Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Humanizing IT's Journey w/ Katrina Macdermid & Wesley Eugene (HIT Global)

Transcript

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Humanizing IT's Journey w/ Katrina Macdermid & Wesley Eugene (HIT Global) · 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, Hello, change Makers. As you can tell
0:10
from my lack of a smooth British accent, and you can't see us but
0:16
lack of a scarf, I am not Tom McGraw. I'm Tim Flower,
0:20
and Tom is not with us today for a very good reason. At the
0:23
time of this recording, it's actually fairly late in the UK on a Monday
0:28
night. He's probably wrestled the kids into bed and is enjoying a little piece
0:31
and quiet for himself tonight. But that brings me to our guests for today,
0:35
one of whom is on the other side of the planet in Sydney,
0:38
Australia. I've had an opportunity to visit Sydney, not once, but twice,
0:42
and I'm always looking for a reason to go back. Maybe this is
0:45
it, sixteen hours ahead of me here in the US, or perhaps eight
0:49
hours in the other direction. Katrina McDermott and Wesley Eugene from Humanizing It,
0:55
Welcome to you both very much. Kim. Thanks, So let's start by
0:59
letting the audience get to know you a little bit. Since you're so far
1:02
ahead of us. Katrina, Let's start with you. How how did you
1:06
get involved with this? You've got an initiative that you've co founded. How
1:08
are you first of all? And then tell us a bit about your initiative
1:11
and from what I understand, it's not only a book, training a certification.
1:17
Help us understand what humanizing it is all about. Certainly, Hi,
1:22
Tim, and thanks for the opportunity to have Wesley and myself on your podcast.
1:25
It's truly an honor. Thank you. Yes, so, as you
1:29
said, humanizing it we're all about, and my journey started with I did
1:34
definitely briefly speak to you about this, Tim pre recording is that I studied
1:40
ITO for many, many years. I'm actually a contributing author of ITEL four,
1:44
an IOL master back in the day. And whilst I was studying it,
1:48
unlike most IT professionals, you know, I thought it was a great
1:52
framework, but I came to the realization that what it didn't have was experience.
1:56
And I quite often say that when I was studying ITEOL, lots and
2:00
lots of books I had to read to become an ITEL master, and in
2:04
all those books, there wasn't one picture of a human and So what I
2:08
had this moment of epiphany thinking, well, is it any wonder the business
2:14
is unsatisfied with it because they really don't consider them a design of it processes
2:20
and services. And coincidentally, I was studying design thinking and part of that
2:27
studying was studying a wonderful company called IDEO. And I can't believe now that
2:34
the former CIO of IDEO is now partnering with us that keep Global, that's
2:38
our company and we're doing humanizing it. So humanizing it essentially is the integration
2:45
of design thinking into it service management. Yeah, it's you know, in
2:52
my long IT career, I've taken a lot of ITAL courses, never went
2:55
down. The full certification was one of the career regress. But what I
3:00
took away from itel very rigid. U uh. It's very specific and it
3:06
needs that right, they need that structure. But even some of the basic
3:09
terminology, like the term user, it still puts the process in terms of
3:15
the technology that we give to the users. They're not employees, they're not
3:20
people, they're users of what I give you. And I always thought that
3:23
that was backwards. We've got to we've got to look at as users as
3:27
employees and figure out what they need and how they're doing, and I think
3:30
it's fascinating work that you're doing. Wes, welcome to you as well.
3:35
A little bit closer to home, I believe you're down in Atlanta. So
3:38
tell us about your background a little bit and your role at h I T
3:43
yeah, thanks a lot, Ti for having myself and on a little bit
3:47
about me. So I had a multi decade career in it, So for
3:57
a ton of reasons, I'm quite pass it by human and eye It's it's
4:00
interesting because you know, the way I look at it is throughout my career
4:09
journey, I have always held it as a principle that people matter and that
4:15
at the end of the day, these these principles need to orient how we
4:19
make decisions, and technology and design gave me a language to express those values.
4:30
And so it was really amazing to meet Kat and as soon as she
4:35
and I started to connect and I learned what she was doing with humanizing it,
4:40
I also shared notes as far as like the way I was approaching digital
4:46
transformation at IDEO, being that I took an experienced lens to approaching our digital
4:53
transformation starting with the core humans involved. And you know, Kat and I
5:01
really nerded out quite a bit in those initial meetings. But I'm thankful I've
5:09
had a a I've been lucky to have a career that spans consulting with companies
5:15
like Captain Jim n Iris Young in the early days too, also working within
5:23
the top fortune five hundred enterprises like a Flag driving digital transformation over there,
5:30
companies like R one, r c M and the healthcare revenue cycle space driving
5:35
digital transformation over there, and then ultimately, you know, last, but
5:42
not least, of course, my time at Idea. It's it's I definitely
5:46
count myself lucky and fortunate to have had an opportunity to articulate my career through
5:51
uh story companies like those. And you know, I'm just excited now that
5:58
I've joined hit Globe and partnering with Kat and with Mark Basham, We're really
6:05
quite excited to really articulate and move humanizing IT across the globe. Truly,
6:13
it's really a mission for us. It's not just a company or a productance
6:18
service. And it's a valiant effort too. Is I think back in all
6:25
of the IT people that I have known throughout my career, whether they're coworkers
6:30
or bosses or subordinates it. People like the technology, but there in many
6:39
cases they're introverts, they're techie, they don't want the human side of it.
6:44
Just give me the bits and bites. And I think in making this
6:49
a visible global effort can help break through that a little bit. Even the
6:56
even the biggest introverts can still learn social skills and learn to understand what it
7:01
means to supply technology to humans. I think it's a great I think it's
7:08
a great effort, and I can't wait to learn more about it. So
7:12
Kat, I think if we drill down into the details, how's the book
7:15
going, you get any kind of world tour, book signing, you're making
7:18
the rounds or what's tell us a little bit about the book? Yeah,
7:21
we certainly are, But if I can just briefly play a bit more on
7:26
what you were saying to him, because it's very valid to what human I
7:28
think it tea is all about. And then we say that in the book
7:30
and in the training as well, that it does attract a certain type of
7:33
persona typically or personas. And what I get quite frustrated is is when I
7:41
hear the CIOs or the CEO of saying to their IT people, you need
7:45
to be more customer focused. And to me, that's like telling someone that
7:48
they need to be taller or happier. I mean, it's a very big
7:55
ask and it's like and again it's also like saying to someone into the business,
8:00
you need to learn it service management. You know, design thinking and
8:03
being human centered is an education. You can't just tell people to be it.
8:09
And what humanizing it does is we teach the tools and techniques and principles
8:13
of humanizing a sorry of human centered design into it service management. So,
8:18
as I said, you can't just say it if there is, there's actually
8:22
an education involved. And that's what our training does. It teaches it professionals
8:26
these tools and techniques in a fun way. And we're just we're about to
8:31
launch an app which is a fun way of learning, which we're talking about
8:35
in a moment. But back to the book. Yes, the book's doing
8:37
amazing and I'll be over in the US in two days. We're going,
8:43
Yeah, we're going to the Pink Elephant conference and we're proud sponsors. Can't
8:48
wait to see David Radcliffe and that's the Pink Elephant crew and where we're doing
8:54
a sort of a soft launch of the app along with the book as well,
9:00
and we'll give you up the opportunity for all the attendees of Pink to
9:05
get a copy of the book and also a sneak preview of the app.
9:09
But yeah, so's it's going very well. And proud to say at any
9:13
conference we go to, Wes and I were in Orlando November, wasn't it,
9:16
Wes, and we were the best selling book there. Yeah, which
9:22
is fantastic. We pretty much did on every conference. Yeah, we're the
9:26
best sellers. Yeah, even been in the keynotes. It's fantastic. That's
9:33
outstanding. And like I said, I've taken that journey in reverse. So
9:37
I know you've got a heck of a day and a half ahead of you
9:41
to get here, but I'm sure it'll be I'm sure it'll be worth it.
9:46
And West, I'm sure there's a backstory kind of how did you How
9:50
did the two of you come to work together? Yeah, So it's all
9:54
about the power of social media, right case LinkedIn, which is frankly the
10:01
only social media I really pay attention to. Guilty admission, maybe not a
10:07
typical for an it guy. In LinkedIn, I write sometimes I post different
10:16
ideas, and Kat reached out to me via LinkedIn. I got a message
10:24
from her. Uh, honestly, Cat, it may be a part of
10:28
a more general reach out to other CIOs. I have no idea. But
10:35
Kat was truly interested in the fact that I was both the CIO and and
10:43
I was at I d L, and these these two facts intersected in interesting
10:50
ways. So she was curious as to how I was thinking about human centered
10:54
design from an IT perspective. And I was like, wait a second,
11:00
here I have an opportunity to talk to an expert, a co author of
11:03
I TIL four and the author of an entirely new framework called humanizing IT.
11:11
So I said, this is an excellent opportunity for me, get some free
11:15
consulting. Let me go ahead and have a meeting with Kat. Because I
11:20
had all these ideas in my head where I was shaping a digital transformation anchored
11:26
on experiences as its foundation instead of anchoring on new products, services, or
11:33
capabilities, and frankly, I was really lonely. I was looking for folks
11:41
who would understand this michig gods I had in my head. And so in
11:46
speaking with Kat, you know, she looked at it. She told me
11:52
about humanizing it t I showed her and shep with her what I was advancing
11:56
at IDEO around this human centered digital digital UH transformation and she's like, Wes,
12:05
you're one of the few c ILS I've ever spoken to that actually gets
12:07
this. And so one thing, that's another. We continued to share notes.
12:13
We ended up co presenting at I T service Men Service Management World sponsored
12:22
by h c I, and then we had another opportunity to present again at
12:30
UH the Service Management World. And of course I'm blanking on the name.
12:39
I'm blank too because I always get the mixed up sd I and hd I.
12:43
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
12:46
right. And so one in Ornando, one in Vegas. One was a
12:52
whole class facility that that that we ended up co facilitating, and the other
13:00
one was a talk but they're both highly ranked. There was a lot of
13:03
excitement because quite honestly, it people know that, people in IT feel it.
13:11
There's an existential threat to the way they've always done things. Now we're
13:16
seeing the advanceage general AI and different things of that nature. They put a
13:22
statement out there quite bluntly, we cannot have robots have more personality and be
13:26
more human centered than people. So I think a lot of folks in it
13:33
understand this, and so they're really gravitating to the message and that counts putting
13:41
out there and that we're we're putting out in the world around humanizing it through
13:46
the integration of human certaered design and UH with IT service management. In my
13:54
career and my journey through the digital employee experience path, one of the things
14:00
that became obvious to me and my team when I was an internal it was
14:03
that we we cause employee experience. We don't create it. It's not done
14:11
intentionally. It's done as an outcome of the technology that we touch. And
14:16
in many cases that experience of the employees we support is poor, and it's
14:22
poor because it's not done intentionally. It's done by happenstance. So being intentional
14:26
about it, I think is a really important part of the whole puzzle in
14:33
technology. And like we said, tech people, they gravitate to the tech.
14:37
The technology is easy, the people are hard, and I think this
14:41
makes it really intentional. Well, in that evolution of it, TSM,
14:48
how are you trying to approach that evolution out of the gate? What were
14:52
the what were some of the early thinkings of of how to kind of tackle
14:56
this before we head off to this notion of the Wizard of Oz. Yeah.
15:03
Sure. So the approach I most recently took at Idea was really solving
15:11
back from the employee experience. So, in fact, we defined three core
15:16
experiences to anchor everything on. The employee experience was one, the client experience
15:22
was another, and then the third one was actually the delivery experience, and
15:26
that was anchored on the persona of the team. And so by thinking about
15:33
these three core experiences, we begin to work backwards to say, Okay,
15:37
when we look at this holistically, it doesn't mean to be an employee at
15:43
Idea. You join, you go from hire to retire. Right you join,
15:50
you execute, you move to a period where maybe you decide to leave
15:54
the company or maybe you decide to just gig with the company in the future.
15:58
And from an IT at SIMS standpoint, it's really looking at those moments
16:03
of engagement. So in order to have a more holistic and a more a
16:15
more frictionless employee experience, we had to expand our aperture to include HR.
16:23
We had to expand our aperture to include finance, to include other parts of
16:29
our operations to really think about, you know, tim to your point,
16:33
the digital employee experience right, looking at it end to end and not thinking
16:38
squarely about it's role as you know, as a pylom, but more as
16:48
a glue across the entire operational spectrum. And really a lot starts and ends
16:55
with the service desk and it doesn't change. That's the point at which folks
17:00
engage with us and want to understand and make sense of things. That's where
17:03
they come for help. And it was really important to recast the service desk
17:12
as not the IT service desk, but we just recast everything as help.
17:18
So we were just help you need help with anything, help you come,
17:22
you come to us, You're actually coming to the service portal. And they
17:26
were engaging with all parts of operations, not just IT, and that was
17:33
that was really core to how we gained success there. Yeah, our service
17:37
desk phone number and I got to believe a lot of others ended in four
17:41
three five seven, right h elp uh, that's where you go to get
17:45
support. The only reason, and I made this case for a long time,
17:48
the only reason the service desk exists in its current iteration is because it
17:53
doesn't know if the employee has a problem. The only way and our CEO
17:57
is famous for saying this to us, our employees have to stop what they're
18:00
doing and call you to tell you about a problem that you probably caused.
18:04
So I love the idea of reimagining that service desk to be an area where
18:11
you can get help for things that you need help with that maybe are not
18:15
even related to IT disruptions. So the biggest chore for all of us,
18:22
I think are not sure. The biggest challenge is to get people to think
18:25
differently about complicated about complicated concepts, and I love the analogies. I love
18:33
talking in ways that boil it down to something very simple to understand. In
18:38
our environment, we always talked about the IT firefighter where the fire. You
18:42
know, we're on the fire engine. We're going to come in, We're
18:45
going to put this huge, complicated fire out. And what we didn't tell
18:49
people was there's an it arsonist in the back room that lit that fire a
18:53
month ago. We would just want to be the IT the firefighter hero.
18:57
There's the analogy of turning the lights on and we're in the dark and we
19:00
can't see things. We need more visibility. So let's turn the lights on.
19:03
But Kat, you landed on the Wizard of Ours and I'm really interested
19:07
in exploring this with you. What was it about the Wizard of Ours that
19:11
drew your attention? In terms of an analogy, it's kind of a good
19:15
leading tim because when you're talking to ways about the service desk and IT service
19:19
management, in my opinion, I think that we are all confused about what
19:25
actually is it service management? I mean, it's IT service. So an
19:30
IT service such as a network printer, email, that's an IT service,
19:36
and we're managing that IT service. And then somewhere among the mix, we
19:41
did we or didn't we? Do service actually mean to serve? Or is
19:45
it the IT service? So I'd just like to sort of call that up
19:49
because there is often confusion, and quite often we are there providing an IT
19:56
service. The service that comes along with it money, it's investments, and
20:03
it again requires training and education. So do the CIOs and CEOs give it
20:08
budget for that? No, they give us money to manage the IT service.
20:12
I didn't give us money for the service. So how did Wizard of
20:18
Oz come on that? Note? Because it is about experience and I guess
20:22
it was Wes's idea. So I'm not going to take the amazing accolade of
20:26
the title of that because we're in Orlando, fun fun, what's the parks?
20:30
And so we we what do we do with it? It was so
20:33
that that's how it came about, and then it just kind of sort of
20:37
morphed into hey, this is really going to fit with the different characters of
20:41
the Wizard. It was I must when I don't have children, and I
20:45
had to go back a bit about who were the characters, and the more
20:48
we studied it and the actual the intent of what the Wizard of was,
20:55
it was just a perfect fit of what ai ah and do and what it
21:00
shouldn't do in the realm of it service management. And again it was like
21:04
a standing room ontely actually we had to unfortunately push people out of the room
21:11
and it's too crowded. But yeah, I guess how did you come up?
21:14
I forgot what was the great idea that made you think of that?
21:18
What paid that idea? I should say, Well, you know, as
21:22
we're going back and forth working on the presentation, we're talking quite a bit
21:29
about ai right, and and we wanted a simple way to help everyone understand
21:37
not on a technical level, because there's plenty of ways to understand AI technically,
21:42
but how do we understand it's relevance on a conceptual level, what it
21:45
means to it, Folks who who've committed themselves to it over decades like we
21:52
have. And Kat knows us about me. I love a good metaphor that
22:00
loves great metaphors too, right, Like we're both metaphor files, if that's
22:07
a word, And so we're looking for a great metaphor here. And I
22:12
thought about the character of the Ten Men. This is really the core metaphor
22:18
that drove me. Drove me. The Tin Man wasn't search for a heart,
22:23
and when we think about humanizing it, we're literally looking at putting a
22:30
heart, right literally, it's a part of the symbol of putting a heart
22:36
into technology. So it seems so apropos to go to the Tin Man.
22:41
And the funny thing is, as we started to explore the Tin Man,
22:45
we went beyond Man to other characters. This whole metaphor exploded. It was
22:52
so rich with different ways to think about it, and this journey with AI
22:57
and what it means that everyone, So that that that was that was the
23:02
emphasis. I couldn't have developed that alone, and it was it was us
23:11
collaboration, huge design people. But as we're really the characters came to life,
23:19
and we made the Wicked Witch of the East, East, the West
23:23
big which the CFOs and so we were making all these characters relating back to
23:32
the business and it actually it worked really really well. Actually, yeah,
23:37
it's there's just so many parallels in that story, from the wicked Witch representing
23:41
everything that can go wrong along the journey, the good Witch is the career
23:45
educator, even the tornado that comes along in the middle of the night,
23:49
the outage that can knock us off the loop. But west, what's the
23:52
what's the kind of the what's the connection to the yellow brick Road? I
23:56
mean, we could talk characters all day long, but that yellow brick Road
23:59
is character into itself too. What's the what's the story there? You know?
24:06
The thing about yellow brick growth I think as I think about it,
24:10
is it's a really great metaphor for what we're all on. We're all on
24:14
this journey. We and and you know, we often focus on the destination,
24:22
and you know especially I mean think about it, and it sm you
24:29
know, MTTR meantime to resolution, right, we are thinking about the destination
24:34
or the outcome almost always, we rarely focus on the journey. But the
24:41
journey is actually where the magic is at. The journey is what people are
24:45
going to remember. The journey is when human beings make new connections, fall
24:51
in love, fall out of love with the organization, have an enhanced experience
24:55
or not. And so it's really important that we focus on the journe ny
25:00
itself and how we really provide and amplify value, remove friction, and make
25:07
that you know, yellow I think is a metaphor for you know, if
25:11
there's probably really a gold world, right, like, ultimately, how can
25:15
we how can we advance golden journeys? Right? And I think there's there's
25:22
something really powerful about thinking about the yellow brick road road in terms of the
25:26
journeys of all of the humans that are having these technology experiences. Cat,
25:34
what would you say? I just took notes with for my next posts on
25:41
the MPG, because it's true, and you know, we're just we're doing
25:47
work for a very big global company and it's just it's just saying that everyone's
25:52
focused on getting that service back back up, but no one's thinking about what's
25:56
happening, and what is happening is experience, and so clients are complaining of
26:02
not complaining saying that there's challenges because they don't know what's going on. They're
26:07
not getting timely comb so the comps don't make sense. And that is such
26:11
another great and I'm going to use it for a post, butk, so
26:12
thanks for that. Yeah, yeah, so I And another premise of that
26:19
tim was that we I can has been around in IT service management for decades
26:30
and and I know this sounds very harsh, but I'll say it that most
26:37
IT service management capabilities for maturity I've seen are extremely low, and we still
26:45
have we don't have a CMDB. And what we don't have we don't have
26:48
a CMDB. Our services aren't that we don't even know what our services are.
26:52
Knowledge articles are written textbeek, should I go on? And so it
27:00
doesn't matter that we can have AI because we've already got it, you know,
27:04
and how we've done it, We've done it very poorly. So what
27:07
this One of the premises the speech was, yeah, you can have the
27:11
greatest technology because we've already got it in many many ways and we've excuse it.
27:15
We've made balls up of it. And so what what speech is a
27:19
bad is that we still need the human experience in that And as I said
27:26
earlier, humanizing it is about educating IT professionals about human centered design to ensure
27:32
that everything is human centered. You know, I think it in many cases
27:38
in my observation, it wants the easy button. Right, Let's get rid
27:41
of this complexity. Let's find the easy way. And if I can't find
27:45
the easy button, I'm going to find the shortcut. And when we do
27:48
those things, we miss out on the education, we miss out on the
27:52
journey, we miss out on the transformation of our teams, and we get
27:56
stuck in this constant desire to just find the easy way out of this versus
28:00
the right journey that is better for us in the long run. And I
28:03
think that applies to our careers as well. Right. Employees are on a
28:07
journey with their company divisions and departments. Organizations are on a journey as they
28:14
try to get better it. People are on a career journey as well,
28:18
right, And all of this matters. And I say this kind of having
28:22
a thirty five year career journey behind me. It's a little bit easier to
28:26
look at what that journey looks like in the rearview mirror than in the forward
28:32
out the windshield. But wes, how should it people look at and maybe
28:37
even narrow it down to the end user computing pros. How do they look
28:40
at this journey of the Wizard of Oz and that golden sidewalk, how do
28:45
they apply that to their own individual career development? Yeah, that's a great
28:52
question too. You know, a lot has been said about AI replacing a
29:00
lot of the capabilities that we have from an ITASM perspective, like General I
29:07
in particular, there's a lot of hype them around there around IT, you
29:14
know, literally reducing the size or removing or you know, potentially creating a
29:19
pathway to eliminating or replacing parts of in user compute as we know it.
29:30
And I start for AI because from a professional development standpoint, I think it's
29:36
really important of course that in using compute in the user in the user compute
29:42
professionals and IT and professionals overall really understand AI and don't view it as the
29:49
boogeyman. Right, So that's really really important. And while I've heard a
29:57
lot about it's it's not the heat. It's not technology professionals that will be
30:03
replaced by AI, but technology professionals will be replaced by technology professionals that understand
30:11
and work with AI. I think that's that that's actually wrong, I think
30:15
correct. The correct statement is technology professionals will be replaced by technology professionals who
30:22
work with AI and understand AI, but who and who also understand the human
30:30
experience. It's it's really those three components. It's not the two that's going
30:38
to make the difference. And it's so critical, it's more critical now than
30:45
ever before from a professional development standpoint to understand what design is, understand human
30:51
centered design, and integrate that with your understanding of the technology. The newest
30:57
kid on the block, of course, is AI as the newest old kid
31:03
on the block, to be fair, and so that's really where it's at.
31:07
I think you have to understand and dedicate yourself to the experience. I
31:14
did a post some time ago. I love hip hop, and I grew
31:18
up with hip hop, and so I thought about the experience of hip hop
31:22
over the ages. And you know, back in my younger day, we
31:29
had people walking around huge boom boxes on their shoulders and they'll put Carton on
31:37
the sidewalk and start breakdancing. Right, The experience of people coming together with
31:42
music hasn't changed. Now, you can pick up a little digital boom box
31:48
that that that that that you bluetooth into and have a great party. But
31:55
the point is whether you're looking at that boom box, whether you're looking at
31:57
the walkman, or whether you're looking at all these boomboxes, the digital devices
32:05
we carry around that anchor our music, and the experience of human beings moving
32:09
their bodies and enjoying music hasn't gone away. Right. The experiences is almost
32:19
this this this eternal component to anchor on while you can see change happening all
32:28
around. So the technology will continue to evolve, tastemakers evolve, influencers evolve,
32:34
but the experiences, the experiences, are our anchors. And I really
32:38
believe these these technology professionals, if they anchor on the experience, they'll also
32:45
have recession proof their jobs and prepare themselves for the future. Right. I
32:50
saw a great keynote in the fall in at Gartner and she talked about embracing
32:55
AI and getting rid of this notion that AI is here replace me. And
33:00
look at AI which has been around for a while, but really exploded last
33:05
year. But look at AI as a partner and a collaborator to make you
33:08
better and learn how to use it to its fullest advantage, into your fullest
33:14
advantage. But you're right, it can't be a replacement. It can't humanize
33:19
you if you're not looking at it the right way. So I think that's
33:22
I think that's hugely important. Kat. How do you how do you see
33:30
the connection to this inundation of AI. What's the dynamic between end user compute
33:37
and AI and that guiding principle of human humanization. How do you see it
33:42
developing so far? Yes, there's a few things there, Tim, I
33:45
quite often say that it professionals are unwittingly creating user experience, unresting and unknowingly.
33:53
Oh we are. Every time we for full of service requests, that's
33:59
an experience. Every time we ask direct a user to a knowledge article,
34:02
that's that's experience. And again, their frameworks do not teach it. Professionals
34:08
user experience. So all of a sudden, we don't know, but we
34:10
are UX. We're creating UX, but we don't know how to do it.
34:14
And so that again, that's what humanizing it does we teach it professionals
34:19
the skills required for that. And when you said earlier we want a magic
34:22
button to fix things, well we do have a magic button. Amazing tools
34:27
like service now and next fix everything everything. There's amazing tools out there.
34:31
They're all great, you know, everyone's got to but most obscene are not
34:36
configured in the user experience. So what we're saying is that where AI can
34:42
help it professionals is that learn learn these principles to design a really great experience
34:47
with your service management tooling. Because I often hear that UX people and CX
34:54
people and are coming into it and designing the portal and things like that.
35:00
Great. But the problem with that, and I'm very passionate about this,
35:02
they do not understand it service management. So they will create a nice,
35:08
pretty and I'm being a bit facetious, you know, nice nice portal.
35:14
You know, so that's a start, because you know, it's it's more
35:15
in use a family stake. I don't have a network issue because what the
35:19
hex and network? How does it useing it? But then what happens behind
35:23
that that that is service management And so the UX and six people don't understand
35:29
that and so we actually there's still a disconnect. So I want IT professionals
35:32
to actually do the UX themselves because they know service management and using AI,
35:37
and to me, you know, that's what we're saying is an amazing opportunity
35:42
for IT professionals to advance their career and become really valuable in the marketplace by
35:49
having these combined skills coupled with the AI. They are rare skills when when
35:53
you find them together in the same person, the IT side and the humanization
35:59
side, and when you cop that with AI and really know how to bring
36:01
it all together, it is it definitely makes a valuable resource. West put
36:08
your let me put it this way, take out the crystal ball. Look
36:13
over the next year or two. How do you expect this all to develop
36:16
over the next few years? Hm hmm. Yeah, it's gonna be a
36:22
really interesting riot, right because I think we're we're in that we're still in
36:31
that deep hill, that's deep, deep incline of adoption of all these emergent
36:38
technologies. I think over the next two years, we're gonna see not just
36:44
AI, but we're we'll see you know, v R ar x R,
36:50
We'll see other components of all these emergent technologies really reshape the digital experience,
36:59
and I think it's really exciting to think about what that means from a IT
37:02
service management perspective, because I think we'll be able to take leaps and bounds
37:09
in developing more empathy with our end users. And for example, like today,
37:22
if something's going wrong with a employees computer, we all know that the
37:30
mature service desk tech could remote into the machine and help address in real time.
37:37
Now, now let's think about that differently. Like, let's imagine that
37:42
same service technician with all these emergent technologies. You've got the AI, you've
37:47
got the augmented reality, and all of this. Like imagine bringing them virtually
37:53
into the room so you don't feel like you're alone. You feel like this
37:59
person has an understanding of your space, your office, how you've got your
38:02
computer. The problem is somebody saying, my mouth doesn't work and they're holding
38:07
it up. That problem disappears from a remote troubleshooting perspective because someone can see
38:14
that you're holding it up. I really believe it's an exciting time to think
38:17
about how these technologies, not any one of them, but all of them
38:22
in concert integrate with focus on the human experience to develop and drive more empathy
38:30
into all of us. As we practiced this tradecraft called it. I think
38:38
although I could continue to talk about this with you for another hour, it's
38:43
probably a great place to wrap it up and let the audience kind of come
38:46
to you and do a little bit more research. Where Wes? Where can
38:52
they find you online? I think you said your primary spot is LinkedIn,
38:54
right, My primary spot is LinkedIn at leading with Wes. Yes, but
39:00
frankly they can find me on x formally known as Twitter at Leading with West
39:07
or even Instagram at leading with West excellent kat closing thoughts, partying, parting
39:15
thoughts and where can folks find you as well? Thanks? Thanks again for
39:22
the opportunity to be I'm with you, we consider and talk for another hour
39:25
or two. It's been fascinating, so so thanks Tim for the opportunity and
39:29
the wonderful people. Next think, we we're launching our new website, so
39:35
that's HEAT Global Services and also obviously on LinkedIn and and as I said,
39:43
we're launching our humanizing I t app shortly and be grateful people to contact me
39:50
to have a go that be much appreciated. So thanks Tim, that's upting.
39:58
Thank you. Thank you both for joining. It was really fascinating talking
40:02
to me that I really enjoyed having you both on the show, So thank
40:05
you very much, both of you. Thank you today. To make sure
40:08
that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts,
40:12
Spotify, or your favorite podcast player, And if you're listening on Apple podcasts,
40:16
make sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap the number
40:20
of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to learn more about
40:23
how next Think can help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
40:28
next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,