Date Published June 6, 2017 - Last Updated December 6, 2017
In January 2017, HDI presented the Top 25 Thought Leaders in Technical Support and Service Management. To help you get to know them better and learn what it means to be a community leader, we’ve interviewed each of our thought leaders. Today, we hear from John Custy.
Tell us about your day job and also how you are involved in the community.
My day job is education and consulting on services management, assisting people with developing their services strategy (including developing strategic frameworks for new initiatives), knowledge management (specifically KCS), problem management, IT financial management, and service catalog management. I also teach ITIL (Foundation and Intermediate) and ISO 20000 as well as conduct DevOps workshops and the Phoenix Project simulation, all to assist organizations in improving their enterprise services management capabilities. I do assessments of support centers, service desks, and contact centers, as well as simulations to improve IT processes and business and IT alignment.
I also try to be active in social media, sharing information on LinkedIn and Twitter @ITSMNinja and sharing my travel experiences on Trip Advisor and Instagram.
What motivates you to be active in the community?
Have always been in a role where knowledge transfer and helping customers has been important. I spent the first half of my career working in various operations and technical roles, so knowledge management/transfer has always been important for customer success. Sharing what I have learned to help others grow and develop so their organizations can grow is rewarding.
What suggestions do you have for tech support professionals interested in getting more involved in the community?
Don’t be afraid to get involved and share what you know. Your experiences are valuable, and you will learn a lot when you network. Remember, though, you need to keep an open mind. There is always something to learn, even if you don’t think that something will work for you or in your organization. Try to understand why a practice works for a particular company, and then identify how understanding this can help you and your organization.
What changes do you anticipate for tech support and service management over the next few years?
The rate of change to technical support and services management will accelerate. Support organizations will be expected to be agile and lean (not cost reduction), so support people need to understand what agile is and the agile principles, as well as lean. With AI, VR, social, knowledge management, problem management, DevOps, and SIAM maturing, the work of support will become more complex, with more new issues (versus reoccurring issues) coming to support. Support models will change for organizations that embrace these methodologies; the tiered support model will be replaced with an intelligent streaming model where organizations have successfully adopted these methodologies, and services quality will improve.
The rate of change to technical support and services management will accelerate.
Analytics and predictive analytics will become critical for service providers, and support is core to capturing and recording data. Reporting on what happened last month is of little value, and organizations will need to forecast the impact of changes on customers (and the organization itself). As with robotics, automation will first replace highly repetitious jobs and then move to more complex tasks. Automated remediation will also be core to infrastructure and applications.
The role of tech support will become strategic, as support has a view that no other function has, when it can provide information for the organization to make better business decisions.
Amy Eisenberg is the editor for HDI where she works with industry experts and practitioners to create content for technical support professionals. She has worked in B2B media and scholarly publishing for more than 20 years, developing content for print and digital magazines, print and email newsletters, websites, conferences, and technical seminars. Follow Amy on Twitter @eisenbergamy, and connect with her on LinkedIn.