Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Experience Rebels: fighting for the DEX tipping point (w/ Josh Sultan)

Transcript

Experience Rebels: fighting for the DEX tipping point (w/ Josh Sultan) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome I Change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:07
Let's get into it. Welcome back to the Deck Show. I'm Tom McGrath,
0:11
joined as ever by Tim Flower, and we'd joined by a very special
0:16
guest, the first time guest on the Deck Show, one of our favorite.
0:20
I think it's fair to say younger voices in the deck space and that's
0:23
Josh Sultan. Josh, welcome, lovely to have you on the show for
0:27
the first time. Yes, yeah, thank you for having me. It's
0:32
it's it's a pleasure to be here. And yeah, I would say probably
0:34
one of the younger voices, which you know, I'm happy to be.
0:38
Yeah, I think it's a good thing. Yeah, we're not trying to
0:41
make you feel bad here too. You know, we're not trying to for
0:43
for any shade your way, mate, I'm I'm comfortable with being the older
0:49
voice. Oh good. But yeah, Josh definitely had great to have you
0:51
here, a great article. I'm looking forward to chat. Thank you,
0:55
Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to getting into it. Splendid.
0:58
I thought we could begin, Actually, Tim and I Josh, we've recently
1:00
had our boss and our boss's boss on the show, which, let me
1:04
tell you from my perspective, is kind of stressful, especially when you have
1:07
for kind of audio nightmares that we had on the day. It was difficult
1:12
going, but a great episode. Nonetheless, once we'd once we'd sorted all
1:18
the audio issues out and the actual episode is called The Invention of Decks,
1:23
and we we took a look at the history of the space that you cover
1:29
so so well. It's probably fair to say, however, that it was
1:32
a fairly sort of Next Think centric history, right, And that's fair enough.
1:37
It was. We were all Next Thinkers on the call, and Next
1:38
Think anyway has a has an integral has had an integral role and has an
1:44
integral role to play in that history. But I was very interested to begin
1:49
by asking you for your own sense of the space's history and origins, the
1:55
significant early milestones from the way you see as you see them, and to
2:00
hear from somebody who's not a Next thinker how they how they chart that that
2:05
history of Decks. Yeah, okay, So I do think that dex is
2:10
definitely still you know, in the early adopter phase if you were to plot
2:15
it on like the technology adoption curve. And I think that we're very close
2:22
to it, to the beginning of decks, and that makes it hard to
2:24
see, hard to pinpoint where it really happened, and so I'll leave the
2:30
really big predictions up to the historians. But I think that you know,
2:35
through the eighties and nineties and then all the way up to about twenty ten,
2:39
priority one was developing technology, getting it up to a point where it
2:46
was suitable for corporate and business use. So we saw like the first the
2:52
invention of personal computers and that was the first time that any digital tools were
2:57
used at work. Then the invention of the Internet, and then the development
3:00
of high speed internet, and then mobile devices, and then later on crowd
3:07
computing. And I think that the idea of putting an emphasis on employee satisfaction
3:13
and engagement with regard to the digital tools that they're using really began to pick
3:21
up in like the late twenty tenths. That's that's where I would put it.
3:24
Hopefully that lines up with what your bosses said to But I think good,
3:30
that's good, dear. But dex is interesting because I think that when
3:37
you learn about decks as an idea, as a concept, especially nowadays,
3:44
I think you realize that you always knew about it, and it recontextualizes your
3:51
whole it journey. So I think the real question is what was the start
3:55
of DEX for me, for all of us personally. So I started my
4:03
my I T career on the service desk, like so many others, and
4:09
I was I was a bit of an experience rebel, which sounds a lot
4:15
cooler than it really is. But I say that because I would basically put
4:21
delivering a good experience ahead of complying to service desk metrics. And my managers
4:32
hated that. But I, you know, I think I was pretty good
4:36
at my job, and I tried to prioritize what I believed was most important,
4:42
and I was often, you know, butting heads with people in leadership
4:46
who disagreed and wanted me to comply more to the metrics. And it was
4:51
only in twenty twenty when I took the an Essence of Experience course with XLA
5:00
UP delivered by you know, Alan Nan, Slesa Schwartz, some people that
5:03
you've had on the show before. Um, and that it was taking that
5:09
course made the penny drop in my head and I thought, oh, DEX
5:15
is something I've always been doing. I just didn't know it was dex before
5:18
I took this course. So I think I think when you when you learn
5:24
about decks for the first time, you know, the invention of decks is
5:28
tricky to pin down because I think they're always been experienced rebels in it.
5:32
I think that they just didn't know that what they were doing was decks until
5:40
maybe a round about Now, hmm, that's so cool, and I love
5:44
it when a guest hands me a perfect title for the episode Experienced Rebels,
5:49
it is we've added that. And when you look, when you look at
5:54
its more recent history, Um, do you think we've seen a tipping point?
5:59
Can we say that deck has now gone mainstream? If so, when
6:02
was it? If not, when will it happen? And what of a
6:06
milestones in its recent emergence at least? So I don't think that decks has
6:15
gone mainstream. Like I said, I think we're still early adopters. From
6:20
here. We need to move into decks being in the early majority, and
6:26
then I would say we're mainstream. And you know, I do think there
6:31
have been some major milestones in the last couple of years that have really tipped
6:35
the scales in favor of decks. That have really pushed the agenda forward,
6:41
and I'm a little bit low to talk about them because I feel like it's
6:45
all we've talked about the last couple of years. But you cannot talk about
6:49
milestones in history that have affected digital employee experience without mentioning COVID nineteen, the
6:57
Great Resignation, the Great Attrition, whatever you want to call it, if
7:02
you want to put a year on it. Then in twenty twenty one,
7:06
the voluntary quit rate was twenty five percent higher than pre pandemic, and only
7:13
thirty five percent of the people who quit took another job in their same industry.
7:18
And that massive resignation, which I'll admit I was actually swept up in.
7:26
At the time, I felt like I was doing the right thing for
7:31
me, and in hindsight, I was part of a very, you know,
7:36
a sizable majority of people who I kind of became a statistic because I
7:43
did the exact same thing. And I think that the Great Resignation showed employers
7:50
and employees that DEX needs to matter. It showed employees that DEX did matter
7:57
to them, that they didn't just they weren't happy just having a job,
8:01
and that the financial compensation was not the bottom line, and that they did
8:05
care about experience to the point where it's something that they'd be willing to quit
8:09
over. If we are in that early adoption phase, still, what are
8:18
the existing obstacles for really for Deck's really get going mainstream for its fuller acclamation
8:24
and adoption. So I think this is probably touching on my personal experience,
8:35
and I'd love to hear what other people have to say, but I think
8:39
that the most obvious obstacle, and maybe this is because, as you said,
8:45
I'm a young voice in the space, but the most obvious obstacle is
8:50
traditional and antiquated attitudes in it that are in leadership positions. Because the problem
9:01
with trying to push like a push a Deck's agenda in a mature organization at
9:05
the moment is that your kind of it's a new way of looking at things,
9:13
it's a new way of doing things, and to some people it can
9:16
feel like you're pointing at them and saying you've been doing it wrong for thirty
9:18
five years, and that is really hard for people to accept. And I
9:26
think that a lot of the people who feel that way by product of the
9:30
fact that they've been doing they've been working in the industry for thirty five years.
9:33
They're in leadership positions, they're in decision making positions, and I think
9:39
that undoing unlearning decades of of of experience it is difficult. It takes time,
9:50
and I think that's probably the biggest obstacle. What do you guys think?
9:54
It looks like Tim might agree another GREA eight set up, because I
10:01
will. I'll let you know that I started my IT career in nineteen eighty
10:05
eight, thirty five years ago this year, so I've had a thirty five
10:11
year journey of an all in end user compute. Started in eighty eight with
10:18
Dawson Windows and then got my CNE with Nobel Netwear and moved into active directory.
10:22
We didn't realize and the same thing with DEX. We didn't realize we
10:26
were doing systems management until Systems Management Server SMS came out in the mid nineties.
10:33
So I think we're in the same trajectory with des. Like you said,
10:37
I think you put a great don't You don't really know you're doing it
10:41
until somebody kind of gives it a name. Next thing coined the term decks
10:46
years back, and now it's kind of it's being adopted. Do you think
10:52
that along with kind of the naming convention, do you think that DEX is
10:58
just a natural evolution of systems management or is it something completely different? M
11:07
I think it is. Yes. I think that, you know, a
11:11
lot of the skills required to be successful at decks stem from a blend of
11:18
both IT and HR, and so I think that it is a natural development
11:24
that stems from the blurring of the lines between these two industries. And I
11:30
think that I think if we had the technology twenty years ago to measure qualitative
11:39
data effectively and like tools like next thing, if we had those twenty years
11:45
ago, then yeah, I think like I said, I think, I
11:46
think people have always cared about decks. People have always prioritized experience. It's
11:52
just we didn't have the tools to really make it a like an organizational change
11:58
until recently. Yeah, And systems management has a focus on the systems and
12:07
DEX has a focus on the employee. So my opinion is that it is
12:11
a blend of multiple disciplines. You definitely need a different skill set as you
12:18
kind of evolve along with the technology and the discipline. What do you believe
12:24
that IT leaders should be doing right now to upskill and prepare both themselves as
12:30
leaders. Like you said, thirty five year career in leadership needs to have
12:33
an ability to upskill and evolve as well. So what should those leaders be
12:39
doing for themselves as well as guiding their teams for success in this expanding DEX
12:46
role. So I think my advice act as I've said this early stage of
12:52
adoption. My advice comes down to two simple steps. Step one, open
12:58
the gate. Step two, get out of the way. I think that
13:05
you need to give your employees the chance to learn about decks, give them
13:09
access to courses, connect them with the right people, encourage them to learn
13:15
about it, and then let them run with it. Because some of them
13:18
will some of them will realize, oh yeah, no, this this makes
13:22
perfect sense. This is the way that I think anyway, you know now
13:26
it's just been given a name, and you know this resonates with me.
13:31
And I think the advantage is that because DEX is so new, because it's
13:37
it's still an underdeveloped industry, if you do this right now, they'll very
13:43
quickly become industry leaders. You know. That is why young voices like myself
13:48
can can come on shows like this because you it does not take too much
13:54
to become a you know, right to to reach the forefront of the decks
14:01
industry because it is a very fresh, very new way of thinking. So
14:07
staying on, staying on that track of education and upskilling certifications that always played
14:15
a major role in enterprise tech. I know they have for me with the
14:18
CNE, the MCS, all of the different technologies that you need to implement.
14:22
You need to be expert class technologists to be able to do it right.
14:26
Next thing recently launched a free course of online deck SERTs and it really
14:33
got an amazing response. So there's a lot of interest in being able to
14:37
adapt careers and skill sets to better suit that decks future. What specific skills
14:43
do you see that are on the rise and most significant to the space?
14:48
It is a moving target, you know. If you'd asked me a year
14:52
ago, I would have said that the most important skill is data analysis,
14:58
But with the AI revolution that we've seen in the last year, I think
15:01
that takes a backseat. I have spoken to leaders in this space about about
15:07
this very thing, and the answers I get back over and over are empathy,
15:15
which sounds like it's not a skill. You know, to many people,
15:18
they'll say, well, you either are empathetic or you're not. I
15:22
disagree. I think that empathy is a skill that you can learn and practice,
15:28
and I think storytelling because some of the value that you will get from
15:35
good decks is hard to quantify. That's certainly one of the biggest challenges that
15:41
I've faced, and the reality is that good work does not sell itself.
15:48
So those soft skills being able to tell the story of why we need to
15:54
make this change to improve decks, and being able to tell the story of
15:58
how it had a positive impact in your organization. Those are the skills that
16:04
are not going anywhere, I think. And then there are as a host
16:08
of technical skills like automation, scripting, dashboarding, and reporting, strategy,
16:15
being able to build influence in your organization. Those are all skills that they
16:22
are useful whichever ones interest you the most. I would encourage anybody who's thinking
16:27
about getting into deck to go and learn one or two all of them if
16:30
you want, but it's not necessary. I'd say a dex team needs all
16:34
those skills, But every individual, I think needs to have that empathy and
16:41
that storytelling that those are the skills that DEX leaders are going to be looking
16:45
for first and are definitely not going to be supported by a I tools and
16:55
you've got You've got the perfect ability. It's almost like you're you're seeing to
17:00
the future. We've got and I couldn't agree with you more. In storytelling,
17:03
I've got a series coming out soon called Stories from the Road, I
17:06
think is the tentative title we're going to use to just get some of those
17:08
IT experiential stories out into the into the public world. Be inviting others to
17:15
submit their stories as well, and start sharing some of that that knowledge and
17:19
telling a story is the best way to get people to understand what's happening.
17:26
If you kind of in that vein, look into that crystal ball that you
17:30
have and look kind of five years down the road, other than skills and
17:36
education, what types of roles and responsibilities do you see coming out to the
17:40
forefront in EUC because it's not traditional roles that we're going to play anymore.
17:45
M Okay, yeah, so looking into my crystal ball of it. I
17:52
will preface this by saying this is pure speculation. I think it's really hard
17:56
to predict, but I think that on site IT and tech bars have kind
18:03
of I would say, fallen off in the last few years with the rising
18:07
remote work. I think there will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes,
18:11
because I think that delivering a really great experience is easier in person,
18:22
it is possible remote. You know, delivering a great employee experience is absolutely
18:26
possible with an entirely remote company. I myself, of course, I'm a
18:32
big supporter of remote working, but I do think that on site it and
18:37
things like tech bars are going to become more popular. They're going to be
18:41
much more focused on decks than you know, fixing it incidents, and I
18:45
think that we'll probably see a resurgence of that kind of thing in the future.
18:51
I also think so I think the chief digital officer role is one that
18:57
we're going to see popping up a bit more so. I read an article
19:02
from on the World Economic Forum about how the average tenure of a chief digital
19:07
officer is thirty one months, which is very little for you know, it's
19:14
like two and a half years. That's not long at all for a role
19:18
that is that senior. And the reason for this is because there they've kind
19:22
of been set up to fail because the role chief digital officer it could be
19:29
called chief Transformation Officer. It's it's more focused on transformation and change than it
19:36
is digital and digital experience. And well, everybody hates change, everybody hates
19:41
transformation, and so it's really easy to pin failures on the CDO role.
19:48
But as time goes on, as transformation digital transformation continues to pick up,
19:57
as as as digitalization becomes more common, that process of digitalization will feel like
20:06
less of a severe transformation, and then the CDR role could flourish again.
20:11
I agree. So last one for me, you're not the only one that's
20:17
looking into crystal ball. The big analysts right Forrester and Gartner, they've got
20:21
all kinds of individual analysts trying to do the exact same thing, what's going
20:25
to happen down the road, and give enterprises a little bit of advice on
20:29
how to prepare for that future. What do you see that they're getting either
20:33
right or wrong in their analysis? Is there anything significant that on either side
20:37
of that that either is being missed or that they're really getting right. Yeah,
20:42
So all of these big analysts Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, I've been
20:48
following these high level you know, I've been following these analyzes for years,
20:56
and I feel like I have seen a shift for sure. You know,
21:02
to begin with, they would mention decks, they would introduce the idea,
21:07
and then we started to slowly see more surveys, more statistics to back up
21:11
the idea of decks. And I think it's only really recently that I've started
21:17
to see more statements of holistic conclusions, like financial compensation is simply not enough.
21:29
It's not you know, it's not that transactional. I think I read
21:32
that in a McKinsey article recently, and it is only recently that they've taken
21:36
that kind of heavy, slightly heavier stance. So I think they're taking a
21:40
very slow and steady approach, and I think that is the right way to
21:48
do it. I think if you want to change those stubborn minds, then
21:52
that is the approach that you have to take. Like you said about storytelling,
21:59
ni to introduce the idea, give them time to warm up to it.
22:03
You need to deliver the proof and you need to tell stories. And
22:08
that is the way that you change it culture. You can't just go in
22:14
and say this is the best way to do things. Now, this is
22:17
how we're gonna do it. It's just it's just not going to work.
22:19
And I think that the slow and steady approach is the right way. It
22:23
is how it has to be done. And I would like to note that,
22:27
you know, I'm using words like stubborn and antiquated, and I do
22:33
think that they're an obstacle, but I don't think that it's always wrong to
22:37
be that way, Especially when you're running a business. You need you need
22:41
to see the proof before you start taking action. And I completely understand that,
22:45
which is why I think that the slow and steady approach of these big
22:51
analysts in doing more DEX research and telling more DEX stories is the right way.
23:00
Time it sounds like he's describing a nie slow and steady, stubborn and
23:03
antiquated. I was gonna say, stops stubbing, Tim, Josh, it's
23:07
just getting a bit much. I said it was fine. I said it
23:11
was yeah, it was too late. Then you know it didn't sound fine.
23:18
Tim mentioned that at the top of the discussion that your your great recent
23:23
piece for the dex Hub Chatting with AI about Digital Employee Experience, very fun
23:30
article. Tell us about what you did in it, first of all,
23:33
and and then what you found out from chatting to AI? Mm. Yeah,
23:40
So I wanted to talk about AI. It's obviously incredibly topical, and
23:44
it was off the back of the announcement of next Thing consist Um, and
23:48
I thought, you know, who's who's gonna give me a better answer about
23:53
the AI and it's impacting the deck space than than chat GPT itself. And
24:00
I will say that in my experience, AI will always back itself and it
24:07
will it will claim it can solve all of your problems. It definitely cannot.
24:10
And I wanted that that was really a central um. Central to my
24:17
article is cutting through the cutting through the noise and the hype and really focusing
24:25
on what AI actually practically could do. So I do think that the most
24:30
exciting things that we could see from AI in the deck space is data democratization.
24:36
Making data analysis easy for less technical, less skilled people is brilliant.
24:45
You know that that is that is really good, like the the natural language
24:48
processing of next think assist oh Man. When I saw that, I all
24:55
I was thinking was God, I wish I had this. I wish I
24:57
had this two or three years ago. You know, it would have been
25:00
it would have been so useful, so it could not have come soon sooner,
25:03
and I'm super excited for that. And also hyper personalization, like being
25:10
able to leverage AI to potentially see exactly what you want to see when you
25:15
want to see it, based on your role in organization, based on the
25:19
services you care about, and based on how services are performing and what incidents
25:25
are occurring. You know, the potential that an AI could could detect which
25:30
metrics you care about most based on what's going on and present those to you.
25:33
I think that's really exciting as well. There are were a couple of
25:37
things that chat GPT said that it could help with help a deck analyst with
25:41
which I completely disagree, like mental health support. You know, that's just
25:47
a kind of ones I'm not going to open, but chat GPT absolutely cannot.
25:53
It is not ready to help you support your employees mental world. Being
26:00
happy to talk about that more, but I'm just going to leave that there
26:03
final. And also I think proactive incidents solving. I think that proactively like
26:08
preventing issues is something that people in the deck space and in the AI space
26:15
are very excited about, and I do think there is potential for AI to
26:19
help us with predictive problem solving. But I think that at the moment,
26:30
with the level of sophistication that we see in AI tools right now, they
26:37
don't do anything that intuition of a professional and experienced IT support analyst cannot already.
26:48
Do you know, they can perhaps detect an AI talker, detect what's
26:56
going on in the network and maybe identify that there's an issue it's going to
27:00
occur, But I don't really think that it's much more than you know,
27:06
Tim who's just working in an infrastructure role would be able to tell. And
27:11
maybe it's useful because um, Tim may not be able to prove that he
27:18
has a feeling that this you know, this change is going to cause problems.
27:22
But I guess what I'm trying to say is as experienced IT analysts,
27:30
we kind of we we know, we know that certain things are going to
27:33
cause problems. We know that updates to highly utilize software is going to cause
27:40
a spike in calls, and we don't need an AI tool to tell us
27:44
that's going to happen because there's not really anything we could have done about it
27:47
anyway. So I think we're just not sophisticated enough yet. When it comes
27:51
to proactive support. So there are things to be really excited about, but
27:56
definitely not everything. Last question for you, Josh, as we enter the
28:03
second half of this year, any trends currently going under the radar that you
28:08
think we should be more attentive to, so less under the radar, but
28:17
more. I think that a lot of organizations have taken their eye off the
28:22
ball, and that's remote work, the remote work trend. So I'm seeing
28:26
all over the place online and in in my you know, in my own
28:33
circles, employers seem to be moving away from remote work for one reason or
28:41
another. And I think that I think what I see happening is we saw
28:48
the great resignation, We saw the great attrition. We saw employers think,
28:52
oh, oh this is a huge problem. We need to make changes to
28:56
stop people from quitting. We need to invest in employee experience. And now,
29:03
you know, a year or two on, things are starting to feel
29:08
a little bit normal again. That crisis mindset has has kind of died down,
29:15
and all of a sudden, employers are taking their foot off the gas
29:19
with employee experience. If anything, is sliding backwards, and you know,
29:25
I see the the the reversion on attitudes towards remote work as a sign of
29:33
this, I think that, and I think that generally employers need to be
29:40
aware of that and need to make sure that they don't start sliding back too
29:44
far. And we have another great resignation. Well said, well said.
29:49
This is absolutely wonderful to have you on the Chow for for the first time.
29:52
Josh really really enjoyed it. Going to direct our listeners thank you over
29:56
to your brilliant article which we just discussed. They can find a link to
30:02
it in the show notes. We'd love to have you back on the show
30:06
again, Josh, hopefully even this year. But first of all, just
30:08
tell our listeners if you would, where they can find you, make contact
30:11
with you. Read more of your work here, more of your thoughts.
30:15
Yeah, so I encourage anybody to connect with me on LinkedIn. The name
30:19
is Josh Sultan, and I'd be happy to talk about any of the topics
30:25
that we've covered today, or you can check out my website which is Sultan
30:29
Josh dot co dot uk. Link to that in the show notes as well.
30:34
Of course, Josh, pleasure to have you on the show. See
30:37
you again, my friend. Thanks, thank you, Thank you both to
30:41
make sure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show in Apple
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