Socializing SupportWhy It Will Happen

An archestra notebook.

© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

Preface…

“IT Service Management” exists in order to assure the value of IT services to the service users. It is fundamentally customer-orientated.

“IT Services” have always come in two flavors: technical services and business services. Service users, who are the customers of IT, are focused on the business, not on the technology.

Technical Support and User Support are two different responsibilities that are interrelated.

Supporting “IT Services” makes sense when it means that User reliance on IT results in Users meeting their requirements for their business performance.

Support evolution: not optional, even if not better.Automation continues to further hide technical complexity from users, even as it adds more functionality.

Automation has also spawned empowered self-aware communities.

As a result of automation, a natural shift of users’ attention has been from “how to make things work” to “what to do with things”. (e.g., from how to drive the car, to where do I want to drive...)

The community’s own intelligence about what can be done is communicated very rapidly and in the heat of the moment. This increases the demand for things and the demand for their supportability.

Facing that increase, scalability and breadth in support must find a balance between depth and agility. Support organizations must rely on the community itself to provide signals of where it is going, and to bring supplemental depth as needed.

processes

Capabilitysolutionspeople

diversity of demand

tools

capacity of supply

Environmentsolutions

Increasing user awareness of opportunities

Business performance

© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

“DRIVERS”

“motivators”

“guides”

“needs”

“causes”

“catalysts”

“priorities”

“methods”

“rules”

The demand side of “drivers” usually adds up to expectations, norms and preferences that exist as preconditions

The supply side of “drivers” usually adds up to policies, evaluations and processes being actively used

Overall, being Provider-driven does NOT mean that support is offered only in terms of “supply”. Instead, it means that support exists primarily (not exclusively) in terms of what the Provider requires from the Users. Requirements reflect both demand and supply objectives.

Being Community-driven does NOT mean that support is offered only in terms of “demand”. Instead, it means that support exists primarily (not exclusively) in terms of what the User in the community requires from the Provider. Requirements reflect both demand and supply objectives.

Understanding Drivers

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The New Default

“Services” have always been managed through an alignment of proximity, skills, and knowledge provided for users.

Meanwhile, the service user’s point of view emphasized choosing relevant services and getting satisfactory support of those obtained.

Powerful technologies for communications, mobility and search have fostered a dramatic increase in individuals’ independence and their expectation of personalization.

In turn, personalization imposes its perspectives on the basics of the service support, by driving the user orientation instead of the technical orientation.

To keep up with responsibilities for the population of services users, the support effort must be effective and relevant in those personalized perspectives. Users will simply go find the support that best fits in their environment.

TODAY’s User Perspectives and Objectives

Technology innovations have allowed individuals to amplify how they naturally do things to make sense of their experiences. That especially affects their activity and interactions.

The “social” aspect of experience is a powerful source of orientation, providing stability in what otherwise would be continual exposure to the overload of awareness generated by the web.

The individual’s sense of having a “presence”, both at-large and amongst interrelated persons, is largely about having confidence as an actor.

Orientation and confidence are readily recognizable as the basis of demand for personalization in experience. Meanwhile, independence through technology has made it more readily apparent that the User is more important to the Community than the legacy support organization is to the User.

The User observes the diversity and value of personalized effort primarily within the community. By empowering the user, personalization makes the user more capable of generating benefit both to and from the community.

In effect, Personalization is the most powerful driver of the shift of focus from Provider-driven support to Community-driven support.

Support as a Service

Being “community-driven” is neither a new stance nor an exclusive one.

Most markets, and of course marketing, are built on the idea that meeting the demands of a community is what makes providers valuable. Outside of not-for-profit or research scenarios , very few markets exist where a given provider is bigger or more important than the kind of market it serves.

For organizations charged primarily with supporting users of services, the capability to address community demand and personalization may not need to replace other current capabilities, but it must be present.

The capability itself manifests as a “service” to users: already running, available on demand, within mutual expectations of the requester and provider.

Socializing the service means tailoring it to address the expectations created by the experience of the users in their community. The support of the service is built into that tailoring, and/or is similarly tailored itself.

Service Population

EngagementPortal

COMMUNITY

USER PRESENCESOCIAL NETWORK

Service Providers have long been aware of the need to manage their influence on their target service population. But the strong emergence of the

population’s awareness of itself as a community is a new flavor of the population. Meanwhile, the centrally accessible enterprise “portal” has been

superseded by the distributed, searchable network. And the Provider’s engagement with the members of the population has shifted focus to being

on what the individual needs as an actor instead of as a user.

Support as a Service

USER PRESENCESOCIAL NETWORK

News CollaborationSelf-service Familiarity ConvenienceReputation

(PERSONALIZATION)

Individuals who are participants in a larger group rely on certain modes and characteristics of experience

that strengthen the benefits of their individual awareness and the reliability of their individual choices. This is the virtual operating

environment leveraged by service users, made more accessible and persistent by technologies available directly to individuals.

The User’s Operating Environment

Adapting Support to the Perspectives that are Drivers

Personalization is a set of perspectives that apply as both physical and logical experience,

to be understood and addressed by providers in determining and delivering support.

Now this means delivering support that has direct relevance within the Service User’s perspective on the value of the experience of

being a business actor in the community.

High-value experiences proactively fortify the Users’ orientation and confidence.

The new strategic role of the Provider has a recognizable pattern of support interests, projected by the community it serves through the

personalization pursued by the members of the community. The Provider addresses both the orientation and the confidence of the user.

© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

Socializing Support as business alignment

Management Approach

User environment enhanced Example reinforcement tactic Supporting tactical resources

Cultivate Collaboration and Reputation Context sensitivity Skill and Communication

Share News and Familiarity Preference detection Knowledge and Search

Enable Self-service and Convenience Location awareness Proximity and Mobile

Support tactically reinforces the effectiveness of the Users’ increasingly personalized leveraging

of their environment of operation. Resource development and deployment by the Support

Service provider aims at being supportive through being integrated, distributed, and

continuously available within the user’s environment.

Meanwhile, being a proactive presence in the user environment largely means

explicitly sponsoring both the networking and the user presence in the supported

community, to increase early detection and cooperation. Ultimately, much of what should be done in Community-driven Support amounts to good marketing.

Solutions for socializing Service Support

• Support exists primarily (not exclusively) in terms of what the User in the community requires from the Provider

• Integrated, distributed, and continuously available within the user’s environment

• Increases early detection and cooperation regarding User intent

• Addresses the expectations created by the experience of the users in their community