Enterprise Digital - the podcast

Our guest is the debonair Duncan Watkins, from Forrester Consulting – Duncan is a well-known and respected member of the UK and global ITSM community. The discussion focuses on comparing current approaches to employee experience and customer/user experience. We discuss similarities and differences, with a focus on what organisations are trying to do – not just the hype. Duncan mentions a ‘spectrum of experience’ – a useful reflection. How do we avoid XLAs falling into the same traps as SLAs – maybe product management as a direction – certainly understanding different types of business… It’s a great discussion and a valuable debate on a highly current topic.

An excellent, enlightening, and exhilarating episode – with our guest Simon Wardley, of Wardley Maps fame..! Simon defines and discusses the challenges that led him to mapping and how this can really help decision-making by providing context and changing relationships as well as the fixed points that are usually shown on graphs. We discuss doctrine tables, principles, and how most maps are not really maps. We also discuss the people side and warning flags about the ‘re-org’ culture that bedevils most organisations on a permanent basis – good advice is to sort out principles first. Our principles take us regularly to the bar and we also discover Simon’s preferred tipple for (dis) ‘orientation…’

Our guest this week is Karen Brusch, experience Service Designer in the financial Service industry, as well as a long standing itSMF contributor, currently chair of itSMF UK. With the annual itSMF UK conference coming up on 14thNovember, this is a timely discussion. We discuss the challenges of service design, how to create the ‘swan’ experience (smooth and seamless), plus what is needed under water to make it all happen. We also cover the impact of different approaches and how this is causing more stress to those people delivering ‘faster, better’ etc… Do we really understand the impact of what we are building and on those being tasked to deliver and run these services – plus ‘agile causes stress…’ Yes – (you’ll need to listen in). Let’s think about context and consequences, not just outcomes.. We also do a little conference preview and also mention our late friend and colleague Rebecca Beach, who recently passed away… A stiff drink is needed to toast her memory.

Lisa runs a successful and growing HR consultancy business – providing the ‘HR’ department for many organisations, particularly in the tech industry. Many changes have taken place over recent years with employee experience roles becoming prevalent.  We discuss culture, values, trust, and the implications of home-working surveillance tools, as well as the challenges of how to move from an entrepreneurial culture to a more structure and process-driven way (often a challenge…) business leaders are often not the best team leaders or managers…!! A great conversation around the intersection of people, tech, management and culture.

Sherry is an experienced and prolific trainer and coach, for leadership, particularly for women in Tech. She has come from the IT and service desk world but now focuses on leadership coaching as well as managing change projects. Sherry brings a different and refreshing focus to our discussion with the perspective of how we are developing our leaders and leadership capabilities. The discussion is full of sage nuggets of advice around leadership qualities, the value of coaching, and how we can help to develop people to be more effective in new management roles. This is a fascinating discussion and also a new perspective on our ESM theme. And yes it ends up in the bar..

Our guest is Alan Nance who has been a key player in the Service Management world since the beginning of time - or at least a while anyway since ITIL was knee high to a grasshopper. Alan is a driving force behind the XLA movement and is involved in developing and taking the whole XLA concept to market through his company XLA Collab. We discuss the essence of experience management, what it is and how it can be used in relation to service management. This is still a new area and the concepts are evolving as well as adoption growing. There’s much to learn and appreciate in this revealing and insightful conversation. And yes we do end up in the bar…

Jeffrey is a highly experienced ITSM practitioner and consultant with great energy and focus on doing the right things and doing them well. He also runs a successful podcast and has published lots of great advice on YouTube videos. We discuss how every organisation is an IT organisation but shouldn’t just focus on IT, how an organisation lost control of 159,000 laptops and why CMDB and why CMDB is important. This is a brilliant high energy and practical discussion around getting the basics as well as the shiny things right..! definitely a great bar-room chat!

We welcome Sandra from the Open University (and other university roles) to talk about how we can develop and integrate more rounded education of service management. How do we ensure that tech can IT education includes the relevant bits of service management that are relevant and useful? Too often we have young graduates with little business or SM skills or knowledge – and its important. Sandra has a breadth of knowledge and experience as an educator at the degree level in this area and we put the world to right on this, including how the Higher Education and commercial training organisations could work better together…

Rob is an ITSM renaissance man, with a keen interest and deep knowledge of a great variety of models, practices, standards and frameworks. His maps that bring these things together are legendary, as are his music videos..! We discuss how to get organisations working across barriers and frameworks and how to get product based (service management based?) consensus. Let’s talk simply about complexity..! Once it gets too tough for Barclay and Ian, we head for the bar..

This is our 50th episode and we are also celebrating now appearing on Apple podcasts! Our guest is the ‘very Dutch’ Dave Van Herpen (his quote)… Dave is an experienced practitioner and consultant for service transformation. He’s also been a core organiser for the SRVision/Service Manager days in Utrecht. He eschews ‘framework fetishists’ (don’t we all) and is clear on the need to clarify business goals before using specific models and frameworks. We discuss practical, positive approaches to Scrum, Kanban, Agile and Cynefin, amongst others, as well as the challenges of joined up DevOps and ITSM implementation. Dave makes a great point that a lot of the ‘framework wars’ occur more at conferences than the workplace. He also discusses valuable experience of agile and ITSM approaches outside of IT. Dave enjoys a good Dutch IPA who doesn’t?