Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Navigating the IT Service Revolution (w/ Collinson Group)

Transcript

Navigating the IT Service Revolution (w/ Collinson Group) · 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. I'm Tom McGraw. I know we've released two episodes already in twenty
0:17
twenty four, but let me just once again pull back for the curtain,
0:22
remove a football whatever that terminology is supposed to be, and say, this
0:26
is our first recording of the New Year, actually in the new year,
0:30
so to speak. So I'm very very excited to get back on the microphone.
0:34
Got a fantastic guest. We'll introduce momentary, but let me just welcome,
0:38
as ever my main man, my co host, my friend Tim Flower.
0:41
Tim, Happy New Year? How you doing? Hey Tom? Happy
0:45
New Y're great to be back on the mic with you. Hope you had
0:48
a great holiday. It was very nice, Thank you. Yeah. I
0:51
had what I like to think of as a European amount of time off around
0:55
Christmas. You know, I know in America is full of people kind of
0:59
dialing it in a bit. You know, you still go to be office
1:02
a couple of times, it's like you're you're still working. But in Europe
1:07
we take some serious time off and it's it's very interesting I did in that
1:11
if that's if that's the description time I had a European holiday myself took a
1:15
chunk of time, tod I'm glad to hear it. Glad to hear it,
1:19
and well, listen, I've got If you're paying attention, you may
1:23
have already noticed that our wonderful producer Catherine has been has been behind the scenes
1:30
doing a lovely refresh of many aspects of the show. So we have a
1:34
brand new brand, a brand new insignia, I guess for the dex share.
1:40
We have a brand new LinkedIn page. Please look us up and if
1:44
you listen regularly give us a follow. There'll be lots of exclusive content and
1:48
news items dropping there. And we also have a fantastic new questionnaire. But
1:53
we're sending out to all of our all of our guests, and let's get
1:56
to some of the details and that questionnaire momentarily and give it a ten stripe.
2:00
But first of all, let's welcome the crash test dummy himself for the
2:05
day. He is Matthew Robinson. I think you go by Matt Is that
2:08
right? That's absolutely fine? Yeah, fine by you? Okay, great,
2:13
and you are it service operations manager at Collinson Group. Welcome to the
2:17
show, Matt. Delighted to have you as our first guest for the new
2:20
year. How you doing. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be
2:23
here. Yes, I'm soldiering on making it through January. Happy to see
2:27
some slightly lighted evenings the morning slowly begin to creep himhich makes me feel a
2:30
lot better. Oh, it's such a grim month, isn't it. But
2:34
it's kind of you know, the older you get, that you kind of
2:37
learned to enjoy it. I think you enjoy the Yes, it's the long,
2:40
long, slow build up to spring. That's how I think. A
2:44
few months now we've got your festive weeks out of a way and so so
2:47
yes, So Matt, you were the first person to fill in our new
2:52
guest survey, giving Tim and I a chance to kind of get to know
2:54
our guests a little bit, a little bit better prior to even talking to
2:58
you, and as a bunch of different questions they are very well chosen.
3:01
My favorite one that Catherine's included in it is about like what is your life
3:07
motto? I like the idea of a life motto. I don't know yet
3:10
if I have on myself, but I liked yours, Matt. If I
3:15
can quote it, if I can be so bold, will it matter in
3:17
five years? If it won't, don't let it stress you. There's there's
3:22
wisdom there. I have to say, thank you, Rose. I can't
3:25
claim complete credit for it. It was something I got from share on a
3:28
Kred Norton episode, but it's so wonderfully encapsulates a way to look at life,
3:35
and you know, to to evaluate whether things are worth letting yourself get
3:38
stressed by, and you know, to have that will it matter in five
3:42
years time. If it's not going to matter in five years time, then
3:44
you know, don't, don't let it affect your life. But if it's
3:46
going to be something you'll you'll look back on five years time and think about,
3:49
then, then it's something worth giving that extra extra time to you and
3:53
extra time to think, think, and consider. My motto is, if
3:55
it's not going to matter tomorrow, not worry about it. I think I
4:04
think as we are masked these these life mottos, I think I'm going to
4:08
take them all in and by the end of the year, I'm going to
4:10
pick one because I don't know if I do have one. But but Catherine,
4:14
our producer, since you've joined us, and since this is your question,
4:15
I wonder if I can pull you onto the mic. She doesn't expect
4:18
this everybody, so she was looking a bit alarmed. But I wonder if
4:21
you do you have a life motto, Catherine, I reckon. It's a
4:25
good one. My dad always said, you win some, you lose most
4:30
growing up, and so every time something goes wrong, that's typically what I
4:36
say. Say, you win some, you lose most, and you move
4:40
on. A great way to instill a bit of durability in your children.
4:46
I think I think he's clearly a wise a wise dad. I love it.
4:51
Well. Listen, Matt, Welcome, Welcome to the show. Thanks
4:54
Catherine for the for the great question. I think we're gonna have a bit
4:57
of fun with those this year is let's let's begin, let's let's get professional.
5:01
Now enough enough new here. But tell us first, we'll tell us
5:08
something about your yourself and your role at Collins and please man. Yeah,
5:12
so Collinson, as you said, I'm the IT service operations manager. Primarily,
5:15
my days day role is managing our service desk that's provided to us by
5:20
their party vendor. So I'm making sure they've got everything they need. Tickets
5:24
are getting progressed, escalations is getting dealt with, all of that, all
5:26
of that good stuff. I joined Collinson about four and a half years ago.
5:30
I actually came into their Windows ten roll out ahead of their upgrade to
5:32
Office SE six five, joined them as enduser Compute manager, and then moved
5:36
into into IT Service operations about two years ago. As I say, predominantly
5:42
just looking after that service desk and some of the associated service has been through
5:45
quite a shake up over the last year or so. We've We've developed Service
5:49
Management Office, and we've been working on some of those service delivery towers,
5:54
change management, proper management, major inst to management, and we're at quite
5:58
an exciting juncture at the moment. We're looking to actually bring the service desk
6:00
in house, so we're moving from an outsource model to an in house provision
6:05
moving tooling. We currently sit on service now and we're moving over to fresh
6:10
service. So we're at the beginnings of a sort of really shaping a foundation
6:15
that's going to be able to allow us to develop, build, improve and
6:19
change the way that we're delivering IT services back to the group, which thing
6:25
is quite an exciting place to be fascinating that whole process of bringing it in
6:29
house. What are some of the big sort of pain points and challenges that
6:31
that's throwing up in particular. So, I mean, it's obviously a big
6:36
project. Understanding what services get delivered through the service desk, Understanding who needs
6:42
to own knowledge, who needs to provide feed you know, feedback, input
6:46
updates. There's been a big recruitment piece. We're going to deliver the service
6:50
out of our Cape Town office where we've already got a large contact center.
6:55
So it's a similar vibe, you know, a content center to a service
6:58
desk. People call in, they need help, so it seemed like quite
7:00
a logical place to put it. So there's been some recruitment going on.
7:03
Obviously all the all the standard work around making sure people are set up,
7:08
got their ready to go, and also a big piece of work on the
7:12
actual tool that we're going to use. That's that's been that's been our key
7:15
focus. We are on service now at the moment, which is a big
7:17
market leader, but it's also quite big, quite an enterprise, quite difficult
7:23
to sort of you know, get changes made to it quickly and adapt to
7:27
business needs. So we've we've gone with We've gone with Fresh after some evaluation
7:31
work. We use another one of their products in our contact centers and manage
7:34
customer contact, and so we felt it was a really good product that we
7:39
could use in and have in house expertise to help us respond to the business
7:45
requirements and help us to deliver a better service by improving things, developing new
7:50
options, workflows, functionalities and starting to look at how we make the service
7:55
better as we as we sort of go forwards. You know, there's there's
7:59
up size and downsides of insourcing and outsourcing, and you know, everybody's everybody's
8:03
got views on it, I think, but the I think that for me,
8:07
the critical thing to remember is with outsources you tend to be a little
8:09
bit more restricted in terms of adaptive response to the business. If you've got
8:13
something in house, you can change very quickly, and you can respond very
8:16
quickly to business pressure when they need things, you can deliver services at a
8:22
pace, whereas with an outsource model, they tend to be a little bit
8:24
more fixed and it tends to be a little bit more difficult to move things
8:28
quickly, which which can be a good thing at scale, but on the
8:33
when we're on the slightly smaller side and we need things, we need things
8:35
time quickly. That can be a bit of a blocker for us. So,
8:39
Matt, as Tom reminds me frequently, I'm not only a proactive IT
8:45
guy, I am an old IT guy. So I lived through the I
8:50
lived through the dark ages when it was literally in the dark, and I
8:56
think Tom probably thinks I'm still in the dark. For the analogies, how
9:01
big a challenge is it, How big a challenge is it for you just
9:03
in general knowing what users are experiencing, Right, that's the typical darkness that
9:09
IT has, is we don't know what it or what employees are experiencing as
9:13
we sit over in it. What are some of the challenges you see,
9:16
both in terms of individual issues as well as the general perception. Yeah,
9:24
I think knowing what people are experiencing is the challenge, right. And one
9:28
of the key takeaways I had from one of the Next Thing's own reports was
9:33
actually, you know, only forty four percent of IT issues getting reported.
9:37
You know, that's over half the people are sitting there with an IT issue
9:41
not even telling anybody they've got an issue, let alone whether they're having a
9:46
good experience consuming the services. So knowing what those people are experiencing, I
9:50
think is absolutely of one of the huge challenges that you need to have become
9:54
one of the real real things. I found fascinating about the the next thing
10:00
product is having that ability to see what a device is doing on an individual
10:05
level, understanding how someone is using their device. When I was Accountable Friend
10:11
User Compute, it was always one of the big pain points as people would
10:13
come up and go either they'd go, oh, I don't like that device
10:16
that you're trying to give me, or they would go, oh, I
10:20
want this device over here, and there's there's no If you haven't got something
10:24
telling you what people are doing on their devices, how do you understand whether
10:26
you're giving them what they need. So, yeah, being able to see
10:31
the next thing product show you you know and give that amazing telemetry data about
10:35
how you know how much of my CPU I'm using on a day to day,
10:39
how much of my storage am I using, which which licenses am I
10:41
using to log into applications. Having that information allows you to make informed decisions
10:46
and to put strategies in place, and I think without tooling, that tells
10:50
us that I think it's it's going to become more and more of a struggle
10:52
to deliver a good quality service. And I think it's one of the areas
10:56
that a lot of a lot of businesses should be looking at getting something like
11:00
that in place, because once you realize the power of that knowledge, I
11:03
think that's a real just such a huge benefit to businesses and the financial business
11:09
case alone. You know, all those devices that get upgraded, they don't
11:13
need to be upgraded, that's that's it pays for itself. So yeah,
11:16
it's something that we want to we want to be looking at doing and improving
11:20
where we are, and I think probably everybody that's the way the general trend
11:24
is going to be going. Mm hmm. So it's often said that proactive
11:31
it and dex as a discipline are a journey. Right, You don't wake
11:37
up on Monday morning and all of a sudden, you know, you see
11:39
everything and everything is solved. But let's talk on the personal side about journeys.
11:43
I travel a ton with work, but I don't have a lot of
11:46
time to explore. You recently had quite a journey to the Far East.
11:50
What was that like? How did you choose that area of the world because
11:54
you did wake up on a Monday morning and find yourself in a different place.
11:58
What was that? What was that journey? Though? Yeah, it's
12:01
It's one of the one of my favorite memories that I'll that I'll have with
12:05
me. I think spending a month traveling around Asia. So I did two
12:09
weeks in Japan, flew flew out to Tokyo, spent about a week in
12:13
Tokyo, got on a got on a on a train, went north to
12:18
Nigata in the north of Japan. Barely anyone spoken English. It was a
12:22
It was a crazy experience. I lived off Google Translate and using the great
12:28
functionality that they've got where you can use the lens to translate in real time.
12:33
What's in front of you. I don't think I've eaten if I didn't,
12:35
if I didn't have that in front of me. Uh. And from
12:37
from Japan, flew to China. I got a train from Beijing all those
12:41
Hanawi in Vietnam, hopped over to Bangkok in Thailand before coming home. It
12:48
was it was one of those things. I love new cultures. I love,
12:52
you know, experiencing different ways of life and seeing seeing some of the
12:56
sort of great things that our world has to offer. So it was,
13:00
it was it was a challenge that I wanted to undertake, going you know,
13:03
can I do it? Can I Can I make it around? And
13:05
will I when I get to see everything on my on my list? And
13:09
yeah, I did it. And that's that's an amazing sense accomplishment, something
13:13
I'm very proud of. Yeah, it's some It's an area of the world
13:16
that's on my bucket list. I've got to find a way to get over
13:20
there. It sounds like, sounds like it's well worth the time to make
13:24
the trip, right. I think I would especially recommend Japan. I think
13:30
as a sort of it's such a different culture and it's such a different experience.
13:35
It's it's an incredible, incredible thing to see. And I always think
13:41
that, you know, getting out there and seeing different ways of existing and
13:46
life, you know, going on in these in these far away places,
13:48
gives you such a sense of perspective on your own kind of preconceptions and social
13:52
norms and the way that we interact and function on a day to day basis.
13:56
So I think getting out and seeing the world is of the best things
14:00
anyone can do. So let's stay on that journey. Kind of the concept
14:05
of a journey a lot like traveling. You're never really done right. You
14:09
set the places you want to go, and then you get to the next
14:11
place, and the next place you build on it. You're clearly on a
14:16
journey around proactive services and a proactive mindset. What are the next milestones,
14:22
the next places you want to visit in that journey. What are you aiming
14:24
to achieve over the next couple of years. Yes, I think we need
14:31
to be focusing in on how we automate better, how we take those tasks
14:37
that are currently being done by people that are repetitive that could be automated and
14:41
get them automated. We're still quite manual. One of the big challenges we
14:46
have across the company is applications with single sign on, adding people into ad
14:52
security groups to give them access you know, these things that you could put
14:56
into tooling and you could get automated to take some of the work clod off
15:00
to free people up to start looking at other areas that could be value add
15:03
And so we haven't kind of fired the starting gun yet, and I think
15:09
the starting gun is going to be our shift onto our own, our own
15:11
tool because if we can't update our portal, give people a service request and
15:16
put a workflow in behind it, then we're going to go nowhere. But
15:20
having that ability in house to do that development work, I think then opens
15:24
the door to us then being able to get started on that road. And
15:26
I think it's one of those things that build momentum. If you take away
15:31
having to add a joiner to a security group because they need access to an
15:33
application, and that's no longer a job that a service agent has to do.
15:39
You've immediately freed up a bit of their time. Right, What's what
15:41
are they then looking at? What's the next bit that they're having come through
15:46
over and over again? I need a share mailbox created, or you know,
15:48
I need to run a script every time someone leaves. What are those
15:52
activities? And it's a snowball effect. I think, once you can get
15:56
going, and I think the hardest bit is getting going. So I'm hopeful.
16:00
I'm optimistic that as I say this switch between tooling, so that we've
16:04
actually got that ability to start developing our own roadmap for the tool itself,
16:10
for what people see, for the portal that people go to to access their
16:14
services. Once we've got the ability to start putting new things and putting workflows
16:18
in behind them that'll get us going, and we've just got to overcome that
16:22
first. It's almost like getting the wheel turning right going the first time round
16:26
as the hard bit, but once you've got some momentum, it becomes a
16:29
little bit easier to maintain. It really is amazing once you get rid of
16:34
the tactical work that people do, the treadmill that you're on day in and
16:37
day out of the same I got to fix the blue screen again today,
16:41
I got to fix another outlook crash. Once that tactical work goes away and
16:45
you free up people to do strategic work, you also free them up to
16:49
do creative work. You're going to start asking yourself, what if we did
16:52
this? How about we take a different approach and solve it this way.
16:56
The creativity and strategic work that you can do once all the always goes away
17:00
really is cool and DEX has enabled that right DEX the discipline of proactive it
17:07
has introduced significant disruption. Me as a former customer, I can vouch firsthand
17:15
that it created a significant change in the way we did business in it and
17:21
how it was perceived others around like you are on that same journey as you
17:26
adopt this new discipline at in It though, at Collinson, what other areas
17:33
stand out for you as opportunities for disruption and innovation? Are you kind of
17:37
primarily focused on proactive IT or what else do you see going on in the
17:41
market or internally at Collinson? Well, I think that concept of freeing people
17:48
up in order to think creatively is really important. Collinson at its core is,
17:53
you know, like most other companies these days, a technology company,
17:56
there's an enormous amount of technology underpinning what we do. So there's a lot
18:00
of engineers looking at the products, they're customers of the service desk. If
18:04
they're not having what was it fifty six percent of their issues and not even
18:10
reporting, how much time are we giving them back to think creatively? They've
18:14
already they're already clearly intelligent created people. They've come up with some great products
18:18
that we sell. What if we gave them each an hour back every week
18:22
that they're not trying to fix I T or request something or wait for a
18:25
license to be applied, what could they then do? You know? And
18:27
that's I think that's again, it's that that's the snowball effect. Right,
18:32
if we can, if you can start to deliver a better employee experience,
18:34
and you can people can access services that are more suited and respond better to
18:41
them. You give them back the time that they would otherwise lose. What
18:45
are they going to do with that time? That's that's an unknown right they
18:48
could, that's that's a limitless possibility. It's an infinite resource. So that's
18:53
that's why I think it's so important. Well, I think digit employee experience
18:57
measures are so important because that's how you enable it, and that's how you
19:00
deliver it interested to him, particularly as you kind of a guy who's obviously
19:06
deeply kind of emerging us in a process regarding the service desk at the moment
19:14
you were experienced London so last year. Now I'm seeing not a sneak peek,
19:19
and it's some insight into some of the technologies coming down the pipe.
19:23
Index. By next thing, when you when you look at the service desk,
19:27
you consider this sort of this arc of technological evolution, how do you
19:33
see that impacting the service desk per se in the coming years and let's say
19:40
becoming five years, Matt, you know, since that is your your your
19:42
main marker of significance. Yeah, I think it'll be. It'll be a
19:48
shift into the into the world of proactive low contact. The idea of having
19:55
to sit on a phone and wait to speak to somebody I hope will be
20:00
relegated to only the most extreme and unusual cases. One of the phenomenal demos
20:08
at the at the event was looking at the flow tool and being able to
20:14
understand the concept of a pop up on your screen going it looks like you
20:18
need your cash flushed, or looks like you're occupying you know, you're using
20:22
too much memory. You need to run this diagnostic tool, or you need
20:25
to run this fix. Do you want to do it now? Do you
20:26
want to wait? No, no human contact needed, you can you know
20:30
the tool is they're doing it and so that that ability to get people up
20:36
and running before they know they've got a problem, I think is where in
20:40
five years that that's where a help de est should be in terms of delivering
20:42
a good service. You shouldn't you shouldn't need to almost need to know it's
20:47
there. That's and I always think that's the funny thing about good IT service
20:52
delivery is you almost fades into the background. If it runs really well,
20:56
and so I hope that we will have the capacity to be delivering things like
21:02
that, so that in essence, the frontline agents that currently deal with a
21:07
lot of contact are much more able, as we said, to focus on
21:11
other areas and other developments. And I think there's a lot of stuff that's
21:14
going to change and going to develop. And I think, you know,
21:17
if we look at the large language models and there's you know, the AI
21:21
as it's often referred to, coming down the pipeline, Microsoft Releasing co Pilot,
21:26
all of these you know, chat, GPT, all of these new
21:29
tools that are going to be there, they're going to need some focus and
21:33
some support. And I don't know what the support for those tools looks like
21:37
right now. So in five years we'll be supporting them somehow. And I
21:41
think if we if we're not out of the treadmill of we still need so
21:44
many people to pat the phone up and answer the chats, we won't be
21:47
able to deliver a good support and we won't be able to get people to
21:49
make the best use of the technology that's available in five years time. And
21:52
I think that's another reason why it's important to be shifting into that proactive mindset.
21:59
Very cool, very well said. And you know, since we're not
22:02
only collecting mottoes live mottos right now in the deck show, we're also is
22:07
that time of year now, we're also collecting twenty twenty four predictions. It's
22:11
almost we're almost out of that zone. But you know, just still in
22:15
January, I think we can pick up a couple more so if you get
22:18
your crystal ball with you, met or you've got anything for us. I
22:22
think, just to reiterate, you know, the the A the AI revolution
22:27
as it's referred to sometimes is kind of here already. We've got we've got
22:33
so much built into our products now. You know, Microsoft actually they've had
22:37
some some of the AI features embedded for quite some time. I think it
22:41
was a couple of years ago. I remember being on a on a sort
22:45
of demo call and they sort of as they were releasing some of the products
22:48
into Office three six five. You know, I remember how long we were
22:51
used to spend building a building a PowerPoint presentation. There's now a creative button
22:55
that you just press and it just designs it for you and it looks brilliant,
22:59
So that I think that will continue. Things like chat GPT. You
23:03
know, it's fantastic resource to mine. It's it's it's almost like an intelligent
23:07
search engine. I used it this morning to generate a list of questions for
23:11
something that I needed. It's making you know, it's taking the again,
23:15
it's taking those repressive tasks and automating them essentially for you. So I think
23:22
that will continue to encroach. And as the more that that gets embedded into
23:25
our lives, the more things that's going to throw up. And I think
23:27
as we as we go through every one of these changes in landscape from you
23:33
know, the first computers, well back from the first team engine, the
23:37
computers, you know, every every time we go through these revolutions as it
23:41
were, and bring in these new technologies, they throw up new questions and
23:45
new challenges for us to overcome. And so I think as as it becomes
23:51
more pervasive, as we get these tools get more embedded, then there will
23:55
be new challenges rising from those. And I think, I think of technology,
24:00
technological literacy is going to be it's going to be a big challenge for
24:03
us. I think I was reading somewhere it's it's the first time in history
24:07
that we have four generations in the workplace all working at the same time and
24:11
you know, competing for the same roles. How that will affect you know,
24:17
the way that the way that the world operates is going to be a
24:18
really interesting one. And I think that the you know, the new skills
24:25
that will come to the fore, there will be a there will be jobs.
24:27
I reckon it will be dedicated to how you ask AI questions in the
24:32
right way to get a response, because I think that's a real skill.
24:37
You know, knowing how to google something is I think a skill that is
24:41
that is going to be needed more and more in terms of asking these large
24:45
language models the right questions in order to get responses. Then there's going to
24:48
be data privacy concerns. It's it's a matter of time before someone's private data
24:55
gets thrown up by chat TVT because it got entered, stored and someone someone
24:59
with some how were able to ask the right question to access it. All
25:02
of those things are going to need need our time and attention. So I
25:06
think that's that's going to be that's going to be our future. Well said
25:10
Matt, and listen, thank you so much for joining us, and to
25:15
the listeners, thank you for joining us with the first really fresh episode of
25:19
the new year. Reminded to please give us a follow on our new LinkedIn
25:23
page. There'll be a link to that in the show notes. And look,
25:27
we've got a lot of amazing guests and some announcements coming up, so
25:32
keep your eyes peeled for that. And just reminds of me to say how
25:34
excited we are in the Deck show and a reality by its full the new
25:37
year and for everything we've got going on. So Matt huge thanks, thanks
25:41
for being our first guest of the year. Effectively, thank you very much
25:45
for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Good stuff, matth Thanks
25:48
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