Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / 🔎 Productivity in the Age of AI – DEXOps 1:1 with Scott Pope

Transcript

🔎 Productivity in the Age of AI – DEXOps 1:1 with Scott Pope · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome it, change makers to the Deck Show with Tim
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Flower and Tom McGrath. Let's get into it.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: So I keep I keep saying, we're going to make
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: some announcements about the future of the show. Everybody, I
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: realize I keep teasing this. Well, well here it is,
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: finally the new format.
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: Everybody is this.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Every guest who comes on the Deck Show from henceforth
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: must not only be a dex expert, there must also
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: be a fan of Arsenal Football Club, and as such,
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I'd like to welcome for the first time onto the show,
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Scott Pope, Fellow, next Finger and senior Value Advisory consultant.
• 0:41
  Speaker 4: Is that your current titles, Scott? Is that is that
• 0:42
  Speaker 4: up to day? No, you've actually you've actually got that wrong.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: I didn't think so.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I thought I thought when I took
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: it off the system, I forgot one update, Scott, do
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: it live.
• 0:52
  Speaker 5: It's a director of Value Advisory. Actually, so yeah, I was.
• 0:57
  Speaker 5: I had a bit like a bit like Arsenal, actually
• 1:01
  Speaker 5: like Arsenal.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, we're going to have those twenty five minute discussion
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: now about Arsenal to tea up to tee up the
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Deck Show proper.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: Of course we're not really listeners, We're not really. I wouldn't.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't do that to any.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Tottenham supporters or indeed American listeners, of which I know
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: we have a number.
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: But one thing, one thing.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: We're going to try and do though, actually is bring
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: on onto the show on a kind of rotating basis
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: a few of my friends from Next Thing to discuss
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: areas of expertise we think will be of interest of
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: the industry. And Scott, I was thinking about it, sweaking.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: I think dexops kind of falls as your area of
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: specific expertise somewhat, would you agree.
• 1:40
  Speaker 5: Yeah, So we've done a lot of work. So yeah,
• 1:44
  Speaker 5: first of all, thanks for having me. It's finally I'll
• 1:46
  Speaker 5: get to it.
• 1:47
  Speaker 4: Scott.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: Don't worry, don't worry, don't introduce yourself.
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: It's okay, right, Yeah, so yeah, dex dexops.
• 1:52
  Speaker 5: Yes, we've been doing a lot of work in the
• 1:54
  Speaker 5: dex up space and I'm.
• 1:57
  Speaker 4: Sure we'll cover that.
• 1:58
  Speaker 5: But yeah, really really resonating with with our customers.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: It is, it is, it's a big preoccupation in the industry.
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: We're going to get your fulls in a minute.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: But okay, now, now, okay, this is your first appearance
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: on the Deck show. So please do anyone in the
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: audience who doesn't know you already, introduce yourself and tell
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: us a bit about your remit here.
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so again, thank you for having men.
• 2:20
  Speaker 5: Finally, after three and a half years, I've been allowed
• 2:23
  Speaker 5: to come onto the show.
• 2:24
  Speaker 4: So it's a pleasure.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Tim was standing him away, Scott, what can I say?
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: He was like, never, no, it can't happen. And now
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: he's gone with free to get you on.
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: I'm kidding.
• 2:35
  Speaker 5: So yeah, it's a pleasure, pleasure to be here. As
• 2:38
  Speaker 5: you said, I am Scott. I'm Scott Pope, based in
• 2:42
  Speaker 5: based in London, just down not too far, not too
• 2:46
  Speaker 5: far from you, Tom.
• 2:47
  Speaker 4: So yeah, just down the road.
• 2:49
  Speaker 5: And yeah, I've recently moved into a new role of
• 2:53
  Speaker 5: director Tom just to just to get that of value advisory.
• 3:00
  Speaker 5: So your listeners might be thinking, you know what, what
• 3:02
  Speaker 5: does what does that mean? So there's really two sides
• 3:05
  Speaker 5: to the to the role. In to keep it simple.
• 3:09
  Speaker 5: One is the customer facing side, so I work with
• 3:11
  Speaker 5: our customers partners in the cell cycle and obviously in
• 3:17
  Speaker 5: the postal phase as well, making sure that our customers
• 3:21
  Speaker 5: see value and then get value business value from our solution.
• 3:26
  Speaker 5: Do some work with the marketing team as well. Always
• 3:28
  Speaker 5: enjoy working with you guys working up tending events and
• 3:33
  Speaker 5: things like that and looking at the agenda for those
• 3:36
  Speaker 5: events and what we can position. And then there's the
• 3:39
  Speaker 5: internal side to making sure that we've got sort of
• 3:42
  Speaker 5: repeatable processes, frameworks for our sales teams, our go to
• 3:47
  Speaker 5: market functions to be able to sell and position the
• 3:52
  Speaker 5: value of dex and Next Thing and dexops plays a
• 3:56
  Speaker 5: big part in that as well.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Fantastic And I just say, I know you need to podcasting,
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: but that line I am Scott, It's top draw.
• 4:07
  Speaker 4: I just needed to make that clear. Good.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: I tell us a bit about your background. What what
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: brought you to next Week? What was your ten and
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: what did your tenure look like since you joined? How
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: has it evolved beyond your very recent promotion which you
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: have an updated yet on the on the system.
• 4:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so what brought me to the Next Thing?
• 4:31
  Speaker 5: I was actually a customer of Next Things in a
• 4:34
  Speaker 5: previous role. So going back to quite a while, I
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: started my career on the on the support desk. I
• 4:44
  Speaker 5: moved into infrastructure cloud, all those all those those buzzwords
• 4:50
  Speaker 5: if you like, managing, managing data centers, managing the digital workplace,
• 4:55
  Speaker 5: service management roles, and then in the previous role I
• 4:59
  Speaker 5: was in before, so I joined next Think. We were
• 5:03
  Speaker 5: actually consumers of Next Thing, so we use next Think.
• 5:07
  Speaker 5: And that's what made me join next Think. I saw
• 5:10
  Speaker 5: the technology, and you know, when I saw the technology,
• 5:13
  Speaker 5: I thought, this is this is new, this is exciting.
• 5:17
  Speaker 5: We're looking at technology through a different lens here, we're
• 5:20
  Speaker 5: looking at it through the lens of the employee. And
• 5:24
  Speaker 5: coming off of the back of some of the work
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: that I'd done in previous roles around projects and data
• 5:29
  Speaker 5: center transformations and things like that, I felt that this
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: was the future of how enterprises would manage technology, looking
• 5:40
  Speaker 5: at things through the lens of the employee. And back
• 5:42
  Speaker 5: back then that was about I think it's about six
• 5:46
  Speaker 5: or seven years ago, so we weren't really talking about AI.
• 5:50
  Speaker 5: It was more around cloud and SaaS, and we'd been
• 5:54
  Speaker 5: through a big transformation of moving services into cloud and
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: into SAS, and for me, the the main focus was
• 6:04
  Speaker 5: now becoming the endpoint or the.
• 6:08
  Speaker 4: End users device, and that's.
• 6:10
  Speaker 5: When I saw so the Next Thing technology and I thought,
• 6:13
  Speaker 5: you know, something clicked, and then luckily enough, next Thing
• 6:17
  Speaker 5: asked me to After a while, they asked me to
• 6:21
  Speaker 5: come and join them. So yeah, that's sort of the
• 6:24
  Speaker 5: pre next Thing story for you.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: No wonder Tim was so against having you on Scott.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: You're like a young Tim Flower there, younger Tim Flower.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: I just actually it was like you got to have Scott.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: It is a big supporter of you, of you Scott.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: But no, that's great. And so since you joined, Yeah,
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: and since since I joined even more so, there's obviously
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: been a been a massive seed change in awareness around
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: dex and what it is with that. How have the
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: conversations you have in your kind of consultancy role effectively
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: evolved and and can you walk us through how that,
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: how that's happened and what what those changes are.
• 7:10
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so before I do that, I think we're just
• 7:12
  Speaker 5: one thing you mentioned Tim. Tim actually hired me, so yeah,
• 7:18
  Speaker 5: you know he did. Hopefully he made a good He
• 7:20
  Speaker 5: made a good hired.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: You and then stops you coming on a Podah exactly
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: mixed messages to him Flower.
• 7:27
  Speaker 5: So I mean, yeah, I think so when I when
• 7:32
  Speaker 5: I first started, that was what three about three and
• 7:35
  Speaker 5: a half years ago. Now, I think the conversations are
• 7:38
  Speaker 5: very different to what we're having now. I would say
• 7:42
  Speaker 5: we were there was more evan We were more evangelizing
• 7:47
  Speaker 5: back then, you know, making people aware of the concept
• 7:51
  Speaker 5: of decks and and selling that you know, this, this
• 7:54
  Speaker 5: is what the technology is and this is what it
• 7:56
  Speaker 5: can do for you. I think now the market's completely changed, right.
• 8:02
  Speaker 5: We've got the analysts. You know, You've got Gardner, you've
• 8:05
  Speaker 5: got Forester. All of these analysts are talking about the
• 8:08
  Speaker 5: concept of decks, right, which helps because that makes our
• 8:12
  Speaker 5: jobs easier. When we're having conversations and I would say
• 8:16
  Speaker 5: three and a half years ago, three years ago, whatever
• 8:20
  Speaker 5: that may.
• 8:20
  Speaker 4: Be, we were speaking with.
• 8:23
  Speaker 5: We were more more focused on sort of the technical buyer, right,
• 8:29
  Speaker 5: so the day to day users or the technical teams,
• 8:32
  Speaker 5: the head of or the leader of the workplace team,
• 8:36
  Speaker 5: the leader of end user computing. Now, it's not saying
• 8:40
  Speaker 5: now that we still we don't speak to those people,
• 8:42
  Speaker 5: because we still do, but the conversation is now changing
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: and that people are now more focused. That the senior
• 8:50
  Speaker 5: leaders are more focused on the concept of decks. And
• 8:55
  Speaker 5: I think that's through the work that we've done at
• 8:59
  Speaker 5: Next Thing in terms of pushing the market forward and
• 9:02
  Speaker 5: evangelizing in the market, and then obviously with the help
• 9:07
  Speaker 5: of the analysts and the likes.
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: Of Gartner and Forrester who are pushing that forward. Hopefully
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: that answer your question.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: Hopefully that absolutely absolutely, And I was going to make
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: with Jake that we've gone from evangelists to having a pope.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: You know, this is how these having the how these
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: things evolve in time. And I mean, let's let's think
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: about how these changing conversations reflect that growing power and
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: relevance of decks, particularly in this relatively new year. So
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: to set the scene, what what do executive level technology
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: priorities typically look like in the large organizations you're working
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: with today.
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so.
• 9:55
  Speaker 5: I think productivity is one of the.
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: The key things that everybody's talking about.
• 10:03
  Speaker 5: Three three years ago, we probably productivity was a very
• 10:07
  Speaker 5: different conversation than it is now, and I think AI
• 10:11
  Speaker 5: has really helped us there. You know, the whole purpose
• 10:15
  Speaker 5: of AI is the dry product dry productivity for the
• 10:18
  Speaker 5: for the employee.
• 10:20
  Speaker 4: I can remember.
• 10:23
  Speaker 5: About three two three years ago, we were speaking with
• 10:25
  Speaker 5: a VP of quite a large organization.
• 10:27
  Speaker 4: In the UK.
• 10:29
  Speaker 5: Speaking about productivity and they said, yeah, yeah, we're not
• 10:32
  Speaker 5: really bothered, you know, we're not, but about that to
• 10:34
  Speaker 5: find you one, isn't it we just want to take
• 10:38
  Speaker 5: cost out if it's our working too hard.
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: We're not really too bothered about productivity.
• 10:45
  Speaker 5: But that has completely shifted over the last two years.
• 10:51
  Speaker 5: I was also in Japan as well last year to
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: the end of towards the end of last year, so November,
• 11:00
  Speaker 5: meeting with customers and prospects out there because we've just
• 11:03
  Speaker 5: obviously hopefully the listeners know, we've just opened that market,
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: and productivity was top of the agenda out there. You know,
• 11:13
  Speaker 5: every single company, that majority of companies that I was
• 11:16
  Speaker 5: speaking with were focused on productivity.
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: So I think that's no longer sort of a nice
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: to have.
• 11:23
  Speaker 5: It's something that every single customer prospect is speaking about.
• 11:30
  Speaker 5: The other the other ones are obviously cost. I mean
• 11:33
  Speaker 5: everybody wants to be more cost efficient. I think even
• 11:38
  Speaker 5: in our personal lives, we want to do everything more efficiently,
• 11:41
  Speaker 5: especially around cost. So proving ro OI looking at how
• 11:46
  Speaker 5: we can be more efficient with things like hardware, software,
• 11:50
  Speaker 5: even AI tooling that's being bought and purchased. So that's
• 11:56
  Speaker 5: really helped, you know, accelerate that that conversation there. So
• 12:00
  Speaker 5: cost cost is key as well. The other thing I
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: just wanted to call out there was was automation and
• 12:08
  Speaker 5: AI because I think automation and AI are critical and
• 12:14
  Speaker 5: when we think about efficiency, we think about productivity. The
• 12:19
  Speaker 5: driver of all of that is automation. So everybody wants
• 12:25
  Speaker 5: to automate autimate more and they want to leverage the
• 12:29
  Speaker 5: value of AI.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Probably that breakschees us up very well for the next question,
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: which is how is des technology increasingly able to meet
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: all of those needs, not just for your automation peace
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: or way. That's certainly irrelevant part of the picture.
• 12:45
  Speaker 5: Yeah, So when we think about the sort of the
• 12:48
  Speaker 5: value proposition of DEX and next thing, I think it
• 12:55
  Speaker 5: it ticks all of those boxes. Right when we think
• 12:59
  Speaker 5: about the the primary core message that we hear Pedro
• 13:03
  Speaker 5: talking about so many times on stage at our our
• 13:06
  Speaker 5: conferences is that we enable people with technology. Right, when
• 13:10
  Speaker 5: you enable people with technology, that drives productivity. So that's
• 13:16
  Speaker 5: that's our fundamental, fundamentally our core message, and that's what
• 13:20
  Speaker 5: we're there to do. And I think with the advancements
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: in our technology and AI things like AI Drive and Spark,
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: we can.
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: Do that even more. Right, We're in the right place
• 13:34
  Speaker 4: to be able to do that.
• 13:36
  Speaker 5: When we think about costs and value, I think they're
• 13:41
  Speaker 5: two separate things. If we focus on costs, I mean,
• 13:44
  Speaker 5: we're seeing a lot of customers drive real hard cost
• 13:48
  Speaker 5: out of the business with you know, incident reduction, ticket reduction,
• 13:54
  Speaker 5: and then hardware and software as well. So we see
• 13:57
  Speaker 5: customers really utilizing our software software to really be more
• 14:02
  Speaker 5: efficient in those areas where they're spending hard cash, if
• 14:08
  Speaker 5: you like, or hard dollars or hard pounds or hard euros.
• 14:12
  Speaker 5: So the other thing I wanted to bring in here
• 14:15
  Speaker 5: was around cost and value. We've recently done a study
• 14:20
  Speaker 5: right of some data from our customer base, and we're
• 14:26
  Speaker 5: seeing that the average customer, from the anonymous data, we
• 14:31
  Speaker 5: can see that the average customer is getting around eighty
• 14:34
  Speaker 5: three dollars worth savings per endpoint per year. So I
• 14:39
  Speaker 5: thought it was quite an interesting point to bring that
• 14:41
  Speaker 5: into this conversation because I thought that the listeners might
• 14:43
  Speaker 5: be interested in.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: That, And I don't know what we thinking about what
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: we're going to call these, you know, I think recurring
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: appearances from you, Scott to talk about not just the technology,
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: but the cultural issues around technology, which we're generally calling
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: deckshop we might call this desk shop corner.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Something like that. I'm not quite sure just yet.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: But let's have our first look at that element, or
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: let's take that perspective of the first time together. Because
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: when we think about those cultural factors around dex communication
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: does feel like a cent facet of it. And we're
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: talking about the conversations you're having and how they're evolving
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: and who you're talking to. What is the trick to
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: translating these kind of topics or those kind of numbers
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: that you just cited when you're addressing C suite or
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: senior technology leadership more broadly.
• 15:35
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so just on the point of deck soops. I
• 15:38
  Speaker 5: think this is really interesting because it was on a
• 15:43
  Speaker 5: We had a call yesterday with we're running something called
• 15:45
  Speaker 5: leadership circles with our senior leaders in the in the
• 15:49
  Speaker 5: deck space, and we brought up some slides that show
• 15:53
  Speaker 5: different areas that we want to talk about to get
• 15:55
  Speaker 5: an understanding of where the priorities were. Can you guess
• 15:59
  Speaker 5: what one of the priorities was, Tom, based on the
• 16:02
  Speaker 5: conversation we're having efficiency, No, no, dexops. Right, everybody, they
• 16:09
  Speaker 5: all want to talk about they all want to talk
• 16:11
  Speaker 5: about dex shops.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Do they the leadership, the leaders themselves all.
• 16:14
  Speaker 5: Want to They all want to talk about dex shops.
• 16:17
  Speaker 5: They want to talk about desops, and they understand that
• 16:19
  Speaker 5: selling the value story is critical.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: Do you think that's obviously to some extent this is true.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: But to what extent is it true that this is
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: because there are our customers and what they're leaders leaders
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: from our customer companies, And to what extent do you
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: think it is.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: A prevalent preoccupation.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: Even if it's taking different forms, And if it is
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: taking different forms, To come back to a question, how
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: do you address them and speak in that language?
• 16:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 16:45
  Speaker 5: So the reason I think it's becoming a priority is
• 16:48
  Speaker 5: because they're seeing the expan expansion of decks across the
• 16:53
  Speaker 5: organization and they're realizing now and this has been one
• 16:56
  Speaker 5: of the key things that I've always wanted to happen,
• 16:59
  Speaker 5: was that X becomes sort of a foundational layer across
• 17:02
  Speaker 5: the enterprise.
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: Or the business.
• 17:04
  Speaker 5: Right, it's not just stuck in the area of the
• 17:06
  Speaker 5: end user computing team. Is that everybody not just across it,
• 17:11
  Speaker 5: but other areas of the business are starting to use it.
• 17:13
  Speaker 5: And that's why that concept of dex ops and dex
• 17:17
  Speaker 5: operations becoming so critical when we think about the value story,
• 17:25
  Speaker 5: if we like and could the communication piece another plug
• 17:30
  Speaker 5: for dexops. Communication is a key part of dexops. It's
• 17:34
  Speaker 5: one of the five key pillars. But when we think
• 17:37
  Speaker 5: about communication, I think we just have to think about
• 17:41
  Speaker 5: communicating in a language that's relevant to the receiver of
• 17:48
  Speaker 5: that of what we're selling, right or what we're positioning.
• 17:51
  Speaker 5: So if we're going in at a technical level and
• 17:55
  Speaker 5: we're talking about i know, disc cleanups or application crashes,
• 18:02
  Speaker 5: somebody in a senior leadership role is not really that
• 18:05
  Speaker 5: doesn't resonate with them, right, because that's not of.
• 18:08
  Speaker 4: Value to them.
• 18:09
  Speaker 5: So you have to understand what is of value to
• 18:14
  Speaker 5: the person that you're speaking to and then talk in
• 18:16
  Speaker 5: that language and show them how you're impacting things that
• 18:21
  Speaker 5: are things that they care about, basically things that are
• 18:24
  Speaker 5: of value to them.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: Which is relevant of course to you know, EUC professionals
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: more generally. Right, it's not just about how to you,
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: as a consultant or whatever communicate to the C suite.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: It's about how it professionals have to learn to communicate
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: upwards in general.
• 18:41
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's what dexops is one of the fundamental
• 18:46
  Speaker 5: areas of dexops, right, is we want.
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: To enable our.
• 18:52
  Speaker 5: Technical day to day users or day to day champions
• 18:56
  Speaker 5: to be able to have those conversations and communicate the
• 19:00
  Speaker 5: value of the work that they're doing, right, because it's
• 19:03
  Speaker 5: important for them.
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: And it's important for their careers, and it's important for
• 19:10
  Speaker 4: us as well as that.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely, And just to get into something you've kind
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: of teased a couple of times in the course of
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: the conversation, which is the project you worked on last
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: year We made fairly big deal about it on the
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: show as well, which was the product the dex Productivity Report.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: You're very involved in it. Talk to us about the
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: history of that search for value. I mean, I guess
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: you've already covered that somewhat, but why it's accelerating more
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: quickly today in terms of actually being able to put
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: numbers such as the ones you just sized them on it,
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: and about that that product that report more generally, I.
• 19:44
  Speaker 5: Guess, yeah, it was a really interesting piece of work,
• 19:47
  Speaker 5: and it sort of come about from speaking with customers
• 19:52
  Speaker 5: around the dex Scorer as a whole. Some of the customers,
• 19:56
  Speaker 5: some of the customers we spoke with specifically.
• 19:58
  Speaker 4: One Actually.
• 20:03
  Speaker 5: We're doing a lot of work in terms of targeting
• 20:06
  Speaker 5: machines and devices with low decks right, low deck scores,
• 20:11
  Speaker 5: but they couldn't quantify the impact that that was having
• 20:15
  Speaker 5: on the business.
• 20:16
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 20:16
  Speaker 5: One of the company that we worked.
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: With was BDO.
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: They spoke at our conference about this, so if any
• 20:26
  Speaker 5: of your listeners want to go and maybe that's a
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: link that we could put underneath the podcast and he
• 20:31
  Speaker 5: can for that session experience. But they really struggled with
• 20:38
  Speaker 5: quantifying the impact of you know, taking a say just
• 20:41
  Speaker 5: at a device layer a dex score from i know
• 20:45
  Speaker 5: twenty to fifty through proactive work and remediations.
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: So what was the actual impact of that.
• 20:52
  Speaker 5: So we bounced some ideas around with their champion, with
• 20:58
  Speaker 5: the champion there, Sam and they.
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: Went away and we work collaboratively.
• 21:04
  Speaker 5: They come up with a formula, right, a formula for
• 21:07
  Speaker 5: that so they could quantify that the impact of that
• 21:10
  Speaker 5: on productivity. So what was the time benefit for the
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: employee of making those technical improvements. They could then take
• 21:19
  Speaker 5: that to their business and say, you know, by this,
• 21:21
  Speaker 5: with the work that we're doing, we're in our driving
• 21:24
  Speaker 5: productivity across these devices or these employees by x, we
• 21:30
  Speaker 5: have improven productivity by X, and that's where the sort
• 21:32
  Speaker 5: of the idea come from, I think for the productivity report.
• 21:37
  Speaker 5: Then we went away and we'd done some studies across
• 21:41
  Speaker 5: a large set of anonymized data, and that's where our
• 21:47
  Speaker 5: metric came from of the time per dex score move
• 21:52
  Speaker 5: I think it was was it twenty two twenty two
• 21:56
  Speaker 5: minutes per week for a ten point accurate dex score increase.
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: So yeah, that was the first report. I think there
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: there will potentially be more to follow as well. I
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: believe it should be. It should be. Yeah, it's cool.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: I didn't know it started with video.
• 22:13
  Speaker 4: I was the obviously experience last year.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: Definitely, as you say, recommend people go to it because
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: it is fascinating. Your people are going to be perhaps
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: a little instinctively cynical of you know, yeah, assertions from
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: a vendor, but they these start with the customer.
• 22:29
  Speaker 4: Customers. I think, I think you have a conservative calculator.
• 22:33
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that the purpose for us was,
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: you know, we want we want customers to go away
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: and think about this. We don't we don't expect them
• 22:43
  Speaker 5: to use our formula. They can if they want it's there,
• 22:47
  Speaker 5: but we are seeing other customers now look at this
• 22:49
  Speaker 5: and say, oh, do you know what we We're going
• 22:52
  Speaker 5: to do this and we're going to take your formula
• 22:54
  Speaker 5: and we're going to adjust it slightly for what's relevant
• 22:57
  Speaker 5: to our business. So I think that that was the
• 23:01
  Speaker 5: purpose and it's good to see that we're we're seeing
• 23:04
  Speaker 5: that across the market. So, yeah, it was exciting and
• 23:10
  Speaker 5: good piece of work. And thank you to the b
• 23:12
  Speaker 5: d O ting if they're listening for their support on
• 23:14
  Speaker 5: that one.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, it was a great piece of work.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: And there will be links in the show notes to
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: bdeo's original keynote or their keynote plus for full report
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: itself and previous episodes where we discussed that in a
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: little bit more detail. Scott, let's end with a look
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: to the future over the next couple of years. What
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: are the business challenges you anticipate emerging whereby dex technology
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: will be crucial in helping organizations adapt and succeed when
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: it comes to those specific incoming challenges.
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so I mean, I I obviously, I mean we
• 23:51
  Speaker 5: have to we have to sort of we have to
• 23:54
  Speaker 5: talk about that, right, How can we how can we not.
• 23:58
  Speaker 5: I think it's going to transform the workplace, especially when
• 24:01
  Speaker 5: we think about decks.
• 24:03
  Speaker 4: I mean.
• 24:05
  Speaker 5: Hopefully you're like, you know, when we think about the
• 24:07
  Speaker 5: agentic side and we look at Spark and what Spark
• 24:10
  Speaker 5: is going to be able to do, well, I mean
• 24:12
  Speaker 5: we I mean I use it every day now, right,
• 24:15
  Speaker 5: It's it is, It's getting better and better. It's amazing.
• 24:18
  Speaker 5: And I think we're getting to a point where every
• 24:22
  Speaker 5: single employee will have their is going to have their
• 24:25
  Speaker 5: own agentic you know, support support person that sits on
• 24:30
  Speaker 5: their computer and fixes things for them and they can
• 24:32
  Speaker 5: communicate with. So that for me, is going to be
• 24:35
  Speaker 5: a game changer, right, not only for by T, but
• 24:41
  Speaker 5: I think for employees in general. Right, that that completely
• 24:45
  Speaker 5: changes things to the employee, and that for me is
• 24:49
  Speaker 5: about going back to our core mission driving productivity. Right,
• 24:54
  Speaker 5: We're seeing some great data around how how Spark is
• 24:58
  Speaker 5: already doing that.
• 25:01
  Speaker 4: I think things like.
• 25:03
  Speaker 5: The term tickets as we know it mm hmm may
• 25:09
  Speaker 5: start to fade away up. I mean, like it, people
• 25:18
  Speaker 5: don't raise tickets, right, we don't raise tickets anymore. So
• 25:22
  Speaker 5: I think what we'll see is that we'll just have
• 25:25
  Speaker 5: some form of system of record that that logs and
• 25:28
  Speaker 5: tracks what the agentic solution is doing.
• 25:32
  Speaker 4: So we have a we have a log in mechanism
• 25:34
  Speaker 4: for that.
• 25:34
  Speaker 5: I'd like to think we can come up with a
• 25:38
  Speaker 5: better term than tickets in the future. I think measuring
• 25:43
  Speaker 5: productivity is critical for every company. You know, the days
• 25:49
  Speaker 5: of just deploying new tech to the business and seeing
• 25:51
  Speaker 5: what happens are over.
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: You know, we can't do that anymore.
• 25:55
  Speaker 5: We have to understand how that is impacting the employees experience.
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: And how it's driving productivity. And then.
• 26:07
  Speaker 5: That probably comes back to the point around value, right
• 26:11
  Speaker 5: value and uri you know, we have to be showing
• 26:15
  Speaker 5: in it now.
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: We we have to be showing the value that we're
• 26:18
  Speaker 4: delivering for the business.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: One, well, it was it was great to have you
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: on for the first time and as I say, expect
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: this to be a recurring feature on the show every
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: month or two. Have you back on to to give
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: us some updates in this particularly as you say, pertinent
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: area of debts at twenty twenty six and their dad
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: beyond and by then, Scott, maybe maybe our hearts as
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: Arsenal fans will be broken, maybe they'll be full or
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: do you would you anticipate. If it's a where are
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: you tending?
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Just just a word on it before we close out,
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: where are you?
• 26:55
  Speaker 4: Are? You only having a bit about.
• 26:58
  Speaker 5: I am very optimistic. I've been here before. I've been
• 27:03
  Speaker 5: here before. I don't think the next few months are
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: going to be particularly good for my for my health.
• 27:09
  Speaker 5: But yeah, we'll see, we'll see. I think we're in
• 27:12
  Speaker 5: a good position. We're in a good if you'd have said,
• 27:15
  Speaker 5: if I'd have said to you tom at the start
• 27:17
  Speaker 5: of the season, you'll be in mid February and you'll
• 27:20
  Speaker 5: be well with three points clear. Every time you're writing,
• 27:24
  Speaker 5: hopefully there tomorrow and morning a probably six points clear.
• 27:30
  Speaker 5: But if I had said to you will be six
• 27:31
  Speaker 5: points clear, we'll be fruit.
• 27:34
  Speaker 4: We're not top.
• 27:37
  Speaker 5: Three points clear, top of the Champions League group, in
• 27:40
  Speaker 5: the Carling Cup, the League Cup final, sorry, and in
• 27:42
  Speaker 5: the next round of the f A Cup.
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: I think you would have bit my hand off, So
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: remain positive. It will hopefully happen.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: I pretty much agree, and I certainly remain positive.
• 27:54
  Speaker 4: And Batt'll do. Batt'll do on the arsenal chat, I don't.
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: We will keep it to him in them everyone. When
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: Scott does come back on.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Well, if you don't like the team, then maybe you'll
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: get some satisfaction out of it. Well, public a few
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: weeks time, have a pleasure to have you on.
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: For the first time, not the last time, Scott Love.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having me all right,
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: we'll see you very soon.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: Man.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: podcast player. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, make
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: you'd like to learn more about how next Thing can
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: next Think dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Until next time.