Well my forecast for what would feature in the event was not bad!
There were several speakers that highlighted the need for our vision of the Service Desk to be updated. Chris Dancy and Rob England (The IT Skeptic), seen on stage together for the very first time, had two different but complimentary views of the future, with Rob being very keen to see process eliminating the need for humans to have to be ‘trusted’ too much as they were mostly error prone through the very fact there ARE human!
Chris, on the other hand, is very keen to see the ‘liberation’ of people to do things almost instinctively with the right tools and technology to help them carry out the tasks. So guess what? It ended up as a bit of a draw with both seeing the other’s point and agreeing that the ‘liberation’ from process has to be earned and only the very best people will achieve that. The rest will always need the support of good process.
Several sessions – Pippa Harrison from Harrods, Clive Davey from Aviva and Kate Wignall from Barclays Bank - picked up on my prediction of importance of business led relationship support, cost reduction, value delivery and measures to demonstrate that. The general view was that if you are to continue to be the preferred in-house supplier of service and support to your business this was an essential goal.
CGI (formerly Logica) were awarded the special achievement award for being the first SDI certified 5* world class Service Desk and presented why they had chosen to pursue that route – largely because it gave them competitive advantage and the ability to really zero in on incremental and continuous improvement to add to the consistently good service they deliver currently. Other managed service providers, Atos and Fujitsu, also appeared and Neil Forshaw from Fujitsu picked up on my prediction of the BYOD and cloud device scenario, and indicated that a clear strategy is essential to cope with it.
The SDI’s IT Service & Support Awards presented some great competition amongst the finalists and the winners who just edged out wer Fujitsu as the new Best Managed Service Desk, Cherwell as the best vendor for customer service and Virgin Media and Severn Trent Water as the best large and small Service Desks. This is one of the best recognition events in any industry, it’s also one of the toughest to win as the judging really IS rigorous compared to most awards. In addition to the conference sessions during the day where the finalists told the conference audience why they had done so well, we got the extra treat of some fantastic ‘fun’ videos where they used their creativity to put together skits and pastiches in their natural habitat. Special mention must go to JMC IT whose ‘northern stereotype’ production was amazingly skilful and funny!!
Other notable events included the introduction of the new ‘ITIL joint venture company with no name’ which is jointly owned by Capita and The Cabinet Office. Their ownership of ITIL is an interesting development and there were many brave and ambitious statements from the first of the new management team. Seems it’s likely that the development of gamified ITIL learning is inevitable, and the £25m spend envisaged is encouraging but I hope it’s spent wisely. Speaking personally I’ve heard many brave statements before that have proved impossible to deliver on – and this initiative is potentially full of potential holes to fall down – so I await with interest!
More highlights included Chris Dancy’s keynote which was well received because it was totally ‘out there’ as we expect from Chris with the message that as individuals we will live as our ‘Quantified Self’ together with our use of the ‘Internet of Things’. Here is the link to Chris’ presentation if you want to know more! The IT Skeptic, Rob England was possibly more pragmatic with his ‘standard and case’ methodology providing knowledge workers with two routes to solve customer issues, with standard mainly a tool for early stage staff and experts mainly in the ‘case’ mode. His later ‘checklist’ presentation paralleled the detailed checklist world of the doctor or pilot to avoid catastrophic life and death failure. Could we use it to help us do the same?
As ever the ‘open and close’ sessions were reserved for two expert ‘motivational speakers’. Chris Barez-Brown ‘upped our Elvis’ in the opener and illustrated how we should put our ideas into action – basically do it fast and make it real to make sure it both happens and sticks. Jim Lawless (ironically a former city lawyer!) used the extreme sports examples of free diving to 100m and learning to be a jockey to showcase his ’10 rules for taming tigers’ where the tigers are the things in your mind that stop you ‘being a bit bold’ and doing the right things. Rules included doing something a bit scary every day and never, ever giving up. Jim lost 3 stone to win a £1 bet over a year to become a jockey when he’d never ridden a horse before!
The last word? As I closed the conference, I observed that both the number of delegates and the underlying thrust of a newly resurgent industry evidenced that the age of the Service Desk is here. We have a responsibility to use the power we have as the supporters of most of the world’s most powerful technologies – and this conference has helped us add even more knowledge to help us do so. Service Desk people: find your voice, promote yourselves and what you do. You ARE some of the most important people in the world right now!
Howard Kendall
Founder of SDI
