Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Tales from the IT Trenches (w/ Adam Moore)

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Tales from the IT Trenches (w/ Adam Moore) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it change Makers to the deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:07
Let's get into it. Okay, we always have our eye out here on
0:11
the deck Show to myself for interesting articles out there online, and we recently
0:17
saw a great one by Adam Moore. He's a global service delivery leader.
0:22
The piece was titled people First It Service Delivery, so you can perhaps see
0:28
why it caught our attention, and it was published on LinkedIn and we liked
0:32
it. We liked it enough to think great theme for a show. Let's
0:35
get Adam on, so let's welcome the author. Adam, Welcome to the
0:40
deck Show. Wonderful to have you on, Mick, Thanks Tom, thanks
0:43
for having me, and thanks for reading the article. Our pleasure. Truly
0:48
good place to start. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your
0:52
career so far. So yeah, sure, so I'm a little snapshot into
0:58
my career has meant that, you know, I've worked within predominantly within financial
1:03
services space for pretty much last fifteen twenty years, on and off and getting
1:10
up to that point of service delivery leader that you introduced me at. I
1:14
have worked within service desks, help desks, I've taken calls at two o'clock,
1:19
three o'clock in the morning over over in Asia Pacific where I'm based.
1:25
I'm based in the UK. I've started working at you know, six o'clock,
1:30
seven o'clock, worked all many different hours. I've understood the pain points
1:36
from the users. You know, I've crawled under desks and so on,
1:40
so effectively, what I'm saying is, you know, I've kind of walked
1:44
the walk so I can talk the talk. And that's how I trust being
1:49
in the trench. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. You know, I cut my
1:53
teeth, you know, working within you know, the asset management space with
2:00
a global asset manager for for many years, and yeah, I mean I
2:07
really enjoyed that, and that's where I learned a lot of the technical side
2:09
of things. Way before, you know, we had the things, that's
2:14
the solutions such as next Thing out there. You know, back in the
2:16
day, for us to get a feel and a grip on a grasp of
2:21
whether a PC, for example, is actually working or not, we would
2:23
look at you know, log files and event viewers and so on and so
2:29
forth. And now with next Thing, you don't need to do that as
2:34
much, and you can look at, you know, whether there's one PC
2:37
as as you know, you know, whether there's one PC or plethora of
2:40
PCs that are that are suffering from the same same predicaments. And as that
2:46
journey went on, you know, I became the you know, team leader
2:50
manager of the team, you know, working in global teams that spanned you
2:54
know, Aja pack and across to New York, which then meant, you
2:58
know, many trips around the world, which was fantastic and I'm very honored
3:06
to have to have given you know, a lot to that you know,
3:09
and see so much of the world through through my career and then ultimately land
3:16
at the position of head of IT Service Delivery that was really leading again a
3:23
best in class team during the during the pandemic, and then you know,
3:29
using the tooling to then look at, you know, things like, how
3:34
are we going to bring back the users into the office? Do we then
3:36
need to look at what we've got, is our existing estate fit for purpose?
3:40
Or do we need to with the way that things were going, you
3:44
know, do we need to be a fully sort of hybrid environment with a
3:46
laptop first, you know environment, Do we need to look at things like
3:53
user personas, how do we slice that up? And there's always that tooling
3:59
there of ailable for you. You know, it's not just a case of
4:02
going round to to the business with your notepad anymore. There are there are
4:09
many tools out there that can help you slice and dice that data. So
4:14
that's so that's a little bit about you know, about myself and what I
4:18
what I've been doing. You know, I'm passionate about it service, service
4:24
delivery. You know, I'm always looking for I guess two sides of it.
4:30
You know, it can deliver you know, it can deliver change at
4:35
a rate of knots. And you know, we within technology can become victims
4:39
of our own success, you know, and we're very good at delivering change,
4:44
but we're not always that good at listening to what the actual user wants.
4:48
And just because Microsoft says or a another solution provider says this is the
4:55
next latest and greatest thing, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is the right
5:00
thing or the right fit for the business that you're in. And I think
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a lot of that is going back to that getting into the trenches. It's
5:08
about getting out and getting into the hearts and minds of what the users wants.
5:14
Almost like that, you know, pseudo business analyst role that that part
5:19
of my role encompasses almost like a voice of the customer, I guess,
5:25
or voice of technology. You can then analyze all of that data and you
5:29
can say, look, this is what we want to do, this is
5:30
what you want, and it's almost like we we kind of will probably touch
5:34
on this word again, almost like a hybrid, like a blend of of
5:39
a bit of both, and then you land somewhere in the middle. You
5:43
know, it's never just one thing without the other. Absolutely, And I
5:47
just want to pick up on something you said at the top of that answer
5:50
that Adam, and I want to direct it to Tim. Tim, what
5:54
was the latest call you ever had in your ID career? Did you ever
5:57
have a free am emergency call? This is not my definition of earning your
6:01
stripes. Okay if you haven't. Yeah, Adam and I lived in the
6:09
same trenches, I'm sure, and also both in financial services, so I've
6:14
been in many of the same situations. We had a two am call.
6:16
I may have told the story before two am, and someone actually started to
6:20
snore on this escalation call, and the only solution to the it was to
6:25
close the call and have everybody else call back in. So, yeah,
6:29
the two and three am calls are not fund I thought it was going to
6:33
be like, well, I had the I can't remember what time it was.
6:38
It was two am, three am, maybe it was something am,
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and yeah, I got caught and it was a Saturday. It was a
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Saturday night, UK time, and the trader was cooling me. Markets are
6:53
closed globally on a Sunday morning after wherever you wherever you are, and the
6:59
trader, well, the company I was working for at the time will go
7:02
unnamed, but the trader was calling and he was relentlessly calling, and it
7:08
hit the hit the mobile, hit the cell that I was that I was
7:11
on, and he was just testing the phone lines. He was testing the
7:15
phone lines in the in the middle of the night. Well it was Sunday
7:18
afternoon in Singapore. And once he got to me, he, you know,
7:23
he finally kind of you know, fest up and said that you know
7:26
this, I'm just testing the phone lines. I just want to make sure
7:29
this is my DCP planning. I've got a task list to complete by the
7:32
end of the month. And you confirmed that they do indeed work at two
7:35
absolutely they go and a little escalation internally on the on the Monday morning,
7:42
and I'm sure that got back to him and then an apology came back my
7:46
way. No harm done. I never felt more like I chose the right
7:53
career, gentlemen than even right now. But yeah, but Adams, so
7:59
we're going to do into your article momentarily. But you know, the theme,
8:03
of course is the people first, people first, it service delivery.
8:09
First question for you is in that career you just described for us, how
8:13
close do you feel you came to implementing that already? I think I think
8:20
the main crux of it is, you know, in terms of implementing or
8:24
certainly executing, a people first, service delivery strategy or or even a mindset
8:30
is almost as good as a strategy because there's always an overarching strategy above everything
8:35
else is getting out there understanding what the business wants. Okay, and that
8:43
might be quite difficult now, it shouldn't be because everyone's reachable. You know,
8:48
we've years ago it used to be death by PowerPoint. It's probably death
8:52
by teams or death by zoom now. But you can set up a you
8:56
know, you can set up a call with them. You know, I
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remember when I was one one asset manager. I went around the whole of
9:05
the business. I went round to the whole of the executive committee. I
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then went round to the heads of business, and I understood and tried to
9:13
understand what their I guess their hopes and aspirations were, you know, and
9:18
that's two sided. What are we doing well? But more importantly, what
9:22
are we not doing so well? And how can we how can we improve
9:26
on that? Because if you're going to be the best in class, you
9:30
need to almost get yourself up onto the platform and understand, well, what's
9:35
good, but also what's not so good, and how can we make the
9:37
not so good better? You know, most people are working within the same
9:43
tech stack, within a within a given industry, and it you know,
9:52
the way that you go and go and execute that is no different to how
9:56
the textbook tells you to. But it's really about going it, getting into
10:01
the hearts and minds of the users, I would say, and finding out
10:05
how you you know, how you can improve on that experience for the users,
10:11
bringing them up, bringing them along the journey, I would say.
10:18
So, I want to go back to the analogy of being in the trenches.
10:20
You and I lived in the same trenches I'm really I love talking to
10:24
people about their next Think experience. A lot of the folks that we talk
10:28
about talk with are the you know, the broader, higher level thought leadership,
10:35
but in the trenches when you're fighting the battles at two am. I
10:39
remember my first experience with seeing Next Thing before becoming a customer at Hartford.
10:45
It was like and to stay in those trenches. It was like coming around
10:48
the corner in the trench and finding the plasma rifle. Right, You've got
10:50
now this amazing tool to get yourself out of the trenches and really make a
10:56
difference. What stands out to you about the capabilities and the tool and why
11:03
you would recommend it to appear or coworker or how do you what's your rationale
11:09
for helping spread the word? So yeah, look, I remember this quite
11:13
vividly, and this really resonated with my then account manager at Next Thing.
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I think it was in I can't remember now if it was twenty seventeen or
11:24
two thousand and eighteen. I forget when I was when I actually became a
11:28
customer exactly, and it was a really good guy. We've got a really
11:33
good relationship up and the one thing that stuck with him was how I was
11:35
using next Thing to change the narrative on it. Okay, how we could
11:41
become more proactive rather than reactive now years ago, tim as you know,
11:46
within the trenches, how would you get support, How would you consume support?
11:50
You would have people that would log tickets well if they wanted to,
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you know, they would walk up to your desk. They'd find anyone anyone
11:58
that works within it sspective of whether there are a service management, service delivery,
12:01
or whatever, developer whoever. Okay, you sit within this area,
12:05
within this quarter of the office. You look like someone that is a techie.
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I need some help. Okay, So what they would you know,
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I was using next Thing to really change that narrative of wanting to be proactive.
12:20
What I wanted to do when we when we implemented it was I wanted
12:26
the team to fix one problem, but then also have a look at you
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know, the laptop health of a particular device or a you know of a
12:37
particular user, rather and say hate him. Right, we've now fixed your
12:41
problem. I can also see that your batteries at you know, forty percent,
12:45
or I could now see that your laptop is due to the end of
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life. Soon, Let's sort something else out of you. Right, let's
12:52
sort the laptop out. Let's prepare a new one for you, or we'll
12:54
put a call in to replace this part. Okay. When we change the
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narrative, we changed the seption. When we change a perception, we have
13:01
happy users. When we have happy users, we have a happy everyone,
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right, you know, And it just makes everything so much more easy,
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easier to deal with. So that in itself was was a game changer for
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me. You know, the level one support feature that you could integrate or
13:24
that you can integrate in service now again was agree. It was an absolute
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game changer for me. You know, self healed pop ups that would tell
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people, you know, these are all when you think about it, these
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are all PowerShell scripts that you know exist natively and you can you know,
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you can script them and so on. But who's going to Who's who has
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the time to do that? You know, if my team have a single
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pane of glass where they can look at everything and they can work within it
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in the same way that they that they would do within an ITSM tool set,
14:00
it makes everything a lot more easier and a lot more efficient. It
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also changed the narrative when we were working with a huge market data company where
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we were discussing whether or not someone had you know, they wanted to know
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why someone within the business was saying that their application was running slow in a
14:28
particular time of day. You know, it was always Wednesday at three o'clock
14:33
in the Southern Hemisphere, and they were the fund manager was complaining that,
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oh, it's because the US have woken up. You know. We had
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two private ips, private routers between you know, the the office is and
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I was talking to this company support team or my team were talking to this
14:56
support team and we were not getting anywhere, and we wanted to escalate to
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the network team. But the first line we're saying to us, hey,
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have you done this troubleshooting? Have you done this? You need to reinstall
15:07
the application, you need to do X, Y and Z. And I
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was saying, but we've got the data in front of us, because we
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can trace it out within next think. We can search for the host name.
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We can find that there's a block there, we can find that something
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needs to be replaced. We can see this. Let me provide you with
15:28
this information that Tim cut down all of the noise and cut down all of
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the backwards and forwards and so on, and at that point that was the
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real light bulb moment for me that said, this tool is an absolute game
15:43
changer. You know, there's one thing that there's one thing tim that makes
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you know that. You know I said before, Yeah, you change the
15:50
narrative and you know it's the self heal and all of this and all of
15:54
that really good stuff, because that's a real perception piece. But when you're
15:58
actually you know, you've got a first line service, their first second line,
16:03
first service desktop support engineer that's taking that information to someone within the network
16:11
team within a save market data organization saying I can prove it, you know,
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and once you've visualize that, you know, they might not know the
16:22
facets around the networks and so on, and they're not supposed to, but
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they can see that something looks like it's stuck, that there's a bottleneck because
16:33
data is going in and data's not going further from this IP address. And
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it doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. It's
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like, can you see the block? Yes, I can see the block.
16:42
Okay, right, let's focus our attention there. You know, I
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love the laborb analogy. Our project was not next Project, Next Think,
16:55
it was project Edison, and we told everyone in the company were turning the
16:57
light on. So that had analogy holds true for so many people I talked
17:02
to. You talked about some of those AHA moments and the benefits of being
17:07
able to go deep in troubleshooting on a device, even though the user didn't
17:11
the employee didn't complain about it. It would never in my experience, would
17:15
never want to ask, so what else is wrong? They just spent god
17:18
knows how long trying to fix this one problem with trial and error, they're
17:22
not going to ask about another one that's going to keep them there. But
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now with that level one checklist, they don't need to ask what else is
17:29
wrong. They can change the narrative and say, here's what else is wrong,
17:32
and here's what I'm going to fix for you. And the employees and
17:36
that I've worked with are so appreciative of it when they're not the ones escalating,
17:41
when it is actually making things better for them. My AHA moment was
17:45
not only going deep on a device and finding out what else was wrong,
17:48
but at the time the version we were on, it was a right click
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this blue screen that I just fixed, I can now right click and holy
17:56
count, there's twelve thousand others that I can go fix. Yeah, yeah,
18:00
visibility is just amazing. What else did you kind of glean from or
18:03
what do you look at it in terms of not it's necessarily the capabilities,
18:07
but what are the benefits? How do you communicate this to an executive.
18:11
It's great to be proactive, it's great that you've got all these capabilities,
18:15
but what's the outcome? What are the benefits that you see? I guess
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the outcome is around we look ultimately and execs always looking for return on investment,
18:25
right, you know, he's he's a you know, especially with the
18:29
level one checklist, you know, integration within within an ITSM tool set.
18:36
You know, we integrated into service now and we were able to we were
18:41
able to evidence here are the tickets that here are the tickets that you know,
18:47
we as in humans have have a lot of you know, have logged
18:51
and clothes at the end of the month, and here are the tickets that
18:53
have been self healed that the users have actually right, you know, something's
19:00
up. They've done something within the you know, within the tool set.
19:03
It's now then sent something through into service. Now it's then closed. So
19:07
here's a portion of tickets at the end of the month we've not touched,
19:12
you know, and that in terms of that narrative change is amazing, you
19:18
know. And that and that bought for an exact then can see, well,
19:21
actually I am getting some bang for my buck here. I can actually
19:25
see what's you know, what what I'm paying for, and there is a
19:27
return on investment. That then means you know that that then also means,
19:33
you know, we're able to be quicker at our response time. So when
19:37
you talked about the blue screen, one thing that happened a few times was
19:41
patching. You know, we'd have issues with patching. Yeah, patch Tuesday
19:47
would come along or something, you know, and we'd always have you know,
19:51
we're working within the heavily regulated organizations, so there was a lot of
19:55
governance around. You know, you can't deploy patches to everyone just because the
20:00
vendor says so you're going to go through you at testing, YadA, yadda
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YadA, and you'll have your test groups and someone will test something, but
20:07
there'll always be something somewhere that hasn't been tested, even though they've said they've
20:11
tested it, and then suddenly a spreadsheet will stop working, or something will
20:15
stop working, or a laptop will overheat or something. There's always something that
20:19
slips to the neck. That's what I'm getting at. We were then able
20:23
to then have a look and see, well, okay, let's scroll back
20:26
within next think and let's see. Let's have a look and let's see right.
20:32
Okay, well when was it working? Okay, it was working yesterday
20:34
afternoon, so that's fine. It looks like there was patches deployed and then
20:40
it stopped working, or it worked for a little bit and then it stopped
20:42
working. Okay, we can have a look at that. Now, let's
20:45
have a look and we go back to your analogy around the blue screens.
20:48
Let's have a look and see where else. All right, Okay, here's
20:51
another fifty machines that we deployed to today with the patch, and it looks
20:56
like they've got that issue. They don't know about it. Okay, what
21:00
are we going to do? Okay, we're going to contact the users.
21:02
What's our roll back back plan? Etc. So that then helps us be
21:07
on the front foot that we can contact those users proactively rather than reactively once
21:15
the noise has kind of you know, lone up and you know, going
21:22
back to your trenches. You've been there before. Yeah, you know.
21:26
There's always this push and pull between enterprise security and IT operations. Security wants
21:32
to patches out as soon as possible. There's a risk there's a vulnerability.
21:36
IT is going to push back and say, well, you know, we
21:37
could end up breaking ten thousand people. We've got to do our due diligence
21:41
and go slow. The visibility that you get here allows you to accomplish both
21:45
needs. You can move more quickly because you're not running around in the dark.
21:52
One of the things that we did, Adam, and I'm curious how
21:53
you approached it was to have a very rigorous plan and of operationalizing. There's
22:02
so many things you can do with the platform once the later on, we
22:06
knew that if we tried to do everything all at the same time, we
22:08
would probably fail. So we set out a very definitive plan. What in
22:12
your view, where is the most important place to start without feeling overwhelmed within
22:22
next think it was it was just for me. It was just taking taking
22:30
it a little step at a time, so just using what was available to
22:34
me. So I remember using the you know, the search function, and
22:38
that was and that was a good, you know, a good tool to
22:41
start off with. We had we had a relationship manager that would help us,
22:48
or success manager rather, that would take us through that journey little by
22:52
little. Again not to not to overwhelm because we always you know, we
22:59
all had our day jobs as well. So what I didn't want to do
23:03
is suddenly become way too overwhelmed with the tool tooling as well, and just
23:07
almost at the point that we would set the strategy with them, would introduce
23:12
the tool to other people within within it, you know, and then look
23:17
at we could use it for network monitoring and we can connect in you know,
23:21
hey, if you've got an API, you can you can connect into
23:23
something else and all of those and all of those things. So I think
23:30
on the main on the main crux of it, it was really that that
23:33
end user the ability to search for a user name, the ability to search
23:40
for a host name, certainly on the on the end user device side of
23:42
things, was was the main part. And we would use it as a
23:48
I guess as a secondary part of our troubleshooting arsenal. Really, you know,
23:56
I would be expecting the teams to be you know, going through the
23:59
you know, going through the basic troubleshooting steps, but then also using next
24:04
think as an enhanced way to get to the answer. So that's so that's
24:11
how I would start off with it. But I would really then work with
24:17
the customer success manager to say, look, we are an organization of X
24:22
amount of endpoints, etc. We are in the financial services space or whatever.
24:26
What has an other company done? You know that, doesn't you know?
24:30
I always say this, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I
24:34
don't want to do something new. I want to try and do the same.
24:37
But I want to know what other people have done before and give me
24:41
your strategy and help me along the way to be successful with the product.
24:47
Whatever an other customers say, and it's kind of paraphrases, I think what
24:51
your approach there is is the first thing I need to do is be better
24:55
at being reactive. I'm horrible at it. Now I'll get a little bit
24:57
better at being reactive, and eventual I can flip that into being proactive.
25:00
The way we looked at it was we're going to fix our existing environment.
25:04
There's tons of things to go after out there that are broken. Today that
25:07
we can go fix. Phase number two we're going to start breaking it.
25:11
We're going to do better testing, better release management, better installations so we
25:15
no longer break the environment. And then phase three years we're going to govern
25:19
the environment. We're going to make sure that we understand what's changing over it's
25:22
outside and trow we're going to see if we can do some some better controls.
25:27
So that's the kind of yeah, that's absolutely it. You know,
25:33
day one we were not it s M integrated and we were not Level one
25:37
checklist. Let's be clear on that. You know, I'm sure, you
25:40
know, I'm sure someone would have liked us to be. But it was
25:44
just, you know, when you've got a global team and you've got you
25:45
know, deliverables in other in other areas, it was the main thing was
25:48
get it out onto the endpoint. Let's start analyzing what we've got. Then
25:53
let's look at oh, we've got for example, we've got a Windows seven
25:56
migration into Windows ten. Let's start having a look at the health and what
26:02
we can you know, when we can move people across and utilize that data.
26:06
Because there was other different projects that were coexisting at the same time as
26:11
a nexting implementation. So it was I was kind of working within partnership rather
26:17
than against one another, and it worked well. So one more question and
26:22
then we'll wake time up and he can ask a few as well. What
26:27
our biggest one of our biggest success criteria was the way we communicated. I
26:32
talked a little bit about our internal branding. How do you view internal calms?
26:37
How key do you feel it is to making the program successful? And
26:41
how do you how do you actually put together that calms program properly? Yeah?
26:47
So look, that's hugely, hugely important. You know that you're only
26:53
as good as the people that you're talking to, really, you know,
26:56
and if you're not talking to people and if you're not taking them along the
27:00
journey, then you know, frankly, you're if you're you're you're not on
27:04
a successful journey. You absolutely need to a get out there and talk to
27:10
people, but be you need to take people along that journey and also break
27:15
it down into into chunks to understand what's in it for them. Right,
27:19
Okay, when you when you look at a transformation from Windows ten to Windows
27:26
eleven, or you know you're going from a file server migration to a chef
27:30
point online migration or something something like that. Right, you need to talk
27:34
to the business and you need to take them along that journey and find out
27:41
what's you know, what what are their what are their aspirations, what are
27:45
their deadlines, what's the what's the emotional attachment around us not doing something?
27:55
And that takes time. Next thing can't quite help you with all of that,
27:59
but it can get you quite along along the way in terms of showing
28:03
you why you should be doing something. So so absolutely setting up focus groups,
28:11
steering committees at at a bit more of a higher level focus groups are
28:17
really important. Getting out there, getting into the trenches and getting the team
28:21
to talk about what's happening within change. We call it that that, you
28:26
know, the elevator pitch, you know, giving a very high level summary
28:33
of what's happening. You know, you've got thirty seconds or sixty seconds to
28:36
tell people what's happening and why. Giving the business a bit of a choice
28:41
as well. I think people like to have a choice, maybe on a
28:45
a set menu in terms of what we're going to be delivering. Now,
28:49
you can't have the shocking pink laptop, for example, but you can.
28:53
These are the laptops that we've got in it fits within our environment. Communication
29:00
through obviously things like road maps and strategies are great, but newsletters next think
29:08
there's a great thing around, you know, pop up campaigns and so on
29:12
where you can kind of tell people what's going on and so on. But
29:15
all of all of that, a combination of both or all of it rather
29:22
really does help get that get that message across, sets out the store,
29:26
and sets the tone amazing and XLA is and sla is Adam. I have
29:33
a feeling that you have some experience in this area as well. I wonder
29:37
if you could tell us the secret to get I think I think one can't
29:47
really work without the other, is my take on that. I think that's
29:49
the secret. I think the Yeah, I think you can. You know,
29:53
you can dazzle people with slas right, you know you can kind of
29:57
Wow, we're brilliant. We've hit ninety you know, we said we were
30:02
going to be ninety percent. We're now ninety eight percent. We're amazing,
30:04
We're brilliant, We've we've smashed it. Guys. Let's let's finish finished a
30:10
week on a high. The XLA side, to me, I think as
30:15
we're as we're in twenty twenty three is much This could be a you know,
30:21
this could be quite an emotive point. I think is maybe much more
30:26
important in terms of finding out what the business wants. Okay, we talk
30:30
around business culture, perception, perception of change. It's really understanding what people
30:37
want and need and how we can provide that change. So your SLAS might
30:41
be great, but the business might not be on board with you. What
30:47
are you doing to change that? You know? Have you you know,
30:49
are you using you know, net scoring? Are you doing c SATs?
30:55
Are you communicating in newsletters? Are you using and you know, digital experience
31:00
tooling like next thing to actually see, well, how can we be better
31:03
in terms of the tech that we've got, you know? Is you know,
31:07
if we're hiring best in class talent, do we have best in class
31:11
technology to support that talent? You know? And that then changes that narrative.
31:17
So so yeah, I do. I do think one kind of compliments
31:21
the other. I don't think you can have one without the other either.
31:23
Really we shouldn't. You shouldn't have one without the other. You're actually a
31:30
remarkable source for the evolutionist this strategy. It's been it's been a fantastic conversation.
31:36
And I next want to ask you about self service and how you fit
31:40
that into this kind of people first strategy in a way. It doesn't doesn't
31:44
burden people or confuse them with responsibilities they don't feel should be theirs, but
31:48
but presumably empowers them and makes them feel more part of the process. Yeah,
31:53
so it goes back to my take on this is very I think I
31:59
think it was somewhere that I saw might have been might have been a Service
32:02
Now conference or something. It probably probably was around the consumation at consumerization of
32:09
it. You know, we've all been accustomed to way before the pandemic started,
32:16
around using phone apps to order things one click order and so on,
32:22
and I use a base have become so accustomed to that. When they came
32:27
into the office, they want that same experience. So we can look at
32:30
self service portals aligned to that experience. We can give them an app to
32:37
do that whatever. You know, I want to order a headset, a
32:38
click here, and it follow some workflow and that's that standard workflow management that
32:44
most solutions have. But I also think self service, when we go back
32:51
two to three years, people were working predominantly remotely. They became more empowered
32:57
because they had to. So might have been years ago, I will come
33:04
to your desk, or we would never send something out without someone coming to
33:07
your home and setting it up to you. Now a lot of users have
33:10
become a lot more self sufficient, almost to the point that they do expect
33:15
that and they are there are you know, there's a blend. I think,
33:17
Tom, there's a blend in all of it. You know, I
33:21
don't think that you can go one hundred percent self service in certain industries,
33:24
and I think that there should be a degree of blend. But why would
33:30
you go self service? Absolutely to empower the users, but also enable the
33:37
teams to work on other things. If they know that some of the light
33:40
touch stuff, password resets, you know, refreshing cash, that type of
33:46
thing has been done for by the users, at least once they've done it
33:52
and the issue is still there, then at least the team know that,
33:55
actually, yeah, we've got to we've really got to get involved here now,
34:00
we Adam. We we brought you on the show because you have this
34:05
wonderful article out there, which we will put in the show notes of course,
34:07
and I swear to God We didn't. We didn't think we were going
34:09
to get such an amazing kind of like real world in the trenches account of
34:15
the impact of Next Think in your various days is wonderful for us because Next
34:20
Think is our is our host and our sponsor. If you will hear at
34:23
the Deck show, and it was, it was. It's always wonderful to
34:27
speak to customers who who have found such value in it. But I think
34:30
they were really really great. It was a really really great account and a
34:34
really multifaceted account, and I'm really really delighted to have had you on the
34:37
show. Could we just ask for people who are interested and of course,
34:40
as I said already, they'd be able to read your article in the show
34:44
notes and they'll be able to find you on LinkedIn. There is there any
34:46
other way you'd like people to reach out to you, follow your work,
34:50
find out more about you. Yeah, I was just through LinkedIn. Sure,
34:54
sure, Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you very much. Thank
35:00
you so much for coming on a show. It's a pleasure to talk.
35:01
Thanks good stuff. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe
35:07
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35:19
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35:22
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35:25
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