Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / The future EUC rock star: AI, automation and digital adoption (feat. Andrew Hewitt)

Transcript

The future EUC rock star: AI, automation and digital adoption (feat. Andrew Hewitt) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
0:07
Let's get into it. Hello, change Makers, Welcome to the Deck
0:11
Show. It's a very special episode today because we are going back to the
0:15
route, back to the origins of the show, which is to say,
0:18
we welcome back our first ever guest on the first ever Deck Show almost three
0:25
years ago, and our free time returning guest. He is none other the
0:30
famous for renowned principal analyst that forster Andrew Hewitt. What's up, Andrew,
0:34
Great to see you again, man, how are you. It's so good
0:37
to be back here. I was trying to remember how many of these been
0:40
on, so it is three? Then I think, so, yeah,
0:43
we need to do like a Saturday night live thing where we could be a
0:46
jacket. We need a maybe a belief the three Timers jacket. Okay,
0:51
we'd have one for Jeff, we'd have one for Andrew. Who else would
0:57
We'd have a couple of others, a couple of others. But yeah,
1:00
it is always a pleasure to have you back on, Sarah. And you
1:03
know, one of the things we started doing more recently, as you now
1:07
know, Andrew is our super producer Catherine Show. She sends out these lovely
1:11
little questionnaires to to our guests, and sometimes we get them back. Sometimes
1:15
we don't, which is cool. Sometimes we forget to send them out,
1:18
no doubt, but we did in your case get it, get it back,
1:21
and we ask people about their hobbies and and in your case, of
1:26
course, we we know something about your hobbies, not only because obviously you're
1:30
you're you're a well known rock climber, which is something you've you've worked into
1:36
some presentations and reports as a very cool metaphor before. But we also know
1:42
that you are a rock star, well not a rock star, you know,
1:44
not saying you're not a star, but a rock music maker. And
1:48
we know this, of course because your your music serenaded us at the end
1:52
of the first ever Deck Show. So if somebody's listening they want to hear
1:55
Andrew's dick Dale style surf instrumental music, it's very cool. Go all the
2:01
way back to that first episode, go to the end of it and you'll
2:04
be able to hear it. So we we did get information Andrew on on
2:07
your hobbies, of course. But what really stood out to me, and
2:12
it was you described as maybe a little morbid for the show, and I
2:15
say, o contrere was what's the motto you live by? And this is
2:20
what you live by, memento mori, which of course means is Latin for
2:24
remember that you have to die, which is which is a little a little
2:29
morbid, but it's also an interesting one. Andrew tell us how how real
2:32
is this? More so how deeply embedded? I was wondering if you would
2:38
bring it up for the part. Yeah, man, it is. It
2:42
is a bit morbid, but you know, there's nothing that really gets you
2:46
moving in the right direction. And then considering your own mortality, you mentor
2:52
mari is basically this idea that we have a limited time on earth, so
2:55
you have to make the best of everything and every moment that you have,
3:00
and sometimes you got to make tough decisions and make a change and those types
3:05
of things. And so I try to keep that in mind with a lot
3:08
of things that I'm doing, you know, especially you know with with my
3:12
health. You know, there's certain things fitness wise that I want to do
3:15
in my thirties that you know, I want to make sure I do those
3:17
now because as I get older, I won't be able to do them.
3:21
For example, So I got that from a lot of like Stoic philosophy.
3:25
There's a lot of good you know, podcasts and things out there around Stoicism,
3:30
and it seems to be having a bit of resurgence. But the menamrea
3:34
is is kind of a classic Stoic phrase, and so I try to remember
3:37
that as much as I can, Like, you know, we only have
3:39
a limited time here, so let's make the best of it and really get
3:43
out there and try to accomplish something great. I love it because I you
3:46
know, when you think back to some of the events when a loved one
3:50
passes or a friend passes away, it gives you that wake up shot.
3:54
Right, This puts everything else into perspective. I really got to think about.
3:58
But being intentional outside those moments, I think is a really good thing
4:02
for us and healthy thing for everybody to do. Think about that when it's
4:05
not top of mind. It's pretty cool. Absolutely, Yeah. Gotta be
4:09
careful to do it too much. It can be It could be a little
4:14
bit heavy if you're thinking every day. But I think, you know,
4:17
maybe once a month, you know, meditation or something, think about that,
4:20
and I think it it puts things into perspective into focus as well.
4:27
Try not to think of it halfway up one of your rock faces, Andrew
4:30
R. Yeah, certainly where you don't want to think about it at all,
4:36
keeping at arm's length, right man, A right, right, Well,
4:41
well it's a it's a it's a lovely preamble, gentleman. But we've
4:46
got we've got some dex matters to discuss as well. We can't just be
4:48
talking to stoicism and mortality or the whole hour, you know, So let's
4:55
let's kick it off with Andrew with some some of the biggest next news we've
5:00
had to really talk about for a while. I'm sure a lot of people
5:02
have seen, but we just a couple of weeks ago now announced our first
5:06
ever acquisition. It's a app learn, which is a UK based company specializing
5:13
in digital adoption software. So it's almost like they have a great metaphor for
5:17
it, Tim what is it? They say, It's like the Google what
5:21
is it? But the GPS of applications. So it's kind of pop ups
5:27
on the screen that can guide users through adapting to new processes or completely new
5:31
applications or new when they join organizations or when applications and processes are updated,
5:39
et cetera, et cetera. So we think it's a really really exciting kind
5:42
of extension of what next thing offers and an interesting place to start with You,
5:46
Andrews, your thoughts on the aptness of digital adoption and digital dexterity and
5:54
other sort of buzz term that's very relevant to it within DEX. I mean,
5:58
do you see it as a true part of it, as an extension
6:01
of it, the new part of an incongruous part of it. What's your
6:04
what's your view? Well, it brings me back to the original definition that
6:10
Forrester had around DEX, which is still our definition around DEX, which is
6:13
that it's the sum of perceptions that employees have working with technology. You know,
6:17
if that perception is that the tool is hard to use, that it's
6:21
slow, that it makes no sense, the user experience is terrible, right,
6:26
that's going to impact your overall digital employee experience. So I absolutely think
6:30
that tools that help improve adoption of digital tools are part of that DEX landscape,
6:39
right, you know, super important. When I talk to a lot
6:41
of DEX teams out there today, they often have digital adoption you know,
6:45
platforms. In addition to, you know, the tools like next Thing for
6:49
example. So they're really important in that kind of quiver of different tools that
6:55
you can use to understand the user experience. And so I think we'll see
6:59
a lot lot more of that. A lot of the clients I've talked to,
7:01
you know, and been working with for a number of years, like
7:04
they made all these investments during the pandemic. You bought this SaaS app and
7:08
this SaaS app, and you've been invested in Microsoft Teams or in Zoom or
7:13
whatever, and oftentimes they're just not getting the value out of the tool because
7:16
the user doesn't know how to unlock all the different features. And so a
7:20
lot of the clients that I speak with today come to me and say,
7:24
how can I make my organization more digitally savvy? You know? And digital
7:30
adoption tools are certainly one way to do that. I'm getting it all in
7:33
one pane of glass. I mean, you know, it's obviously going to
7:38
kind of decrease for confusion around all these applications as well. Thinking about I've
7:45
written it, but thinking about maybe EUC as a profession more generally, what
7:49
are it implications for this suddenly being something that EUC professionals. It professionals can
7:57
start to influence, start to get involved in, you know, which is
8:00
to say, more directly engaged with user behavior, user learning, et cetera.
8:05
Well, I think it's it's interesting, especially as the user interface is
8:09
changing for the PC. You know, the major you know area that you
8:15
know, people have spent all their time for the last you know, however
8:18
many years is changing with things like generative AI and like being able to go
8:22
in and use natural language querying on your PC to go and look up things
8:26
and get information and create content like that whole landscape is completely changing, and
8:31
so it's forcing a lot of end user computing professionals to say, Okay,
8:35
what is that like design and user experience of the actual device actually look like.
8:39
I mean, I think we just haven't thought about that. We're always
8:43
thinking about specific application. So it's not just at the application level, but
8:46
it's also at the operating system level too, And so there's a big opportunity
8:50
for and user computing folks to get closer to the actual user journey that that
8:56
employee is going on rather than just kind of your traditional performance metrics. So
9:01
that's kind of the opportunity is being a lot more human centric in terms of
9:05
how we look at usage of that technology versus just making sure it's not crashing
9:11
and it's performing well, et cetera. Yeah, and I guess it kind
9:15
of leads us perfectly to the question of generative AI. Very big impact on
9:20
DEX and on the sort of next thinks offering over the last twelve months alone.
9:26
What's your analysis of the progress of his marriage of the two so far.
9:33
So I expect generator of AI to be part of any DEX solution going
9:35
forward, Like it's going to be a feature that's expected from every customer that
9:41
buys a tool. And when we look at our overall DEX model today at
9:45
Forrester, we say there's basically four pieces. There's insights, that's the data
9:50
you're collecting, and there's people people that are in charge of DEX initiative.
9:54
Is your metrics like your xolas, then's your future fit tech, that tech
9:58
that just comes along and just completely changes the user experience and improves the digital
10:01
employee experience. Genitor of AI is that, right, So it is providing
10:07
a new user experience that's fundamentally better. So just by virtue of adopting it,
10:11
you are improving digital employee experience. So I do see a lot of
10:16
organizations just investing in genitor of AI as that front end user experience and really
10:20
claiming a lot of benefit in terms of their overall deck strategy. But there's
10:26
the other side of that, which is not the end user side, but
10:28
there's the administration side, and I think that's where a lot of these really
10:31
interesting genitive AI use cases start to come out. When you think about improving
10:37
root cause analysis, which is still a major challenge today in the space.
10:41
Right, being able to query all that historical data and use natural language processing
10:46
and simplify and make that a lot faster for it administrators. You know,
10:50
AI is going to have a huge impact there, predictive in terms of the
10:54
overall user experience. Being able to go into the console and say, you
10:58
know it, give me a list of devices that are most likely to fail
11:01
because of a battery issue over the next six months. Right. You couldn't
11:05
do that before. You had to model that out and you had to filter
11:09
and go through the console and dig deep into the data. The natural language
11:13
piece really brings that data to the fore and brings us closer to insights rather
11:16
than just a giant dump of data, but even some other things, like
11:22
a lot of our clients are talking about knowledge based article creation with genertive AI
11:26
within DEX tools, like it should be pretty easy just to put together something
11:30
that says, you know, if you have this issue with your device,
11:33
this is how you fix it. Those types of things I think will go
11:35
a long way and giving people additional resources within their decks initiative rather than having
11:43
to go through all this superhuman manual effort all the time, which which tends
11:48
to be a lot of what DEX teams end up doing is that manual work.
11:52
So I think there's benefits on both sides. I'd actually like to see
11:58
DEX and AI put an end to the KB article. If I can generate
12:01
and create a kV article to tell you how to fix it, AI and
12:05
DEX should just fix it, don't tell me to read an article and go
12:07
fix it. So I think there's an evolution here where AI, AI and
12:13
DEX, in my opinion, are aligned. I'm curious what your opinion is.
12:18
Pedro and everyone at next Think really likes to emphasize that next Think the
12:24
original product and the patent we're built on. An AI postgraduate study. Pedro
12:30
put a ton of work into that, and it's founded on AI. I'm
12:33
curious what your thoughts are on whether they're kind of mutually exclusive, does one
12:37
depend on the other, what's the dynamic between AI now and DES kind of
12:41
moving forward? I think anytime you're trying to make sense of a large quantity
12:46
of data that's constantly changing, that's where AI really comes to your benefit,
12:50
right these It helps simplify access to that data. It makes it quicker to
12:54
go and harvest that data and gain insights. It allows you to summarize that
13:00
data quicker and send that out to an executive to show, you know,
13:03
here's what's happening with our digital employee experience. So it's a really natural fit
13:07
at the end of the day. Like dex tools are, you know,
13:09
they're data tools. They're all about giving you that data, right, and
13:13
so that goes hand in hand with AI. Of course, you know,
13:16
dex is different than some other monitoring tools in the sense that there's a lot
13:20
of remediation that's happening with dex tools. We are actually fixing it, we're
13:24
not just like observing it, right, So that's a little bit of a
13:28
difference. But AI helps with that too, by giving us that insight to
13:31
say this is most likely what's going to work in this particular circumstance, for
13:35
example. So I see it as a very strong natural alignment. Like I
13:41
said, I think it'll be embedded in every you know, major dex tools.
13:45
You know, if you're not using AI as a vendor, you're going
13:48
to get left behind. Yeah, completely agree. So Tom and I were
13:52
thinking back, we've got over one hundred episodes you've been on at least three.
13:56
It could have been very easily someone else who meant this, but we
14:00
think it was you that talked about how it IT professionals should really be looking
14:09
to automate their role. Kind of the job of the help desk is to
14:11
get rid of the help desk. This is a little different it people should
14:15
be automating their role. I'm curious if if you remember that, But even
14:20
if you don't, what are your thoughts about it automating the roles in the
14:22
context now not so much of automation but AI, Right, how should an
14:28
IT professional look to their role related to what AI will do to it.
14:33
It's a great, great question, and I do think it was me first
14:35
of all that but it wasn't my original idea. I believe that it was
14:41
my manager, Glenn O'Donnell who first told me about that idea. And this
14:46
is a kind of a consistent theme across the tech industry is that the people
14:50
that move up find a way to do things faster that provides more value,
14:56
that reduce the overall cost. Right. You know, people get wrapped up
15:00
around the actle with decks because of some of the cost elements, but really
15:03
it's about reducing costs. Is like a major piece of decks. It just
15:07
so happens it also improves the experience as well. And so when you're thinking
15:11
about kind of AI and automation in terms of the impact on the overall IT
15:18
administrator, it's about creating more value with with less effort and reducing that overall
15:24
cost. So at the end of the day, I think if you are
15:28
skilled enough to be able to make sense of what's happening with AI within the
15:31
decks platforms, and you're able to drive a lot of automation, reduce costs,
15:37
discover those root causes faster, show that you can improve the overall experience,
15:41
you're going to be a rock star at work like that. Is that
15:45
is the pathway going forward is being able to take advantage of those AI capabilities
15:50
and become kind of you know, we use the termine for AI literate,
15:54
become AI literate with your dex tool, and that's going to help you open
15:56
up a lot of different career paths. You know, it's not going to
16:00
be that you're going to be doing all the things that you did in the
16:03
past in terms of writing scripts and doing deep dive root cause analysis. Right,
16:07
it's that technical stuff is going to be handled more and more by AI,
16:11
but you're going to be playing the role of managing the AI looking for
16:15
quality, and you're also going to be playing a role in terms of interfacing
16:18
more with the end user and really trying to understand more of the human element
16:22
that underpins decks. So it's a great question. Yeah, so I think
16:26
that getting past those traditional tasks freeze you up to do all these other things.
16:34
AI makes me better and AI doesn't replace me, right, yes,
16:38
Yeah, so that's the IT professional and the relationship with a technology capability.
16:45
Let me put a different spin on the question. What are your thoughts about
16:47
the relationship between an IT professional and the myriad of vendors that are out there
16:52
today, all bringing new, unique or somewhat unique capabilities. What do you
16:56
think the relationship is going to be between the IT pro and the vendors.
17:00
I guess the short way to ask it is, is it getting overwhelmed with
17:06
technology? Is there just too much technology for us to worry about right now?
17:10
It's a great question, and it's constantly evolving. You know. One
17:12
of the major questions is around monetization right now at AI, like are vendors
17:18
going to charge extra for AI capabilities or is that going to be embedded?
17:22
You know, I happen to think that all these DEX tools are going to
17:25
have AI embedded in. It's going to be this expectation, and customers out
17:30
there are all facing these different requests from vendors that are saying, why don't
17:36
you pay me extra for this AI capability, whether it's DEX or whether it's
17:40
any other technology. Right, that itself is overwhelming, like which SaaS tools
17:44
am I going to pay extra for AI? Versus where am I not going
17:48
to pay extra? Right? And so that relationship is going to be tricky
17:52
to navigate over the next year or so as vendors figure out how they're going
17:55
to monetize AI. Ultimately, I think what will happen is a lot of
18:00
the smaller markets, and I would say dex is included in this ultimately get
18:04
pushed towards AI as a feature within the product. I'm not paying extra.
18:08
The bigger vendors out there, you know, you're giant hyperscalers. They can
18:11
kind of throw their weight around, right, and so they often have a
18:17
reason to charge extra, or they have some licensing play that they can charge
18:22
extra. But it's harder when you're a smaller vendor. And so that's going
18:25
to be something that you know, a customer in it is really going to
18:27
have to think about, is where do I pay extra and where do I
18:32
pull back? The other thing is trust, right, you know, everybody
18:36
is new to this. They're integrating with different types of AI algorithms, whether
18:38
they're from you know, open source or Microsoft or whomever, right, and
18:44
so how do you start to build that trust with the with the administrator as
18:48
a vendor that these automations and these AIK movies are actually going to do it
18:52
they say that they're going to do. We're going to have some rocky times
18:56
ahead in terms of mistakes and halls and things like that that occur there.
19:02
So I think monetization is a major challenge. Trust is a major challenge.
19:07
And I think the other major piece that is unknown today is everybody's talking about
19:14
you know, co pilots with the lowercase C right, all these conversational AI
19:18
capabilities. It feels like everybody's creating a conversational AI. At what point does
19:23
that become overwhelming for the end user? And I start to look at a
19:26
more integrated approach. Maybe I want to have one single user interface that pings
19:32
all these other, you know, different areas that I can bring in that
19:36
third party data for example. So that to me also feels like a challenge
19:40
that we haven't really fully bumped into yet, but we will over the next
19:45
twelve months. I think there's an integration opportunity there to have two conversational ais
19:49
just talk to each other all day long. Definitely, definitely. So we
19:55
talked a little bit about app learn and bringing that digital adoption capability to the
19:59
platform, and we talked about maybe having too much technology out there for us
20:02
to really absorb it all. But let's flip that question around. What is
20:06
dex dex as an it discipline missing. Are there other emerging technologies out there
20:11
that you think that you're seeing that could have be related. Is there something
20:15
that people are asking for that's not there, What do you see that that
20:18
might be missing. Well, one thing that is coming up quite a bit,
20:21
which is newer in this space, and you happen to have this too,
20:25
is low code orchestration. Right. A lot of tools out there today,
20:29
right, it's very much manual in terms of building scripts and pushing them
20:33
out and you're doing on a device by device basis. But bringing in low
20:37
code into the DECKS platform is going to be an absolute must for organizations going
20:42
forward because it just helps you to do that automation at scale. So it's
20:48
not really AI. I mean AI has a relationship there, but it is
20:52
fundamentally about doing like mass automation across your entire and computing a state. So
20:59
that's one of the major areas that I expect, you know, is mostly
21:03
a gap in the space today or is new, and so that's going to
21:07
be an area will start to see a lot more maturation over the next twelve
21:11
months twenty four months. I would say the other interesting piece that I don't
21:15
think many people are talking about is the rise of the AIPC and specific silicon
21:22
that is designed for running AI workloads at the edge. That's going to have
21:26
an impact on decks for sure in terms of performance and battery life and things
21:32
like that. And there's going to be more of a conversation between what's happening
21:36
at the operating system and software level and then what's happening at the hardware chip
21:40
level as well. I think there is this ecosystem that's coming together around decks
21:45
that includes, you know, the traditional DEX vendors, includes the operating system,
21:49
and also includes the chip and the role there as well. So that's
21:53
going to be an interesting area of potential integration. Longer term is being able
21:59
to happened to some of that chip technology to improve the overall digital experience.
22:07
Speaking of your overall digital experience, I think we've spoken about before Andrew maybe
22:11
a couple of times down the years, and I think something that Forester,
22:15
along with next Thing, has really long advocated for pretty directly, and something
22:21
that a lot of organizations which are really ahead of the game in terms of
22:25
their their deck strategy and their deck success is around this idea of DEX maturity
22:30
is the idea of like cultural changes explicit not just explicit investment, but explicit
22:37
structures that facilitate and support DEX, explicit professionals who are you know who are
22:44
explicitly focused on DEX And that all fits into overall idea of a DEX maturity
22:49
model. And maybe I'm interested in getting your updated view on where the market
22:56
is in relation to this. But first of all, maybe maybe out in
23:00
brief what it is that for us it directly would advocate, but I haven't
23:03
said already. So when we look at the overall maturity model, I basically
23:07
see three major steps. I mean, you could slice and dice it in
23:10
a lot of different ways. But you know, most customers today are in
23:14
what I call more of like a fixer mentality, right They're using the tool
23:18
to fix things, and they're using it to drive a decent amount of automation.
23:23
They're trying to set a solid foundation for the experience so that when I
23:26
come into work every day, and this is a true story from one of
23:30
our clients, I'm not experiencing a twenty five minute boot up in the morning
23:34
every morning, you know, with my device like that. There's a lot
23:37
of customers that are in that realm, and you know, maybe they're looking
23:41
at a little bit of sentiment data, but it's usually just in the context
23:44
of like a service desk interaction. So you kind of have this situation where
23:48
DEX is kind of bifurcated across and use computing and service desk. The next
23:53
level is you start to bring all that together. You start to have a
24:00
order a holistic view into the experience. You're not just looking at the devices,
24:03
but you're looking at applications and maybe network maybe that data is available within
24:07
your service desk platform, and you're actually starting to collect sentiment on an ongoing
24:14
basis, And I'm starting to understand outside of the context of something went wrong,
24:18
how is my overall experience as andrew on a monthly basis or something like
24:23
that, Right, And so I'm getting more sophisticated in terms of my sentiment
24:26
collection, having a broader remit in terms of the data that I'm collecting and
24:32
trying to understand about the experience. And there's a good chunk of I would
24:36
call them fairly mature customers that are in that realm, Like they have a
24:40
DEX practice that's built up, they have people in charge of it, and
24:42
they're really you know, taking a pretty holistic view. The next step breaks
24:48
decks out of it and it starts to say what does DEX look like across
24:52
the entire organization? And this is where like the most leading customers are today
24:57
in my view, and where they're really struggling is there's this constant battle between
25:03
HR and IT DEX teams who owns the overall digital experience. You know.
25:07
I had an interviewed UH, a leader of a DEX team at a large
25:11
US financial organization, for my last report, and she said, working with
25:18
HR has been the bane of my existence as a DEX professional because there's there's
25:23
there's a lot of you know, bickering about who owns that overall experience.
25:26
And so the next step is sort of breaking out of that and starting to
25:30
say, Okay, what is the end user journey across multiple technologies, some
25:34
which are owned by IT, some which are owned by HR, some are
25:38
owned by facilities, right, and start looking at that actual user journey of
25:42
them trying to get something done and be successful at work, rather than looking
25:47
at it in kind of these discrete areas. So that requires a huge cultural
25:52
shift as well, which I'm sure, we'll chat about But that's I think
25:56
that the leading customers are kind of they're trying to break out of this and
25:59
make decks this, you know, high level strategic initiative. In one case,
26:03
I'm working with a client now that's actively trying to hire a chief DEX
26:07
officer because they're having so much trouble, you know, building that coordination,
26:11
you know, between the various groups that all want to have some impact on
26:15
decks. But I don't all necessarily know what they're talking about. Chi officer,
26:23
I love it. Numbers. What's the number? Yeah, I'm gonna
26:27
say they're already a customer team. Don't even worry about it. If they're
26:32
not, you know, they hired a chief DEX officer, they might want
26:36
they listen to it. This one. Okay, okay, you know,
26:41
ind in terms of numbers, I mean you speak to more kind of proactive
26:45
so to speak, DEX users and perhaps anybody, and do you feel that
26:52
this is a tipping point with regards to seeing more of that level of commitment,
26:59
more of clarity around what they want to achieve and how they're going to
27:03
have to go about achieving them. Yes, we're certainly at the tipping point.
27:08
When we look at our adoption data, for example, for DEX tools,
27:15
the majority of decision makers that we're looking at over fifty percent saying that
27:19
they're actively implementing or have implemented. So we're at the stage now where and
27:25
this is at the enterprise level where you have a lot of recognition that these
27:30
tools are going to provide a lot of value. But we're also at a
27:33
place where there's where there's been a lot of adoption for many years, and
27:37
people have got to kind of the end of their rope in terms of the
27:42
use cases in some ways, like they get to a point where they're able
27:47
to automate and they have a DEX score and they're tracking that, et cetera,
27:51
and they get to this place where Okay, where do I go next?
27:53
And the next place is that user journey and they get pushed in that
27:56
direction because they need to find other ways to create value. Right, they
28:02
have that super solid foundation, they're able to track the experience and now it's
28:06
about transformation of the decks and that requires you know, a lot of departmental
28:11
coordination. So yeah, I think we're definitely at a tipping point. I
28:15
had had a question for you. Next about sort of other cultural changes and
28:19
by all means, if there are any that stand out with regards to sort
28:22
of internal decks, let me know. But I kind of thought about sort
28:26
of iterating on it slightly because we've been having discussions this week as as a
28:30
team. And next thing about the idea of investing in some external research where
28:36
we we ask EUC professionals, what do you think the future is for the
28:41
service desk? Like you, what do you think do you think when you
28:45
look ahead four or five years, three years, whatever it is, do
28:48
you see a service desk still here? What succeeds it, what follows it?
28:53
What will it be called? What will it be focused on? And
28:57
actually I just update my question Andrew, since we have have you here today
29:00
and ask them, ask what your own, your own view of that evolution
29:04
is and what do you think it's it's time limit is, and what do
29:11
you think its future is it's evolution? Well, I think there's an interesting
29:15
discussion right now happening on integration of multiple tool sets, whether that's service desk,
29:23
dex tools, endpoint management, software, asset management. Those four areas
29:29
are areas where it makes sense to share a lot of data and so with
29:33
that in mind, I think we'll start to see more integration between those tool
29:37
sets and maybe even consolidation in the market. But what that ultimately does in
29:41
terms of the service desk discussion, is the service des changes a bit.
29:45
It's not just a I don't think it fully goes away. You're still going
29:48
to have issues. You're still going to have you know, technology is weird.
29:52
Stuff happens, You're going to be calling in and not know what's happening.
29:56
I don't think it's going to fully go away anytime soon, but I
29:59
think nature of it changes where instead of becoming just a place that you call
30:03
when things go wrong, it's also a place that you go to learn how
30:08
to take advantage of new capabilities, where you you gain access to adoption capabilities
30:18
you know, longer term, right, and it becomes more not so much
30:22
the center of excellence, but it's it's it's kind of the center of the
30:26
decks in the organization. I think there's that's fundamental transition that will happen is
30:30
that it'll be it will become less of like your traditional L one, L
30:33
two, L three service desk and more focused on kind of enablement of the
30:37
workforce in general, it'll have a broader remit, you know, beyond devices.
30:42
I expect things like you know, facilities like you know, the conference
30:45
room booking tools for example, to be part of that longer term, and
30:49
maybe some of the HR applications. So I think it'll evolve. I don't
30:53
think it'll fully go away, because it's still going to be issues, but
30:56
a lot of that is going to be driven I think from the tech stack,
30:59
which is becoming increasingly consolidated. Very interesting. I'm looking looking forward to
31:04
getting this survey. Actually, I'm interested in what it ces itself. You
31:08
know, yes, me too, Andrew a wonderful conversation. Last question for
31:15
you. It's still relatively earlier in the year and yeah, yeah, and
31:19
you here, So we got to ask what do you what do you foresee?
31:22
What milestones? What expectations do you have for for us of twenty twenty
31:26
four you're our it nostrodamus call. If you had asked me in December of
31:32
twenty twenty three, I would say there's going to be an acquisition in the
31:34
txtpasion. I wish I wish you had asked me then because I would have
31:40
been proven right. But I don't think we're at the end of the acquisition
31:45
uh phase, to be honest, you know, I think there's a lot
31:48
of forces in this market that are pretty interesting. You have an economy that's
31:52
kind of roaring back to life, increased tech spending, but you also still
31:57
have this pressure to consolidate and reduce costs from the CIO CFO perspective, and
32:02
so with that, people are going to be looking to consolidate in different ways,
32:07
whether that's bringing additional you know, tools into their existing dex tool or
32:13
bigger vendors you know, coming into the space. You know, I would
32:15
expect there to be more acquisitions. I'll predict right now that there will be
32:21
one more this year. So I think we're we're at this interesting tipping point
32:25
you mentioned earlier where there's a lot of different market forces all working together that
32:31
it feels like we're at this breaking point where there's going to be a major
32:35
change in this space in twenty twenty four. And I'm very excited to see
32:37
what happens. And obviously congrats to the whole Next Thing's team for the for
32:44
the acquisition already, So I think just the beginning, in my view,
32:49
we were just making sure your prediction came right. You know, we just
32:52
thank you. I appreciate that high help, sequesciousness from a vendor expensive Andrew,
33:00
thank you, pleasure to have you back on mate. And let's say
33:04
it was a third light. Let's not even count. And let's assume we
33:07
see you again in about a year and the luck we've anever waves coming up,
33:12
So best of luck for that and lovely to see you again. Thank
33:15
you. I'm looking forward to it and great to see you both as well.
33:19
And yeah, thank you so much for having me cool. Thanks Andrew.
33:23
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