifting or some of the menial tasks that consume the time of talented technology leaders or technology workers, developers, individuals so that they can actually build better services for citizens in the community that they're serving. If you think about it, you start every day as an agency with thousands of items on your to-do list. Could artificial intelligence, could automation take care of some of those tactical items to free your agency staff up to do the most important work to ensure you deliver the most critical elements of your mission. And you know, PagerDuty being born in the cloud and natively leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning on a proprietary foundational data set enables us to not only support humans in doing higher order work through automation, but also help them to make better, faster decisions in those moments that matter for their citizens when they're interacting with the agency of choice.

Well, we're seeing just about every agency we work with looking for ways to become immediately more efficient, to modernize and consolidate their operations such that they can deliver on the mission on a lower cost base. And at the same time they have the challenge of modernizing their technology to reduce the fragility of that tech stack, make it more resilient, make sure it's more available for citizens and make sure they can still provide the services that matter for citizens because that is the mission for the federal government. We also work closely with state, local government and education. And we've seen the ability through automation, through the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to deliver more than a 290% return on investment with a pretty seamless platform that's hosted in the cloud that's easy to use, easy to deploy, and easy to get value because it reduces the noise coming at individuals. All the different alerts and alarms that tell somebody that something's wrong and points them or orchestrates them to the challenges or the opportunities in their tech environment that really matter in either getting in the way of that mission being delivered or in reducing the reliability of critical services that citizens or users expect and rely on. And in doing that, you help users manage things like context switching. You know, if you're working in a citizen service environment in one platform and you have to switch to see what's going on with a failing product or service into another platform and then work in your local laptop or desktop to try and troubleshoot something, it's very time consuming. These are very stressful moments where there's an outage that is potentially public or causing a lot of complaints or causing longer hold times. And PagerDuty is seamlessly integrated into the platforms that our users are used to working in and reduces that context switching, but helps them get back to work on the things that matter quickly, but also helps citizens get back engaged and complete the transaction that they're trying to work through with the agency that they're working with at the moment.