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Humanising IT: We Need to Talk About IT is the podcast for IT leaders, service management professionals, and digital transformation teams who know that great IT is about more than process, tools, and frameworks.
Hosted by Katrina Macdermid and Wesley Eugene and brought to you by HIT Global, this podcast explores how to make IT service management more human, more effective, and more relevant in a world shaped by experience, AI, and constant change.
Each episode dives into the real conversations happening across modern IT, including:
- IT service management (ITSM)
- Human-centred design in IT
- ITIL and experience-led service management
- Digital employee experience
- Service desk and support leadership
- IT transformation and organisational change
- Humanising AI and modern service design
If you work in IT and care about creating services that actually work for the people who use them, this podcast is for you.
Whether you’re a CIO, IT leader, service manager, consultant, support professional, or transformation lead, Humanising IT: We Need to Talk About IT will challenge outdated thinking and help you rethink what better IT service really looks like.
Expect:
- Honest conversations
- Fresh perspectives on ITSM
- Practical insights you can apply
- Thought leadership from experienced voices in the industry
- A more human view of IT, service and experience
Subscribe to Humanising IT: We Need to Talk About IT for new episodes, expert insights, and modern thinking on the future of IT service management.
Explore more from HIT Global: https://www.hitglobal.services/
Learn more about Humanising IT™ training and certification: https://www.hitglobal.services/podcast/
[00:00:00] Wes: So this is super exciting. Um, Wesley Eugene here, uh, and I'm here with both Katrina McDermott, author of Human Centered Design for IT Service Management and the new book, humanizing It, you know, um, exploring the Experience Distortion in IT service management. And I'm also here with Mark Basham, uh, CEO of HIT Global.
[00:00:16] Kat: Well, um, my pleasure to introduce, uh, David Ratcliffe. He's the president of Pink Elephant. Um, on a personal note, I've known David for a long time. I've also known of, um, your incredible company, pink Elephant, and what your company and your team have done for it.
[00:00:30] Service management.
[00:00:31]
[00:00:36] Kat: Absolutely. Training is great, you know, good investment. Um, but what I found in, I think where we've talked about this in Mark, that I don't know if I've been unfortunate in my career that I, I've worked for most part in IT organisations where. It service management was, had a lot of opportunities for improvement.
[00:00:54] What I'm saying was a very low maturity. Yeah. And you know yourself, Dave, we do maturity assessments. You know, very rarely does someone get over 1.5, you know, two's good. That's reality. And so when you do training and you train eg the service desks or level one, level two, they've got constraints. So constraints might be an outsource of that.
[00:01:12] You know, you bound to SLAs and all this sort of stuff. And it just makes it really hard to what you learn in a classroom, to apply to reality. Like, that's my experience. And it's, it's hard, you know, level two, you know? That's right. Oh, sends a ticket back. You know, all this behavioral stuff. And I guess what's he's saying, Dave and Mark, it's about behavior versus a framework, isn't it?
[00:01:33] But it's the realities of it, service management. And we talk about in the book, so,
[00:01:38] David: so if you wanna talk a little bit about assessments, then Yeah, we get, we do a lot of those. Yeah. And, um. In fact, it's increasing, which is just something I'd like to understand a little bit more. Maturity
[00:01:49] Mark: assessments.
[00:01:50] David: Yeah.
[00:01:50] Well, we do maturity assessments. Capability assessments. Okay. There's a difference. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Maturity is all about are you prepared?
[00:01:57] Mark: Yeah.
[00:01:58] David: For delivering, you know, have you got everything you need lined
[00:02:00] Kat: up? Yeah.
[00:02:01] David: To be able to deliver the service you've set out to do. Capability is actually, are you do, how are you doing?
[00:02:08] Mark: Yeah.
[00:02:08] David: How, how are you doing? Right.
[00:02:09] Mark: Yeah.
[00:02:09] David: So you may wanna do an maturity assessment first, and then after six or 12 months, you wanna do say, well, how, how have we actually been delivering this? Anyway, sorry about that. Little lecture point is, is when we're doing assessments, what's the overall objective the organisations try to achieve?
[00:02:26] Right. Same as what we were talking about with training. Yeah. What are the, what's the ci Oh, why is the target in this training, what we found is that there's two camps. There's organisations who just wanna see a. And the score get better over time. Right? Which again, it's, it's kind of a natural thing.
[00:02:43] You'd say, commonsensically, if you've got better scores than last year, you must hopefully be doing something better, but it can't really put my finger on it, right?
[00:02:53] Wes: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:53] David: The second one option is where we do the assessment and then we, then we sit down. This is what happens most often. We sit down with the key group of stakeholders and we say, look, here's the state of your industry right now.
[00:03:07] This is where you're at,
[00:03:08] Wes: right?
[00:03:09] Marker
[00:03:09] David: What do you think of this? What are your priorities? How are we going to move the goal? How are we gonna make this better? Right?
[00:03:17] Wes: Yeah.
[00:03:18] David: So, you know, I'll use, I mean, I don't do this work anymore. I used to do it 25 years ago, but I don't do it now. There's, it's much smarter people working at Pink Elephant doing this.
[00:03:28] So the examples I give, sometimes they're a bit dated, but they just illustrate the point. So for many, many, many, many years, problem management was the least mature process. We, we, I did an analysis of hundreds of assessments a few years ago, and it came out an average of about 1.6 or something.
[00:03:46] Wes: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:46] David: Everything else was in the high one point somethings and even in the twos and whatever. Right. And over time, if you did multiple assessments with the improvement plan, after each one, your scores would start to improve. So that's what organisations should be doing. Sitting down at the end of the assessment, looking at the results, saying, okay, do we care about that score?
[00:04:08] It's not high priority right now. That area, minimal amount of, uh, transactions work this over here, change failures. That's, that causes a lot of outage for us, man. And that's what, that's the reason we brought you in in the first place. 'cause we knew we were not very good at this. And it's just been proven.
[00:04:26] How do we fix this now? What do we do about this? And that's where we sit down and we go through with them opportunities for improvement, what the dependencies are. And it's not just a case of let's improve this. It's what do you have that's gonna make that happen? Do people know why they're doing this?
[00:04:42] Is it a, is it some kind of training or awareness gap? Is it the tools that are out of sync? Is it the fact that there's another process? Which is it, it's dependent upon, that's dysfunctional. It's like how long is a piece of string? There's so many different reasons why something doesn't work, and a skilled consultant who's seen it all before can start to identify, here's what I recommend you do.
[00:05:07] Yeah. And that's, that's where we're actually starting to see value coming out of The experienced person who maybe a few years ago did training every day of the week. Now we're putting that experience of working with customers and hearing every, every story and every, uh, opportunity for dysfunction.
[00:05:27] Becoming, uh, a tool to help us to help the next guy to improve.
[00:05:32] Mark: So here's you, you've said in the last two sentences the word experience, albeit referring to people, experience people. I, I, I, I think this is probably an opportunity to circle back to experience and experience management.
[00:05:44] Wes: A hundred percent.
[00:05:45] Mark: Because all the training that we kind of has been going on in our industry, service management for the last blah 30 years has broadly been the same stuff. It's trying to tick the same boxes, the capability assessments, the maturity assessments. We've been measuring the same things. What we haven't done enough of in my, and I would say our hit global, uh, uh, of view is experience management and thinking about user experience in particular.
[00:06:10] And so the shift that hit Global's bringing, and I don't want to hijack it, so
[00:06:14] David: are, are we talking about the same thing when we say experience?
[00:06:17] Mark: I think, I think not. And that's, that's where I'm coming from
[00:06:19] David: because when I talk about experience, I'm talking about. What the person gives.
[00:06:24] Mark: I know you are, you're talking about individual's experience in terms of expertise and
[00:06:27] David: think what you're talking about is what somebody receives.
[00:06:30] Mark: I'm talking about outcomes. Um, so, uh, yeah, the experience of a service. The experience of, right. And, and that's what we are, that's the lens that we are, are, are bringing to the industry. And that's the lens that I think is starting to shift the conversation. Katrina's just written a second. You know, a, a, a new book.
[00:06:47] Um, the first 1, 3, 4 years ago, I think it was first published, um, introduced a concept of user experience and human centered design to it service management. That has become now i, I would suggest almost accepted wisdom. So the second book and it's is, is now focused very much on how you create a better experience for users and the activities with that, that.
[00:07:12] We as it org it people, it practitioners can adopt and, and work through in order to drive better
[00:07:18] Wes: mm-hmm.
[00:07:18] Mark: User experience and better outcomes as a result of it. And wasn't planning on triangulating back to the, the question you asked me right at the beginning, which was around investment and justification of the stuff.
[00:07:29] That's,
[00:07:29] Wes: yeah. That's just, yeah.
[00:07:31] Mark: But to my mind, that's the key anchor point. By creating better user experiences, you create better business experiences, better customer experiences, and ultimately better performing businesses. Better performing teams.
[00:07:42] Wes: Yeah. What I reflect back on my career, mark, what I find is that ironically, the, the easiest way to get an investment in training and consulting was due to a failed experience or a disrupted experience, or some experience that fell apart.
[00:08:02] It. At that point, every self-respecting CIO wants to retain their job and they're like, okay, we just need this thing fixed. This cannot happen again. My user base cannot experience this thing, whatever that was. So please let me get on the nine one one, then call Pink Elephant, then call HIT Global. Let me, let me, let me call people to help fix this thing so that my user base, my employees, my VIPs never experienced what they have just experienced again.
[00:08:35] Kat: But it brings me back, Dave. Sorry, back to what you were saying, and I might have picked up the wrong book, but when I was studying and it's in my first book, you know, we, people challenge me and say, and say, oh, you know, we always had the P people in IT, service management. But the book I picked up was, we talked about people, process, products, and mm-hmm.
[00:08:56] Partners. Was that it? Yep. And um. Experience was experience as in of the IT professional. How much were they certified? How much experience did they have? It never talked about,
[00:09:06] Mark: I don't think That's what data changed. Yeah,
[00:09:08] Kat: exactly. Exactly. And that's when, you know, when people challenged me, oh, we always talked about people.
[00:09:12] Mm. It didn't really, it, it didn't really, from a human centered design lens, I don't think service management really did it. It, as I said, it talked about the people in the organization with the experience they have. Did I pick up the wrong version of the book?
[00:09:28] David: Well, I dunno if you're maybe not given a, a little bit of credit that I think is deserved with the regional service management.
[00:09:34] I mean, I'll even go back to before, before I learned about formal service management, I was hired in the consulting and training world to teach courses to people in it. And my first experience was very technical. IBM main. Stuff so we can forget about that. Right. But I, I moved on to teaching, uh, customer service skills, like telephone skills for help desk analysts and, uh, teaching them how to empathize with the customer.
[00:10:04] Right. Teaching them what was, what was the definition of good service.
[00:10:07] Kat: Yeah.
[00:10:07] David: Right. So that kind of started
[00:10:10] Kat: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:10:11] David: That started to kind of inform the movement around my mentor, Malcolm Fry's, seminal books on the service culture. We called it, uh, him and his editor Tony, uh, probate called the four books that Malcolm wrote, uh, the Service Culture.
[00:10:27] And we never used the word, really used the word service in that type of context before. Mm-hmm. It's all about functional stuff. How do you, how do you record incidents? How do you, you know, move things along the pipeline? Right. And so. That was something which informed the I movement in the mid 1980s and it, it was originally called the Government IT Infrastructure Management Method.
[00:10:51] Horrible acronym. Giam. Actually, funny acronym.
[00:10:54] Wes: I think it might work today.
[00:10:56] David: Government. Yeah. But because it was all sponsored by the government, they put the word government in there, but before it came to fruition, it was published because of the likes of British Airways and Legal and General Insurance Company and all the rest of them who were not government.
[00:11:09] Wes: Yeah.
[00:11:10] David: Uh, it somehow got renamed overnight to ITIL IT Infrastructure Library.
[00:11:16] Wes: Right.
[00:11:16] David: Not the IT service library.
[00:11:18] Wes: Right.
[00:11:19] David: And uh, it's that name stuck forever. And now it's just become not an acronym, it's just a word, which I think is probably a good idea because otherwise you kind of keep getting pulled back into.
[00:11:30] Infrastructure library. It's not by infrastructure. That was a, there were, there were books, the first 44 books, there was a book, I think it was about 64 pages long, which was all about ca different types of cabling infrastructures.
[00:11:42] Wes: Wow.
[00:11:43] David: There was another book on fire protection systems.
[00:11:46] Thank
[00:11:46] David: you. None of this had anything to do with service.
[00:11:48] It was about infrastructure. Right? Yeah. That's what it was for. But then version two was throwing away some of that, or putting it to one side, not throwing away, because that sort of technology focus becomes redundant after a while.
[00:12:01] Wes: Yeah.
[00:12:01] David: Yeah. Certain if you, if you're an Apple user, you know very much what I'm saying about cabling infrastructures, they changed with every new product.
[00:12:09] Right?
[00:12:09] Wes: Right.
[00:12:09] David: Anyway, the, the, the next thing that happened was we got this, uh, service, uh, thinking with business relationship management, which was part of the business perspective books, which were the first strategic books in the library. So we kind of gradually were introducing elements of service and un understanding of treating people respectfully.
[00:12:34] But it was not, I would say some of my coworkers of those days might vehemently disagree, but I would say probably not very consciously. The way you have taken that gone to it very proactively. These were just things that were happening. It's kind of like, you know, the evolution of, you know, the amoebas coming together and creating multi-cell systems.
[00:12:56] Yeah. Things were starting to happen kind of by accident, I would say by human nature.
[00:13:02] Wes: Yeah.
[00:13:03] Kat: But because you made it more efficient, you could move on to something else. You know, it did its job, do you know what I mean?
[00:13:08] David: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:08] Kat: The technology was stable and
[00:13:10] David: yeah, so we, we taught about service. We taught about service level agreements.
[00:13:13] Yeah. Again, you know, just a very basic tool, which never really worked. When we spent years talking about service level agreements and to me it never really worked. 'cause there was always exceptions. It was just a world full of exceptions. Right.
[00:13:28] Wes: Right.
[00:13:29] David: That service level you've defined works fine.
[00:13:32] Wes: It's kept the loud lawyers
[00:13:33] David: very busy.
[00:13:34] It worked fine. You know, nine 30 on a Monday morning, but it five past five on a Friday is a whole different set of priorities. Right.
[00:13:40] Kat: That is, that's another podcast. I've never heard you say that, Dave, in all the years I've known you that it was, it didn't really work. And it's interesting 'cause there are metrics that were used to save for good or bad.
[00:13:49] Wes: It's bad
[00:13:50] David: so deeply. There's, there's elements, you know, let's not go too far. There's, there's still some value there. Yeah. But it was never complete, it was never holistic. Didn't cover for every eventuality. Right, right, right. I mean, the, the best example is, you know, when, when my printer's not working, you know, I'll stand in line and I'll wait until my priority gets up there to get to tension.
[00:14:08] The CIO's print is not working.
[00:14:11] Kat: Yeah.
[00:14:11] David: Right. Absolutely that happens right away. And I'd have to explain this to people to say, well, so you think that's unfair? Do you? Well, yeah. 'cause you know, my, I can't do my work, but my boss gets his work. She gets her work fixed straight away. I said, yeah, but you know what is actually she doing?
[00:14:27] Right?
[00:14:28] Kat: Well, this is definitely another that's dangerous. No, no, no. I disagree and Wes know I disagree with that. I don't agree with,
[00:14:35] David: but when you've gotta make decisions and prioritize, I agree. Things come, things go ahead of other things, right? Entitlements. I'm not saying, I'm not saying in every instance.
[00:14:43] Wes: Not in every instance,
[00:14:44] David: but, but you, you are framing it as a criticism because, you know, why does your boss get better treatment? Well, might be, it might not be just because she's your boss.
[00:14:52] Mark: Yeah.
[00:14:52] David: It might be because of what she's doing.
[00:14:54] Mark: And that's the point. It, it should be a conscious
[00:14:56] David: and
[00:14:57] Mark: deliberate
[00:14:57] David: decision.
[00:14:58] So therefore, the, therefore the parameter is that you put in a service level agreement, have gotta locate for all of these little exceptions. Which becomes like tires impossible to do.
[00:15:08] Wes: Sure, sure.
[00:15:09] David: But all we have left with is something very general that could help in 80% of the time. Right, right, right. You know, how many incidents did we have last week?
[00:15:18] How many incidents did we have this week? Are we getting better? Are we getting worse? What's our target? And I always used to have fun with students and say things like, you know, so you have a target for failure. 'cause you're measuring how many failures you have and you've got a target well done so that there's a target.
[00:15:34] So do you, do you, do you punish yourself if you don't achieve the target of how many failures?
[00:15:38] Kat: Yeah.
[00:15:39] David: So it's the, the, the thinking was not very sophisticated.
[00:15:43] Wes: Yeah.
[00:15:43] David: Mm-hmm. It's, my point is it was, it was a nice idea.
[00:15:47] Wes: Yeah.
[00:15:47] David: But the application of it, there you go. You see theory, we teach people theory. The book says this in practice though.
[00:15:57] How helpful is it really?
[00:15:58] Kat: E exactly right. As I said earlier, Dave, all the constraints of reality of service management. Yeah. So I think, uh,
[00:16:05] Wes: it's been,
[00:16:06] Kat: that's
[00:16:07] Wes: a long one. Fascinating. Yeah, it's a fascinating conversation. Um, perhaps we, um, kind of land a plane with a thought, right? Um, we are seeing a lot of things emerging right now on the one end.
[00:16:19] We've talked about ai. Um, we've talked about how the training landscape is shifting from where it used to be with a more industrial focus to where it mature to with a service and a more experienced focus. One of the things I think we should tee up, just tee up and address as well is like the movement beyond it to the enterprise when we're thinking about.
[00:16:49] Enterprise service management was. So we've got these different forces. We have ai, we have this in emerging embrace of enterprise service management. And I know like there's a set of books that I'm familiar with, uh, integrated it, ITSM that I think goes away towards helping with that. But how should we, how should we think about this all and how, you know, if there are any like thoughts, closing thoughts to like land this in this moment?
[00:17:22] David: Can I answer that? Be very selfish.
[00:17:24] Wes: Sure.
[00:17:25] David: Just thinking about myself
[00:17:27] Kat: Please.
[00:17:27] David: Which is what selfish is. I think, um, I've had that question brought up a few times about enterprise service management over the years, gone back many years. I don't have time for that. That's my self, that's my selfish answer.
[00:17:40] Wes: Okay.
[00:17:41] David: I'm, I'm so preoccupied and still trying to make service management work in ic. Yeah,
[00:17:44] Kat: I'm with you David. I
[00:17:46] David: am with you. The idea, the idea of, and this was one of the initiatives that was discussed, well, I gotta be careful how far I go with this, but I do know that the, in recent years, the folks who managed the most prevalent ITSM framework
[00:18:05] Wes: mm-hmm.
[00:18:05] David: Wanted to take it in that direction.
[00:18:07] Wes: Yeah.
[00:18:07] David: I disagreed and I think a couple other people did as well, but there was a, I was almost expecting to see some of that come out in the recent update, but, um, yeah. Yeah. Maybe there's a, maybe there's an application in the enterprise for the, these principles, but when we've, when I've just been talking about service level agreements and service level management being a challenge to implement within it.
[00:18:30] How's that gonna work in the enterprise when we still got gaps to fill in and, you know, not, we're not really considering every single exception. So yeah. Somebody that's somebody for the next generation, not something that I have a lot of, uh, motivation to do. We have talked occasionally with customers who will say things like, you know, our HR department wants to learn from what we're doing in it.
[00:18:57] Yeah. And apply this, these principles, you know, in things like onboarding new staff, right?
[00:19:03] Wes: Yeah.
[00:19:03] David: Which has a bit of an IT element to it, but there's other things as well. Right?
[00:19:06] Wes: Yep.
[00:19:07] David: Um, that's just a natural thing that you will use knowledge that comes from wherever you find it, that you, you, you repurpose knowledge.
[00:19:14] But, um, so that thing, you know, I'm not so sure about. I'm not so sure about that to be honest. You kind enough to mention integrated ITSM, which Pink Elephant co-developed with professional designations. That's not meant to be a frame, an alternative framework. It's actually meant to be some detail as to how you work with the frameworks.
[00:19:35] Right? So when you look at the, the core book, there's five books, but one of them is the core book. It's called Executing, integrated, ITSM. It actually goes into the nitty gritty details of what is a process, starts with a purpose, set of objectives, and then the various resources and the outputs. How do you actually set that up?
[00:19:56] How do you actually define it and create a process and make it, and then work with it. Right now, the other models that we looked at, frameworks for ITSM, it's more of a very big conceptual model where everything's connected together. You know, you have a service value chain of right, of, of, and, and a life cycle.
[00:20:17] Of, uh, you know, what do you do when, depending on which versions of the service management framework you're on, there's all of these very interconnected strategic approaches, which on their own are have some value for sure.
[00:20:32] Wes: Yeah.
[00:20:33] David: But when I'm hired at a school and I'm in my first job and maybe I'm in support or I'm in some kind of network management role, and I'm trying to understand how do I achieve the service levels my boss says is, are very important.
[00:20:47] I don't know how to do my job. There's no guidance there. I'm told about what's the definition of an incident and the problem, any change. But beyond that, um, how do you categorize them? How do you prioritize? What do I learn there? How do you, you know, the idea of a priority system of urgency and impact, but there's still other exceptions, like I talked about earlier, that don't really fit into this model.
[00:21:09] There's a lot to learn at the operational level. Absolutely. That's what integrated ITSM does, and we are very proud of it, we think, and everybody who's seen it thinks it's just like, this is, this is what we've been waiting for.
[00:21:21] Mark: We, we, we certainly hear good things about it. The people who've, um, yeah, amazing things
[00:21:25] David: can pick it up.
[00:21:25] So yes. You know, it's, you can take a horse to water, but
[00:21:28] Mark: yeah.
[00:21:28] David: Right. So when we, when we talk about, Hey, take a look at this, we try to make it easy for people to refer to. We've developed some training courses. I mean, we are, we're not a registered charity. We have to make a living. Right. But we're never gonna get rich selling books Katrina, I don't think.
[00:21:42] Kat: Oh, wait,
[00:21:43] David: wait. You see, unless, unless you're John Ian or Katrina McDo, you're never gonna get rich writing books. Bless you. So, so, you know, we do the training and we do the consulting as well, right? Yeah. And of course we talk about it at our big annual conference a lot.
[00:21:54] Mark: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:55] David: But, uh,
[00:21:55] Kat: but, but if I can say like, what you've created in, in your essentials, David, is what is needed for service management.
[00:22:01] It, because I think essentially service management is in the operations at the how do you Yeah. Enable business outcomes. It's
[00:22:07] David: execution.
[00:22:07] Kat: Exactly. And the, as the most prevalent framework doesn't really tell us how to do that.
[00:22:13] David: It tell, it tells you what you should do. It, it tells you what, you know, the frameworks say, here's what, what you should be paying attention to.
[00:22:17] But it doesn't say, how do you do it? Yeah.
[00:22:19] Kat: How do I change that nut and bolt and, yeah. And I also appreciate
[00:22:23] Wes: about, um, integrate ITSM is that. Um, its approach is that of a unifier, so it's not really, it's saying bring whatever other
[00:22:33] David: Yeah.
[00:22:33] Wes: Compatible frameworks you
[00:22:35] David: need. Yeah. That's what, that's where the word integrated comes in.
[00:22:37] Wes: Right. Right. And that, I think that's quite powerful,
[00:22:38] David: you know,
[00:22:38] Wes: because I've lived, I've lived in the framework wards.
[00:22:41] David: Yeah.
[00:22:41] Wes: Right. Have architect X arguing for this, architect y arguing for that, and you get nowhere fast. Right.
[00:22:49] David: But not everything is a framework.
[00:22:51] Wes: Right.
[00:22:52] David: Uh, there, it's kind of an overused word.
[00:22:54] Anything that's like an acronym or a short little made up word suddenly is a framework. And not everything is a framework.
[00:23:02] Wes: Right.
[00:23:03] David: For example, things like say lean in the, the way it is applied in it, what we call lean it.
[00:23:11] Wes: Right.
[00:23:11] David: Which talks about how you can analyze a process and identify opportunities for efficiency and to eliminate waste.
[00:23:20] That's got a role to play in IT. Service management. It's not a framework for service management, it's just kind of a little point solution.
[00:23:27] Wes: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:27] David: That can, has, has a lot of applications. Right. Same with Agile. When you're gonna develop stuff in an agile way
[00:23:33] Wes: mm-hmm.
[00:23:33] David: You know, you're gonna get some benefits and won't explain to in great detail what they are, but it's not a framework.
[00:23:40] It's a set of practices that can help you get the work done more efficiently and more reliably, right?
[00:23:45] Wes: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:45] David: And then you've got other bigger frameworks, stuff like cobit, stuff like IL, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:23:50] Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:51] David: But integrate, I TSMs not a framework, it's just a set of practices that can help you, whichever framework you decide you want to work to.
[00:23:59] Wes: Right, right. Yeah.
[00:24:01] David: And right now I think, you know, if I was a CIO, I'm not so sure I'd be lining up with any particular framework,
[00:24:09] Wes: right.
[00:24:09] David: I'd be looking at somebody coming in and saying. Where are your strengths? Well done. Where are your weaknesses and gaps?
[00:24:18] Wes: Yeah.
[00:24:19] David: What can we do about that? And, you know, maybe there's some guidance we can have with some common language, which we can draw from here, there, or wherever.
[00:24:27] But not to try and implement end to end this lifecycle solution or this service value chain solution, necessary focused solution.
[00:24:37] Mark: I I, I, you say if you were a CI think more and more CIOs are taking exactly that approach. David, I, I think there's more and more who are just stepping back from formal framework adoption.
[00:24:48] Um, and they're looking now just to go deliver and, and, and, and, and, and great services and great experiences pulling what they considered to be the
[00:24:56] David: best. Well, well that all started at, at a time when we had a great vacuum, right? We had a great vacuum and knowledge of how we do things. Now that vacuum is not, is, has been replaced with all of this chaos.
[00:25:08] Wes: Right.
[00:25:09] David: Which is supposed to be order,
[00:25:11] Wes: right?
[00:25:11] David: But it's people saying, well, we use COVID for this. We use it L for that. And by the way, because of our corporate goals, we have to get ISO 20,000 certified as well.
[00:25:20] Wes: Yeah.
[00:25:20] David: You know, and so there's this kind of complicated world complexity that we're living in.
[00:25:24] Wes: Yeah.
[00:25:25] So I would, I would say in, in wrapping up, right? Sorry. No, I'm, I'm, I'm just very curious, like, perhaps one way, um, to, to put a fine point on it, is we are here, um, at Pink 26. You were in 2026. What is your highest hope and aspiration? I'll start with you, David. And then Mark and Kat, what's your highest hope and aspiration for it?
[00:25:52] Service management. This year. We've
[00:25:55] got
[00:25:55] Kat: one minute left each.
[00:25:57] David: Sorry. Well, I, I would say don't forget the universal truths and the universal truth for me is all around leadership. Leadership being, making sure people understand very clearly what they're supposed to be doing. Right. Helping to remove the obstacles out of their way, which is traditional leadership, but it's not all down to the one person you might look to as being your leader.
[00:26:17] Wes: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:17] David: The universal truth for me is that we all have to demonstrate the right kind of behaviors to fit within a corporate culture or a network of, of people working together where we're mutually supportive, each providing leadership to ourselves and to our coworkers. And that's got nothing to do with whether we're, we've just entered the world of mobile computing or we've just entered the world of ai.
[00:26:42] It's all about people knowing where do they fit in and how do they contribute. And so that universal truth is. Empathic leadership, making sure you understand where you fit in what you're supposed to be doing, how you can help everyone around you. Even if it's your first day on the job and you've just gone through the orientation of your business and you go into the workplace with the folks who've been working there for a year or two, you can help them by reminding them of what you just learned.
[00:27:10] What are our business objectives? What is our vision and our mission? Why is that important And how does it guide us? You don't have to be the boss to talk about this stuff.
[00:27:22] Wes: Beautiful, beautiful Mark.
[00:27:26] Mark: User experience, I think continued focus. I, I, I wanna see this movement continue, um, and, and to continue to drive through organisations, which is what we're seeing.
[00:27:35] So you focus on user experience drives, uh, an, an improvement in everybody's, um, efficiency. Everybody's activity. Um, and the outcomes that people, people are all driving, which ultimately results in those stronger business, uh, stronger business performance. That connection is what's being seen. Status, perception of it as a function
[00:27:56] Wes: Yeah.
[00:27:56] Mark: Is improved. And, um, that means that the, the business is, uh, is investing more and more in those important things, which is, uh, the space that we live in. IT service management, IT services, and, and, and ultimately human experience.
[00:28:07] Wes: Fantastic. Kat,
[00:28:10] Kat: oh, I'm gonna be sarcastic
[00:28:14] that we're still not talking. What's the difference between an instant and a service request? Because those conversations are still happening. Um, yeah. So I like, yeah. To be serious, really. I would love, I think this is a really great opportunity for IT professionals to upskill in, in different skills, make operations more efficient and integrated.
[00:28:38] Um, and as Mark said, more experience driven.
[00:28:42] Wes: Beautiful. So we've got empathic leadership, we've got a continued focus on the user experience, and we have, honestly, getting brilliant on the basics. Let's not forget that there's still quite a lot of work to do. Mm-hmm. Uh, with those foundational skills. This has been an incredible conversation.
[00:28:58] Mark: Yeah. And it is.
[00:28:59] Wes: Absolutely. And, um, I, my hope is, of course, that the industry continues to evolve. I am excited about this embrace of our own humanity as we're juggling the advance, the raucous advance of technology, right. That we are most definitively humans. A human experience managing a digital enterprise.
[00:29:23] And uh, yeah, I think that's good for now.
[00:29:26] David: Great. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.
[00:29:28]