Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #38: The DEX Maturity... Dialectic

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Reality Bytes #38: The DEX Maturity... Dialectic · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:07
Let's get into it. Hello, change Makers. You know what it
0:11
is. It's reality by its show within a show within a show where reality
0:17
bites panelists get to talk to fascinating colleagues, fascinating next thinkers. And we
0:22
have a wonderful next thinker for you today. His name is John Cairns.
0:26
He's senior vice president for Technical Services and it is a testament to how many
0:32
interesting and insightful people people there are in this company. But I hadn't thought
0:36
of inviting John on reality bikees up until this point until I saw a fantastic
0:41
presentation from him in Barcelona, And for why on earth haven't I done this
0:46
yet? John, Welcome to the show for the first time. It's lovely
0:48
to have you. Thank you, an absolute pleasure to be here. Tom
0:51
as well, excellent, excellent listen. You know a lot of Next thinkers
0:56
are going to know who you are, and fair few customers I expect as
0:59
well. But for for anybody who doesn't out there in the listening audience,
1:03
please tell them a bit about yourself and what you oversee here. My friend,
1:06
No, absolutely so. As you mentioned earlier. I mean my official
1:10
job title, I guess is SVP of Technical Services, which sounds a bit
1:15
ominous, I think, is one way of putting it. But really what
1:18
I do I lead the pre sales teams. I lead our consultancy teams and
1:22
also our CSM teams. This global organization, we've got everyone from kind of
1:26
the West coast of the US down to Melbourne in Australia. But one thing
1:30
I did joke about our sales kickoff the other week, Tom was really that
1:34
I kind of sometimes think that I should change my job title would be the
1:37
head of Happy Customers. Ah, yes, he did. Yeah, Well
1:42
that's really, you know, the outcome that I'm trying to help me and
1:45
my team are trying to achieve. The next think. You know, if
1:48
it's the sees working during the sales cycle with potential customers making sure they're happy,
1:53
or even if it's with the CSMs and our professional services organization workers or
1:57
our existing customers to get them happy, that's what I do. I help
2:00
customers be happy, I guess is the easiest way of thinking about it.
2:02
You delight them, John, You delight I tried to. I think there
2:07
would both be a really cool job title, and it make it look a
2:09
little bit like you worked in McDonald's, you know what I mean, A
2:12
little bit a little bit of both, a little bit of both, and
2:15
you've been I may have done that before, but I'm not going into that
2:20
right now. We've all shoveled, we've all shoveled the friars at times,
2:23
we've How did you get that? Pertinent to my next quick question, John,
2:29
which is, you know you've been here longer than I have, by
2:31
I think a fair way. What was the road that brought you to?
2:35
Next thing? I think I think whenever I talk about my career, I
2:39
always kind of say, it's it's almost been a game of three halfs.
2:43
If I can use that analogy, I don't think it works by going We'll
2:46
stick with it. It does in my mind though. But the first half
2:51
was very, very technical. You know, I was an engineer. Actually,
2:53
I was writing code, believe it or not, for software, credit
2:57
card authorization systems and things like that, and showing my age. I was
3:00
writing code on Unix green screens using Visor text editor and send break points in
3:05
it. That really does show my age. But this was back in the
3:07
day before there were fancy things like IDs that made it easier than that.
3:12
But that was kind of the first half. The second half was very much
3:15
McDonald as we've covered. No, I'm not talking about that. Like I
3:19
said, the second half was more like leading sales, leading marketing teams,
3:24
being a sales leader, being a marketing leader, believe it or not.
3:27
And then the third half was where I already found that sweet spot, which
3:30
for me is that customer facing technical functions like pre sales, like professional services
3:36
like CSMs, where I could actually leverage that technical knowledge but also that,
3:42
you know, how do I talk to people and explain that knowledge at the
3:44
same time, And that's really been the sweet spot. Ended up at a
3:46
bunch of large American enterprise software companies working in like cybersecurity, virtualization, and
3:53
then delighted to find my way to Mexic where you make a famous contribution.
3:59
And if I could just say, it's rare you get to use this word,
4:00
but there's actually a word for what you just described, where you have
4:03
a one thing and then the opposite them in a combination, and that is
4:08
a dialectic what a what a lovely and posh word that I rarely get to
4:12
use here on the deck show, So forgive me, forgive me that moment
4:15
of pretention everybody, and let's get into the main theme for the discussion John,
4:19
which is at KO Barcelona. One of your your your your main discussion
4:25
points on the stage fantastic presentation, as I've already said, was around DEX
4:30
maturity. So first of all, from what are the cultural components from your
4:36
your your very first hand experience for successful application of DEX in an organization.
4:43
And I know you'll have seen it done very very well and perhaps not so
4:46
well at times, so you must have some some real insights there. Love
4:49
to hear what they are first, first and foremost. Yeah, No,
4:53
I think I think that one of the key things is we all need to
4:56
be realistic. You know, this isn't an industry where you can just install
5:00
all the software and it goes away and everything works fine and you don't need
5:02
to do anything else, and you do need to build people around it,
5:06
and you need to build process around it. Okay, And certainly that's kind
5:11
of what we've been helping focus on to get our customers to that happy state.
5:15
You know, it's not just about configuring and using what we provide,
5:18
but it's about how we build that deckkops team around it. How do we
5:21
hire the people with the right skill set, you know, how do we
5:25
embed decks into our existing processes, how do we create new processes around deck?
5:29
And we put a lot of thought and effort into that. And I
5:31
think the way we were talking about it the other week at kickoff is we
5:34
have to really get back to employees themselves and they're kind of interaction with it
5:41
and with technology. So, you know, I'm kind of a happy employee.
5:44
I'm going along doing my job. Everything's fantastic, and then suddenly I
5:48
have this kind of disruption event and experienced disruption event. So maybe my team's
5:53
call quality isn't great, maybe my Wi Fi is a lagging a little bit,
5:57
or is it an application that crashes annoys me, It disturbs my experience,
6:02
it stops me being productive. It's not kind of bad enough for me
6:06
to call the help desdeh And I'm kind of trying to live with it and
6:09
fix it myself. And then it gets to the point where I actually open
6:13
a ticket. At that point in time, I'm just annoyed about the whole
6:15
thing. You know, this is where traditional service desk I TSM kind of
6:17
technology kicks in. Very few employees get to that point, but when they
6:24
do, they're not in a good place. Okay, So when we think
6:27
about maturity, we really think about those three different aspects. The first one,
6:30
you know, an employees opened a ticket. Everyone's reactive at that point
6:34
in time. We need to use decks to help them almost be more than
6:39
reactive. Reactive plus okay, we can use deck technologies to actually help them
6:43
understand the help desk understand exactly what's happened with that employee. You know,
6:46
where should they look? How can they fix it in a much more reactive
6:49
way, but doing it in a much more efficient way than they could do
6:53
in the past. But ultimately, with decks, what we want to do
6:56
is get before that. We want to get them to be proactive. Let's
6:59
get ahead of it for employees even open tickets. So you know, when
7:02
we start seeing those experienced disruption events with one or two employees, hopefully we
7:08
can get ahead of that and stop those disruption events happening for hundreds or thousands
7:12
of employees. And that's a massive multiplier. But then the final stage is
7:15
really get to preventive. You know, get ahead of those disruption events before
7:19
they can even happen, and when you get there, that's kind of a
7:23
thousand times multiplier. If you can make sure that you know, the digital
7:27
workplace that's been provided never has any challenges, and you're in front of them
7:31
before those challenges happen, then you don't actually have employees being disrupted. You
7:36
don't potentially actually have employees opening tickets at that point in time because they don't
7:41
need to. And really that's kind of our core focus is how do we
7:44
help our customers move through that maturity? How do we help them build the
7:47
right teams, build the right process around it to enable them to get to
7:51
that preventative state as quickly as possible. So, John, our organization is
7:58
obviously intrinsically linked to customer success. What's been the history of your engagement in
8:03
this theme and how has it emerged in practice and how has your view of
8:07
it evolved across the years. Well, first off, Hey, I didn't
8:11
know you're on the current good to hear from you idea. This is my
8:18
life. You know we joined Ida and Sean today. I'll pre warn you
8:24
about Sean. Sorry, I'm waiting for my like I don't know like my
8:28
brother to come out in a minute and ask me a question about like that.
8:35
So, yeah, customer success, I mean I would say, you
8:39
know, the phrase customer success can be viewed as one of those misused words
8:43
in the industry of the moment. It's a bit like AI. It's a
8:46
bit like cloud as well. You know, if I want to make millions
8:48
of dollars, I'm going to start a customer success firm that uses AI in
8:52
the cloud, and I'll float it and make millions. Believe me, because
8:54
it's the best buzzwords ever. Right, I was going to bring you into
9:00
it, Tom, But I think you know, customers if you think about
9:05
what we're talking about there, Like, customers don't buy technology, okay,
9:09
they don't buy products that they buy based on the promise of business outcomes is
9:16
what they do, and the business outcomes really need to drive value. Okay.
9:20
Now I use the word value carefully, as when you say that,
9:26
everyone sort of goes, you know, show me your ROI spreadsheet. I
9:28
want to look at the TCO and things like that. Value isn't necessarily always
9:33
an ROI TCO spreadsheet, you know, sometimes people want to look at saving
9:37
it time becoming more efficient in it, reducing tickets and things like that,
9:43
reducing the cost of it. Sometimes people want to look at saving employee time.
9:48
If you look at like the big consultancy firm, law firms, anyone
9:52
that has knowledge workers that are billing for their time or generating value from it
9:56
for them, their currency of value is very much about let's remove those digital
10:00
distractions from those employees. It's not necessarily about reducing it costs at that point
10:03
in time. Some people want to increase the speed and success of their digital
10:07
transformation. So there's a long answer to your question, Dina, Actually,
10:11
but I'm passionate about it. I think for me, customer success is very
10:16
very easy to say. It's about, first off, understanding the business outcomes
10:20
that customers want to achieve, and also how they need to measure the value
10:26
and then delivering against that. And I guess I've seen many other sort of
10:30
CS teams at other organizations saying we need to focus on adoption less track of
10:33
the customers using the shiny new widget or not. None of that matters at
10:37
all. You know, technology focus does not matter. It matters if they're
10:41
getting the customers getting the business outcome from the technology and they understand the value
10:46
to them, And in my mind, that's what customer success is. Really
10:52
totally agree And what do the analysts say about this topic that really stands out
10:58
to you is they're are thinking more or less aligned to our mindset. That's
11:05
a good question, you know. I do think that the reality is we've
11:09
we've got, at next thing, you know, the largest team of Dex
11:13
maturity experts in the world. Okay, we've We've got over two hundred people
11:16
whose only focus is to help customers execute against their DEX strategy and build their
11:22
maturity and be successful and with our customers. We've also got the largest kind
11:26
of Dex community in the world of customers that share their best practice and knowledge
11:31
between themselves as well. So I guess my answer to the question is the
11:35
analyst view is very aligned to ours, because the reality is the analysts are
11:39
asking our customers how they build DEX maturity, and they're sharing all the great
11:43
work that we've done to help them achieve that. So I think it is
11:46
very aligned to what we're saying because they're learning from what we've done. So
11:50
absolutely, Hey, John Sean, Sean as a going pretty good, pretty
12:00
good it's nice to hear your voice again and see your face. I had
12:03
I have a question, so I know, you know DEX maturity when I
12:07
started a couple of years I think Tom and I started around the same time,
12:09
around four years ago. When you talk about DEX maturity, that's something
12:13
we've been advocating to customers pretty consistently for years. But I do feel like
12:18
there's there's previously been a sense that maybe the market wasn't quite ready for it
12:22
back then. Do you think this has changed, and if so, why
12:26
now? Yeah, No, it's it's a good question, actually, and
12:31
I think the answer is yes, absolutely. I think you know, everyone
12:35
in the world in this industry has really starting to see the benefits and the
12:39
value of adopting that DEX mindset. You know, if he if he well
12:45
a bit of a history lesson here again, I'm going to show my age
12:48
because I know none of Tom won't recognize any of this, but you know,
12:50
he's a lot of big words apparently, let's see. But if you
12:54
like the whole of I s if you think about it, they've kind of
12:58
really been focused on until itsm service desk for the last thirty years, is
13:03
what they've done, so ITILL itself. So you go, Tom, do
13:07
you know where ITIL came from? The ITEL framework? No good, Okay.
13:13
So ITEL was developed actually in the late eighties early nineties by the UK
13:16
government. It's actually ITEL is a UK government framework that they developed and they
13:22
developed it to standardize how it management is performed across different government functions in the
13:30
UK government is what they did. So that's where it comes from. That
13:33
whole concept of ITEL, ITSM and things like another British government success story,
13:39
John No exactly thirty years ago the people are still and it was great.
13:45
Don't get me wrong. I was actually working in the industry. I was
13:46
working for probably the largest service desk software vendor at that time in the industry.
13:52
So I remember when ITOL came about and embedding it in service desk process
13:56
and it was great. It was absolutely the right thing at the time.
14:01
But the whole concept of that was really focused on the fact that the service
14:05
desk is the only way that we can know of employees are experiencing issues and
14:11
fix them is if they call us. You know, that's the whole concept.
14:15
You have to call us to tell as you're having an issue, let's
14:16
try and fix it. But the problem is they don't call. We know
14:20
that, and where they do call, it's almost too late. So it's
14:24
really just not the world we live in today. So kind of as I
14:26
talked about earlier, you know, with decks, you can see those issues
14:31
before they lead to any disruption, and you can fix them proactively. That's
14:33
what we're trying to achieve, and that's what everyone wants. You know,
14:37
no one wants to deal with unhappy employees who are forced to call the service
14:41
desk to get their issues resolved. So the industry is clearly moving away from
14:45
that reactive service desk approach to a proactive deck based approach, and I think
14:50
that's really the shift in the market that we've seen in the last few years.
14:56
Very cool. And then kind of to follow that in a thought,
15:00
so for a more explicit decks focus and trying to be proactive are what are
15:07
some of the main obstacles to embracing that type of ethos that type of philosophy.
15:13
What's keith and what's key for getting over those obstacles for any individual organization?
15:20
Yeah, I think the key thing for us is that it does need
15:22
to be a journey. Okay, so you know the maturity definition that I
15:28
touched on earlier. We have a lot of information behind that. We talk
15:31
about and the different structures you can make in your deskhop centers, the kind
15:35
of roles you need to have, the job descriptions, the process. There's
15:39
a lot of information behind that. But we also recognize that you can't consume
15:43
all of that in a week. You can't build a deskop steam in the
15:48
week, you can't hire all those people in a week. So we need
15:50
to think about this as a journey that we help our customers evolve along.
15:56
And the best analogy is kind of you know, the GPS or SAT there
15:58
in your car, your planning to drive between London and Manchester, or Boston,
16:03
New York, or Paris and Marseille, wherever you want to go.
16:06
You know where you're starting from, you know where your end destination needs to
16:11
be, but you need to have the SAT and ab GPS plan your journey
16:15
and also the stops that you want to make along the way. And that's
16:18
exactly kind of the pragmatic approach I think we need to take with decks.
16:22
You know, most people know the vision they want to get to proactive instant
16:26
avoidance. You know, employees not having any issues perfect it. They kind
16:30
of know where they're starting from, but we need to help them plan that
16:34
journey, and that journey really has to have stops along the way. They
16:37
need to be able to capture business outcomes and the value associated with it along
16:41
the way. And sometimes there's some low hanging fruit we can help them with,
16:45
like visibility or even ticket reduction as we help them on that journey to
16:49
proactive IT. And for me, it really has to be that pragmatic journey.
16:53
Pragmatic journey. Sorry, I'm struggling to say that word, Tom,
16:56
let alone the words you said earlier, let's alone, dialect dialectic. Yeah,
17:02
there you go. Everyone everyone's different, everyone's got a different journey,
17:08
everyone's got different timings they want to achieve. But it's very much about making
17:12
sure they can achieve those business outcomes and the time they want and the value
17:15
associated with it while they're heading towards that vision of proactive IT. Team.
17:21
Now, John, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but me and
17:22
you have a history of bumping into one another in airports and one time we
17:27
had one time we had the experience of just the most insane delays. We
17:33
were in a queue together for like two and three quarter hours or something that
17:37
was just going nowhere fast. And of course the reason we're the reason we
17:41
crossed passing airports is we're both English and we have a little ritual on these
17:47
episodes of reality Bites, if you will, where we invite guests to tell
17:51
us what they what they love about being a Next Thinker. And I will
17:53
concede that this kind of question to an English person, doesn't you know the
18:00
answer? You know, a little awkward, a little awkward. We don't.
18:03
We don't thrive with these kind of questions, but I you know,
18:04
I do suspect you you love Next Thing and obviously you're one of its best
18:10
evangelists in a very real way. So I am as much as I enjoy
18:14
putting on the spot to say something kind of a little bit corny, maybe
18:18
I'm are so curious to know what your answer is. So what do you
18:21
love about? What do you love about Next Thing? John? It is
18:23
my long way of saying many many many things, Tom and the table stakes
18:32
for me are the technology, I mean, just to put that on the
18:33
table. And yes we have the best. You know, I come from
18:37
a technology background. You know, technology for me is core to what I
18:40
do, and that's great, that's kind of table stakes. But on top
18:44
of that, I think the thing I love most well two things. I
18:47
guess what one is our customers. Okay, the fact that we've got the
18:51
best technology, the fact that we've got this extensive fan base in our customers,
18:56
and hearing the success that our customers, hearing them talk about what they've
19:00
done with Next Think and achieved it is just absolutely fantastic and I couldn't ask
19:07
for anything more than that. And then the second part is also the people
19:11
that work and Next Think. I think the fact we've got the best technology,
19:12
that we've got the best customers that really rave about us, leads us
19:17
able to really bring on board the best people at the same time. So
19:22
those three things, I guess Tom, you know, the technology combined with
19:25
the customers that we've got and the passion they've got, and the passion in
19:27
enthusiasm that all our Next thinkers have got as well, for me, they
19:30
kind of combine into a dialectic. No, I can't say straight away that
19:40
ladies and Gentlemen is effusive as an Englishman will become about it. I don't
19:44
get any more effusive of that, but it was pretty effusive. So Johnny,
19:48
it's been a delight to have you, and I honestly I'm not nobs
19:52
couldn't. I couldn't believe it's been so long, it's been as long as
19:55
this that we've been having Next thinkers on and we haven't thought to invite you,
19:57
so you must come on again and future. It's been a pleasure to
20:00
have you, mate, Absolutely pleasure, and thank you so much, Tom
20:04
Sean and Dina as well. Yes, the surprise the surprise voices on this
20:10
episode. Thank you. To make sure that you never miss an episode,
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