Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #17 – Amplifying Amplify, w/ Andy Philp

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Reality Bytes #17 – Amplifying Amplify, w/ Andy Philp · 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.
0:06
Let's get into it. Hello, everybody. If Reality Bites is the
0:12
Deck Show show within a show, then then vise new editions of Reality Bites
0:17
must be the show within a show within a show. It is where various
0:22
bitters interview. Select next, Think Brains, and we have a fantastic next
0:29
Think Brain to welcome today, and that's Andy Phillips. Andy, how you
0:32
doing man? Thank you for the very nice welcome. Yeah, I'm doing
0:35
great, Thank you, excellent. I hear you know, I was,
0:37
I was in Boston recently and you've just been there ahead of me. And
0:41
look, I mean, I don't want to put to find a put in
0:43
it, but people were still shaking off their headaches and hangover. That's what
0:46
I'm saying. Andy, you know North America. Yeah, no comments,
0:53
but yeah, as long as you're there eight thirty in the morning, ready
0:57
for prime time, you can do whatever you want to do. That's fine
0:59
by quite so. Quite so, there you're only the second next think.
1:03
I guess we've had on reality vits, as I've just said, so we're
1:06
all a bit new to this ourselves as well. But you are. You
1:10
are product marketing direct here, and I think the best place to start is
1:12
just hearing from you a little bit about what that means and where your role
1:19
specifically fits into this great raft of new releases. Next Think is launching across
1:23
twenty twenty three. Yeah, I think things traditionally and it very It's one
1:29
of these roles where you're in the kind of the middle of everything. So
1:30
you've worked with our sellers, channel teams, marketing teams, and predominantly the
1:38
product management team. So you know Sam who was on before, he is
1:42
our chief product officer next Think, and his team is already responsible for building
1:48
out the road maps and designing what the products are going to look like and
1:51
and then working with engineering to get it done. So we are really responsible
1:56
for making sure we understand and share what problems we're solving, why they're important
2:02
for our customers obviously, and prospects that are coming into next Link for the
2:06
first time, and then making sure that we're celebrating the success of all our
2:09
customers. So one of the great things I think when I joined next Innk,
2:14
our current chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer, said to me next
2:19
Dink is like switching the lights on, and the reality is like when we
2:23
do this in every customer, we suddenly see all these new things appearing that
2:27
they had no idea what was going on. And it's about capturing those stories
2:30
and then sharing them with the world and obviously making sure that everyone knows about
2:35
them. So it's a very varied role. Every day is different. It's
2:38
good, very cool. I love that analogy and the many folks know as
2:44
a former customer, we didn't name our project after Next Think. We named
2:51
it Project Edison, and we used the light bulb and the analogy of turning
2:54
the lights on for our employees every time we talked about it. So I
2:59
love that. I love that you've seen talks in those terms as well.
3:02
And we're going to kind of focus a little bit today on one of the
3:06
products that you're working on and getting out the door is already out the door,
3:09
called Amplify. It's not when you think about data and visibility and the
3:15
ability to see things, amplify really resonates, but it's not inherently a name
3:23
that you understand what it is. So I'm really looking forward to digging into
3:25
it with you today. But let's start a little bit with your background,
3:30
I think it's more in line with mine in traditional end user compute rather than
3:36
where Amplify plays with the service desk. How do you see the dynamic evolving
3:40
between service desk and end user compute over the last couple of years, Where
3:46
do they impact one another most of all? Or or is it just a
3:51
complicated story. Yes, it's complicated, and I think I've been I've been
3:55
doing Andy's competing roles for twenty years now, actually, and I'd like to
4:00
think back to my onboarding. I joined the company called Novelle. It's kind
4:05
of still around now. It's been bought and sold and shop doot various times.
4:09
But my onboarding experience was classic. It was they forgot that they hired
4:14
me, and then on day three I got a stinky old laptop that was
4:17
locked down. I couldn't do anything, and of course, as being a
4:21
very technical person I was in a consulting role at the time, I immediately
4:25
reimaged the laptop and put Linux on it. So this is classic shadow it
4:30
But and that's the classic right that we've We've talked about this before. The
4:33
classic approach, going back fifteen years, twenty years was that standardization, the
4:41
golden image. Everyone gets the same thing, lock it down, send it
4:44
out, hope for the best, and wait for the tickets to come in
4:46
and then fix it. And as we know, the world today is very
4:50
different. We have sas based applications, DAZ and vd upson Mac and PC,
4:57
and people are moving around and in and out of VPNs and offices,
5:00
and the world of the digital workplace is much more complicated and therefore much harder
5:08
to support that kind of old approach, of kind of fire forgets we know
5:14
best. Let's focus inwards that traditional model. It just doesn't work anymore.
5:17
So, Yeah, I think that's a dynamice that's going to increasingly happen as
5:24
things get more and more complete complicated. I don't think they're going to get
5:26
easier. Sorry, you know. And I'm still proud of my my Network
5:30
three one two certification, one of the toughest courses I've ever been through my
5:34
life. But I thought it was complicated back then, right, Distributed computing
5:40
mixed with mainframe, mixed with the burgeoning audio video and multi media, and
5:47
it's just it's incrementally more complicated now. Indeed, So and again I'm gonna
5:56
sound like I'm pitching to the readers, so to the listeners. But that's
6:00
one of the reasons I joined. Next thing right was my previous company was
6:03
VMware, but it was still very much focused inwards. It's right now,
6:08
we will do the better job of curating your best experience. You know what
6:12
it is, but it never really looked at how it all came together in
6:15
front of the employee. And of course that's what we're obsessed about here.
6:18
Next thing right, Everything is how it's being received, So we know what's
6:23
the reality, the stark reality of it, and how it's being delivered,
6:28
not what it thinks that it's pushed out and hopes is being delivered. And
6:32
it's a very different technology, but it's also a very different mindset as we
6:36
know that customers need to meet too. Yeah, and just kind of the
6:41
commentary on vm We rolled out VDI to thousands of remote workers thinking that everything
6:46
would be fine, and it melted down under its own weight and even usability.
6:50
What do you mean, I have two start buttons, right, You've
6:53
got two dust stops to manage. It's that there's things you have to think
6:57
about from the user's perspective that it has traditionally struggled with yep, exactly.
7:03
So it's it's hard and I think I think, well, what we're all
7:08
about is a different approach, a complimentary approach, and one that the line
7:13
always uses. The most important asset of any businesses are its people, So
7:16
you have to focus on them and the way they're receiving technology. Because it's
7:21
now everything is digital, you have no choice but to focus in that place
7:26
first, correct with the when you look at all of the issues that are
7:35
being faced or addressed to the service disk today regarding incident resolution, from your
7:42
own perspective, what are the immediate challenges that are standing out, the ones
7:46
that are popping out that we need to directly go and address them. Great
7:49
question, and I think, as we've talked about before, it's that idea
7:53
of the complexity of the modern digital workplace, and the main challenge is how
7:58
to cut through it all and provide the right context. And of course,
8:03
as I said before, that's what next think is all about. We see
8:05
everything that's going on, and we do it continuously, and we do it
8:09
in real time for everyone, and we're looking at how things are being received.
8:13
But that's only the first real step of The challenge next is then we
8:18
need to spot the patterns, which is obviously what we do with our Infinity
8:22
platform. Everything is based on understanding patterns and highlighting what to focus on.
8:26
But then there's an additional challenge, which is we're not just servicing people which
8:31
are inside. Next, think, how do we take that really relevant information.
8:35
We might want to call it dex but it's I would like to prefer
8:39
to call it like context in the context of this conversation. How do we
8:43
give it to the relevant people in a timely fashion to help them do their
8:48
jobs better, but do it natively in their own systems, in their own
8:52
workplace. I think that's I think one of the major times there is today
8:56
is networking tools and pcvent tools and security tools and statis desk tools and tools
9:05
that kind of maybe try and aggregate all of that information together, but that's
9:09
not the same as understanding how it hits users and what the patterns are that
9:13
matter. So delivering the relevant context to help people, of course we're talking
9:18
kind of about statis desk here, but doing it natively in their own tools,
9:22
with minimum friction and minimum disruption. I think that's a really important challenge
9:28
to fix, and of course we're talking about Amplify earlier. That's really what
9:33
amplify is all about. Yes, that's where I was going to ask,
9:39
like why amplify is so impactful at this stage and can you talk us through
9:43
the whole browser based functionality and what's the difference, like what's the key difference
9:50
point at this while using amplifiers this level. We've work with customers over the
9:54
years to integrate next think into specifically Service Now. That's a very popular tool
10:01
that includes service disk functionality, and we've done that in the past through back
10:07
end integrations. So we're working within service now. We're using connectors, and
10:11
we're updating their data stores, and we're doing it at regular intervals. But
10:16
the reality is that's great. We've done lots of work with service Now.
10:22
But the first one is there's lots of other service desk tools that are being
10:24
used out there, and also that it is quite a heavy lift from a
10:31
change control perspective and getting permission from various teams to update their systems, and
10:37
we've done that across many things. Right, it's not just for managing tickets,
10:41
but it's things like cmdb population, stealth service chatbots, checklist, instant
10:46
creations. There's all sorts of things that we do today with service now ample
10:52
by those is really different and it's very innovative. I love the fact of
10:56
how simple but affected this product is. The idea of Amplifier is that we're
11:01
doing that integration on the front end, So in essence, really amplifies a
11:05
browser plug in which which is installed, it's pointed to the next thing instance,
11:11
configurations pulled down, and we tell it what URLs to monitor. So
11:16
it would be, for example, the service desk tools to any service desk
11:20
tool that is monitored access through a browser, and then we detect that and
11:26
then we enable then the context from the next thing to be presented to frontline
11:33
agents immediately in real time with the most up to date information directly with that
11:39
browser plug in, natively within that web experience. So imagine you're opening up
11:43
service desk, you go to an incident. We can detect a configuration item
11:48
on the page like a device idea for example, or we can right click
11:52
and look up a device or a user, and then the plug in makes
11:56
an instant, native secure call to our API in the cloud and instantly brings
12:01
back device information, checklist, information, highlighting things that need to be focused
12:07
on, and also the ability to fix things. So data retrieval and orchestration
12:13
of next think instantly. So what does that mean? It means any tool
12:18
you can then get a view of a user and all their devices and see
12:26
what's going wrong and then potentially fix issues there and then without having to call
12:31
the user, without having to escalate. So in essence, amplifies about fixing
12:35
issues much much quicker and escalating a lot less because we know every time you
12:41
escalate at level two, level three and go beyond, it's exponentially more expensive
12:46
and exponentially takes more time. So amplifies fantastic for its time to value is
12:52
instilled, the product up and running in hours potentially, and all that configuration
12:58
is then provided by the infinite platforms. So yes, it's one of these
13:01
examples where with all the effort that we've put into infinity, I've lost two
13:05
years of building patform. It's now inherited and now we can provide new services
13:11
such as Amplify to bring that in front of other people in the service tests.
13:16
It's a very exciting time. May at least can you tell that I'm
13:18
excited about it? Very exciting times. Thanks a lot. Hey Andy,
13:24
Sam here, you you mentioned there you know some things about kind of the
13:31
cost saving benefits and the time saving benefits with amplifying kind of infinity in general.
13:37
I'm curious because we talk a lot about the big picture financial impacts of
13:43
tools like next think that make the service desk more efficient, you know,
13:46
the cost savings for the business year over year, things like that. But
13:52
I'm curious because I know you've you know, worked with a lot of customers
13:56
directly and kind of seeing different stages of their journeys. I'm curious about the
14:01
impact that tools like this have on kind of the service desk itself, meaning
14:07
how to their core priorities and activities change and evolve once they've kind of had
14:15
access to this these capabilities for a certain amount of time. I'm just curious
14:20
what you've seen in terms of kind of the evolution of a certain desk as
14:24
a result exactly. And I think, well, I'll come back to a
14:28
case. I think we mentioned MEDII before my previous role, but ultimately I
14:33
think we had the term shiflect. We use that a lot, and reality
14:39
is that the more that you get fixed earlier in the process the better.
14:43
In fact, you know, evenin next thing is called vision is really to
14:46
fix problems before users raise the tickets. But I believe that for a future
14:52
conversation. But when a user an employee has an issue and it's got to
14:56
a point where they have to complain and a ticket has been raised, the
15:01
idea of fixing that quicker without escalation. There's obvious financial impact of that,
15:05
which is time and money. And I'll give you some examples. Well,
15:11
i'll give you one great example. My previous role was at VMware, so
15:15
I worked with VDI teams a lot. And this is a classic example which
15:20
we've talked about on this podcast series before about the blame game. The number
15:24
of times I talked to customers that VIDI teams. If any issue happens inside
15:31
a virtual desktop, it's almost automatically the fault of the VIDI platform, and
15:37
imagined quite often a VDI team is a very complicated system at the back end,
15:43
especially the on premises ones to support, So quite often those tickets get
15:46
escalated to those dedicated kind of level three and engineering type teams much much sooner
15:52
than they should. So the ability for for example, an l one relatively
15:58
June, relatively less experienced frontline agent to be able to quickly identify it perhaps
16:06
that this problem is coming in has absolutely nothing to do with the DI and
16:10
it's something to do with the application or the network or the EPN or whatever
16:14
it may be. And be able to potentially identify that and fix it before
16:18
it goes anywhere is huge for any kind of service desk environment. It means
16:23
obviously that L two and L three can focus on what they should be doing,
16:29
which is much more strategic and proactive types of things, and now one
16:33
can focus on fixing things and satisfying users much quicker. I think that's great
16:38
for everyone, right, it's great for the business, it's great for I
16:41
to the service desk, but I think more importantly it's great for people,
16:45
the people that are complaining, because they've got to the stage where they're complaining,
16:51
so that should be a priority to fix. And that kind of blamed
16:55
game we see it all the time. Issian performance monitoring teams get blamed when
17:00
you know where applications aren't working, very similar to that video blame case,
17:04
which is often it has nothing to do with the application itself. The classic
17:11
examples we've seen at some of our customers is simply moving closer to the Wi
17:15
Fi router at home sold the issue, right, That's got nothing to do
17:18
with the video desktop. It's got nothing to do with the application itself.
17:22
But again, that's something we can really easily expose in an L one checklist
17:26
how he connected the internet. We have checklists for things like Wi Fi strength
17:30
and be able to see that very quickly. That's something that's very easy to
17:34
have a frontline agent look at and identify it and fixed very quickly. So
17:38
yeah, there's very I think financial, but I think for me when I've
17:44
talked to customers, it's more about reorganizing and putting focus rutifally where it should
17:49
be, which is making things better and not firefighting. Right, So that's
17:55
ultimately where we want to get to. I think we probably talk about that
17:57
later in this discussion. That sounds a lot like uh my, my,
18:03
my personal it strategy when when I'm at home, just get closer to the
18:07
router and that's basically all I got. Um, well, I power things
18:11
on and off. That's the other one I'd hit it with. Yep.
18:15
Back in the uh, I don't know any of my Nintendo sixty four players
18:19
back in the day, you just blow on the cartridge. That was another
18:22
one. Yeah, that's basically the start and end of my IT skills there,
18:26
Andy. But uh, at least I know with amplify. You know,
18:33
there's talk of eventually kind of expanding into a lot more use cases,
18:37
um, whether that's security and compliance, finance hr um, and just like
18:42
this technology, you know, is just continuing to kind of uh expand and
18:48
evolve in scope. Uh, you know, as it has over the past
18:52
decade, and I'm sure it will over the next the next decade. So
18:56
I'm curious and I won't make you make any bold predictions about the future anything,
19:02
we know how foolish that is. But as this technology kind of continues
19:07
to expand into more use cases and expand its capabilities, do you think we'll
19:12
reach a point where kind of we're thinking completely differently about like the support ticketing
19:18
framework as a whole, like as something that might be relatively obsolete. Um,
19:23
Like you know, we talk about I know some customers have talked about
19:27
kind of a frictionless IT experience, Like that's kind of the the goal.
19:33
How close to a frictionless I experience do you think people will be able to
19:40
phase it feasibly reach as this technology continues to kind of evolve. Wow seperationing
19:48
question. Um, yeah, So firstly, I wax kind of that first
19:51
part that question is it work with any browser based apps. So the next
19:56
question is, well, how best can we help provide information in to other
20:00
kind of personas within business so we can see it quite easily, the information
20:07
that next Thing provides could be very helpful for someone in human resources. For
20:11
example, they're perhaps they're in what they people solve something like that, and
20:15
they want to understand how satisfied someone is with their digital experienced and then being
20:21
able to potentially go and ask them more about it. So that's classic next
20:25
Thing, right, using engage, using sentiment. That's very a kind of
20:30
very basic but simple example of how we can surface other bits of next Thing
20:34
data in front of other people. Very simple for us to go and do
20:37
that for other personas within customers. But the idea of like frictionless experience is
20:45
really interesting because there's been lots of and discussions around this over the years,
20:52
but really taking I think there's a couple of few things that I think need
20:56
to happen for that to be even close to a reality. I don't want
21:00
to make two sales pitchy. But well, first think, I think we're
21:04
talking about being proactive, and I think there's a habit of it to look
21:11
at what's known, right, look at the tickets that have come in,
21:15
and then try and focus on making those go away, which kind of that
21:21
clearly makes sense. Now, I did my it tal convocation back in the
21:26
day, but for me, that's a bit like going from incident management to
21:29
problem management and sort of ultimately being more proactive. But I think one of
21:33
the things is you have to do is to focus on the unknown. At
21:37
the beginning of this care we talked about you know it kind of the classic
21:44
approach is waiting for the tickets to come in, but it's hard. What
21:48
next thing is all about is showing customers the reality of what's actually happening all
21:52
the time, continuously and in real time. And we know when things are
21:56
bad, right, we see the patterns and we can help it act on
22:00
them. We do not need the employees necessary to tell us. So I
22:07
think using the employees dissatisfaction as a way to gauge success is a very short
22:18
term way of thinking. So and whenever I talk to live audiences, and
22:22
I know a lot of people think came as well, and maybe perhaps the
22:26
listeners can think about this very quickly. Think about the last month. How
22:30
many times you've had an issue with some kind of IT technology at work that
22:34
stopped you on your tracks, took you out of your thought process, prevented
22:38
you from getting your job done, or you've had to reset, rethink,
22:42
and it's kind of taking you off track most of the time. I think
22:45
ninety ninety five percent of the audience will put their hands up, and then
22:48
you asked the question or how many times how many of you reported all of
22:52
those issues to IKE and very few hands that traditionally go up. I think
22:56
we did a study where we found on average, issues go unreported, but
23:03
whenever I ask audiences it's way higher. I certainly I suffer in silence a
23:08
lot and grumble, and obviously Google is normally the first thing that I try
23:12
to do. So I think number one is proactive should be about unknown things
23:17
as well as known and you shouldn't rely on complaints as the input or yard
23:22
stiff for success. I think number two is you need to be able to
23:26
understand if you're succeeding and if you're going in the right direction. So we've
23:32
kind of wrapped that term of decks. So I think the idea of continuously
23:36
measuring and basicining decks so technical and sentiment elements that we talk about into something
23:41
that can be measured and reported outside of it. That's really important to use
23:47
a language that's understood perhaps by HR and finance. People don't in those organizations,
23:52
don't care about meantime to resolution and average hand in time for tickets.
23:56
It doesn't mean much to people outside of it. So the ability to step
24:00
back from the minutia and to get that enterprise wide view and see the patterns
24:04
in the place to focus is very important. And again that's another area that
24:10
next thing has been laser focused on, going forward to being proactive and looking
24:14
at known and unknown and then obviously baselining and measuring decks. And I think
24:22
especially with service tests, we see this idea of self help, which is
24:26
interesting because I was thinking about this earlier. I think, if you're very
24:32
careful, I think with this idea of self help, I think we're all
24:36
problem solvers. Many of us, including me, I had an issue a
24:40
couple of days ago and The first thing I naturally do is I google and
24:44
before I report something, but I think so self service, I think the
24:48
relevant context is more important. So asking employees to self diagnose an issue that
24:55
they have picked from a list on a self service screen and then do some
24:59
kind of remediating it sounds good, but it can potentially be very overwhelming,
25:04
especially to people that aren't technical, like my parents for example, They wouldn't
25:10
have a clue about what to do. So I think it and often serviced
25:15
this, but definitely it are typically very technical people, so that mindset isn't
25:22
necessarily shared with other people in the business. So it's very important to approach
25:25
the idea of self help or self care very very very carefully. So I
25:32
think and again this is the third area. That next thing has been and
25:36
will continue. There'll be more news on this coming later in the year.
25:40
But to fix things automatically, to automate the idea of experience management, I
25:45
think that is going to be a huge part. So going back, if
25:49
I remember what I said, proactive on what's known and unknown, measuring and
25:55
baselining decks and communicating that to the rest of the business and using it to
26:00
and celebrate success approaching self help, So don't put the burden on users to
26:04
fix things for themselves, but fix things automatically in the background and keep experiences
26:11
the number one goal. I think if we get to that stage, I
26:15
don't think we'll either be one hundred percent frictionless, but it will be pretty
26:19
close. And I think it's an actually a requirement. You think about contractors
26:26
coming in maybe with their own device and everything's provided in a cloud desktop.
26:33
I tarre accountable for that experience, but they're not informed. They don't have
26:36
a visibility out of the box and what's happening. They don't know what's going
26:38
on in between. So the ability to monitor experience and those kind of environments
26:45
as people are more tinerant, as people are more sort of the gig economy
26:48
kicks off and people aren't doing jobs for years and years. I think this
26:52
idea is essential going forward to even start to think about a frictional society experience.
27:00
But I think those steps, I think the things we need to focus
27:03
on before we can even have that. Conversations on the panel agree disagrees of
27:08
interesting what your thoughts are, but I think that's where I come from it.
27:11
I actually worry Andy that we're a bad out of time. But listen,
27:15
that was a wonderful description of the significance of Amplify It. And you
27:19
know, I think a really great illustration of why we wanted to start getting
27:22
Next Thing because onto the show just every now and then to talk about next
27:26
thing stuff, because there are some really really exciting thought and innovation coming out
27:30
of a company, particularly at the moment. So Andy, thanks so much
27:33
for joining us. Absolute pleasure to have you on once again to the Deck
27:37
show. If anybody wants to hear you, I think it was a VDI
27:40
special we did before, right back in early earlier last year. We will
27:45
put the link in the show notes, and I know you've written for the
27:48
Hub as well, right, so we're gonna we're gonna link to that link
27:51
to those pieces as well, and listen, thanks so much for coming on.
27:55
We hope to have you back again soon. Yeah, pleasure to be
27:57
here. And I'm always welcome to We're ready to come back and talk.
28:00
So thanks for having me, super thank you. Thanks and thanks also to
28:06
Tim, to Sam, to Dina and as Eva, our super producer Catherine
28:10
Shay. See you soon, everyone, see you guys. Thank you guys
28:12
later. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the
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have the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to
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learn more about how next Think can help me improve your digital employee experience,
28:33
head over to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until
28:37
next time.