October 21, 2025 • 33 mins
Tim and Tom host another special live edition of The DEX Show, this time from the Omni Boston Hotel, recorded during last week’s Experience Boston. Joined by Christina Lahr (Bayer), James Krick (Campbell’s), and Ryan Way (Warburg Pincus), the hosts dig into more real-world stories of data-led IT excellence, once again in-person.
In between, listeners can learn a few unexpected facts about Tim — has he ever been in a fist fight, starred in a play, or been thrown out of a bar? Listen now to find out...
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report here
In between, listeners can learn a few unexpected facts about Tim — has he ever been in a fist fight, starred in a play, or been thrown out of a bar? Listen now to find out...
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report here
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome it, change makers to the Deck Show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGrath. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Welcome to the Deck Show, Welcome to Experience Boston. It's
ever a round of applause, everybody lovely to see while
we're a little bit worried there that are London going
to embarrass Boston, but.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
You've made it up for it. Hello, Tim, good to
see man. How you doing?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Oh okay, fi bump lovely lovely? So who here listens
to the Deck Show. We're a v decks podcast. We've
got a few hands up. That's good to see. Thank
you put your hands it's polite. No one's gonna no
one's gonna test you on it, okay, just just that's great.
But we are a weekly podcast and we have, you know,
hundreds of fantastic guests every single year. Well that doesn't
(00:46):
quite work out mathematically, but you get you get my point.
And we're incredibly excited. I think the fourth year in
a row, the fifth year in a row that we're
doing live and experience. We've done London, now we're in Boston.
We're all excited. It's the biggest deck event of the year.
How you doing, Tim Flower, I'm doing a good time.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
You've been shot out of a cannon this morning. It's
really cool to see.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well at a round up some audience, this is can
you hear us?
Speaker 5 (01:13):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
By the way, everybody is that? Okay? Okay, fantastic.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well we have got We've got three wonderful, wonderful guests
to get to today, a bumper edition, you might say.
Before we do, however, we had to think of We
had to think of a bit, you know, because it's
a live podcast, you've got to think of you know.
And so we have a game for you all, okay,
And it's a game that's going to enable us to
get to know Tim Flower across the course across the
(01:37):
course of the podcast a little more intimately. Shall we
say that sounds a bit weird When the game is called,
are you experienced any Jimmy Hendrix fans in the audience?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
You know, so you get the illusion there.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Right, and are you experience because we are, of course
at experience.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
You see what we did there, And.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We're gonna ask between all the guests, We're gonna ask
Tim a question to find out how experienced Tim Flower is.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Okay, And the first I'm scared Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
The first question is Tim Flower, have you ever been
in a fist fight?
Speaker 5 (02:11):
Have I ever been in a fist fight? So you reckon?
What do you reckon?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Raise your hands, everybody feel everybody sees a man's I'm
a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
I'm a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
You can imagine growing up in the seventies and eighties
with the last name Flower, I had to defend my.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
Family honor once in a while.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
It was just black and blue the entire time, you know,
from the age of seven to seventeen, it was that
it was add.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
A yes, Tim, it was a yes. You got it right?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Well, round of applause with Tim Flower defending, defend, defending
the Flower name. Glad to hear it, glad to hear it.
And I did say I would respond in kind. And
I have to tell you that I am I'm not
sure how to answer answer the question because I think
for a fist fight, you have to be two people fighting.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
I've been you for yourself. I've been punched a few.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Times, but I haven't I've never really thrown back in
any earnest if I'm on. But let let's get them
with welcoming our first guest, and I think it's Christina.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Right, we're welcome.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
No, we're gonna bring James up first.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We're gonna we're gonna bring James. Sorry, everybody bear with me.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, well, we're very very blessed to have him because
we did lose one of our guests yesterday. But he's
presenting a fantastic breakout later today which we'll hear more about.
He's a director of Digital Workplace Services at Campbell's and
he's James Crick. Ladies and gentlemen, rounded, applause for James, James.
(03:38):
Thank you, sir, come on in. Welcome James. Thanks for James.
And here is your look. You've got like a.
Speaker 6 (03:44):
Testing testing Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Oh it's some, it's some. It's our pleasure. Really, it's
our pleasure. And tell us, Audden, tell us about a
bit about yourself and and your role first of all
at Campbell's.
Speaker 7 (03:54):
Please sure sure before I do that, I do want
to say it's an honor to be here on the
deck show.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
Thanks man, happy very much.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
You guys asked me last minute, did you have a
fistfight with a guy.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
Before we did?
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Ye?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I like that, so I guess that's.
Speaker 7 (04:06):
My benefit, right, all right. So I've James Crick Campbell's.
I've been in the IT industry for about thirty years.
Started out of college as a desktop support tech was
actually outsourced at the time the biggest outsourcer service provider
in the world, and spent twenty years of my career
there gaining a lot of experience, a lot of different roles,
(04:29):
and then took a left turn and left outsourcing business.
I went to a company where we created and developed
a team to do service delivery for service desk, desktop
support and modern device and then after that came to
Campbell's and now I'm actually on another side of the table,
so to speak, managing an outsourcer for those respective services.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And you got to break out later today, what was
that going to be about?
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Ooh, that's going to be very exciting. So at one o'clock,
everybody just on the ensemble f right.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Down there, miss it.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Yeah, we'll be sharing a lot of the great things
that we're doing at Campbell's with The Next thing.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Is Campbell's as iconic a brand here as in the UK.
Speaker 6 (05:11):
I have to say, you know, in the UK, I
didn't know it was iconic.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It genuinely. Is it's beIN the name everything.
Speaker 7 (05:17):
Yeah, it's actually got a very fascinating history, but I
won't go into that too much. But yeah, since eighteen
sixty nine it was Wow, Sure, sure, but we changed
the name to the Campbell's Company because soup is only
twenty percent of our revenue. Now it's it's a whole
host of different products and brands now.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
And rumor is that you guys recently got quite a
distinguished award we did.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Can you tell us a bit about it?
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Did?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Sure?
Speaker 6 (05:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (05:43):
So there's an industry analyst consultancy called Digital Workplace Group.
We've been a member for several years and they're on there,
I think their eighth year of their awards, where they
basically give out awards for organizations enterprises that develop high
performing digital workplace environments, and we won an award called
(06:06):
Data led Experience Management. I can't share too much of
the criteria because that's stealing some of the thunder at the.
Speaker 6 (06:17):
Caning at one o'clock.
Speaker 7 (06:18):
But what I will give you Tim and Tom is
a taste of we're very intentional at Campbell's, right.
Speaker 6 (06:25):
A lot of the.
Speaker 7 (06:26):
Actions and trans transitions that we make at the company
are predicated on data and Next Thing provides a wealth
of data to us, and so a lot of the
implementations that we've done with Next Thing kind of afforded
us to get that award. In fact, that guy right
over there, Rory Gardner, was the one who presented me
(06:47):
the award, So a little shout out to Rory. Yeah,
but yeah, it was definitely an honor for us to
win that team award.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Pobulous cool.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
So let's let's stay on that theme and connect the
dots between that award, data, lead management, and outcomes.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
Right, So talk a little bit.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
About what the efforts were, kind of what the outcomes are.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
What are you seeing from real results? Did you what?
Did you?
Speaker 7 (07:13):
Absolutely great question, Tim. I've been at Campbell's six years
and so we haven't had next Thing for six years,
actually just the last two. But we've seen with a
lot of the levers that we've pulled to drive the initiatives,
year over year, our service desk contact volume has gone
(07:34):
down year over year by ten percent plus year over year,
which is to me astounding. I've seen lots of different
especially in outsource, and a lot of different environments, a
lot of different metrics. I've never seen such a phenomenal
stare step down our incident volume, which is kind of
like the you know what you strive for, you want
that to go down year over year, and so we've
(07:54):
seen that over the past five years. MTTR again, same
story over year improvement.
Speaker 6 (08:02):
And then our c SATs.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
When I first started with a company, we were about
anywhere ranging between eighty to eighty five percent. For the
last three years we've been ninety five percent plus.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And do you do c SAT like a lot of
it organizations on feedback from a ticket and experience with
a help desk or customers sat on it in general,
whether or not they logged a call correct.
Speaker 7 (08:26):
So one of the odd things when I got to Campbell's,
they do one hundred percent. So every ticket gets a survey.
To me, that's over surveying your public. But our return rate,
I can't argue with our return rates, it's like seven
percent usually in that vein it's industry standards around three percent.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
So we're really happy with that. And now we're.
Speaker 7 (08:43):
Starting to dip our toe into the sentiment aspect of
next thing to also gain feedback in that avenue.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
So feedback from employees is one thing. What's the feedback
been from leadership and kind of opinions on your efforts?
Speaker 7 (08:56):
Sure, so the leadership is, you know, treating us well well, right, Bill,
We've partnered, so some of the success has fostered other
organizations across the business within Campbell's to reach out and say, hey,
those cool branded pop ups that you guys do, can
we get in on that? And so we've had hr
communications some of the other businesses approach us. So I'll
(09:19):
give you a quick example. Right, every company goes through
their annual benefits enrollment, So that team reached out last
year and right they you know, we'll do the traditional
email on the internal.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
Social media posts.
Speaker 7 (09:32):
Hey it's that time of year if you're going in
the company needs to sign up for their benefits. They
asked us to do a pop up in like the
last week before it ended, and they said the spike
that they had the day that we did the pop
up was huge compared to their other avenues. So a
lot of people are clamoring to us, focusing specifically on
(09:53):
the engagement campaigns.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
And are you seeing it now?
Speaker 4 (09:56):
People are realizing that it's part of your DNA and
necessary part of their un the operation or do you find
yourselves of having to evangelize still on the benefit.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
We do still have to evangelize to some extent.
Speaker 7 (10:08):
So as much as I have some of the business
partners clamoring to get in, I was a little surprised
that some of our IT brethren are not chopping at
the bit. We do have our network team, we train
them all up on it. We're doing another round of
training soon because again data Next Think has just a
wealth of data that you can consume and take action upon.
(10:31):
But there's other groups in it that we believe that
can benefit, especially the application side of the house, and
nobody from the application side of the house has really
knocked on our doors.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
So we're doing the evangelist.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Cool, No.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Fantastic.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And when it comes to AI, you know, particularly like
next Think innovation within AI, are you getting any value
out of it? Is anything particularly cool your eye? The
next thing's announced and launched in the last few months.
Speaker 7 (10:56):
Yeah, the the infusion of AI into next Think assist.
I have a lot of high hopes for It's interesting
our implementation. I remember Tim, the first time I met
you was at a Gartner show and Javine right and
I remember watching you speak to the audience and you
were explaining how a lot of times an organization will
(11:19):
bring in next Think and one of the first things
they do, kind of low hanging fruit, is they'll they'll
do the API with a ticketing tool, and they'll they'll
use next Think as.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
A first step to really help the.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
Agents and the texts to help with problem determination resolution.
Speaker 6 (11:37):
We had Campbell's we actually kind of skipped that step.
Speaker 7 (11:39):
We went right to the kind of level zero versus
level one and two to kind of get those masses
of incident reduction. And it's just now that we're starting
to really do the full court press on education to
our agents in our texts and with the infusion that
the timing right, so we're also at the same time
rolling out where a big micros off shops are rolling
(12:00):
out Copilot to our environment or enterprise, and so we're
training all of our folks, including our agents and tech.
So the fact that they're learning AI and now that
there's an infusion of AI into Next Think assists where
you can type in the conversational prompt and they're getting
better at those prompts, we believe that's going to help
(12:22):
a lot with the resolution.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
Amazing James.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Before we let you go and we plug one last
time your exciting breakout.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Thank you, and let's pretend you weren't doing a breakout.
What drules you to experience? What can you what could
your peers seek from coming to this event in person?
Speaker 5 (12:37):
What's jone?
Speaker 7 (12:38):
Absolutely, this is my second year, so last year. It's
fantastic time, So there's no way I was not going
to miss it. Essentially, you have some of the best
minds from Next Think from all over the world under
one roof here where you can tap into and listen
to right Then on top of that, you bring all
of your your vendors and partners here and showcase that
(13:02):
you have people like myself that will share their experiences
of how they're using next Thing. So all of that collectively,
the amount of information that you get out of these
two days is you know, comparable.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
We appreciate it, man, So is one pm?
Speaker 6 (13:17):
One pm? Which room is samble f? Yeah, everybody's company.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Don't miss it, everybody and show a big round of applause.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Huge thanks James, Man. We appreciate it.
Speaker 8 (13:30):
Friends.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Okay, who wants another round.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Of are you experienced? We want to know more about
Tim Flower. Yes, okay, here's here's a question.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Once again, we're going to put it to the audience. First,
do we think that Tim Flower.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Has appeared on stage before, not in this capacity, but
in a play.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Raise your hands if you think Tim's been in.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
A play, A street fighting man, and and and a
ftpian Tim is that accurate?
Speaker 5 (14:00):
It's a It is accurate. It is accurate.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I actually knew this from an earlier show. But tell
us what the play was to it was and Meghan.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Meghan actually took a walk, which she can relate to
this as well. I played Oliver, so it's kind of fitting, right,
fist fight. You can imagine Oliver twists. It's more appropriate
conversation for maybe the tobacco docks that setting.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, yeah, Oliver.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Twist was my claim to fame. And was it the musical?
It was absolutely in the musical and so well one song,
one song you'd have to sing it, but I'll do
a lyric. Consider yourself, right, let's go food, glorious food, food,
glorious food.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
And my big solo, I do anything I do.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, okay, it's good memories, Okay, nice, all right, Well,
I'm not actual gonnadd I actually sang in a pantomime?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Did you sang in a pantomime at Christmas?
Speaker 5 (14:53):
Break the rules?
Speaker 4 (14:55):
What do you mean you can you can verbalize in
a pantomime?
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, anto, we call it all right. It's like it's
like a Christmas plaything, and I sang, I'll do anything.
But it was in like Cinderella ros all right, I
was like buttons.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Okay, So who we got next? We've got christ with
Christina Stina.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, please put your hands together and welcome from Bayer.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's Christine Lea.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
Hey, hi Christina, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Hi Christina, welcome to the show. How you doing here?
Is your Mike Raffon?
Speaker 5 (15:27):
Thank you? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:28):
The bumpy ride in we're delayed ride in?
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yes, yeah we did. Have you been in the play before, Christina? No? No,
what about a fistfight outside of siblings? Now?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Okay, yeah that's true. That definitely doesn't count. Well, welcome
to experience. This is your first time.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
Here, first time out experience.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
First experience. Okay, fantastic. Introduce yourself and your business recipit.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
So my name is Christina lar I'm currently here from
Bear Saint Louis, Missouri. Been with Bird eleven years in
the industry fourteen. My back ground is very much an
architecture engineering and then recently took over our dex platform
as a product manager.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Soupep and what have been some of the key achievements, say,
over this first year with a platform.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
So overall, one of our major achievements this year was
the rollout of the platform operationalizing it. We do work
with external managed service partners, so it's not as simple
as just bringing a product and managing it in house
because we have external partners that play key roles within it.
So major accomplishment obviously rolling out our DX platform, further
(16:35):
building out the team as well as we start to
forward look at what we want to do not just
in DX but also the agentic AI space additionally with
data Foundation and how we want to further driver data
analytics platforms moving forward.
Speaker 5 (16:49):
Cool amazing.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
So for folks that have been listening to the podcast
for a while, you've heard me draw the parallels between
healthy It and healthy society that we are as a society.
We are more healthy if we eat right, we exercise,
we get our vaccinations, we stay out of the hospital,
and we're less of a cost burden to the system.
(17:11):
Same goes with it healthy happy employees. If you keep
things running well, are you seeing kind of in your
environment and acknowledgment of that that it's no longer keeping
things healthy is no longer kind of nice to have,
but it's a really a necessary part of the org.
Speaker 9 (17:26):
Yes, and this gets i would say, stronger and stronger
every day as the years go on. We're more and
more reliant on our laptops working, our endpoints working.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
It should just work.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
Every minute loss is minute loss with our customers in
those customers spanning outside of healthcare, but also in the
crop space and the consumer space. Very important because in
the end our customers internally within it are customers who
directly face our customers externally in the industry.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
But again you see a domino effect.
Speaker 9 (18:01):
They lose time, we lose time in the industry.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
So we're kind of celebrating the launch of our first
annual workplace Productivity report, cracking the decks equation. Everyone's got
a little bit of a different formula, a different equation
of what that actually means to them. Talk a bit
about what is part of your equation and what some
of the results are.
Speaker 9 (18:21):
Yeah, So we put a lot of heavy emphasis on
our DX really in the last quarter. So we do
operate in what's called ninety days sprints, and in our
last ninety days major focus of ours was DX. Through
that we rebaselined our DX score. We shifted things based
upon what BEAR needed, not so much the industry because
(18:41):
we already know within the organization we're behind on a
lot of stuff, so we already know it's adversely affecting us.
But where can we provide the most value instead of
wasting time where a particular root cause causing that that
DX impact might take six to nine months to fix,
Where can we further put our f and focus there.
So as we rebaselined our DX, how we built our
(19:05):
equation out was obviously the sentiment and the technology side,
but we took out non key enabling drivers maybe it's
a collaboration, maybe it's particular websites or URLs or the
whole application side, and we put actual focus on underlying
foundational pieces such as device performance in other areas. And
(19:27):
then our idea as we further build out the DX equation,
we'll focus more on a benefit analysis around it and
then consistently review that DX score and optimize that equation.
It should never be a stagnant equation on our side.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Thank you for that, And I should put in a
plug for people who want to find out more about
the decks equation.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
When you report it.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Funds that four hundred and seventy thousand hours are lost
per years for enterprises due to poor decks And if
you want to start putting some productivity findings and figures
on your DEX investment, go over to the Ambassador's hub
where you can download the report, or go over to
the next new website where you can get it as well.
Absolutely check that out. What is next on the roadmap
(20:11):
for Bayo Usina.
Speaker 9 (20:13):
So first thing is data enablement. Our next on our
roadmap is absolutely a key data foundation layer as we
forward look in the next year. The ideas once you
have good data, you can start making it intelligent, you
can start adding anomaly detection, you can start really driving
improvement without all the manual intervention. And this is where
(20:33):
we're using DEX as a key driver to further building
out this full agentic view.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Fantastic and looking at the agenda across Experience Boston, what
stands out to you, what are you excited about doing well.
Speaker 9 (20:47):
We're here most of all networking understanding what others are doing,
seeing where we can rinse and repeat, where we can
shift also our focus. But maybe somebody's already done it.
We don't have to spend that amount of time on
implementing it within the organized cool.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Let me ask you a little bit of a curveball.
What's when you turn the lights on? When next thing
you find? Obviously the things you know about anything come
to mind over the last little bit of time of
something you found that you didn't even expect. Kind of
do you look at the environment, what kind of data
are you seeing that you said, Wow, I didn't even
know that was out there.
Speaker 9 (21:22):
Uh, we see it in multiple areas. We we obviously
see the things we expected, log on boot times, things
like that. I would say that our key drivers of
things like impact of CPU, impact of memory and disk
space wasn't always what we thought it was, So I
would say that was a little bit of a surprise,
(21:42):
but based upon the data, we were able to optimize
that and it's back to exactly.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where we thought it was.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Great.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Christina, thank you so much, Van, thank you, thanks such.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Thanks Christin, thank you thanks.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Okay, one last round everywhere we go, last round of
are you experienced?
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Tim Flower? Edition?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Tim Flower, I'm gonna ask him and we're gonna have
to show hands before he answers. Okay, The question is,
has Tim Flower ever been thrown out of the bar?
Speaker 5 (22:14):
We already know he's been in. Did the fight happen
in the bar?
Speaker 3 (22:17):
So you know, do we think he's been thrown out
the bar? Raisy hands? If it's a yes, Oh, look
at that one. You know, highly respectable, highly respectable, never.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Been thrown out of a bar.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
You were quite right intimately, Well, I get yeah, No,
I'm very very respectable in the bar.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
I have been frond out of you.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
I'm afraid to say, everybody, I'm afraid to say. And
you know now we're gonna welcome our final guest.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Our final guest. He's Ryan Way from Warburg Pinkers.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
Brian, come up here, Come on, Brian.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
And while Ryan's coming up, if anybody in the back
can't hear us, there are headphones if you'd like to
grab a headphone if you're unable to.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Hear yes, or is your microphone? Welcome to Experienced Boston.
Welcome to the deck Show. Life. Thank you is first
time experience.
Speaker 10 (23:09):
It is my second time, but first time as an
active customer. Last year I understood half of the terminologyious.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
Now you understand it all?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, of course, what was that experience like last year?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I mean it was how early in your dex's journey
were you at that point?
Speaker 8 (23:26):
About negative one month?
Speaker 10 (23:27):
So I came in just very thirsty for knowledge, attending
every breakout session. I could not understanding what was happening
on the spotlight stage at the time, but still writing
things down. But it all came in valuable later because
I was like, oh, this makes sense now, okay, let
me go back.
Speaker 8 (23:44):
How can I apply this?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
And I mean just to tell people a bit about
yourself and your business as well to begin Sure.
Speaker 10 (23:50):
Yeah, my name is Ryan Way. I worked for Warburg Pinkus.
It's a private equity firm where a global company. I'm
based out of our New York flagship office. I've been
with Warburg since twenty eleven. I was raised on the
level one level two teams. Recently about two or three
years ago, transition to our infrastructure team, and then the
timing was right when we started looking at next think.
(24:13):
I raised my hand and said hey, I want to
do this, and now here I am.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
So I love I love talking with like minded it
folks that have that proactive mindset. Back when I was
at the Hertford stood up the proactive services team and
it changed everything for us.
Speaker 5 (24:29):
Led to me coming here.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Talk a bit about what proactive services means to you.
What kinds of things are you doing? How has it
changed your operation?
Speaker 10 (24:38):
Yeah, I'm going to say for myself, I approached it
very greedily. If I was still on the help desk team,
if I was still on level two, how could I
make my own life easier if I had unlimited control
over our decks platform, unlimited data from the endpoints, you know,
ability to send remote actions workflows. That was my first step.
(25:00):
I didn't I didn't care as much about the deck score.
Maybe I should have. It was more how do I
improve the lives of the technicians First, get them to
fall in love with the product, and then they can
say this is perfect.
Speaker 8 (25:12):
Now can we do this?
Speaker 10 (25:14):
So I wanted like a self generating platform and I'm
still working through that, but it's been very well received.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
And Christina talked a little bit about some of the
things that they're seeing in the environment and the changes
that they're making. You talked about kind of the and
I refer to it as this is your first thoughts
of proactive it ta or for selfish reasons, how do
I make my job easier?
Speaker 5 (25:36):
How do to make things better for me?
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Talk about what proactive services means to actually improving the
experience of the people that you support. What kind of initiatives,
what kind of efforts are you you have underway that
make their lives better.
Speaker 10 (25:48):
Yeah, a lot of it is identifying where we can
use like self healing workflows, where it was mentioned earlier
the web hoook, create a ticket, have someone follow up
on it. I'm trying to bypass that step where first
we recognize this is a repeatable solution, now let's automate it.
So anywhere that I can apply that, I'm immediately just
(26:10):
jumping for it. Beyond that, not to steal the thunder
of later, but I saw there's a breakout session called
suffering in silence.
Speaker 8 (26:19):
Yeah, that's been our focus.
Speaker 10 (26:22):
Like we know there are users who are suffering in silence.
They're willing to just endure crashes if they can get
back to work without a big downtime.
Speaker 8 (26:30):
So we made them a focus.
Speaker 10 (26:32):
We wanted to identify where are all our dark spots,
where are the people that have problems that are not
reporting it. And one of my goals was get to
a point where nobody catches our CTO in the elevator
and surprises them with something. So so far we're accomplishing
that goal, and then some almost to the point where
some users are like, yes, I know I'm having this problem.
Speaker 8 (26:55):
Can you come back later. I don't want to deal
with it.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
One of the fun things about my job is helping
people think a little bit differently, and what you just
talked about can be counterproductive when you're internally focused. If
I'm looking at reducing it costs, I'm not going to
be worried about the people that don't call because I'm
not responding. I'm not fixing it. There's no expense to
me if they don't call. In fact, I can reduce
my expenses. I'll just tell everyone to stop calling, and
(27:19):
then I have no tickets to respond to you. So
I'm glad to hear that you're focusing on those folks
that are suffering in silence, even though there's less of
a burden relief on it.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
That's a cool way to look at it.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Yeah, I think something that a lot of enterprises focus
on is the big picture, right dex is about how
is my enterprise, how is my company managing? How are
we making everyone's lives better? But you have a focus
on the smaller groups and actually you're write down to
individualized it. So how do you look at and respond
(27:54):
to your stakeholders that are you have maybe concerned about
the masses, but twenty people failed. I want to know
who they are, why they failed, what was done, and
when was it resolved? So how are you making kind
of proactive it an individual solution?
Speaker 10 (28:10):
Sure that was something like I chose to do very early,
understanding who I report to, understanding who's going to look
at the data, and immediately looking at the dashboards that
come with next thank I was like, this is not enough.
I'm going to be drilling into every investigation and wasting
so much time identifying who is having these problems. So
(28:32):
what I do now is I treat the library content
almost as my ala carte menu. I'll install it, I'll
look through it, and I'll just say this is great.
I'm taking this small plug. Whoever made widgets able to
be copy and pasted. I love you if you're here,
I owe you a drink later. But what I'll do
now is I will build out a dashboard that at
(28:53):
the top has the KPIs you know, twenty people were impacted,
thirty people were impacted, and then below I'll have a
widget that says these are the people that were impacted,
this is their office, this is their title, this is
the model laptop they're on, if that's relevant. And then
any recent alerts that might be related to that problem,
I'll break that out as well, so all the questions
(29:15):
should be answered in a single tab of the dashboard.
And then those are the things that I usher our
support teams to focus on at the beginning of the day.
Come look at this, tackle these key issues, then work
your way through everything else.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
One more for you, And we talked a little bit
before about it before the show, talk a bit about
the impact of a platform like this when you're a
very small, nimble team, right when you're supporting a smaller enterprise,
you wear a lot of hats. You're the networking guy,
you're the euc guy, you're the application guy, you're the trainer.
How does that visibility across the enterprise. Help when you've
(29:49):
got all those hats.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
It's actually really worked in our favor.
Speaker 10 (29:53):
I get approached a lot by teams that I don't
directly work with. For example, I mentioned like, we're a
private equity firm. We have a third party portal for
our investors to sign into. So I created an alert
where if our employees have two connection failures in fifteen minutes,
an email goes out to the teams responsible for the site,
just so they have an early warning of there might
(30:15):
be an outage, there might be service disruption. Let's look
into this, Let's get on the phone, let's prepare. It
also means I get approached by a lot of people
in IT to help them with their projects, where they'll
tell me we're about to start working on this thing,
like let's use to example Windows, Hello, passwordless login. They'll
come to me and say, hey, I'm gonna do this.
How can next things support my project? How can we
(30:38):
make real time reports instead of sending around spreadsheets to
mark our progress.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
So I think it's a big deal. It's something to
highlight there. It's alerts are great. Knowledge of the alert
that it happened is great. Using it as a trigger
to take automated action so that you're actually responding to
the alert in a way that doesn't require you to
go in and hands on go do something.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Yeah, I think is huge.
Speaker 10 (30:59):
Yeah, that's the direction we definitely see ourselves going in
for a while.
Speaker 8 (31:04):
It's been working so far.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Ryan, you came here for the first time last year.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
If there was a peer out there or a colleague
who was thinking about coming to experience, what would you
tell them about why they should attend and who.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Should come and what should they be looking to find out?
Speaker 8 (31:22):
Honestly everything.
Speaker 10 (31:25):
If there's a session you can sign up for and
you don't know what it's about, you should be in
that session.
Speaker 8 (31:29):
You should be taking notes.
Speaker 10 (31:31):
It's definitely going to come in handy later, even if
it doesn't make sense today, and then that can be
a good talking point later as you're networking with people,
say Hey, I attended this session, I wrote this down,
what does it mean?
Speaker 8 (31:43):
Do you understand this?
Speaker 10 (31:45):
And it's just a good way to start generating conversation
and learn everything you can while you're here.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Fantastic, Ryan, stay with us a moment, but huge thanks
to Ryan.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Round of the plause.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Thanks Ryan, Thanks Man, Thanks for coming on, Thanks for
joining us again, and thanks for everybody for coming to
join us with the Dex Show Live. Tim, You're on
the Spotlight Stage a lot the next couple of days,
is that right?
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Yeah, we'll be m seeing some of our partners to
come up and talk a little bit to quick ten
minute lightning talk about the services or products that they've
got that really help contribute to the Deck's ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Make sure you drop by the Spotlight Stage as often
as you can. Final plug for that dex Equation report.
Check it out of the Ambassador's Hub. We'll go online
to find it some really really striking data. We've had
a lot of feedback about that being really really useful
and insightful research.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
And look just I'm Tom McGrath, this is Tim Flower.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
We are the world's biggest DEX podcast with a new
episode every single week. Make sure you tune in if
you're not already, you can get us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
wherever you go for it. And we'll welcome to Experience
Boston and we'll see you all very very soon.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
Thank apreciate job. Thank you for.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
To make sure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe
to the show in Apple podcasts, Spotify from your favorite
podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple podcasts, make
sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap
the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If
you'd like to learn more about how next Think can
help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until
(33:16):
next time.
Welcome it, change makers to the Deck Show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGrath. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Welcome to the Deck Show, Welcome to Experience Boston. It's
ever a round of applause, everybody lovely to see while
we're a little bit worried there that are London going
to embarrass Boston, but.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
You've made it up for it. Hello, Tim, good to
see man. How you doing?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Oh okay, fi bump lovely lovely? So who here listens
to the Deck Show. We're a v decks podcast. We've
got a few hands up. That's good to see. Thank
you put your hands it's polite. No one's gonna no
one's gonna test you on it, okay, just just that's great.
But we are a weekly podcast and we have, you know,
hundreds of fantastic guests every single year. Well that doesn't
(00:46):
quite work out mathematically, but you get you get my point.
And we're incredibly excited. I think the fourth year in
a row, the fifth year in a row that we're
doing live and experience. We've done London, now we're in Boston.
We're all excited. It's the biggest deck event of the year.
How you doing, Tim Flower, I'm doing a good time.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
You've been shot out of a cannon this morning. It's
really cool to see.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well at a round up some audience, this is can
you hear us?
Speaker 5 (01:13):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
By the way, everybody is that? Okay? Okay, fantastic.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well we have got We've got three wonderful, wonderful guests
to get to today, a bumper edition, you might say.
Before we do, however, we had to think of We
had to think of a bit, you know, because it's
a live podcast, you've got to think of you know.
And so we have a game for you all, okay,
And it's a game that's going to enable us to
get to know Tim Flower across the course across the
(01:37):
course of the podcast a little more intimately. Shall we
say that sounds a bit weird When the game is called,
are you experienced any Jimmy Hendrix fans in the audience?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
You know, so you get the illusion there.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Right, and are you experience because we are, of course
at experience.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
You see what we did there, And.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We're gonna ask between all the guests, We're gonna ask
Tim a question to find out how experienced Tim Flower is.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Okay, And the first I'm scared Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
The first question is Tim Flower, have you ever been
in a fist fight?
Speaker 5 (02:11):
Have I ever been in a fist fight? So you reckon?
What do you reckon?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Raise your hands, everybody feel everybody sees a man's I'm
a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
I'm a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
You can imagine growing up in the seventies and eighties
with the last name Flower, I had to defend my.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
Family honor once in a while.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
It was just black and blue the entire time, you know,
from the age of seven to seventeen, it was that
it was add.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
A yes, Tim, it was a yes. You got it right?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Well, round of applause with Tim Flower defending, defend, defending
the Flower name. Glad to hear it, glad to hear it.
And I did say I would respond in kind. And
I have to tell you that I am I'm not
sure how to answer answer the question because I think
for a fist fight, you have to be two people fighting.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
I've been you for yourself. I've been punched a few.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Times, but I haven't I've never really thrown back in
any earnest if I'm on. But let let's get them
with welcoming our first guest, and I think it's Christina.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Right, we're welcome.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
No, we're gonna bring James up first.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We're gonna we're gonna bring James. Sorry, everybody bear with me.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, well, we're very very blessed to have him because
we did lose one of our guests yesterday. But he's
presenting a fantastic breakout later today which we'll hear more about.
He's a director of Digital Workplace Services at Campbell's and
he's James Crick. Ladies and gentlemen, rounded, applause for James, James.
(03:38):
Thank you, sir, come on in. Welcome James. Thanks for James.
And here is your look. You've got like a.
Speaker 6 (03:44):
Testing testing Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Guys.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Oh it's some, it's some. It's our pleasure. Really, it's
our pleasure. And tell us, Audden, tell us about a
bit about yourself and and your role first of all
at Campbell's.
Speaker 7 (03:54):
Please sure sure before I do that, I do want
to say it's an honor to be here on the
deck show.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
Thanks man, happy very much.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
You guys asked me last minute, did you have a
fistfight with a guy.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
Before we did?
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Ye?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I like that, so I guess that's.
Speaker 7 (04:06):
My benefit, right, all right. So I've James Crick Campbell's.
I've been in the IT industry for about thirty years.
Started out of college as a desktop support tech was
actually outsourced at the time the biggest outsourcer service provider
in the world, and spent twenty years of my career
there gaining a lot of experience, a lot of different roles,
(04:29):
and then took a left turn and left outsourcing business.
I went to a company where we created and developed
a team to do service delivery for service desk, desktop
support and modern device and then after that came to
Campbell's and now I'm actually on another side of the table,
so to speak, managing an outsourcer for those respective services.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And you got to break out later today, what was
that going to be about?
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Ooh, that's going to be very exciting. So at one o'clock,
everybody just on the ensemble f right.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Down there, miss it.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Yeah, we'll be sharing a lot of the great things
that we're doing at Campbell's with The Next thing.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Is Campbell's as iconic a brand here as in the UK.
Speaker 6 (05:11):
I have to say, you know, in the UK, I
didn't know it was iconic.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It genuinely. Is it's beIN the name everything.
Speaker 7 (05:17):
Yeah, it's actually got a very fascinating history, but I
won't go into that too much. But yeah, since eighteen
sixty nine it was Wow, Sure, sure, but we changed
the name to the Campbell's Company because soup is only
twenty percent of our revenue. Now it's it's a whole
host of different products and brands now.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
And rumor is that you guys recently got quite a
distinguished award we did.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Can you tell us a bit about it?
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Did?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Sure?
Speaker 6 (05:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (05:43):
So there's an industry analyst consultancy called Digital Workplace Group.
We've been a member for several years and they're on there,
I think their eighth year of their awards, where they
basically give out awards for organizations enterprises that develop high
performing digital workplace environments, and we won an award called
(06:06):
Data led Experience Management. I can't share too much of
the criteria because that's stealing some of the thunder at the.
Speaker 6 (06:17):
Caning at one o'clock.
Speaker 7 (06:18):
But what I will give you Tim and Tom is
a taste of we're very intentional at Campbell's, right.
Speaker 6 (06:25):
A lot of the.
Speaker 7 (06:26):
Actions and trans transitions that we make at the company
are predicated on data and Next Thing provides a wealth
of data to us, and so a lot of the
implementations that we've done with Next Thing kind of afforded
us to get that award. In fact, that guy right
over there, Rory Gardner, was the one who presented me
(06:47):
the award, So a little shout out to Rory. Yeah,
but yeah, it was definitely an honor for us to
win that team award.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Pobulous cool.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
So let's let's stay on that theme and connect the
dots between that award, data, lead management, and outcomes.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
Right, So talk a little bit.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
About what the efforts were, kind of what the outcomes are.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
What are you seeing from real results? Did you what?
Did you?
Speaker 7 (07:13):
Absolutely great question, Tim. I've been at Campbell's six years
and so we haven't had next Thing for six years,
actually just the last two. But we've seen with a
lot of the levers that we've pulled to drive the initiatives,
year over year, our service desk contact volume has gone
(07:34):
down year over year by ten percent plus year over year,
which is to me astounding. I've seen lots of different
especially in outsource, and a lot of different environments, a
lot of different metrics. I've never seen such a phenomenal
stare step down our incident volume, which is kind of
like the you know what you strive for, you want
that to go down year over year, and so we've
(07:54):
seen that over the past five years. MTTR again, same
story over year improvement.
Speaker 6 (08:02):
And then our c SATs.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
When I first started with a company, we were about
anywhere ranging between eighty to eighty five percent. For the
last three years we've been ninety five percent plus.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And do you do c SAT like a lot of
it organizations on feedback from a ticket and experience with
a help desk or customers sat on it in general,
whether or not they logged a call correct.
Speaker 7 (08:26):
So one of the odd things when I got to Campbell's,
they do one hundred percent. So every ticket gets a survey.
To me, that's over surveying your public. But our return rate,
I can't argue with our return rates, it's like seven
percent usually in that vein it's industry standards around three percent.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
So we're really happy with that. And now we're.
Speaker 7 (08:43):
Starting to dip our toe into the sentiment aspect of
next thing to also gain feedback in that avenue.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
So feedback from employees is one thing. What's the feedback
been from leadership and kind of opinions on your efforts?
Speaker 7 (08:56):
Sure, so the leadership is, you know, treating us well well, right, Bill,
We've partnered, so some of the success has fostered other
organizations across the business within Campbell's to reach out and say, hey,
those cool branded pop ups that you guys do, can
we get in on that? And so we've had hr
communications some of the other businesses approach us. So I'll
(09:19):
give you a quick example. Right, every company goes through
their annual benefits enrollment, So that team reached out last
year and right they you know, we'll do the traditional
email on the internal.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
Social media posts.
Speaker 7 (09:32):
Hey it's that time of year if you're going in
the company needs to sign up for their benefits. They
asked us to do a pop up in like the
last week before it ended, and they said the spike
that they had the day that we did the pop
up was huge compared to their other avenues. So a
lot of people are clamoring to us, focusing specifically on
(09:53):
the engagement campaigns.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
And are you seeing it now?
Speaker 4 (09:56):
People are realizing that it's part of your DNA and
necessary part of their un the operation or do you find
yourselves of having to evangelize still on the benefit.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
We do still have to evangelize to some extent.
Speaker 7 (10:08):
So as much as I have some of the business
partners clamoring to get in, I was a little surprised
that some of our IT brethren are not chopping at
the bit. We do have our network team, we train
them all up on it. We're doing another round of
training soon because again data Next Think has just a
wealth of data that you can consume and take action upon.
(10:31):
But there's other groups in it that we believe that
can benefit, especially the application side of the house, and
nobody from the application side of the house has really
knocked on our doors.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
So we're doing the evangelist.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Cool, No.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Fantastic.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And when it comes to AI, you know, particularly like
next Think innovation within AI, are you getting any value
out of it? Is anything particularly cool your eye? The
next thing's announced and launched in the last few months.
Speaker 7 (10:56):
Yeah, the the infusion of AI into next Think assist.
I have a lot of high hopes for It's interesting
our implementation. I remember Tim, the first time I met
you was at a Gartner show and Javine right and
I remember watching you speak to the audience and you
were explaining how a lot of times an organization will
(11:19):
bring in next Think and one of the first things
they do, kind of low hanging fruit, is they'll they'll
do the API with a ticketing tool, and they'll they'll
use next Think as.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
A first step to really help the.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
Agents and the texts to help with problem determination resolution.
Speaker 6 (11:37):
We had Campbell's we actually kind of skipped that step.
Speaker 7 (11:39):
We went right to the kind of level zero versus
level one and two to kind of get those masses
of incident reduction. And it's just now that we're starting
to really do the full court press on education to
our agents in our texts and with the infusion that
the timing right, so we're also at the same time
rolling out where a big micros off shops are rolling
(12:00):
out Copilot to our environment or enterprise, and so we're
training all of our folks, including our agents and tech.
So the fact that they're learning AI and now that
there's an infusion of AI into Next Think assists where
you can type in the conversational prompt and they're getting
better at those prompts, we believe that's going to help
(12:22):
a lot with the resolution.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
Amazing James.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Before we let you go and we plug one last
time your exciting breakout.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Thank you, and let's pretend you weren't doing a breakout.
What drules you to experience? What can you what could
your peers seek from coming to this event in person?
Speaker 5 (12:37):
What's jone?
Speaker 7 (12:38):
Absolutely, this is my second year, so last year. It's
fantastic time, So there's no way I was not going
to miss it. Essentially, you have some of the best
minds from Next Think from all over the world under
one roof here where you can tap into and listen
to right Then on top of that, you bring all
of your your vendors and partners here and showcase that
(13:02):
you have people like myself that will share their experiences
of how they're using next Thing. So all of that collectively,
the amount of information that you get out of these
two days is you know, comparable.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
We appreciate it, man, So is one pm?
Speaker 6 (13:17):
One pm? Which room is samble f? Yeah, everybody's company.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Don't miss it, everybody and show a big round of applause.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Huge thanks James, Man. We appreciate it.
Speaker 8 (13:30):
Friends.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Okay, who wants another round.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Of are you experienced? We want to know more about
Tim Flower. Yes, okay, here's here's a question.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Once again, we're going to put it to the audience. First,
do we think that Tim Flower.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Has appeared on stage before, not in this capacity, but
in a play.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Raise your hands if you think Tim's been in.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
A play, A street fighting man, and and and a
ftpian Tim is that accurate?
Speaker 5 (14:00):
It's a It is accurate. It is accurate.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I actually knew this from an earlier show. But tell
us what the play was to it was and Meghan.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Meghan actually took a walk, which she can relate to
this as well. I played Oliver, so it's kind of fitting, right,
fist fight. You can imagine Oliver twists. It's more appropriate
conversation for maybe the tobacco docks that setting.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, yeah, Oliver.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Twist was my claim to fame. And was it the musical?
It was absolutely in the musical and so well one song,
one song you'd have to sing it, but I'll do
a lyric. Consider yourself, right, let's go food, glorious food, food,
glorious food.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
And my big solo, I do anything I do.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, okay, it's good memories, Okay, nice, all right, Well,
I'm not actual gonnadd I actually sang in a pantomime?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Did you sang in a pantomime at Christmas?
Speaker 5 (14:53):
Break the rules?
Speaker 4 (14:55):
What do you mean you can you can verbalize in
a pantomime?
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, anto, we call it all right. It's like it's
like a Christmas plaything, and I sang, I'll do anything.
But it was in like Cinderella ros all right, I
was like buttons.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Okay, So who we got next? We've got christ with
Christina Stina.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, please put your hands together and welcome from Bayer.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's Christine Lea.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
Hey, hi Christina, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Hi Christina, welcome to the show. How you doing here?
Is your Mike Raffon?
Speaker 5 (15:27):
Thank you? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:28):
The bumpy ride in we're delayed ride in?
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yes, yeah we did. Have you been in the play before, Christina? No? No,
what about a fistfight outside of siblings? Now?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Okay, yeah that's true. That definitely doesn't count. Well, welcome
to experience. This is your first time.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
Here, first time out experience.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
First experience. Okay, fantastic. Introduce yourself and your business recipit.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
So my name is Christina lar I'm currently here from
Bear Saint Louis, Missouri. Been with Bird eleven years in
the industry fourteen. My back ground is very much an
architecture engineering and then recently took over our dex platform
as a product manager.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Soupep and what have been some of the key achievements, say,
over this first year with a platform.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
So overall, one of our major achievements this year was
the rollout of the platform operationalizing it. We do work
with external managed service partners, so it's not as simple
as just bringing a product and managing it in house
because we have external partners that play key roles within it.
So major accomplishment obviously rolling out our DX platform, further
(16:35):
building out the team as well as we start to
forward look at what we want to do not just
in DX but also the agentic AI space additionally with
data Foundation and how we want to further driver data
analytics platforms moving forward.
Speaker 5 (16:49):
Cool amazing.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
So for folks that have been listening to the podcast
for a while, you've heard me draw the parallels between
healthy It and healthy society that we are as a society.
We are more healthy if we eat right, we exercise,
we get our vaccinations, we stay out of the hospital,
and we're less of a cost burden to the system.
(17:11):
Same goes with it healthy happy employees. If you keep
things running well, are you seeing kind of in your
environment and acknowledgment of that that it's no longer keeping
things healthy is no longer kind of nice to have,
but it's a really a necessary part of the org.
Speaker 9 (17:26):
Yes, and this gets i would say, stronger and stronger
every day as the years go on. We're more and
more reliant on our laptops working, our endpoints working.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
It should just work.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
Every minute loss is minute loss with our customers in
those customers spanning outside of healthcare, but also in the
crop space and the consumer space. Very important because in
the end our customers internally within it are customers who
directly face our customers externally in the industry.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
But again you see a domino effect.
Speaker 9 (18:01):
They lose time, we lose time in the industry.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
So we're kind of celebrating the launch of our first
annual workplace Productivity report, cracking the decks equation. Everyone's got
a little bit of a different formula, a different equation
of what that actually means to them. Talk a bit
about what is part of your equation and what some
of the results are.
Speaker 9 (18:21):
Yeah, So we put a lot of heavy emphasis on
our DX really in the last quarter. So we do
operate in what's called ninety days sprints, and in our
last ninety days major focus of ours was DX. Through
that we rebaselined our DX score. We shifted things based
upon what BEAR needed, not so much the industry because
(18:41):
we already know within the organization we're behind on a
lot of stuff, so we already know it's adversely affecting us.
But where can we provide the most value instead of
wasting time where a particular root cause causing that that
DX impact might take six to nine months to fix,
Where can we further put our f and focus there.
So as we rebaselined our DX, how we built our
(19:05):
equation out was obviously the sentiment and the technology side,
but we took out non key enabling drivers maybe it's
a collaboration, maybe it's particular websites or URLs or the
whole application side, and we put actual focus on underlying
foundational pieces such as device performance in other areas. And
(19:27):
then our idea as we further build out the DX equation,
we'll focus more on a benefit analysis around it and
then consistently review that DX score and optimize that equation.
It should never be a stagnant equation on our side.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Thank you for that, And I should put in a
plug for people who want to find out more about
the decks equation.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
When you report it.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Funds that four hundred and seventy thousand hours are lost
per years for enterprises due to poor decks And if
you want to start putting some productivity findings and figures
on your DEX investment, go over to the Ambassador's hub
where you can download the report, or go over to
the next new website where you can get it as well.
Absolutely check that out. What is next on the roadmap
(20:11):
for Bayo Usina.
Speaker 9 (20:13):
So first thing is data enablement. Our next on our
roadmap is absolutely a key data foundation layer as we
forward look in the next year. The ideas once you
have good data, you can start making it intelligent, you
can start adding anomaly detection, you can start really driving
improvement without all the manual intervention. And this is where
(20:33):
we're using DEX as a key driver to further building
out this full agentic view.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Fantastic and looking at the agenda across Experience Boston, what
stands out to you, what are you excited about doing well.
Speaker 9 (20:47):
We're here most of all networking understanding what others are doing,
seeing where we can rinse and repeat, where we can
shift also our focus. But maybe somebody's already done it.
We don't have to spend that amount of time on
implementing it within the organized cool.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Let me ask you a little bit of a curveball.
What's when you turn the lights on? When next thing
you find? Obviously the things you know about anything come
to mind over the last little bit of time of
something you found that you didn't even expect. Kind of
do you look at the environment, what kind of data
are you seeing that you said, Wow, I didn't even
know that was out there.
Speaker 9 (21:22):
Uh, we see it in multiple areas. We we obviously
see the things we expected, log on boot times, things
like that. I would say that our key drivers of
things like impact of CPU, impact of memory and disk
space wasn't always what we thought it was, So I
would say that was a little bit of a surprise,
(21:42):
but based upon the data, we were able to optimize
that and it's back to exactly.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where we thought it was.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Great.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Christina, thank you so much, Van, thank you, thanks such.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Thanks Christin, thank you thanks.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Okay, one last round everywhere we go, last round of
are you experienced?
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Tim Flower? Edition?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Tim Flower, I'm gonna ask him and we're gonna have
to show hands before he answers. Okay, The question is,
has Tim Flower ever been thrown out of the bar?
Speaker 5 (22:14):
We already know he's been in. Did the fight happen
in the bar?
Speaker 3 (22:17):
So you know, do we think he's been thrown out
the bar? Raisy hands? If it's a yes, Oh, look
at that one. You know, highly respectable, highly respectable, never.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Been thrown out of a bar.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
You were quite right intimately, Well, I get yeah, No,
I'm very very respectable in the bar.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
I have been frond out of you.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
I'm afraid to say, everybody, I'm afraid to say. And
you know now we're gonna welcome our final guest.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Our final guest. He's Ryan Way from Warburg Pinkers.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
Brian, come up here, Come on, Brian.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
And while Ryan's coming up, if anybody in the back
can't hear us, there are headphones if you'd like to
grab a headphone if you're unable to.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Hear yes, or is your microphone? Welcome to Experienced Boston.
Welcome to the deck Show. Life. Thank you is first
time experience.
Speaker 10 (23:09):
It is my second time, but first time as an
active customer. Last year I understood half of the terminologyious.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
Now you understand it all?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, of course, what was that experience like last year?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I mean it was how early in your dex's journey
were you at that point?
Speaker 8 (23:26):
About negative one month?
Speaker 10 (23:27):
So I came in just very thirsty for knowledge, attending
every breakout session. I could not understanding what was happening
on the spotlight stage at the time, but still writing
things down. But it all came in valuable later because
I was like, oh, this makes sense now, okay, let
me go back.
Speaker 8 (23:44):
How can I apply this?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
And I mean just to tell people a bit about
yourself and your business as well to begin Sure.
Speaker 10 (23:50):
Yeah, my name is Ryan Way. I worked for Warburg Pinkus.
It's a private equity firm where a global company. I'm
based out of our New York flagship office. I've been
with Warburg since twenty eleven. I was raised on the
level one level two teams. Recently about two or three
years ago, transition to our infrastructure team, and then the
timing was right when we started looking at next think.
(24:13):
I raised my hand and said hey, I want to
do this, and now here I am.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
So I love I love talking with like minded it
folks that have that proactive mindset. Back when I was
at the Hertford stood up the proactive services team and
it changed everything for us.
Speaker 5 (24:29):
Led to me coming here.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Talk a bit about what proactive services means to you.
What kinds of things are you doing? How has it
changed your operation?
Speaker 10 (24:38):
Yeah, I'm going to say for myself, I approached it
very greedily. If I was still on the help desk team,
if I was still on level two, how could I
make my own life easier if I had unlimited control
over our decks platform, unlimited data from the endpoints, you know,
ability to send remote actions workflows. That was my first step.
(25:00):
I didn't I didn't care as much about the deck score.
Maybe I should have. It was more how do I
improve the lives of the technicians First, get them to
fall in love with the product, and then they can
say this is perfect.
Speaker 8 (25:12):
Now can we do this?
Speaker 10 (25:14):
So I wanted like a self generating platform and I'm
still working through that, but it's been very well received.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
And Christina talked a little bit about some of the
things that they're seeing in the environment and the changes
that they're making. You talked about kind of the and
I refer to it as this is your first thoughts
of proactive it ta or for selfish reasons, how do
I make my job easier?
Speaker 5 (25:36):
How do to make things better for me?
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Talk about what proactive services means to actually improving the
experience of the people that you support. What kind of initiatives,
what kind of efforts are you you have underway that
make their lives better.
Speaker 10 (25:48):
Yeah, a lot of it is identifying where we can
use like self healing workflows, where it was mentioned earlier
the web hoook, create a ticket, have someone follow up
on it. I'm trying to bypass that step where first
we recognize this is a repeatable solution, now let's automate it.
So anywhere that I can apply that, I'm immediately just
(26:10):
jumping for it. Beyond that, not to steal the thunder
of later, but I saw there's a breakout session called
suffering in silence.
Speaker 8 (26:19):
Yeah, that's been our focus.
Speaker 10 (26:22):
Like we know there are users who are suffering in silence.
They're willing to just endure crashes if they can get
back to work without a big downtime.
Speaker 8 (26:30):
So we made them a focus.
Speaker 10 (26:32):
We wanted to identify where are all our dark spots,
where are the people that have problems that are not
reporting it. And one of my goals was get to
a point where nobody catches our CTO in the elevator
and surprises them with something. So so far we're accomplishing
that goal, and then some almost to the point where
some users are like, yes, I know I'm having this problem.
Speaker 8 (26:55):
Can you come back later. I don't want to deal
with it.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
One of the fun things about my job is helping
people think a little bit differently, and what you just
talked about can be counterproductive when you're internally focused. If
I'm looking at reducing it costs, I'm not going to
be worried about the people that don't call because I'm
not responding. I'm not fixing it. There's no expense to
me if they don't call. In fact, I can reduce
my expenses. I'll just tell everyone to stop calling, and
(27:19):
then I have no tickets to respond to you. So
I'm glad to hear that you're focusing on those folks
that are suffering in silence, even though there's less of
a burden relief on it.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
That's a cool way to look at it.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Yeah, I think something that a lot of enterprises focus
on is the big picture, right dex is about how
is my enterprise, how is my company managing? How are
we making everyone's lives better? But you have a focus
on the smaller groups and actually you're write down to
individualized it. So how do you look at and respond
(27:54):
to your stakeholders that are you have maybe concerned about
the masses, but twenty people failed. I want to know
who they are, why they failed, what was done, and
when was it resolved? So how are you making kind
of proactive it an individual solution?
Speaker 10 (28:10):
Sure that was something like I chose to do very early,
understanding who I report to, understanding who's going to look
at the data, and immediately looking at the dashboards that
come with next thank I was like, this is not enough.
I'm going to be drilling into every investigation and wasting
so much time identifying who is having these problems. So
(28:32):
what I do now is I treat the library content
almost as my ala carte menu. I'll install it, I'll
look through it, and I'll just say this is great.
I'm taking this small plug. Whoever made widgets able to
be copy and pasted. I love you if you're here,
I owe you a drink later. But what I'll do
now is I will build out a dashboard that at
(28:53):
the top has the KPIs you know, twenty people were impacted,
thirty people were impacted, and then below I'll have a
widget that says these are the people that were impacted,
this is their office, this is their title, this is
the model laptop they're on, if that's relevant. And then
any recent alerts that might be related to that problem,
I'll break that out as well, so all the questions
(29:15):
should be answered in a single tab of the dashboard.
And then those are the things that I usher our
support teams to focus on at the beginning of the day.
Come look at this, tackle these key issues, then work
your way through everything else.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
One more for you, And we talked a little bit
before about it before the show, talk a bit about
the impact of a platform like this when you're a
very small, nimble team, right when you're supporting a smaller enterprise,
you wear a lot of hats. You're the networking guy,
you're the euc guy, you're the application guy, you're the trainer.
How does that visibility across the enterprise. Help when you've
(29:49):
got all those hats.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
It's actually really worked in our favor.
Speaker 10 (29:53):
I get approached a lot by teams that I don't
directly work with. For example, I mentioned like, we're a
private equity firm. We have a third party portal for
our investors to sign into. So I created an alert
where if our employees have two connection failures in fifteen minutes,
an email goes out to the teams responsible for the site,
just so they have an early warning of there might
(30:15):
be an outage, there might be service disruption. Let's look
into this, Let's get on the phone, let's prepare. It
also means I get approached by a lot of people
in IT to help them with their projects, where they'll
tell me we're about to start working on this thing,
like let's use to example Windows, Hello, passwordless login. They'll
come to me and say, hey, I'm gonna do this.
How can next things support my project? How can we
(30:38):
make real time reports instead of sending around spreadsheets to
mark our progress.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
So I think it's a big deal. It's something to
highlight there. It's alerts are great. Knowledge of the alert
that it happened is great. Using it as a trigger
to take automated action so that you're actually responding to
the alert in a way that doesn't require you to
go in and hands on go do something.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Yeah, I think is huge.
Speaker 10 (30:59):
Yeah, that's the direction we definitely see ourselves going in
for a while.
Speaker 8 (31:04):
It's been working so far.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Ryan, you came here for the first time last year.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
If there was a peer out there or a colleague
who was thinking about coming to experience, what would you
tell them about why they should attend and who.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Should come and what should they be looking to find out?
Speaker 8 (31:22):
Honestly everything.
Speaker 10 (31:25):
If there's a session you can sign up for and
you don't know what it's about, you should be in
that session.
Speaker 8 (31:29):
You should be taking notes.
Speaker 10 (31:31):
It's definitely going to come in handy later, even if
it doesn't make sense today, and then that can be
a good talking point later as you're networking with people,
say Hey, I attended this session, I wrote this down,
what does it mean?
Speaker 8 (31:43):
Do you understand this?
Speaker 10 (31:45):
And it's just a good way to start generating conversation
and learn everything you can while you're here.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Fantastic, Ryan, stay with us a moment, but huge thanks
to Ryan.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Round of the plause.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Thanks Ryan, Thanks Man, Thanks for coming on, Thanks for
joining us again, and thanks for everybody for coming to
join us with the Dex Show Live. Tim, You're on
the Spotlight Stage a lot the next couple of days,
is that right?
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Yeah, we'll be m seeing some of our partners to
come up and talk a little bit to quick ten
minute lightning talk about the services or products that they've
got that really help contribute to the Deck's ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Make sure you drop by the Spotlight Stage as often
as you can. Final plug for that dex Equation report.
Check it out of the Ambassador's Hub. We'll go online
to find it some really really striking data. We've had
a lot of feedback about that being really really useful
and insightful research.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
And look just I'm Tom McGrath, this is Tim Flower.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
We are the world's biggest DEX podcast with a new
episode every single week. Make sure you tune in if
you're not already, you can get us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
wherever you go for it. And we'll welcome to Experience
Boston and we'll see you all very very soon.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
Thank apreciate job. Thank you for.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
To make sure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe
to the show in Apple podcasts, Spotify from your favorite
podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple podcasts, make
sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap
the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If
you'd like to learn more about how next Think can
help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until
(33:16):
next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com