HDI 2005 – Come Discover a New Vision with Us

Celebrate… Excellence · Our Profession · Your Team Learning & Knowledge Innovation · The Past, Present & Future of the Support Industry

 
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Opening Day Monday, March 7th

More than 2,400 service and support professionals, industry experts and technology vendors gathered at the Venetian in Las Vegas March 6-10 for the largest HDI Conference & Expo ever.

Following two days of pre-conference sessions focusing on ITIL and HDI Certification, knowledge management, and HDI’s new Support Center Leadership Program, Greg Cortopassi and Mark Rosenberger led an informative, dynamic and fun conference optimizing session for 300+ first-time HDI Conference attendees in which they promised to set up the first-timers for success at the conference.

“This session is designed to set you up for a win and to maximize your ROI at the conference, and to help you improve skills, confidence and the ability to network at the conference.”

Following this brief introduction to the conference, HDI 2005 officially kicked off with the pounding music of Sting as two Cirque du Soliel performers swung swirled and flew across the general session stage with unbelievable grace and strength.

HDI founder and CEO Ron Muns then took the stage to greet attendees and make his first prediction at the conference.

“According to a recent report from the ITAA, there are 10.5 million IT professionals in the US today,” reported Muns. “The largest portion of those have always been programmers – 2.1 million. There are now 2.08 million tech support professionals. I predict that this year tech support will exceed programmers to become the largest category in IT, and will be from now on. The focus of the world is on enabling productivity, and that is all about help and support.”

Mary Cruse, the president of the HDI Member Advisory Board and Karen Ewing, president-elect then announced the winners of the HDI Local Chapter Excellence Awards.

The Pittsburgh chapter received the award for Membership Excellence, the Capital Area Washington DC chapter was honored for Programming and Website Excellence. The Southwest Synergy chapter won the Newsletter Excellence Award. The Special Events Excellence award was won by the Austin chapter, and the Pittsburgh chapter was honored for Overall Excellence.

The Diagonal Group then led a fun and revealing group networking activity called “What Color Is Your Style,” which explored people’s work and management styles and aligned various traits with the colors red, yellow, green and blue.

It was then time for the general session’s main event – a hilarious keynote presentation by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, in which he shared his favorite cartoons and told stories about various Dilbert strips that had gotten him in trouble over the years – with his former employer, Pac Bell, his editor, and readers. Adams concluded that although he had at first experienced rejection in his quest to become a cartoonist, that he didn’t give up and that optimism and perseverance allowed him to see and take advantage of opportunities that eventually led him down the path to become successful in achieving his dream.

“It turns out that if you act like an optimist, your field of perception increases. You probably have to do at least 10 things before one of those things works out really well. And no one is probably smart enough to know the difference between what might fail and what might be a success. Just being optimistic seems to make the real difference.” Adams received a standing ovation – he and his little character Dilbert are clearly heroes to the HDI crowd.

The evening concluded with a busy reception in the Expo Hall where nearly 90 vendors of help desk, IT service desk, and customer support solutions met with conference attendees and demoed their latest product offerings.

Tuesday, March 8th
 
Day Two of the 16th Annual HDI Conference & Expo opened with Wes Borg of www.deadtroll.com. His somewhat frantic curmudgeon-like comedic approach to the stressful life of a help desk professional included such tongue-in-cheek comments such as: There are a handful of stressful emergency jobs, according to Borg. "There’s the police, ambulance and fire fighters … and the IT help desk. If you’re not scared, you don't understand the job," and "The hold button is your best friend!" He then got out his guitar and serenaded the system administrators.

The Help Desk Analyst of the Year award was presented by Sophie Klossner of HDI and Katherine Spencer Lee of Robert Half Technology. More than 100 nominations resulted in six regional finalists, including Bisera Black of KPMG, Brian Bell of St. Paul Travelers Insurance, Dora Luz Gandanosa-Salazar of the Institute of Technology, Christian Marquez of Sutter Health, Carol Mastelski of Parker Hannifin Corp., and the winner of the 2005 HDI Help Desk Analyst of the Year award – Frank Hartnagel of Progress Energy Corp.

"Given the company I am in, this is an honor," commented Hartnagel, referring to his fellow finalists. "And given the scope of this conference, this is quite humbling," he added, looking out into the audience of nearly 2,000 of his colleagues from around the world. "Without the other analysts on our team, and the chance to work together and pick each other's brains, I wouldn’t be here today."

Techno-visionary Leo Laporte delivered the morning keynote and identified what he perceives as the Top Five Technology Trends of the Next Decade:

Here, there everywhere, cheap and ubiquitous bandwidth, enabled by technologies such as WiMax and BPL Location-based technologies such as RFID, GPS and Steve Wozniak’s new company Wheels of Zeus Network-centric computing, including mesh computing, web services, distributed processing and the notion of “the network is the computer.” Security technologies such as smart cards, USB tokens, biometrics and others Improved more intuitive user interfaces, including voice recognition and an update to the "19th century keyboard design." The bottom line: "Instant data everywhere, all data digitized and the location of everything known."

"I believe we’re at the elbow of technological change," stated Laporte. Technologies such as Linux, podcasting, RSS feeds, and the digitization of content are all driving the notion of "data wherever we want it, whenever we want it and with no copyright protection. Users want information to flow freely, and it doesn’t really work to shut it down. If you know what users want there's a lot you can do with it. Enthusiastic users innovate and create using existing content," according to Laporte. "It's possible to harness users' enthusiasm. We've got to figure out how to give users what they want and still make a living."

Following the morning's keynote attendees chose from more than 25 sessions focusing on all aspects of service and support, IT customer satisfaction, service level management, knowledge management, tools maximization and more.

The Expo buzzed with activity as HDI Conference attendees visited the nearly 90 exhibitors, and the Expo Hall’s Launch Pad was the site of three exciting announcements:

MRO Software introduced a new product, Maximo Enterprise Suite. HDI's CEO Ron Muns and industry expert Sandra Simpson then made an exciting announcement – the introduction of a new book published by HDI, Implementing Service and Support Management Processes: A Practical Guide, the industry’s first prescriptive guide to implementing IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) and other processes specific to the IT support center environment. Finally, program director Cinda Daly announced the new ITIM 2005 Conference program.

The afternoon continued with three mini-keynote Visionary presentations: "Thinking in Future Tense" with Jennifer James, "Avoiding the Nine Biggest Presentation Mistakes" with Terri Sjodin and "Maintaining a Winning Spirit" with Ed Foreman; and the day concluded with more than a dozen sessions through an Afternoon of Discovery.

Wednesday, March 9th

The third day of the HDI Annual Conference & Expo began with the presentation of the HDI Internal Team Excellence Awards, which were presented by HDI’s Sophie Klossner.

“These organizations represent the best of the best,” she said as she announced the 2005 finalists: American Honda Motor Company and Verizon Wireless, and the winner, Sutter Health. “Thank you to HDI for continuing to raise the bar and encouraging us to succeed every day,” said the spokesperson from Sutter Health as she accepted the prestigious award.

Tim Sanders, Yahoo’s leadership coach delivered a memorable, moving and sometimes chilling keynote. Sharing many, many funny, sad, remarkable and frightening anecdotes, Sanders drove home the power and importance of being likeable or having “a high the L-factor,” as he puts it, which he defines as your capability to produce positive emotional responses in people which they reciprocate by liking you.

“We have a cancer in the world of IT,” stated Sanders. “It’s killing our teams and it’s killing our people. The problem is we need to do so much more with so much less and it’s creating a very negative outlook.”

According to Sanders, 81% of IT professionals are active job seekers, and a large majority would take a 20% pay cut to work or someone who was nice to them. Working for a boss you don’t like for five years triples your chance of having a stroke. Conversely, having a higher L-factor can result in more money, better health, less divorce and better sex, says Sanders. “Unlikeability doesn’t work but it’s extremely easy to change if you care.”

Sanders delivered four bits of seemingly very easy advice:

1. Think friendly thoughts… then tell your face.
2. Be relevant – find things you have in common with others.
3. Be empathetic.
4. Be real.

“I dream of a more likeable world,” said Sanders. “Long after people forget what you did, they will never forget how you made them feel.”

The morning’s breakout sessions focused on topics such as ITIL, global IT organizations, disaster recovery, self service, tool selection and off-shoring of support.

The Discovery Zone was filled with HDI Conference attendees as they pursued the aisles of vendors, and the expo stage, the Launch Pad featured two announcements from HDI: the updated standards for HDI’s Support Center Certification program, and an update from HDI, CompTIA and Microsoft and how the three leading certification bodies will collaborate to deliver a comprehensive approach to certification for tech support professionals.

The afternoon’s Visionary keynotes featured a state-of-the industry address from CEO founder and CEO Ron Muns.

“IT service and support professionals’ roles and responsibilities have changed significantly over the last few years. The industry is more process-focused and is working toward common best practices,” said Muns.

His presentation explained industry trends, and he discussed key process changes, technologies that support these changes, and how customers and support professionals are impacted. Overall, the industry trend this year seems to be toward empowering the customer, with an increasing number of organizations providing self help technologies, allowing direct customer input and ability to query the call tracking (service management) systems. Also, self-diagnostic tool usage is also increasing at a significant rate. With regard to outsourcing, HDI continued to find a lot of churn, with some organizations outsourcing while others are bringing them back in-house, but overall, HDI found that more companies are outsourcing some or all of their support center activities. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been a major issue and has caused many IT organizations to focus on process improvement. Indicators of this are the increasing number of individuals and support organizations choosing to be certified and increasing interest in ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) framework, COBIT, Six Sigma, and, in general, in adopting and documenting best practices for IT and IT support operations, according to Muns

The day’s education concluded with more than a dozen sessions on best practices, metrics and marketing your support center.

On the eve of the last day of the Conference, HDI threw a party featuring an exclusive engagement with world renowned comedian and host of the Tonight Show, the loveable and hysterical Jay Leno!

The evening began with a complimentary cocktail reception, followed by the opening act with comedian magician, Mac King. Then, HDI attendees enjoyed a very special evening of comedy with Jay Leno, followed by dancing with the Harbor Lights band.

Thursday, March 10th

Following the most exciting HDI Conference party ever, featuring Jay Leno, the last day of HDI 2005 offered attendees two dozen breakout sessions on topics such as web self-service, extended provisioning, peer support, metrics, bringing outsourced support back in-house and the future of mobility.

The Executive Discovers met at breakfast to discuss IT governance; the last session of No SPLAT! Zone participants met to discuss how to take their ideas and learnings back to their support organizations and the each of the Vertical Visions groups met for their wrap-up “Open Door” sessions.

In the final general session, the 2005 HDI Team Excellence Award for External Support was presented to CompuCom. “We at CompuCom are honored to receive the 2005 HDI Team Excellence Award for External Support. Given the rigorous criteria by which candidates are reviewed, this award is a testament of our dedication to quality and our pursuit of excellence in client satisfaction. We respectfully thank our clients, our help desk team, and the HDI judges,” said John McKenna, senior vice president of Services, CompuCom.

The final keynote was presented by artist and innovator, Erik Wahl, who shared “The Art of the Vision” with HDI 2005 attendees, using his spectacular paintings as a visual metaphor to create a vision for success strategies!

We look forward to seeing you all again next year in Nashville, TN, and encourage and welcome your feedback. E-mail us at info@thinkhdi.com.