Q1:  Steve, what are your thoughts on the future of the technology service and support industry, and where do you see the industry ten years from now?

Our industry is on the verge of a truly significant transformation. For the last 30 years, the primary mission of the service and support function in technology companies has been about how to restore customers to functionality in the face of some kind of user or system problem—predominantly done in a reactive fashion.
 
Over the years—the last 5 in particular—the industry has worked hard to perfect and cost-optimize this model, however, the value proposition to the customer has stayed the same—“if there is a problem, we will
solve it”. 

More recently, companies have shifted their efforts to delivering proactive or preventive services where the goal has been to get out ahead of problems before they have a chance to manifest themselves and impact the customer.  But if you peel back the layers, this still may be considered another version of the insurance policy value proposition, and ironically, if executed well, makes support less visible to the customer, thereby making the value less evident and causing customers to question the value received for the budget dollars they allocate to service and support.
 
As enterprise customers increasingly challenge the “support as insurance policy” value proposition, it puts technology companies in a very precarious place as they’ve become financially very dependent on the revenue and profits generated by the support business.

For consumer customers, the gap between the complexity of the product and their ability to use it is growing.  Yet consumer technology companies still lack the economic model that allows them to provide the level of support that the customer is looking for.

It’s imperative that we define a new purpose for the support function—one that delivers great financial benefits to the company and unparalleled value to the customer.  One new perspective comes in the form of a new model from SSPA called Value-Added SupportSM.
 
The Value-Added Support model transforms customer support resources to proactively accelerate the customer’s time to value and boost the overall ROI and value on the product. It has the potential to make customers more successful at using technology products which enables a technology company to enjoy greater product sales to existing customers through accelerated repurchase frequency and brand preference.

This is a profoundly different role than support has typically played, and one that requires significant change and a repurposing of our customer support delivery platform to a new and greater use.  The good news is that most companies already have a support infrastructure which is an amazingly efficient customer interaction platform.  And it’s already built and paid for.  The Value-Added Support model takes that existing platform to the next level by using it to drive product value.

What’s so exciting about this is that it places support in a really important new role as being a key lever in driving product sales.  That’s something that resonates with CEOs and CFOs and puts support front and center in corporate strategy.

My expectation is that this is a decade-long journey that will require a lot of persistence and intestinal fortitude, but one that will have enormous potential impacts to technology companies.  If we’re successful, that’s where we’ll be in ten years.

Link to view Steve’s answers to these questions:

Q2:  What role will innovation play in technology services?

Q3:  What should service and support leaders be doing today to ready themselves and their organizations for the changes that lay ahead?

Q4:  What does it to take to drive the kind of massive transformation that you’ve described? 

Q5:  How were you successful in driving the major change initiatives at IBM? 
 
Q6: You have a rich professional background in management consulting and high tech, including launching and growing several start-ups and most recently your time at IBM.  Can you please fill our members in on the highlights of your career?

Q7: While your background is clearly impressive, the SSPA community may find it surprising that as SSPA’s new Executive Director, you‘ve spent limited time working directly in the service and support industry. What qualifications and strengths do you believe you bring to your new role and the SSPA community?

Q8: The SSPA is quite enthusiastic about you coming aboard and taking hold of the reins in your new position. In fact, our excitement has grown over the past several weeks as we anticipate some of the ideas and goals you have for the direction of the Association. What are some of the initiatives that you are looking to put into effect initially?

Q9: What is it that makes you so energized about SSPA and its future direction?

Q10:  If a brand-new member were standing in front of you, what would you say to them about what they should be most aware of regarding the benefits of membership in the SSPA?

 

Q2:  What role will innovation play in technology services?

One thing that is critical for enabling the future is getting tech companies to realize that they need to think about services as a strategic area for R&D dollars and engineering cycles. Everyone knows that tech companies spend billions of dollars annually in R&D, and that makes sense. But today, virtually all R&D dollars are spent on product development, which needs to change. As services become a more important part of the business both financially and strategically, companies need to start putting real investments into services innovation and funding R&D dollars in this area.

One of the key underlying enablers of Value-Added Support is that we engineer out as many of product defects as possible, and engineer in the maximum amount of self-healing capabilities and support automation features. This is what will allow us to free up services resources and funding that can be repurposed to delivering Value-Added Support.
SSPA is taking a leadership role in this area by co-founding the Service Research & Innovation initiative through which we hope to get corporations to commit to funding a permanent service R&D budget, governments to sponsor research in universities and applied research centers, and academic institutions to increase core research in services, establish curricula, programs and degrees for service disciplines.
We’ll be hosting the first SRI Symposium in Santa Clara on May 30th and I hope all of our SSPA members show up en-force to help send the message that this is an imperative for our companies and our overall national economic future.

Q3:  What should service and support leaders be doing today to ready themselves and their organizations for the changes that lay ahead?

There are three key activities that leaders can begin immediately. 
First, start to systematically reduce the causes of low-value support.  What are the big drivers of break-fix support calls, and how can your company obsolete those over time?  Support organizations have an unbelievable amount of data at their disposal that can provide the ammunition needed to get the attention of product development, especially when you start to pair that up with the cost to the company of the support infrastructure that has to be maintained to deal with them.  Product usability, reliability and supportability must have greater impact on services costs and capability. Development needs goals, incentives and penalties. Support leaders should start to champion these kinds of initiatives now.

Next, start to think about the value-added business and operating model that’s right for your company.  Think about the current post-implementation customer experience—what is your support case data telling you are the areas where you can uniquely add value to your customers that will help them get more value out of the products and technologies they’ve deployed? Start to aggregate and mine the wealth of information your support engineers are collecting about product use in key vertical markets and think about how you can deliver that to your customers in a proactive way that will help them accelerate and increase their overall product ROI.  And then think about how you can start to combine the resources and capabilities across your service units—support, PS and education —to deliver high value to customers.

Lastly, start to shift resources from low-value support into Value-Added Support.  A great first step here is to start to use your support staff for cross-selling and up-selling customers.  In the enterprise space we may not be actually selling products or services but we certainly should be identifying and passing along sales and account information to the sales teams.  In the consumer space we need to look at industries like financial services that are already successfully implementing up-sell and cross sell tactics.  No other organization is better positioned to recognize a customer sales opportunity real-time as your support team.  Think about how you can start to leverage this into incremental sales for your company, and track every dollar that you yield.

Q4:  What does it to take to drive the kind of massive transformation that you’ve described? 

There are a number of key factors that are required to make a transformation like this successful. 

First, recognize that this is a long-term journey and that the transition to Value-Added Support is something that will happen over a multi-year time horizon, not overnight—and it will be different for each and
every company. 

Second, it not only requires a vision of what the future will look like, but a solid roadmap and the right types of internal ‘champions’ across the organization and committed c-level support to get you there from where you are today.  Having a clear roadmap with measurable goals and objectives along each step of the way will enable you to ‘protect the core’ of your existing service business while transforming and adding the capabilities required to move you to Value-Added Support and the c-level commitment will help drive the organizational change.

Lastly, recognize that while the end result of Value-Added Support is a step change from where your organization is today, flexibility is paramount.  There are going to be changes to your business model, the way you develop new products, the way you make investments in your organization and the way you interact with customers. Be prepared to start this journey and know up-front that you will make changes to it along the way with all of the dynamic interplay among all of these constantly moving parts, the ability to adapt and be flexible is essential.

Q5:  How were you successful in driving the major change initiatives at IBM? 

When we launched our On Demand business transformation efforts in IBM back in late 2002, we focused on four key things.

First, we needed senior commitment and continuous sponsorship across all levels of the organization throughout the whole process. The fact that everyone from the CEO on down was talking about this transformation was a key part of the success—but that alone was not enough.  We had to make sure that each level in the organization clearly understood not only the vision and strategy at a high level, but what it meant specifically to them and how they played a part in enabling the strategy. Making the strategy and transformation “real” was essential.

Second, we learned early on that in order to succeed we needed to communicate, communicate, communicate.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of communicating what’s happening in the transformation, why it’s happening and what the results of the transformation have been to date. 

Third, putting an effective change management program in place is essential.  We all know that organizational change is one of the most difficult things that a company has to deal with—minimizing the organizational resistance requires not only support and constant communication, but a plan that breaks the transformation into manageable chunks that are part of a clear path forward helps mitigate resistance. 

Lastly, we recognized the need to find the early adopters—the ‘champions’ from an industry, service or product group that wanted to lead the way.  We identified those executives and developed special programs to maximize their odds of success and then used them as examples to the rest of the organization to describe the impact and power of the change we were proscribing. 
 
Q6: You have a rich professional background in management consulting and high tech, including launching and growing several start-ups and most recently your time at IBM.  Can you please fill our members in on the highlights of your career?

I have been in various services-related businesses now for over 17 years.  During these 17 years, I have had the opportunity to work with a tremendous number of companies across a large number of industries and address a wide variety of challenges.  A few highlights include:

• Led the operational transformation for the customer care operations for one of the largest telecommunications providers in North America
• Led IBM’s On Demand Business Transformation strategy globally for Business Consulting Services (30,000+ employees)
• Launched and led IBM’s Component Business Model offering globally and personally presented to IBM Board of Directors
• Led services strategy for IBM’s Business Performance Transformation Services—IBM’s strategic initiative to move into high-value, high-growth areas
• Helped build one of the largest independent Lotus Notes consulting and software businesses which was sold to Ernst & Young in 1995
• Co-founder and COO of Encadia, Inc which was sold to Mainspring and then to IBM.
• Developed a custom, client-server based, end-to-end product design and development system in the same year that the first client-server ERP software came out from SAP (1992).
• Wharton MBA in 1998

Q7: While your background is clearly impressive, the SSPA community may find it surprising that as SSPA’s new Executive Director, you‘ve spent limited time working directly in the service and support industry. What qualifications and strengths do you believe you bring to your new role and the SSPA community?

While I have not spent my entire career in the service and support industry, I believe that I bring a number of important qualifications and strengths to this role—especially as the industry transitions from the traditional break-fix model to the Value-Added Support model.

First, I believe that my services background over the past 17 years and my exposure to all parts of the various services business—from the development of IT services to technology consulting to management and strategy consulting—gives me a unique perspective on the role that services plays in technology organizations and its overall evolution and importance in the future.

Second, I have done work with several organizations to help transform their operations and have touched most aspects of the business from programming IVR’s to developing multi-channel support strategies, creating support knowledge-bases, developing training and knowledge management content and even developing customized staffing applications using Erlang-C.

Third, I think that the experiences I’ve had over the last several years, including leading transformation across one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world, gives me tremendous insight into the organizational challenges that SSPA members will face—and a number of approaches to deal with them—especially when the transformation involves fundamental changes to business models.

Lastly, I believe that leading this journey to Value-Added Support requires a set of strategic skills and capabilities that I have been developing over the past 17 years and have been fine-tuning these last several years at IBM: the ability to help shape the vision and identify the actionable steps to get you there; the ability to quantify and articulate the critical importance of this transformation to c-level executives; the ability to work with the analysts to gain recognition of Value-Added Support in a company’s valuation—all of these will be required in order for this journey to be successful.

Q8: The SSPA is quite enthusiastic about you coming aboard and taking hold of the reins in your new position. In fact, our excitement has grown over the past several weeks as we anticipate some of the ideas and goals you have for the direction of the Association. What are some of the initiatives that you are looking to put into effect initially?

One of my primary tasks will be to develop the blueprint for how companies make the transition to Value-Added Support.  We will be doing this in partnership with several early-adopter SSPA members who have told us they want to be first in the industry to transform themselves to this new future state.  Transformations of this type happen in stages, and we’ll be documenting and synthesizing all of our learnings along the way so that they can be shared with the SSPA community.  That is truly the beauty of the association model.

Q9: What is it that makes you so energized about SSPA and its future direction?

I believe that the service and support industry is nearing a major inflection point. 

The confluence of events—the changing economics of the software industry, the changing demands of end customers on the type of support they want, the impact of a flattening world, the increasing linkage of products and services, constantly changing technology in both the support organizations and in the products themselves—all of these things intersecting at once make this one of the most dynamic and exciting places to be right now.

The SSPA is in a unique position to have a dramatic impact on the future of service and support that will fundamentally help shape not only the economics of this industry we serve through Value-Added Support, but the integration of products and services in new and powerful ways going forward.  I can’t imagine being in a place that’s more exciting or energizing.
 
Q10:  If a brand-new member were standing in front of you, what would you say to them about what they should be most aware of regarding the benefits of membership in the SSPA?

The SSPA offers an unparalleled source of intelligence on state-of-the art practices for technology service and support. We have a unique vision for the future of support, and the data, models, and resources to help members adapt, change and improve at the pace that’s right for them. We have an incredibly strong staff with deep industry experience that members should view as an extension to their own teams, and resources that can help them take on whatever challenges or ambitions they have for themselves, their customers and their organizations.