When Barry Libenson, the CIO at Land O'Lakes Inc., a cooperative with 9,000 employees, took his job several years ago, one of things he found was a service desk nobody really liked. The help desk used an old Lotus Notes application to keep track of issues. The core team believed the tools were terrible and there was a backlog of 3,000 open tickets that could take days to weeks to resolve.

The system made no sense to Libenson, especially considering the money that Land O'Lakes was investing in a new ERP system.

"You wouldn't take a Ferrari to get repaired by the corner mechanic," he said, explaining the help desk mismatch he found.

Libenson switched his help desk to ServiceNow, a cloud-based service, and reduced the backlog to about 200 open tickets and response time from days to hours. "We really felt that this was the ideal application environment to put in the cloud," said Libenson.

The company has been using the service for the past year. About 40% of the applications used by Land O'Lakes are now delivered via the cloud.