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The SDI Middle East and North Africa team hosted over 200 members of the ITSM community on Sunday 20 October at The Address in Dubai Marina. IT professionals from across the Middle East came together to network, listen to and learn from some of the best speakers on the future of IT service, IT service management, digital transformation, continual improvement, ITIL4 and customer service excellence.
IT Service and Support organisations worldwide are moving aggressively towards new business models. ITIL 4, AI, and hiring practices that place a premium on business skills are radically altering the landscape of the industry.
A bright future awaits those who are prescient enough to embrace these industry megatrends, while those who are slow to adapt will operate at a significant disadvantage for many years to come.
In this keynote address, Jeff Rumburg, Managing Partner at MetricNet, the global leader in IT service and support and contact center benchmarking, used industry benchmarking data to connect the dots and present a vision of the service organization of the future.
You will have learned how people, process and technology are converging upon a tipping point that will radically reshape the support industry of the future.
In this session, Paige shared her experiences of aligning award-winning managed service provider Air-IT’s service to global best practice. She’ll talk about the challenges and obstacles faced by the service desk and how overcoming these challenges led to the transformation and growth of both their team and business. Paige showed how the development and implementation of their Customer Experience programme helped them to achieve a CSAT target of 96% as well as their journey and experience of attaining 3-star Service Desk Certification. We hope you gained tips and ideas on setting up a successful employee satisfaction programme and a comprehensive CX programme.
Before starting his own successful IT support business, James spent twenty-two years servicing, supporting and expanding clients and companies in the U.A.E. and U.K. James wanted to get more from his current business, in his search he was referred to Asentiv.
After a successful career helping SMEs improve how IT works for their business and not against them, James trained as a coach for Asentiv. James now coaches business owners on how to build their business beyond IT. Giving them more time, more business and more freedom.
James enjoys spending time with his family, sailing and working towards his next challenge which could be anything from teaching his children a new skill to conquering a mountain.
Automate IT services and operations. Make time for creative innovation. Transform your business.
assyst from Axios gives you unified IT management in a single cloud app. It’s time for IT to change the game.
Many companies face challenges in finding ways to merge their traditional operations and service management organisations with agile and DevOps ways of working. Both approaches are needed; organisations need process and structure as well as the ability to work quickly and effectively – there is no right or wrong here or one-size-fits-all way of doing things. The challenge is often for the human beings caught between different cultures, different generations and different languages and ways of working.
This session explored how to bring these contrasting worlds together for successful transformation and value. The focus of this will include how ITIL4 fuses the proven worlds of ITSM with current models, language and methods for agile, product management and DevOps practice.
The focus of this is ITIL4’s Guiding Principles – flexible and context-relevant guidelines on how to apply common sense in a variety of different situations. The Guiding Principles provide the key to open up new and collaborative ways of working across all areas. They also finally remove any doubt around the fact that ITIL is not a prescriptive or rigid way of working – quite the contrary!
Barclay Rae is one of the Lead Architects of the new ITIL4 programme, with many years of experience working with culture and organisational change.
Mauricio Corona is currently one of the 8 architects selected worldwide to carry out the ITIL4 update. He has a doctorate in business administration, a master’s degree and a degree in information technology, in addition to 19 ITIL certifications, and many others in COBIT, ISO 20000 & 27000, Prince2 and MCP. He helped the English government to develop the ITIL Maturity self-assessment service and AXELOS at the ITIL Practitioner certification level, is an official reviewer of the ITIL 2011 reference framework as well as a translator of the ITIL exams for Latin America. These types of qualifications have led Mauricio to be considered internationally as one of the world leaders in IT service management issues.
His career has focused on helping organizations and communities of professionals to adapt and adopt integral solutions in IT Service Management in different organizational areas, industries in different countries of America and Europe including the United Kingdom.
He has worked as an IT Service Delivery Manager, international speaker, as well as professor in different universities at the master level.
He is currently the Chief of Transformation Officer at SDI which has headquarters in London, and a member of the board of directors of BP Gurus, with offices in Mexico City and with operations in different countries, as well as executive advisor to people and companies worldwide .
Transform your service desk with the right ITSM solution.
BMC delivers modern, intelligent ITSM solutions that are fast, accurate, and cost effective, whether you want to operate in the cloud, in a hybrid model, or in your own data center.
For generations, companies have maintained a rather cozy relationship with their customers; they had advertised and marketed their wares and, depending on whether they liked their products, customers would buy them or wouldn’t. But these days, social media, connected devices and other digital driven initiatives are pushing forward to a change in the relationship between business and customer and it goes both ways. No longer will a disinterested or disappointed customer simply refuse to buy your product; they will now actively try to bring it down. Social media can destroy a poorly run business in a matter of weeks.
In this new digital era, companies need to adjust their business models to reflect the changes this brings. Customer demands are increasing day by day
The presentation addressed:
Revonic has a real focus on clients and supporting them to grow their businesses. As the Service Delivery Manager, Ruman is their first point of contact for 20 clients, which include some of the biggest names in the MENA region, along with some globally recognised household names. Besides being responsible for growing a dynamic annual portfolio currently worth 7 million Dirhams (£1.5 million), Ruman is also responsible for responding to incoming enquiries or escalations, monitoring support, maintenance budgets and contracts, SLAs and overall customer satisfaction.
As the manager of a dedicated support team of web developers, working very closely with project managers and UX strategists, Ruman’s goal is to ensure everyone at Revonic understands what ITSM is and how it relates and works in synch with DevOps and Agile. Revonic now pride themselves on high velocity service management and excellent service standards.
Nikhil, IT consultant at the Abu Dhabi Council for Economic Development, presented his real-life experiences implementing and working with AI and robotic process automation (RPA) in a service desk environment.
Omar shared with us his work ‘Beyond Service Desk’ at the University of Sharjah where their service desk is the heart of Service Management providing bi-directional communication with users and updating them with the new initiatives and changes. The service desk also plays a key part of in early lifecycle of service provisioning to provide an extraordinary experience to customers.
Omar is a seasoned IT strategist known for developing innovative solutions for clients through well-driven projects and programmes. Adept at interacting with clients to collate and evaluate requirements for developing customized IT solutions as well as upgrading existing IT solutions based on technological upgrades in field of operations. Omar is skilled in overcoming complex business challenges.
More and more organizations are designing highly customized experiences around the behaviors, preferences, and values of individual users. The engine behind them includes an integrated array of leading-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, voice response and AR/VR—which means the landscape of how services are delivered to the customers is also changing.
It is important to remember that behind every digital experience there is a human one too. In this presentation Andrea spoke about about how when deployed together, these exciting technologies deliver emotionally intelligent human experiences that leverage connections between people, systems, data, and products.
Andrea is a consultant with great passion for Service Management, Service Integration and Management (SIAM) and Business Relationship Management (BRM).
SDI’s Chief Value & Innovation Officer David Wright held a Q&A panel with four of the world’s most eminent thought leaders in ITSM. He asked what the future holds for service management and for the service manager.
Barclay Rae, Jeff Rumburg, Andrea Kis and Mauricio Corona discussed:
– What does service management mean? What are the key trends we are seeing?
– What does every service manager need to understand about their future?
– What will a service manager look like in a year’s time in terms of the value they create and the skills they need?
– How can you be at the top of your game in your career?
They delved into leadership skills and culture, explored how service managers can co-create value by collaborating more with the customer and the organisation. They also looked at the concept of high velocity IT for digital organisations as well as sharing their thoughts on best practice standards, ITIL4, agile and Devops.
