joanna.darby@ifsworld.com, Author at Future of Field Service

By Tom Paquin

The last two years have irrevocably changed the landscape of how we, as a society, interact with technology. COVID-19, its fallout, and the restrictions it posed are but one strand of a confluence of factors that have been reshaping the service industry in recent years. Taken as a whole, these divergent factors, advancements, and changing customer expectations paint a vivid picture for what the future of field service looks like.

So what does this mean about the State of Service heading into next year, and looking ahead to the next five years? What trends are beginning to gain a foothold, how have those trends already begun to evolve, and what comes next? Through our stories, firsthand experience, and study of macro service trends, The Future of Field Service has generated a robust picture for the current state of service. This new series, to be consolidated and expanded in an upcoming whitepaper, will use our insights to build a coherent, forward-looking image of what the state of service looks like today, and what we can expect tomorrow. Here is some of what we will explore:

The Post-COVID Service Technology Stack
The State of Field Service Management Software
The State of Connected Assets
The State of the Service Workforce
The State of Small Business Service
The State of Industrial Operations

These explorations will be colored by many of the conversations that we have experienced over the last twelve months, and will function as an overall pastiche that will prepare you to start 2022 on the right track. We’ll begin next week by exploring the impact of COVID on service technology spend. We’ll see you then.

Dan McClure, Systems Innovation Choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem discusses with Sarah the differences between incremental improvement and true innovation and provides advice for companies on how to react sufficiently to today’s disruption.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host Sarah Nicastro. Today we are going to be talking about both the lure and the detriment that the idea of incremental improvement can cause your business. I'm excited to be joined today by Dan McClure who is the systems innovation choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem. Dan, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Dan McClure: Sarah, it's great to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: It's great to have you. So before we get into the thick of it, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Dan McClure: Well, I have been somebody who has through good luck been thrown into burning buildings throughout my entire career. So I started my career in an industry that was going through massive deregulation, had a chance to spend time as an entrepreneur for a decade and then have gone from industry to industry really looking for the places where disruption was happening and there were opportunities to do what we've called system innovation, changing the way that they fundament organization works to create value in the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Now it's interesting that you would categorize being thrown into burning buildings as good luck, because I don't know that everyone would feel that way. Why do you say it that way? What do you think that that fact has enabled you to learn or to do?

Dan McClure: Well what's exciting about a burning building or more conventionally framed, a burning platform, is that you are in a position where there is not only a motivation for big change, but you've broken out of the status quo. There are pieces that are freed up that allow you to be really boldly creative. So if you're the type of person who says, "I don't want to simply repaint the house, but I want to imagine the house with an entirely new set of rooms," a burning building is not a bad place to start because you really get the chance to bring other people along on a big bold dream and do something that has a real impact in the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's really cool. So I read an article you wrote that said ... The quote said, "The hard truth is that complex systems problem can't be solved with piece meal inventions. They need to be addressed with far more ambitious systems solutions." So tell us a little bit what you mean by that quote and what the route of systems innovations is.

Dan McClure: So most organizations are in the habit of working. They have built up a set of system, they've built up a value proposition. They've built up a market place. That all work together to essentially deliver value to their customers and to their shareholders and to their employees. Everything works. And for those types of organizations, simply making an incremental change to make things a bit better makes them more profitable, more competitive. Sustains their role in the market place. The challenge is, if they need to make a bigger change, let's say a competitor comes in and offers a radically better proposition, or the fundamental basis for their marketplace disappears, then they can't make small changes to the way things work, because those won't be enough. They'll find themselves in perhaps three different categories of situations.

Dan McClure: They may find themselves commoditized. So they can continue to sell in their market, but they're not going to make any profit on it. They may hit a plateau where they really still have their market share but they're never going to grow any further than they are. They have essentially gone as far as they can and they're just waiting for something worse to happen. And the third thing, the worst that could happen, is they might find themselves completely obsolete. So this temptation to resort to small incremental innovation often leads to these dead ends or these areas where the future is really not very bright at all. And so moving beyond incremental change becomes the thing that they need to do. They need to create a new value proposition that's new and differentiated in the market.

Sarah Nicastro: So what I'm curious about and I recorded a podcast a while back with a gentleman who at the time worked at Cisco and the title of that podcast was weighing the decision of disruption. And it was this idea that Cisco's business in the area and region that he worked, was doing quite well. But they knew there was an opportunity to do things differently. And it was a tough choice to make because there wasn't this catastrophic burning building type issue. They weren't becoming obsolete. There wasn't that big of an issue. But there was a significant opportunity and I think Dan, that a lot of people in our audience are in similar situations where there's a big opportunity being presented by the market and the customers that these customers serve for more and for different than what they've historically provided. But maybe for a lot of organizations, the need for that change isn't so intense that it's a do or die type scenario which causes people to drag their feet. So how does a company know when it's the right time to look at more of a systems innovation approach then just sort of incremental improvement?

Dan McClure: I think the whole question of disruption and the way people react to disruption is interesting. Often times disruption is framed as opportunities early on. So you look at the marketplace and you say, "Ooh, there's a new opportunity, maybe we could be a fast follower, or maybe we could do this sometime in the future." There's a couple of problems with that. That optionality, that assumption that we can wait because things are going pretty well right now. You sighted that example of the gentleman from Cisco. The reality is their platform may well be burning, well in advance of the time they see smoke. And often times these disruptive changes are already well in flight before anybody realizes them.

Dan McClure: The other problem is, is that there's an assumption that if we delay, when we do see the disruption, we'll have the time to respond. And frequently once these changes start to happen, they happen incredibly quickly. So consider the classic case of Uber, which used to be the innovation example cited in every conference three or four years ago. But it took them only three years to outpace New York City taxi cabs as the primary provider of transportation service in New York City. If you look at other industries like healthcare, in the first six months of the pandemic, there was a 16,000% increase in digital health services. Once the lever tends to tip, it tends to tip very, very quickly. So this idea that we can wait, because we don't have a burning platform right now, is often, misses the true reality of the situation organizations are at.

Dan McClure: The other thing to remember is you don't simply get to claim market share by showing up. And so when these new market opportunities emerge, they're going to be fiercely competed for. And as a result, if your organization isn't making the kind of deep thoughtful creative changes to position you as a leader in that market, you're not going to be in a position to show up late in the game and say, "Okay, now I want my share."

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay, so that makes sense, but I think what I want to talk about is sort of what you refer to in some of your content as the lure of incremental improvement. So saying it makes sense. It makes sense. You need to be creative, you need to innovative. You need to stay ahead of disruption. It all sounds very good. But it's obviously harder than it sounds when we're talking about it. And I think part of that is this lure of incremental improvement. So let's talk a little bit about why that tendency is so so strong for organizations to sort of stay in their comfort zone, maintain or incrementally improve the status quo, et cetera.

Dan McClure: Yeah. I think it's interesting and you almost have to go down to a project level. So imagine you're a project leader and you have two ideas. One of them is an incremental change and the other one is a disruptive change. For the incremental change, you're going to be able to document pretty hard evidence of the types of improvement you see. So you may be able to reduce head count or you can project with reasonable certainty a 1% increase in market share. And as a result, that projects going to be very easy to sell. If you're the sponsor, the person with the budget, you're going to be able to say, "Well, I'm pretty sure I can get that type of project delivered." But that's got to have some pretty high degree of certainty of results. And then I you look for everybody else across the organization, it's just going to be a small change to the way they work, so they're going to have an easy time to adopt it. So all along the way, that project, that incremental project, is going to be easier to sell, lower risk to execute and easier to adopt. And that's a very attractive thing in an organization. Nobody wants to be the person who's spearheading a failed project.

Dan McClure: Now contrast that to a disruptive change which requires an entire system to change. Here we're saying, "We're going to imagine a much bigger opportunity and it's not even going to really be proven out by any evidence in the marketplace yet." So we're going to have to hypothesize over what we think the opportunity is. We're going to have to change lots of different pieces and put in new things that nobody's thought about before really carefully and therefore the risks are going to be higher. And finally, we're going to have to get everybody else onto an entirely new page. And so all those system changes are going to have to cascade across the organization. If you compare selling those two projects, it's a heck of a lot easier to sell that small incremental project. And at the same time, it's the big disruptive system change project that really offers the hope of getting past these big threats that we were talking about earlier.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's interesting because it makes me think about in a lot of the conversations that I have here, we talk a lot about, I mentioned before we started recording that some of the big disruptive change in our space is related to the idea of this journey to servitization or to outcomes based service. And we have a lot of conversations on this podcast about the fact that that level of change and evolution is not possible without buy-in from the top. And so that is just making me think about what you're saying which is the ultimate stakeholders that you're presenting these options to, if they're very comfort zone in status quo oriented, if they have certain motivations that maybe make them incredibly risk averse, if they are quite stuck in their ways for a number of different reasons, it's really hard for anyone that sees this opportunity within the business to bring it to the forefront. It just, they keep defaulting to the easier options that are being presented. And so it's just making me wonder your thoughts on the criticality of leadership who is willing to take risks and be creative and embrace a more innovative approach.

Dan McClure: So here's where I think sometimes the narrative is a little too simple. I certainly have been the person who's been going to a leader and then been slapped down hard, and that's not a pleasant experience. And I probably went out to the bar later that evening and had a beer and was complaining to my friends about what Luddite and risk-averse manager we had and da dah, da dah, da dah. The reality is, while that can be a concern, more often it's that people are pursing system innovation in the wrong way. They're asking their leadership to do things that don't make sense and as a result, what we really need is to figure out how to do system innovation well and then use that to go to management with a clear set of here's how we're going to approach this disruptive change.

Dan McClure: So let me give you a few examples of things that people do wrong when they go and talk to senior management. The first thing is they arrive and deliver a dead rat. So they walk through the door and they say, "The world is ending. Everything is going to go bad and we need to change something." And then they stop talking and they've delivered the dead rat, but they don't actually have a solution. And this is often way easier to do than actually coming up with a solution for a hard disruptive market change. If you were to imagine your newspaper co, a newspaper, and you've got print editions and this is your business, and certainly I'm sure lots of people ran into management offices saying the world is coming to an end. Much harder to come up with, and now what do we do? So that's the first thing is the system innovator, the person who's proposing these changes actually has to think through what it is they want to see.

Dan McClure: The second piece is they need to come in with a solution that is complete and compelling. So it's not enough to simply say, "We need to make this one little foray into some change. We need to add a mobile app." For a while there it was, we could become a digital company simply by adding a mobile app for example. I think servitization often becomes the same sort of silver bullet solution, is we'll simply add a bit more service onto our product, do what we've always done. And what the system innovator needs to do is if they're going to go to management, they need to come up with a big enough and powerful enough system change that it actually does create new differentiated value.

Dan McClure: And finally, they need to go with a strategy that basically manages the risk. You're asking an organization to take big leaps in faith, plow into areas of uncertainty and so you need a strategy that allows you to evolve this new market opportunity. Evolve this new disruptive system over time. And it can't be we're going to invest for four years, put millions of dollars into it and then see if it works at the end. There have to be early points of feedback, all the way along the way to show that this is all working. I think if you do that well, we'll find that a lot of those senior leaders that seemed like they might be anti-change, are very appreciative of the fact that they don't want their company to fail either and they have a real opportunity here. Here's something they can actually act on with faith.

Sarah Nicastro: So it just makes me think, what is it then that would drive someone within the organization to take that on, because it does sound daunting. So at the beginning when you've mentioned you've had the good luck of being in these burning buildings, I mean it sounds like you have looked at this through the lens of liking the challenge and seeing the opportunity and wanting to do this work of presenting a solution and seeing it through. What is it within a person that you think gives them the likelihood to want to spearhead systems innovation?

Dan McClure: So I think it's really fascinating that there are different types of roles within organizations, that we've clearly defined. We know what a manager's role is and what the skills are that go with that. So you need somebody who's organized, who has good attention to detail. We understand in many ways that executives are good about exercising control and being able to take bold moves, et cetera. When we look at systems innovation, there is an unnamed role that is I think far more common than people realize. But it's a type of person that we've labeled as a choreographer. And their focus is really ... Their passion is about new ideas. And not small new ideas like we've made a bit of change in the production line. But rather, this is a big bold idea that gets me excited. So at the risk of citing guys who have been launching themselves into space, the Elon Musks, the Richard Branson, the Jeff Bezos, are all these sort of excited by big idea people. Regardless of how you feel about them individually, you can certainly get the sense that there's a group of people that are excited about big ideas.

Dan McClure: The other aspects of that type of personality is they tend to look at big pictures rather than at the details. So when they look at an opportunity, they don't see the small things that stand in their way. They see the big connection of how all the piece fit together. And they're fostered in that by the ability to be generalists. So one of the phrases that I really dislike is the, "he's a jack of all trades, but a master or none." A generalist is basically a specialist in everything. A specialist in seeing across things. So they don't necessarily know the details of everything, but they see how a lot of things fit together. And when you combine this sort of passion for big ideas, the ability to see the big picture, a generalist background, along with a certain rebel attitude of what being willing to break thing apart, you end up with somebody who not only is able to accept that kind of challenge, but who fits actually very poorly in most other jobs and so they need to go find those types of challenges if they're going to be happy.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So here's my next question then. So if you think about, let's just take an example of an organization that manufactures something, has been around for 100 plus years and there is this disruption happening, but this tendency towards incremental improvement versus true innovation. Do you think that it's possible for somehow that organization to find this talent, motivation, inspiration, skill set among itself, or is there a benefit to seeking outside perspective or different roles, different talent if you're trying to make some progress in this area?

Dan McClure: So what's interesting about choreographers, because they don't have an official job title, often times there are choreographers wandering your hall and you're not even aware of it. So part of it is simply just being aware of the choreographers that you have. You probably have some that have been banging around, looking at the bit problems, excited about ideas, but haven't been recognized for their ability to do this. So part of it is just look at the groups that are within your organization. A second feature here though is, don't kill them off. So most organizations are actually well designed to identify choreographers and get rid of them because they disrupt the way things work.

Dan McClure: Christensen talked a lot about this, just there are people who within organizations will try to bring up new ideas and the organization is designed to stop them from doing that. So part of it is just removing the immune system to these types of people. But the reality is most of these individuals have very random resumes. So I've been talking about my own resume being a fruit salad of all these different things all tumbled together across multiple industries. If you're going to go out and look for choreographers, look for people who have the skill of dealing with big disruptive ideas, rather than somebody who's a specialist in your industry, who's had a particular job title, et cetera. You're really looking for a unique type of person rather than a particular career path.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, that makes sense. Going back to the question that I brought up about knowing when is the time and recognizing disruption, and you point about often times it's well underway when you have that aha moment, but there're companies that are choosing to nurture disruption and to embrace it and to try and be ahead of the curve. And then there are those that are responding to disruption by force. So are there differences in approach that need to be taken with systems innovation for an organization that is sort of being more proactive versus reactive? Does that make sense?

Dan McClure: Yeah. I think, so the first thing I would observe here is, many of the things that companies do to check off the I'm an innovator check box, are really pretty ineffective and they're designed for either incremental or irrelevant innovation. So there was a period of time where every company wanted to have a hackathon and there were big company celebrations around here's all the ideas that came out of our hackathon. Those types of events very, very seldom produce substantial systemic change, because they're small ideas imagined in the moment without deep connection to where the company is or where it's going. Likewise, innovation labs, where a few privileged innovators are given a space to go off and test out new ideas et cetera, very seldom successful in actually scaling up ideas. And to go back to the idea of spin offs. Perhaps you create a spin off company that could go and test out an idea.

Dan McClure: The problem with all of these is they essentially isolate the change in a corner of the company. And what you really need for this type of disruptive deep change, the type that's going to allow you to capture a new market place is you need to be weaving change throughout the entire organization, which makes it a much more enterprise wide effort. And so it has to be technology, it has to be business, it has to be senior leadership. It has to be middle management. Middle management is often the biggest barrier to a lot of these changes. So when we look at a genuinely agile organization, it's somebody who's able to take all the pieces of their organization and engage them in these new ideas.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So can you tell me why it is that middle management is often the sticking point here?

Dan McClure: Yeah. So the phrase that you often hear is the frozen middle. So people on the ground are often choreographers, can have ideas, they see things that are new that are different. They are generally focusing on particular problems and challenges, and so they can get excited about those. Senior leaders see the big market challenges, the dangers, et cetera and often times they will bring in specific people who are charged with making all those new and different strategies go. Middle management is basically in the role of making the organization as it is work. And both their job security and the nature of their job, puts them in a position where they need to keep the status quo what it is and as a result they're going to be hesitant to raise up ideas from below and they're going to resist the types of deeper systemic change, even if it's coming from above.

Sarah Nicastro: So then how does an organization counterbalance that?

Dan McClure: So you really have to intentionally plan to do system change. And that's where we'll come back here to the concept of system innovation. System innovation basically says, I'm not simply changing a process or an output, like a feature or a product. But rather I'm changing the way everything works to achieve a new type of goal. And so the entire effort has to be around all those different types of change. And that means that you need a vision of what that whole change is going to be. But you also need the choreographers to work across the organization to make all those pieces of change happen. So you basically are designing your entire organization to be embracing this kind of change.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Now you said earlier that a lot of times companies put in place things that they think are fostering innovation that really aren't, so the examples of the hackathon or the innovation lab, et cetera. Is there any sort of self-reflection test or criteria a company can use to determine, do we think we're innovating, but we're really just continuing to promote incremental change maybe at a better than average pace? Do you know what I mean?

Dan McClure: Oh yeah, absolutely. So frankly, if they were promoting incremental change at a better than average pace, that would still be a positive outcome. Frequently what you see with these programs is really nothing is happening. So the first piece would be simply measuring what your actual outcomes are from these operations and whether it's a lab or a hackathon. Not how many things were generated this week in the hackathon, but rather for last year's hackathon how many of those things actually went into practice. So there could be just some discipline in classic lean fashion of how much did this change matter to me?

Dan McClure: I think more fundamentally though, as we've talked about just more, better incremental change is not going to be enough. And so the real question is, how do I know that I'm on the path for doing something deeper and more systemic. And there it really begins with understanding that there is a systemic change that you want to make and putting that front and center of everything and then starting to build in measures around how close am I to making this systemic change. It becomes really a case of refocusing yourself on that bigger, deeper change.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So talk to me about the role of agile in all of this and then also some of the misperceptions of what that means.

Dan McClure: So for a lot of folks, both the phrase systems and the phrase agile is tied to technology teams. And there are certainly uses of those terms. So if we're talking agile as far as agile software development, what that really is a more flexible business aware form of software delivery. It allows for less upfront design and allows you to deliver software in ways that you could learn as you go along. That's great stuff. You should be doing that no matter what. Agile applied to an enterprise level is really a much bigger change. And what you're really talking about there is the organization can exhibit agile practices. They can identify long term goals. They can adapt and change. They can respond to insights as they go along.

Dan McClure: All of these things are at really a different level than agile technology teams. And so while we've called them the same thing and they have some of the same principles, learn as you go along, have clear goals of where you're going et cetera, it's a very different type of journey for the organization and you shouldn't assume that you can simply take your agile scrum coach and throw them into the enterprise and you'll get the kind of results that you want. Because what you're really trying to do is a much different type of creation. You're creating a new system in the organization rather than creating a new piece of software.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Now is there advice about how to adopt a more agile mindset and business mentality?

Dan McClure: So is an element at the senior level of beginning to recognize where you want to go from an opportunity perspective. So instead of focusing on scheduling the projects that you're going to do in the next year, understand the opportunities that you want to pursue. The advantage here is that once you've shifted to think about opportunities, you can continue to change the way you approach and pursue those, rather than simply saying, "I've now executed this project and it didn't really didn't make a difference whether I changed anything in the marketplace or not." So this shifting the executive focus to opportunities and where do you want to go. So what are these big new things you want to do?

Dan McClure: Then when you start to make change across the enterprise, you're going to want to do it in a vertical slice. So it's going to be very difficult to get the entire enterprise to change all at once. So instead, pick a layer of executive, middle management and folks on the ground who can all work together around a new idea. And that type of slice will allow executive sponsorship, middle management, operational control and hands on work on the ground to actually all work together around the change. And then move additional thin slices as you go through.

Sarah Nicastro: Now is there a typical slice that usually works well, or it just depends on the industry, the organization, et cetera?

Dan McClure: I would say it depends on the system you're trying to create. But the key thing here is to note that opportunities come from bolting many things together, multiple things together. So your thin slice won't necessarily be just the marketing operation. It may well be multiple pieces of very different things that all need to work together to create this new opportunity.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And that sort of higher level orchestration, the elimination of silos, they change management of getting everyone bought into these concepts, I mean, that is the hard hard work. I mean, those are the things that come up time and time again in the conversations we have here about why regardless of what that opportunity is, it can be very, very hard to make progress. So yeah, this is great insight, Dan. I wanted to ask what are you favorite sources of insight or motivation related to innovation and considering how to make progress here?

Dan McClure: I think one of the things that's really exciting is, for a long time, if you were a system innovator, there was not a lot of language around what we did. So there was sort of very academic abstract systems thinking books that you could get. And then there was a lot of sort of management theory books about some details of ways that you might do bigger strategies. But there wasn't a lot about people who were actually doing system change. It's exciting in the last year and a half perhaps, to see the level of embrace of practical system change. And so I think one of the things you could do is simply look for examples of places here people have changed the way things work and look at how they did that. And I would strongly advise to look outside your particular field. It's often easy in your own domain to get trapped into the idea that's the hot new idea and think of that as the innovation. Whereas really the question is, is how do you make systems work differently? How do you make the organization work differently and bring together different pieces? And for that, being the generalist, looking outside your own particular domain, can provide a lot of inspiration.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. I mean the idea here is not following the latest trend to be able to orchestrate yourselves to deliver on that. It's this concept of re-engineering the way your business works to be able to recognize and deliver on opportunities. Whatever those are and as they change. I mean-

Dan McClure: And it's complex opportunities. It's not we were the first person to pick up X and then we were the first person to pick up Y. But rather, it's we re-imagined how this manufacturing business might go if we thoroughly integrated service to the product offering. Or we imagined how we could be more customized in the delivery of services to customers. And those aren't a series of one off type additions. They're really reshaping the way the organization works and creates value.

Sarah Nicastro: ... Right. Right. Okay, this is some wonderful food for thought. Do you have any closing thoughts or last words of wisdom before we wrap up for today?

Dan McClure: I don't know, if I was in an organization that was on the cusp of being a burning building, whether or not the flames have come out or not, I think if I was the choreographer, I would say rise to the challenge. See the big opportunities there and learn how to make big ideas acceptable to leadership. And for leadership I would say recognize that this big change that you want to do is going to require you to change things across the entire enterprise and you're going to need the support of choreographers within your organization to do that. So there's a real opportunity for everybody here to rise to exciting new challenges, and I think while it's exciting as all get out, it's also pretty exciting.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. It's a little bit of both. All right, well Dan, thank you so much for being here with us today. I appreciate it.

Dan McClure: Thank you very much.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at the Future of FS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more by visiting IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Let’s be clear – no one is suggesting that continual improvement isn’t a good thing. However, what deserves some real exploring is whether incremental improvement is killing true innovation within your business. There are a number of reasons this can happen – incremental improvement can feel like “enough” if your business is achieving success; even as opportunity for true innovation abounds. Incremental improvement feels safe, whereas innovation can be scary. And, perhaps worst of all, you are focusing on incremental improvement under the guise of innovation – in other words, you don’t really see the difference.

In any of these instances, it is time to break up with the idea of incremental improvement and accept the fact that today’s market landscape demands true innovation. I recently had a conversation with Dan McClure, systems innovation choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem, which you’ll see soon on the podcast. It was clear in the first few minutes of our talk that Dan isn’t one to shy away from the challenges of true innovation, and he’s created a career from his inclination and passion for it in helping companies embrace real innovation.

“Most organizations are in the habit of working. They have built up a set of systems, they've built up a value proposition. They've built up a marketplace. That all work together to essentially deliver value to their customers and to their shareholders and to their employees. Everything works,” says Dan. “And for those types of organizations, simply making an incremental change to make things a bit better makes them more profitable, more competitive. Sustains their role in the marketplace. The challenge is, if they need to make a bigger change, let's say a competitor comes in and offers a radically better proposition, or the fundamental basis for their marketplace disappears, then they can't make small changes to the way things work, because those won't be enough.”

Disruption Can Be an Opportunity or a Threat

What Dan’s referring to is disruption as a threat, which is a very common viewpoint. What happens if a new competitor enters our market with a compelling offer? How do we pivot if the need for our core product declines drastically? What do we do when our value becomes commoditized? These are the type of disruptive circumstances that kick companies into gear when it comes to taking action – but of course, they have to hope it isn’t too late.

But it’s important to remember that disruption can also originate as an opportunity. Perhaps you see a gap in your customers’ needs that isn’t currently being met, but to jump in and address that need will be disruptive to your organization. Disruption as an opportunity can sometimes be more challenging in the sense that it is far easier to squander. Whereas disruption as a threat is obvious and forces action, disruption as an opportunity can be more subtle and easier to overlook – particularly when your current business is performing well. Weighing the decision of disruption when it is an opportunity versus a threat is an important skill to practice.

With disruption of both types rampant in a number of industries today, meeting these threats and opportunities with innovation is imperative. But companies commonly default to the comfort zone of incremental improvement. “An incremental project is going to be easier to sell, lower risk to execute, and easier to adopt. And that's a very attractive thing in an organization. Nobody wants to be the person who's spearheading a failed project,” explains Dan. “Now contrast that to a disruptive change, which requires an entire system to change. Here we're saying, ‘We're going to imagine a much bigger opportunity, we're going to have to hypothesize over what we think the opportunity is, we're going to have to change lots of different pieces and put in new things that nobody's thought about before really carefully and therefore the risks are going to be higher. And finally, we're going to have to get everybody else onto an entirely new page.’ If you compare selling those two projects, it's a heck of a lot easier to sell that small incremental project. And at the same time, it's the big disruptive system change project that really offers the hope of getting past these big threats that we were talking about earlier.”

The Art of Selling Innovative Change

With both the threat and opportunities of disruption high, it’s important for stakeholders across the business to become more comfortable with the unknowns and discomfort that embracing innovation brings. That said, as Dan points out, some of the discomfort can be alleviated with a more refined approach to suggesting innovation. If you recognize an opportunity or threat within your company, make sure you think about what innovation you think is needed before you articulate the need. “Let me give you a few examples of things that people do wrong when they go and talk to senior management about innovation. The first thing is they arrive and deliver a dead rat,” says Dan. “So, they walk through the door and they say, ‘The world is ending. Everything is going to go bad and we need to change something.’ And then they stop talking and they've delivered the dead rat, but they don't actually have a solution. As the innovator, the person who's proposing the change actually has to think through what it is they want to see.”

As you envision an innovative change to address disruption, be sure you don’t inch back into an incremental approach. “Come in with a solution that is complete and compelling. It's not enough to make one little foray into some change.,” warns Dan. “I think Servitization is a good example because companies think, ‘we'll simply add a bit more service onto our product, do what we've always done.’ What the system innovator needs to do is if they're going to go to management is come up with a big enough and powerful enough system change that it truly does create new, differentiated value.”

Finally, consider how to not eliminate but minimize risk. Risk is inherent in innovation and it needs to become more comfortable for companies looking to take market-leading positions, but that doesn’t mean it should be a free for all or that strategies shouldn’t be explored to minimize risk. “You're asking an organization to take big leaps in faith, plow into areas of uncertainty and so you need a strategy that allows you to evolve this new market opportunity over time,” says Dan. “And it can't be we're going to invest for four years, put millions of dollars into it and then see if it works at the end. There must be early points of feedback, all the way along the way to show that this is all working. I think if you do that well, we'll find that a lot of those senior leaders that seemed like they might be anti-change, are very appreciative of the fact that they don't want their company to fail either and they have a real opportunity here.”

By Tom Paquin

This is part of an ongoing series on the state and standards of service management software. Here are the previous articles in the series:

For businesses working with large, complex assets, whether it be in manufacturing, utilities, telecommunications, or simply service operations, there’s a growing necessity to develop a sound strategy for how assets impact your service workflow. As we’ve discussed previously (and like any major business initiative), doing so is not as simple as switching on a lightbulb. There’s naturally a timeline of events that need to occur in a logical sequence in order to initiate or overhaul an asset-centric service practice.

This all starts with IoT.

It Starts with a Good Data Stream

I’ve said this before, but bad data begets bad data. That is why it’s important, within any data model, to have a strong process in place to collect, validate, and process data. Within the context of asset-centric service, this often means that we’re talking about IoT. As with anything that we talk about here, there are plenty of resources, use cases, and best practices that you can call on to support what that looks like in a variety of different contexts.

IoT, largely, functions as a vector through which you analyze things like work history, which will benchmark an asset’s condition against the needs for service previously in order to predict service needs. A frequently overlooked way that IoT can be used is considering an asset within the broader context of your organization, where it organizationally fits within an ecosystem that may not, in some cases, be under your direct control. There’s also, of course, the direct monitoring of data, which can be used to assess asset condition during remote repairs, or simply to identify outages, and understand where, downstream, those outages are happening.

This is, of course, the first step. Next is to consider the software you’re using to manage your assets, and what it’s offering your business. That’s what we’ll discuss next time.

Catherine Wood, Service owner, Engineered Deployment at Compugen, talks with Sarah about the role of creativity in IT and how she views it as an art form as well as her experiences as a woman in IT leadership and the advice she'd pass along to newcomers.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking about the art of IT. Yes. You heard that correctly. We're going to be talking about how IT relates to art. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Catherine Wood, who is the Service Owner for Engineering Deployment at Compugen. Catherine, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Catherine Wood: Hi, thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. So before we talk about where are the worlds of art and IT collide, why don't you say hello to our listeners, tell them a little bit about yourself and your role with Compugen?

Catherine Wood: Sure. Well, I've been with Compugen for 15 years. Before that I was with IBM. I am currently the Service Owner for Engineered Deployment. So the installations across the country, very technical services role. And that's about it. I've been in IT for about 20 years.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So let's talk about your life before IT. So I found this interesting when we connected, it hasn't always been IT for you. You went to school for fine arts and you were a teacher at one point. So tell us a little bit about that and how this transition to the world of IT occurred.

Catherine Wood: Yeah. It's been a strange road. I went to school for fine art. I loved art, always have, but I've always been interested in computers since I was a kid. When I was finished school and started having a family, I wanted to go back to work after my kids were in school. So I took a computer courses at a local computer college, but just to be able to use a computer again, been a while, but I got a job as a teacher, teaching arts. I was teaching art for a while and I moved to a couple of different schools. But at one point I was teaching at a private school and their computer teacher left and they knew I had this computer background. So they asked me to fill in and they needed a teacher fastest. So I all of a sudden became a computer teacher and it turned into me only being a computer teacher after a few years. And from there I went to IBM and now I'm here.

Sarah Nicastro: And the rest is history.

Catherine Wood: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Okay. So this correlation between art and IT, so you said that one of the reasons you love IT is because for you, it requires the same type of creativity that art does. So talk a little bit more about what you mean by that.

Catherine Wood: Well, first of all, the exciting part to me is you could do anything with a computer, whether that's programming or automating, it's very creative. All you have to do is dream it up. Computer programming is just another medium. It's just like oil painting or water painting or writing or film. It's just another medium. And it requires that somebody dreams up something new to do with it. And so it requires that creative process right at the beginning, what do I want to do? What problems am I trying to solve? And from there, then you decide on the technical pieces and you put the technical pieces together about how to build it, but the dreaming it up, that's absolutely creative.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So you paint. So when you are going to paint, do you have in mind what you want to create?

Catherine Wood: Yes. Me personally, I do. Not everybody is like that. Some people get in front of a Canvas and they just start. Me personally, I do. I have an idea in mind. I have something I want to say, something I want to communicate. So I will start with sketches and then outline. And sometimes you do color samples and you test different things on test canvases. Absolutely. Plan it all out beforehand.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I was just thinking about the consideration of those two mediums, if you will. So thinking about your process when you paint and the process of an IT project and you have a vision in mind for where you want to be and that process of working towards it and the use of technology as a medium is the creative journey. I think there it... Just the reason I was asking is I was thinking if you had a different type of creative process where you just sat down and painted, and you didn't know what you were trying to get out before you start.

Catherine Wood: Well sure. I mean, if you're going out and you're painting something spontaneously or you're painting outside but you're still choosing what it is you want to do. You're not trying to create a great work of art or necessarily, you're trying to paint what's in front of you. So yeah. In that case, you're not doing a lot of planning other than making sure that you have all the tools you need with here. There's still not. And you have to be skilled enough with the medium that you're working with too, whether that's paint or whether that's computers, or IT in general, what is it capable of doing so that I know when I get inside in front of something that I can do whatever it is I want to do.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Just it's interesting because it had me thinking a bit about and I know agile becomes a tricky word, but just the idea of what you can find or learn as you're going through the process. So the idea of maintaining some level of flexibility. So as you embark on a journey, either journey, you're going to create as you're going along to some extent, so okay.

Catherine Wood: Actually an interesting point about that. So part of creativity is not creating something right up front, like starting to sit it down and write a program or build something, but how you're going to find creative solutions for the limitations or the challenges that come up. And I think that speaks to the agile piece that you're talking about there, where coming up with creative solutions to things that come up in front of you are really part of the creative process and all part of it. You're constantly creative as you're trying to problem solve.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So let's talk about this idea of creativity for a minute. So you hear people say, well, I'm not creative. And then there's people that wholeheartedly identify themselves as a creative. So there's two ends of that spectrum. Do you feel like people either are, or aren't creative? Do you feel everyone is and it's just a matter of whether it's tapped or untapped. Like what do you think about that?

Catherine Wood: Well, yeah. People look at me like I have two heads. I'm creative in IT, that can't possibly work. How does that work? So I think I innately feel that everybody has a creativity that they don't make it necessarily recognized in themselves. I mean, somebody who builds their own deck or renovates a house, or even cooks or bakes or how about creates a PowerPoint presentation because they have to for business. To do that those are all creative endeavors. And I think people fail to recognize in themselves when they're creative. I hear that all the time. I can't even draw a stick figure. I'm not good at that. But people are creative in so many different ways. They just don't recognize it. And so they don't give themselves that credit and they don't have the confidence to say that I can create something new when they do it every day in other areas of their life.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So I think confidence is a really good point. But if we take that a layer deeper, I think that this idea of how creativity fits into the way you just explained it into all of these different work projects and processes that we do or could be responsible for. Part of it is confidence. It's kind of like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Catherine Wood: Sure.

Sarah Nicastro: But I think the other thing is in terms of corporate culture, it isn't necessarily urged in the sense of an employer may think it's great if they have a creative employee, but they're not necessarily giving people the space or the fail-safe environment that they might need to feel that they have the latitude to explore their creativity or build that creative confidence. Does that make sense?

Catherine Wood: Yeah. No, absolutely. Creativity, well, has been traditionally not thought of in business or in IT. So I definitely think there's some, it's undervalued there for sure. I think that's changing. The employers are starting to see where creativity needs to come in to problem solve. And if you look at any CEO or anything else, to be able to change is a creative action itself, but it is undervalued. But I think that it also takes a leadership team or the leadership needs to be able to provide the trust. People need to be able to trust that they can take chances and that they can try things and fail and fail fast and recover.

Catherine Wood: And that's all creativity, but that comes from the leadership down. Absolutely. The other thing is that I really think is the organizations don't tend to value that time, where someone is sitting in themselves and just giving themselves the space to stop and think and people have been told our whole lives. You're sitting there doing nothing. What are you doing? You're not doing nothing. You're thinking about... you're problem solving. You're thinking about things. Your mind is wandering. You're making connections that you wouldn't be able to make if you didn't give your mind that kind space.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's such a big part of it. Everyone's busy, everyone's overtaxed and it can be really hard as individuals and then for organizations to prioritize the white space that tapes to have time to think creatively, definitely something that I struggled with a little bit. I always blocked time in my calendar and never keep it. So, yeah. So is there any tips you have either, again as an individual or as a leader for how to give yourself some of that creative space or provide that creative space to your employees?

Catherine Wood: Well, for myself, it really is that set the time in your calendar and keep it. You need to have time to think about things to problem-solve, to strategize, all of that kind of thing. You need to give yourself that space. For my teams, I try and for team members that really are comfortable doing that or don't have time, I'll try and get on a call with them and brainstorm with them and then give them the time and space to take it away and say, look, this is a priority that we solve this or that we find a strategy for this. So we'll start to brainstorm and Hey, why don't you take that away and see what else you can do with it? What else can you come up with? And that's encouraging that creativity time. And hopefully they understand that they can take that and they can take the space to do that. It is a priority and it's a part of their job.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. Can you share an example of what it looks like to use your creativity in practice in IT at Compugen?

Catherine Wood: Oh, it's pretty messy. I use a lot of whiteboards. And when we were locked down in the pandemic, one of the first things I did was run out and order. Now I have a lot of easels around, so I have an easel in front of my desk here and by all sorts of big newsprint and colored markers. And so when I do book myself, that time that I need to write it down or I need to see something visually, or I can do a mind map or where I'm just brainstorming with myself and trying to let my mind free flow, different concepts in different words.

Catherine Wood: And then I can sit back and I'm a visual person, obviously I'm a painter, so I can sit back and I can look at it again and from a distance and say, oh yeah, okay, that works or that doesn't work, or, oh yeah. What was I thinking? I'm a visual person. So I use those kinds of mediums to try and work on something creative if I'm doing it just the same as I would, if I'm painting where I'm going to do a bunch of sketches beforehand and sketch it out, what works, what doesn't.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). That makes sense. So let's talk a little bit, shifting gears slightly, when you first transitioned into IT, we talked about the fact that, so you said that was 20 years ago. And you said you were often the only woman in the room. So how much or little would you say that that has changed?

Catherine Wood: It has changed. It's slow, but it has changed. I'm not as often the only woman in the room. Men are more comfortable seeing women in IT. And we're seeing more women in leadership roles in IT, which gives other women the confidence to be able to say, Hey, I can see myself there or I can succeed in this. It's unfortunate. It's still happens where you get questions. But and even just a few weeks ago, I was in a meeting and someone tried to explain to me where the start menu is.

Catherine Wood: He knew we both work in IT. He knows the company I work for. He knows my role. And he's explaining to me how to find the start menu. I don't keep quiet in those situations. I used to when I was younger, but I don't anymore. And I really asked him as politely as possible. I asked him what makes you think that you need to explain to me where the start menu is? And I know he was uncomfortable, he was. But I said, Hey, look, if you're wondering, ask before you explain something like this. So it is changing. When I first started at Compugen, there was no women in upper leadership and there are now, and that goes across the industry. So it's so exciting and women bring new perspectives and new problem solving and new experiences to IT that I think really expands and helps solve the problems of the world that we're all trying to deal with right now. But yeah. There's still ways to go.

Sarah Nicastro: Work to do, yes.

Catherine Wood: Yeah. Work to do.

Sarah Nicastro: What would you say have been the biggest challenges of often being the only woman in the room?

Catherine Wood: Hmm. I often feel, I have to give my resume every time I'm in a new room and I'm asked questions that nobody would think of asking a man, because if he's in that room, he's already qualified to be in that where they see a woman walk in and they think, oh, she can't possibly be technical, or she can't possibly know anything about this. Women get talked over. We still get spoken or talked over in meetings or dismissed or someone will say something and will get ignored. The conversation will just keep going. Those are still challenges that we deal with today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you hear a lot about, you hear the term like microaggressions, you know. And it is really true. There's a lot of things that get said that I question, "Would somebody say that to a man?" And it's not always malicious, but that doesn't change the impact of it. And so it's very easy to say or think, oh, they probably didn't mean it that way. But it's still harmful even if there isn't mal-intent behind it.

Catherine Wood: Well, isn't that just the same boys will be boys kind of excuse. Like they didn't mean it that way. Just move on, get over it. If it happened once in my lifetime, I'd get over it.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure.

Catherine Wood: When it happens multiple times a day, it starts to have an impact on me. And maybe it's multiple people during the day and they all didn't mean it. But the challenge is changing everyone's understanding of what that is not dismissing the fact that it has an impact on the people it's happening to.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So you gave the example of the start menu the other day and speaking up about that, and you said you wouldn't have always spoke up. So can you talk a little bit about what do you think helped you find that voice and being more comfortable using it and what might you say to a younger woman who's starting a career in a male dominated field in terms of not maybe waiting as long to speak out or speak up.

Catherine Wood: Hmm. Those are a few different questions in there.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I have a tendency to do that.

Catherine Wood: Okay. Well, let me see. I might start with the second one. What I would say to someone who's younger than me is advice based on what I had to learn, which is first be a sponge, learn everything that you can from every interaction, because there's always something that you're going to take to the next meeting, to the next project so learn everything that you can. And the other thing is, don't worry about it. If you ask a question and you think it's stupid or forgive yourself, if you make a comment and somebody gives you a look like I ask it that, just let it. Forgive yourself, because we are so hard on ourselves that we're going to say the wrong thing or somebody's going to think less of it. Nobody's thinking that. Nobody in the room knows everything. Everybody contributing makes goes towards that shared goal of solving the problem of moving that project to completion of great customer experience, all of those kinds of things.

Catherine Wood: So speak up. Even if you think that it's stupid or it's wrong, it's a bad question, or maybe you're wrong. I was in the room. And so to address the first question, what did it for me was leadership. People who would call someone out in a meeting who hadn't spoken, do a round table at the end of the meeting so that everybody gets a chance to vocalize something. What do you think? And what do you think and what do you think? And leadership that would say, "Hey, Catherine, we haven't heard from you, did you have anything?" "Well, yeah, yeah, I do. And the more you do it, the more confident you get. And so leadership goes a long way towards giving people that confidence, men and women, young men have the same problem. Men and women, giving young people the confidence to speak up and say something in these projects and in these meetings.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's such a good point because some of this issue, the issue of learning to use your voice. Yes. It's something that everyone's personally responsible for. And you want to work on and work on doing well. But that point, I think, is an important one because there are ways that leaders can really help enable that rather than just sitting back and waiting for everyone to miraculously build their own confidence level enough to verbalize their thoughts and feelings. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I think it's also a good point that the idea of asking questions. I've shared a story a bunch of times about very early in my writing career. It was actually the first like case that a type article I ever wrote.

Sarah Nicastro: And I didn't understand probably 80% of what the guy said to me in the interview, but I didn't want to seem stupid. And so I just did a lot of aha. And then I tried to write an article based on that. And the copy editor just threw it back at me and said, call him back. And I had to call him back and so it was a good lesson and just asking and once I became comfortable in really any situation, just saying I don't really understand what you mean. Can you explain it to me differently? Or I've never come across someone that wasn't willing and it's helped me learn so much just by being able to, you know, ask for clarification or examples or details, you know?

Sarah Nicastro: And then the final thing, I think is the example that you shared from the other day with that gentlemen. I think it is important to, you said he was uncomfortable and you're probably at a point in your career where you could have just easily ignored it or blown them off. Like, you don't need to point that out to make yourself feel better or different. But I think it is important to do because in a lot of cases, like I said, there's things that get said that it's not ill intent, but it's unnecessary and it shouldn't happen. And so it does take someone who has built up the confidence to speak out so that maybe that person thinks a bit about how they're coming across and can acknowledge that behavior so...

Catherine Wood: Right. And it wasn't trying to... My goal wasn't to make him uncomfortable obviously. But my goal was to gently educate him. Because he wasn't doing it on purpose. He was trying to help. He really thought he was trying to help, but he just was going about it in a way that he needed to think about it a little bit more and be aware of.

Sarah Nicastro: And he was probably uncomfortable because he cared about the fact that he had come across that way.

Catherine Wood: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: If he was doing it maliciously, he probably wouldn't have been uncomfortable so much as combative or dismissive. I think that discomfort comes from any time you realize you've done something wrong and you care about what you've done. You feel that discomfort. And to your point from earlier, you have to forgive yourself. You do as best as you can until you know, better and then you do better.

Catherine Wood: And then you do better.

Sarah Nicastro: So hopefully that'll help him.

Catherine Wood: Sure.

Sarah Nicastro: A couple other questions. So before you were with Compugen, you changed roles pretty often because you liked variety, you liked new challenges and now you've been with Compugen for 15 years. And so when I asked you what made you stick around, we talked about the culture and how as a woman and especially a working mom, the culture has been a really good fit for you.

Sarah Nicastro: This is a conversation I think is very important because also being a woman and also being a working mom, I started my motherhood in a career, in a workplace that was not a very working mom friendly culture and come to be a part of IFS and to be in this role, it's really honestly changed my life. I mean, it has made me feel that I can excel in both my career and my role as a mom at the same time, without constantly feeling like I'm sacrificing in any area. Of course, it's still a lot to juggle. I mean, we all know that, but it's at least impossible. So can you talk a little bit about as companies look to continue to bring more women into the workplace, particularly into IT roles and things like that, what are some of the aspects of culture that you think are particularly important and beneficial?

Catherine Wood: Well, first and foremost, I would say flexibility. I mean, women are responsible for so much when it comes to the family. Rightly or wrongly, I'm not going to debate that one way or the other at the moment. But at the end of the day, when it comes to dentist appointments, doctor's appointments, dealing with schools, all of those kinds of things, they tend to fall more on the mom, on the woman in the household. And so to be able to have an environment that you've got some flexibility with your schedule, whether that's here's your deadline, you meet your deadline and you figure out how you're going to meet that deadline, or whether it's just, you are in an environment where if you have to say, I have to run out to my child's school, something happened, they just fell off the swing set or something.

Catherine Wood: And you can say that without fearing for your job or that it's going to negatively impact your career. The flexibility that I was afforded in my first few roles went a long way to that. It really gave me a quality of life and feel and quality to my children's life and my family that I could be there for them. And that only made me want to work for Compugen even more and even harder and do everything I could to help the organization succeed. And I think organizations miss that. Some organizations who don't do that really miss the point that doing that will make the employees work so much harder for you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It pays dividends.

Catherine Wood: It definitely does.

Sarah Nicastro: I really really believe that. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Catherine Wood: Yeah, I do too. Compugen has employees who have been there for well, and I still feel like the new girl at 15 years, because they've got 15, 20, 25, 30. There's a lot of employees that stay and stay for a long time. And that's a real indication of a great corporate culture. So that's a lot of it. The other part of it that made me stay personally is I worked in all these different jobs and different roles and I think this is career number six for me overall.

Catherine Wood: And I like variety. So I don't have a role right now. And I haven't in the last 15 years where it's the same day, every day. I'm not doing the same thing all day, every day, the kind of variety and choose what I'm working on right now. I mean, I have a list that I've been given. I have to do all of this, but I don't have to do it all in a certain order. As long as I get them done by my deadlines or a new problem comes up that I have to solve, or a new project comes out that has a different, so that gives me the variety to keep me interested and keep me excited about what it is I'm doing. And they afforded me opportunities to succeed. Like I have been in multiple roles in Compugen. And so I've been able to feel like I can grow my career, that I'm valued, that I'm respected. All of that is that corporate culture in Compugen specifically which has really kept me here.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I just think it's an interesting dynamic. There's huge conversations happening right now around what will the future of work look like and how are we going to attract and hire and retain talent, all over the board, from leadership all the way to the front line and I think this whole idea of re-examining company culture and really thinking about what your employee experience is like, and is it conducive to the type of experience that the level of talent you want to attract is going to want for themselves? And some of the things we're talking about, it's not trips to Aruba every year and $50,000 bonus. I mean, it's nothing ridiculous that is so important. They are things that are absolutely attainable if people are just willing to reflect and think through and that sort of thing.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think it's important for across the board. I think particularly the idea that we talked about as working moms, I think that we bring a lot to the table, but there's some of those key factors that are going to be extra, extra important. And I think the point you made about being, given that flexibility, making you only care and be more loyal is absolutely true. Okay. Last question for today is as a leader, but I'm also going to ask you as an artist, what are your biggest sources of inspiration?

Catherine Wood: Hmm. People. People are my biggest source of inspiration. As a leader, I really only want to be of service to people. It's about my team. It's about giving them everything they need to succeed personally and to be able to succeed and for the organization to succeed and to guide them and to be of service to them. In my art and creativity, it's still people, it's learning in so many different ways from so many different people. So mentorship means a lot to me. Me mentoring, because you get so much back when you mentor, but also me having a mentor and guidance and different kinds of medium like podcasts and books and other people's experiences. That brings me so much inspiration for where I want to go and what I want to do. People is my biggest source of inspiration. And it's also what I paint. I paint. I do a lot. All of my paintings revolve around the human form and portraiture and things like that. So, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Very cool. Very cool. All right, Catherine. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I really appreciate being here.

Catherine Wood: Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks. You can find out more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I talk to leaders all the time who are frustrated with their company’s lack of progress when it comes to embracing the potential that Servitization and delivering outcomes holds. This frustration is understandable, but it isn’t surprising – there’s a lot of deep-rooted legacy that holds many companies back from the world of potential that service can bring. On last week’s podcast, I talked about this issue in detail with Scott Weller, partner at Mossrake Group.

Scott was formerly the global leader for the support services business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a role in which he helped build a multi-billion-dollar IT-as-a-Service business that is now known as GreenLake. In his current role with Mossrake Group, Scott helps companies achieve success in introducing As-A-Service offerings in their own businesses based on the lessons he learned in what works – and what’s doesn’t – during his time at HPE.

According to Scott, the history of most product-centric companies creates an identity that is hard to overcome, both culturally and operationally. “Identity in a company is really around the unwritten rules it gets codified into the business model, so that the value chain aligns to it, and really, the business is optimized for that identity, and even over time, as the business might evolve, identity is what survives,” he says. “And so, if you try to introduce a new business model into an existing business, what can happen is the entire value chain can work against you. The identity becomes a barrier to change.”

As such, creating a new identity – say, as a service versus product business – is a difficult, fundamental shift that, as my conversations with leaders reflect, many organizations are still struggling to come to grips with. “This is why you find a lot of mature product companies either haven’t started on the journey or are working through the journey even though there are clear demand signals from the market,” says Scott. “Just think about the impact – you think about sales, for example. Salespeople have to move from a transactional relationship to one that's continuous and collaborative. And of course, there's the never-ending questions about, how do they get paid? You will find people who strongly believe that anything that leads to a monthly payment must be in the purview of the financial services organization or an external financial partner. And consider product development. You have engineers and product management who identify with making the coolest thing, the fastest thing, the best, the highest quality thing, and now they're asked to be a supporting cast member in an ensemble trying to deliver unique experiences and outcomes.”

The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step

While we’ve painted a daunting picture, though, it isn’t without hope. Bit by bit, organizations across industries and across the globe are recognizing the demands of the market and the value service holds in differentiation and growth. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and this is why Mossrake Group so highly recommends the microcosm approach when it comes to making tangible progress in introducing As-A-Service and outcomes-based service offerings.

“Our view is, having done this in practice, is that the microcosm approach is really the best one. The internal incubator where you start small and take an agile approach is really the best way for us to see this evolution to succeed, because in the end, what this approach does is it allows the new business model to essentially gestate within the existing machine,” Scott explains. “This allows a company to knock down all of the value chain barriers one by one, which is not a small challenge. But when you do it in a microcosm, it's just much easier, and by the time the bigger machine realizes what's going on, the model is entirely proven. And then the question is not whether it works, the question is, how do you go faster?”

The microcosm approach, which we discussed in detail with Schneider Electric who recently worked with Mossrake Group to introduce power-as-a-service, circumvents the often snails-paced acknowledgment of and alignment around an opportunity and enables a “dip your toes in” approach that minimizes the impact of failure should failure occur. But this self-starter approach isn’t without personal risk for the leader that decides to spearhead the effort, and it requires the right mix of some key ingredients:

A visionary leader. Someone needs to be willing to take control of building some momentum for this change to take hold. The visionary leader sees the potential of service for the business and is willing to take some personal risk in evaluating and evangelizing its worth for the company to pursue at scale. “Once you have someone who's visionary, by that I mean they can see how this plays out, they're getting the demand signals locally, and they really believe in the idea, then they're willing to put their neck out a bit and have the courage to see it through,” says Scott.
Initial pilot customers. To begin, you’re really testing the waters to determine what new value proposition will fit. “First of all, determine, are the demand signals that they are personally seeing representative of the broader market? If so, then what is the opportunity in the market?” says Scott. “And then get down to, okay, well, what do we want to offer here? Define that, build it out, again, using an agile approach, where you don't solve every problem at the beginning, you know that you don't know everything, and you start building.”
Enlisting adventurers. A visionary leader can’t go it alone, but in the early days of building this in the microcosm, resource is scarce – so they must enlist the adventurers around them to bring the vision to life. “It's harder than it looks,” says Scott. “You can find people who are really up for it, but they're just bored and aren’t the kind of people that you need at the moment. You look for people who seem to be high energy, always looking for how to do things in a better way. It's almost like you know it when you see it. And even then, not everybody can sustain the level of energy and output.”
Test and refinement of the go-to-market. This is where the agile aspect really comes into play. “The presumption is that you have a pretty good idea of the pins that you have to knock down along the way, but you certainly don't know everything. You have a pretty good idea about what will resonate with the market, but there are pieces that you can't know, and you might have to, maybe not do a hard left or right, but you have to be able to shift direction. And especially for the sponsor of a program like this, they have to have a rapport with their peers and management chain that allow them to come in and say, "Hey, listen, what we've learned is we need to shift a little bit to the left or right, and that's got to be okay. That's not going to kill this," right?” explains Scott.
Initial wins for internal evangelism. The goal is to be able to provide evidence-based insight that service is a viable future for your company. “In my experience, what happens is once senior management sees this, they're like, "Okay, this is really good, and why aren't you going faster?" At some point in time, after enough work has been done, there should be a hard go-no-go decision, not unlike the classic waterfall model, you do need to prepare for that moment in time where you're going to say, "Okay, we've learned enough. Is this what we really want to do?" Because the next phase will inevitably require more people, more resources, more investment. And especially, if you've built a local successful business, now you want to take it on the road, and take it to other locales and try to build the business in those places,” says Scott.
Documentation to expand success outside of the microcosm. If you find success, that success must be able to be replicated across the business. This means that every step you take should be well documented. “This has to be well documented, again, across the value chain, every aspect,” says Scott. “Every aspect is within what we call an operational blueprint, so that when we're no longer involved in the activity, the business is able to survive personnel changes and so on. It's essentially a matter of institutionalizing what you're doing to the point that it will survive personnel changes, and certainly, our involvement coming to an end.”

Now neither Scott nor I can tell you the microcosm approach makes this evolution from product to service easy, but it is a viable, proven method to consider if you feel progress needs to be made at a faster pace. Perhaps you are the next visionary leader? “In storytelling, it's thought that really there are only a few unique themes, like coming of age, or good versus evil. One of them is about courage and tenacity, perseverance. And I would say that that is the theme of moving to as a service and outcomes,” says Scott. “You have to have courage, or some small group of people have to have the courage to think differently, to put themselves out there a little bit, to champion the cause, to fight the good fight to stay with it through and through, and those kinds of people are hard to find. It's much easier to play it safe and let somebody at the top of the company make the big decisions.”

By Tom Paquin

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the 1971 classic film based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl, is still one of my favorite movies, boat scene and all. Gene Wilder’s ability to vacillate his performance between loving and deranged in a single moment is truly inspired. When it comes to how he manages his factory, though, he certainly trends towards the deranged.

Yes, on its face, having the entire world frantic with excitement over the opportunity to go visit a factory is a bizarre premise upon which to build an entire story, but think of the service implications! I certainly have, and let’s just say it: Willy Wonka is not managing his service opportunities effectively.

According to a strange tinker, elaborated upon by Grandpa Joe (who seems to implicate himself in the process) Wonka closed out the outside world from his factory’s comings and goings due to corporate espionage. This, in turn, created a closed system, which was run by Wonka’s subhuman labor indentured force known as the Oompa Loompas.

Some businesses have no trouble handling a closed system. Apple is the obvious example, as they own the product, diagnostics, and depots for their devices. But even big bad Apple can’t do that all in a closed system without the proper oversight. That oversight comes from smart, forward-thinking technologies that are not just reflective on the specific industries in which they are found, but are proven through a strong network of references and use cases. Here are a couple of technologies that really could have improved

Capacity Planning

In the film, Wonka announces his Golden Ticket giveaway of a trip to the factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate (It’s not specified whether the lifetime supply is delivered annually or in a lump sum). This creates an immediate strain on the supply chain, leading to shortages so severe that Queen Elizabeth herself is forced to bid on what is apparently the last box of Wonka bars in the United Kingdom.

While these issues make for entertaining scenes, they could easily have been mitigated if Wonka had taken the time to run scenario forecasting. With such a tool, the factory could have routed supply chains appropriately, make the necessary arrangements, and avoided a lot of headaches.

Depot Repair

I’m sure Oompa Loompas are great for rolling around giant mushrooms in your candy terrarium, but do they know how to replace the parts of your meat-and-potatoes chocolate manufacturing equipment, as featured in the (still incredible) opening credits? Surely, building a system that routes parts, materials, and assets through external systems, even if they’re owned internally, would be necessary to avoid bottlenecks like a complete UK chocolate shortage.

Logistics

Fun fact: Quaker Oats financed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as an excuse to produce and sell their own Wonka bars. The bars shipped to stores about a month before the film’s release, but they were taken off store shelves because they melted at room temperature. So, the movie was released, but there was no tie-in chocolate bar.

Sure, it was the early 70s, and computers were the size of a Buick at the time, but smart logistics planning in real life could have gotten them back on track. Heck, that same logistics management could have allowed Wonka to distribute the golden tickets equitably, and over the course of a prolonged period of time, in order to ensure maximum sales. This is why simple factory service management is great, but truly next-level service management ties all the areas of your business together seamlessly.

Sarah talks with Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake Group, about the work he does helping companies bring as-a-Service offerings to the market and how the microcosm approach can aid in overcoming the barriers in realizing the potential of as-a-Service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about what it takes to successfully introduce an as a service model. You may remember from the podcast, Scott Weller, who is partner with Mossrake Group. Scott, welcome back to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Scott Weller: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Scott was on the podcast a while back with Howard Bowland from Schneider Electric, talking about their introduction of an as a service offering. I wanted to have Scott back because he has a lot of really interesting and valuable expertise in this area that I think our listeners will find a lot of benefit in hearing.

Sarah Nicastro: So, Scott, before we get into the content we have planned for today, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background, and then we'll get started.

Scott Weller: Sure. So, Scott Weller. I'm a partner with Mossrake Group. And we work with technology product companies who are looking to grow through services. And these days, that conversation inevitably goes to as a service models and outcomes based business. Prior to Mossrake, I was the global leader for the support services business in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and in our time, there we built a multi-billion dollar IT as a service business, that's now known as HPE GreenLake.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Okay, so you have experience with this transition and evolution firsthand from your time at HPE and you also have a lot of experience helping organizations on this journey as well. You just mentioned two terms, and I want to clarify the intersection here of the terms outcomes based service, and then as a service. So, can you give some context on where you see those two things intersecting?

Scott Weller: Well, in our business, we, again, work with technology product companies, and usually, their identity is tied up in being product focused. And of course, they'll have services to maintain the products. But shifting to outcomes is a very different kind of animal. Outcomes is about putting yourself into the customer's shoes, looking at the business they're in, and looking at what they're trying to get done versus focusing on the particular asset. So, I suppose it's not required to move to as a service to be able to deliver an outcomes basis, but what we find is, is that... Well, we haven't seen an example of that, quite frankly. Customers really want to shift the way they procure, the way they consume value when they're focused on outcomes. And so, we see those almost being synonymous but they're not really synonymous, but in practice, they might as well be, from our experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. So, you mentioned the word identity, and this is a term that we've talked a little bit about. And when you're looking at transitioning to as a service, you have said that identity is a really big factor in that transformation. So, talk to us a little bit about what that means, what identity means for the business, and how it affects the journey.

Scott Weller: Well, so identity in a company is really around the unwritten rules, what we're here to do, what we value, what we're good at, what we're known for, and identity gets codified into the business model, so that the value chain aligns to it, and really, the businesses optimize for that identity, and even over time, as the business might evolve, identity is what survives. And so, if you try to introduce a new business model into an existing business, what can happen is the entire value chain can work against you. It becomes a barrier.

Scott Weller: You think about sales, salespeople have to move from a transactional relationship to one that's continuous and collaborative. And of course, there's the never ending questions about, how do you get paid? You will find people in your company who firmly strongly believe that anything that leads to a monthly payment, that must be in the purview of the financial services organization or an external financial partner. And probably, the most difficult transition is for product development. You have engineers and product management who identify with making the coolest thing, the fastest thing, the best, the highest quality thing, and now they're asked to be a supporting cast member in an ensemble trying to deliver unique experiences and outcomes.

Scott Weller: So, really, it's a fundamental shift, it's very difficult. And this is why you find a lot of mature product companies either haven't started on the journey or are still on that journey even though there are clear demand signals from the market.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, there's a massive opportunity with this journey but there's significant challenges in terms of intrinsically, that identity companies have and evolving that and overcoming what that means in terms of migrating the business towards this more modern approach. So, generally speaking, what's the path? What do organizations need to consider? What's the best approach to make progress here?

Scott Weller: Typically, when something this big, this kind of shift is needed, it's a C level decision. And, of course, what's top of mind there is, "How do we overcome the inertia within our company to do this and make the investments while still making our financials for the quarter and the year?" It's not an easy problem to solve. So, what we've seen is there are usually two paths that are taken. One is, if you're a technology product company, you engage a third party finance firm. And that's really problematic, because number one, it puts another entity, another brand, another identity between yourself and the customer. I mean, you've worked out maybe how to do billing, but that hasn't solved the problem of becoming an outcomes based or an experience based company, and customer see right through that. So, that to us is not even a good half step.

Scott Weller: The other approach, of course, that companies take is through mergers and acquisitions. And as we all know, acquisitions rarely fulfill the entire promise. It's very problematic. You're starting with two different identities trying to come together, two different value chains, mismatched expectations, and on and on. So, that's a very high stakes, highly visible play to make. It brings in all kinds of special help to make it work, and so it's really a challenge.

Scott Weller: So, really, our view is, we feel strongly and we've actually done this in practice, is that the microcosm approach is really the best one. The internal incubator, start small, an agile approach is really the best way for us to see this succeed, because in the end, what this approach does is it allows the new business model to essentially gestate within the existing machine and has to knock down all of these value chain barriers one by one, which is not a small challenge. But when you do it in a microcosm, it's just much easier, and by the time the bigger machine realizes what's going on, the model is entirely proven. And then the question is not whether it works, the question is, how do you go faster?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay. So, one of the things I want to just touch on before we talk a little bit more about the internal incubator approach is this idea that the reason those other methods are problematic is because when you're looking at introducing as a service, it isn't about the financials, it's about the value proposition, right? So, that idea of just, "Okay, so we'll take our products from a CAPEX model to an OPEX model, and that will move us to as a service," right? That's basically faulty thinking, correct? Because customers are looking for, it's not about the method of financing, it's about the value proposition.

Scott Weller: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of a rat hole that you can get into in every conversation. And so how is this different than financing? And financing, really, if you think about it, is still very much a product focused, asset focused approach to the market. It simply is a different way to pay versus a very different kind of experience and outcome. Because if you work with financing, that's great and there's a place for that, but if you want an outcome basis, you've got to be thinking about what is the experience you're delivering? Who's looking after that asset in the customer context? Who's there to ensure the promise is fulfilled? Who's there to make sure that, as the customer evolves, essentially, the solution evolves with them? Again, a financing arrangement is still a transaction, versus an ongoing, continuous relationship that's really more like a collaboration than anything else.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. And I just wanted to clarify that to make sure people understand that they are two very different things. And when you're talking about getting the ultimate results of introducing this model, it's in the context of moving toward that outcome or experience approach. Okay.

Scott Weller: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: So, let's talk in a little bit more detail about the internal incubator or microcosm approach. So, this is something that we discussed in the context of the Schneider Electric example. I found it very interesting. So, in that instance, Howard in his region, along with Mossrake, has done this internal incubator type process. So, tell us a little bit about how that works and why it is a really viable option for companies that are looking to make progress on this journey.

Scott Weller: So, I don't want to make it sound easy like there's a silver bullet here, because it's never going to be easy. And I guess the other thing I would say is, it does require a visionary leader on the ground. And this may be why companies don't do it, because they can't find that kind of person where they need them. But once you have someone who's visionary, by that I mean they can see how this plays out, they're getting the demand signals locally, they can see how this can play out, they really believe in the idea, and they're willing to put their neck out a bit and have the courage to see it through. And I don't use that term lightly in the context of business, because it is high stakes even if it's in a microcosm.

Scott Weller: But with all that, I mean, really, it's almost like the antithesis to the big, monolithic, multi-year, very expensive programs that big companies tend to embark on when they need to make a transition. It's not common to say, "Hey, let's go do a small thing, see how the market reacts, let's see how a few customers react, let's go after this." And by the way, the local team has to be willing to do this as a second job. So, you have to enlist people who are game for this and have the right skills.

Scott Weller: So, it's not like a miracle has to occur, but a lot of the right things have to come together at the local level to do this microcosm approach. But then, as I said, I mean, I can tell you from our experience back at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and then more recently with Schneider Electric is, you do these small things, you test it, you come back, you refine, you pilot, you get a few customers, they tell you what's good and bad about what you're trying to do. And the thing then can grow. And if it's going to fail, it fails quickly on a small scale without any of the reputational risk and financial risk really.

Scott Weller: But again, once it's proven, companies can continue to study this and should we do it or should we... But I mean, there's no question that it works, the only question might be, well, maybe it doesn't work in every locale, and that's fine. But again, in my experience, what happens is once senior management sees this, they're like, "Okay, this is really good, and why aren't you going faster?" If you think of the question.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, the microcosm, so we're talking about taking a particular region or a particular area of the business and using it as that internal incubator. So, what does that process look like? And I know that at Mossrake, you guys are really working hand in hand as an extension of the team to take this from vision to reality, refinement to reality, etc. So, tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Scott Weller: Well, like any other management consultant project with a client, usually, it's begun by this visionary leader who may not have the skills in their team, or they may not have the positional authority, or even the credibility. Like a new leader can come in and they're an unknown quantity, so they seek our help to really, first of all, determine, are the demand signals that they are personally seeing representative of the broader market? If so, then what is the opportunity in the market? And then get down to, okay, well, what do we want to offer here? Define that, build it out, again, using an agile approach, where you don't solve every problem at the beginning, you know that you don't know everything, and you start building.

Scott Weller: So, that's how we did it as internal executives back at HPE, and that's how we did it working with Howard at Schneider Electric, and that's how we do it with our other clients that are in flight.

Scott Weller: And there are times we've seen where, once this is all laid out, a client might say, "Hey, listen, we have so many things on our plate right now, we just can't do it. We think it's absolutely where we need to go. We can't do it." Others are saying like, "We're so late now. How do we do all this but speed it up?" And there are ways to do that, but also limits, because if you want to be thoughtful and build incrementally versus these large, monolithic programs, simply, there's a point where you can't make it go any faster.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, there's a couple of things, if I'm reflecting back on the example that I'm most familiar with, about the microcosm approach that I think are really interesting to discuss. The first is the role that you played in terms of, not only helping create the value proposition or the go to market, but then also acting as a resource in terms of almost training in real-time on how to articulate that to customers, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So, I found that very interesting because when you're making this big of a change in an organization, we're talking about changing the whole way that you think about, deliver service, and engage with your customers, it seems terrifying to me to just say like, "Okay, salesperson, go have this conversation and see how it goes." Right? And you guys played a very hands-on role in that process, so that through some cycles, you were able to help get those conversations comfortable and build those skills, almost leading by example, right? So, can you talk a little bit about that aspect of it?

Scott Weller: Sure. And I should say that we did what you've just describe, not just in the go to market, but across the value chain, having done it and lived it in another big multinational. But for sure, on the sales side, it's things like, what is the story? What is the message and how do you package that as sales enablement? And then how do you begin to train up sales people who are, in a way, predisposed to a different kind of messaging verses what they've might have been massively successful doing before? It doesn't necessarily mean that this is the kind of message they feel comfortable with, the storytelling might be quite foreign and uncomfortable to them.

Scott Weller: So, you have to intersect the right kind of messaging with the people who are able to receive it and take it to customers. So yes, we did a lot of that, shoulder to shoulder, as they say, with individuals. In the case of Schneider, COVID threw a wrench into our being physically present, we did some of that prior. But in any case, you do have to take that shoulder to shoulder approach and really support the sales activity with research.

Scott Weller: Back at HPE, I did the SWOT for a SWAT team approach, where some of my local leaders from the global team would literally fly out and do seminars, and go into customer situations and help either deliver the pitch or assist in delivering it, do post-mortems and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean, you have to really understand that this comes down to people. Every aspect of this comes down to people. You talk to someone in product development, they say, "What's in it for me? I want to make my cool stuff." And so, really, it's very much about people all through this, and sales especially.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think, again, the value of this internal incubator approach is, one, it's at a scale where you're able to provide that shoulder to shoulder type of support so that you really are having that opportunity in a vacuum to get that story right, refine that message, train those skills and how to have those conversations, and get it right before you expand it out, right? So, rather than trying to do it at scale and have however many customer interactions potentially go awry, you're really refining that in this incubator before you start to take it out to the masses. So, it seems very smart to me. And I think that that was one thing I found really interesting.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing I wanted to touch on related to the microcosm approach is this idea of, from the very beginning of it, you have the intention of documenting everything well so that there is an opportunity to, once you're successful, expand it throughout the rest of the business. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Scott Weller: Yes, and I completely agree that this has to be well documented, again, across the value chain, every aspect. So, all the sales. I mean, we essentially have quite a sales library built up and, essentially, training programs, also partner program well documented. So, really, every aspect is within what we call an operational blueprint, so that when we're no longer involved in the activity, the business is able to survive personnel changes and so on. It's essentially a matter of institutionalizing what you're doing to the point that it will survive personnel changes, and certainly, our involvement coming to an end. So yeah, I think that has to be really designed in upfront when you're going to go down this path, that somehow you're not going to have successful business in the moment, but nobody knows what to do when a new person comes in or an experienced person leaves. It's really critical that you have everything written down.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I just think that's a really good point, because this isn't an internal incubator, like, "Hey, let's try this, see what kind of success we find, and then we'll figure out what comes next," this is doing it with the intent of, "Let's create the success in this microcosm with the ability to blueprint it and then take it throughout the organization." Good.

Sarah Nicastro: So, you've mentioned agile a few times, and I want to talk a little bit about this because I think this is a term that just gets misinterpreted, or misunderstood, or thrown around a lot, and I want to talk about what it is, and isn't, I guess, in regards to a project like this. So, tell us a little bit about what the agile process looks like within this microcosm approach?

Scott Weller: Sure. Well, again, it's a process that's, as I mentioned earlier, the antithesis to the big monolithic program, it's really meant to be iterative and collaborative, collaborating not just with the end customer in terms of, what do you think about this, but also you have to collaborate with your channel partners, your sales organization, how you run inventory, how you do billing, all of these sorts of things have to be brought into the process.

Scott Weller: And, again, the presumption is that you have a pretty good idea of the pins that you have to knock down along the way, but you certainly don't know everything. You have a pretty good idea about what will resonate with the market, but there are pieces that you can't know, and you might have to, maybe not do a hard left or right, but you have to be able to shift direction. And especially for the sponsor of a program like this, they have to have a rapport with their peers and management chain that allow them to come in and say, "Hey, listen, what we've learned is we need to shift a little bit to the left or right, and that's got to be okay. That's not going to kill this," right?

Scott Weller: And, again, keeping the reputational risk low, the financial risk low means that no one is going to lose their mind, their heads aren't going to explode over some of these kinds of natural shifts. And at some point in time, after enough work has been done, there should be a hard go-no-go decision, not unlike the classic waterfall model, you do need to prepare for that moment in time where you're going to say, "Okay, we've learned enough. Is this what we really want to do?" Because the next phase will inevitably require more people, more resources, more investment. And especially, if you've built a local successful business, now you want to take it on the road, and take it to other locales and try to build the business in those places.

Scott Weller: That's a huge commitment and investment, and pretty soon, the company, if they haven't by that time already, they're going to be talking to the market about it, it's going to become an investor discussion even. And so, you really have to be prepared for the bigger transitions. And so, there are some moments in time that are hard choice points, but not at the beginning, not in the initial build out, not in the figuring out, "Is this a business that works and is one that we want to be in?"

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think there can be this interpretation of agile as just completely loosey goosey, and we'll just go in and see what happens. I think the idea here is you have a good plan going in but you're open to evolving, refining, learning, in those early phases to make sure that before you take it out of that microcosm, you have something that's pretty well vetted and pretty proven.

Scott Weller: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So, that makes sense. What I'm curious about, Scott, is, what does this all look like from the perspective of the pilot customers?

Scott Weller: Well, pilot customers, I would say, if they've become a pilot customer, they appreciate this approach. The individual, the sponsor on the customer side is probably, you could call them an adventurer, a forward thinker, and they like being part of a process like this, realizing that they're investing themselves, they're investing their own time, it can be a distraction to do this in their business, but they're game for it. And I would say, other than maybe a higher frequency of interaction, because again, it's a collaborative process, we try to keep the burden low and we try to essentially create a commercial arrangement that allows them to go down the road with us, but at some point, say, "You know what, this was fun and all, but we need to take our hands off this wheel and go back to the former way of operating," and that's fine.

Scott Weller: So, you have to give them a path out, you have to give them a path to double down if they really like what's happening. So, it does take a different kind of care process for this customer, beyond maybe your traditional product services, you've got to really look after them and make sure they're good every step of the way.

Sarah Nicastro: And what's your advice for fully leveraging success with a pilot customer once you've got to that point?

Scott Weller: Well, we do ask for references, if they would be willing to be a reference customer. Sometimes they have their good reasons not to be. If you're in a sensitive industry, maybe being seen as the first or not being seen as a conservative brand might hurt you. So, they say, "Well, listen, we love this but we just don't want to put our name on it." Other times they love it, they want to be associated with forward thinking and innovation. And so, every customer is different, but we do ask for that.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, we talked about the need for a visionary within the company to spearhead this, but as you mentioned earlier, especially early on in the process, you're also asking a lot of people that are going to be involved that are early on, both keeping up with the day to day and the traditional way of doing things while also introducing this and working on this microcosm. So, I love that you call them adventurers. I think that's really cool. I'm curious if there are, I don't know, common characteristics that you look for. How do you find those adventurers and enroll them in this journey?

Scott Weller: It's harder than it looks. You do depend on knowing people. And this is where the internal sponsor, they need to have their network of people, because you can find people who are really up for it but they're just bored, they just want anything else as a distraction, but they may not be the kind of people that you need at the moment.

Scott Weller: So, you look for people who seem to be a high energy, always looking to find ways to do things in a better way or have a better outcome, people who were maybe questioning the system every day, asking themselves, "Can't we find a better way to do this?" And it's almost like you know when you see it. And even then, not everybody can sustain the level of energy and output, because working today is hard, there's a lot of demands on people, and so sometimes people just have to excuse themselves on the process, that it's the coolest thing ever but they just don't have the bandwidth to do it. And even those who you get into these programs and they go on for a year or more, at some point, people may be looking at career transitions. And so, it's not like you can get your dream team set up day one and then they're there forever. People come in and out.

Scott Weller: So, this is where you're constantly evaluating people for this, and hopefully, eventually, as the business takes off, you can put people into this new business officially, and they don't have all the other distractions. But what we see happens, though, is, even when that happens, especially in this microcosm model, there are things that you have to overcome or build that you say to yourself, "Really, this should be a corporate initiative," like when it comes to IT systems, for example. "Why should a local team be worrying about ERP or trying to get these systems to bend to the new model?" So, there's always the next challenge, and people can get burned out.

Scott Weller: And so, it's not enough to be the visionary leader, you have to always remember that this is a people things, people are at the core of all of this, and you need to really watch how people evolve themselves personally through this process.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I would think, as that visionary leader, you need these adventurers, not only to drive progress, but to keep your own energy high. Do you know what I mean? If you're the only one that's kind of pushing this, right, not only is that not feasible, but that would be a pretty isolated place to be. So, if you can find this network of adventurers that are excited about the opportunity and willing to work alongside to drive it, it's beneficial in both ways.

Scott Weller: It is. Although I would just say that, really, the visionary leader has to be more a source of energy than a sink of energy. Unfortunately or fortunately that's typically how it works.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, maybe they can get some of that energy from you and Mossrake instead of the team internally, right? Because they need to be providing it, not taking it.

Scott Weller: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, this transformation to as a service depends on both internal and external influence. So, talk a little bit about how that materializes in the work you do with your customers.

Scott Weller: So, again, every customer is different. What we find are some common themes, though. I mean, even I would say more than ever, companies realize that what got us here won't get us there. We might be at the top of our game, but the world is evolving and changing so fast. The chances of getting blindsided, particularly if you've got a lot of momentum and you've had a lot of success, is people will double down on what they did yesterday versus looking for the challenge to do something different today. And that momentum becomes nothing more than inertia to be overcome in the next turn of the business.

Scott Weller: So, I think this notion of optimizing, optimizing down, what you've got today as a path to success, really, I think is more and more... of course, companies want to optimize. Why be wasteful in what you do? But at the same time, optimization can mean that a company is fragile. And so the next time you want to introduce something different, then, really, everything breaks, there's just fires everywhere. And so, how do you create a business that can be resilient through these transitions, and also, how do you engender in your people a kind of... Well, I always talk about three things; adaptability to the change, tenacity so that you can hunker down and get through it, and curiosity, because there are views that, really, without curiosity, civilization can't really evolve and transform.

Scott Weller: So, these three attributes are so critical to engender in your people. You have to hire for it, you need to encourage that way of thinking. I've just seen in a lot of cases people will say, "Hey, I listen to what you're talking about, and I have to admit, I'm not a very curious person. You give me a problem, I'm on it dog on bone. I'm going to make this thing happen, and that's great, but I don't think about, 'Well, what does my peer do? What does this other group do? How are we working together to create this outcome?'" And you can see that if you had an organization that had those kinds of attributes and then learning, "Okay, today we're product focused, tomorrow, we're going to be outcomes focused," you can see how having the right kind of mental model and attitudes within your people can make that transition really a lot easier or a lot harder.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. And that goes back to the point you made about this is all about people, right? I mean, that is the key thing here. And there's a lot of different enablers, there's a lot of different do's and don'ts, but your success or failure really comes down to who you have as a part of the journey.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Well, this is a lot of great information, a lot of good food for thought, and I'm sure there's a lot of other things we could dig into, so perhaps we'll do it again in the future. But for today, Scott, any other closing comments or words of wisdom that you want to leave the listeners with?

Scott Weller: In storytelling, it's thought that really there are only a few unique themes, like coming of age, or good versus evil. One of them is about courage and tenacity, perseverance. And I would say that that is the theme of moving to as a service and outcomes. You have to have courage, or some small group of people have to have the courage to think differently, to put themselves out there a little bit, to champion the cause, to fight the good fight to stay with it through and through, and those kinds of people are hard to find. It's much easier to play it safe and let somebody at the top of the company make the big decisions. And so, if anyone is listening to this that's at that point where they're ready to put themselves out there for something they believe, just go for it. It's well worth it, and you can, as we did back at HPE, you can literally change the direction of the company.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's really good advice, and I think you're right that those people are hard to come by, and I hope the companies that have those people understand the value of those folks, right, because it's a huge asset. So, thank you for that, Scott.

Sarah Nicastro: Scott Weller, Mossrake Group. You can find Scott and Mossrake Group on LinkedIn, if you want to check out a little bit more about what they do and how they work with different folks that are on this journey. So, thanks again, Scott, for coming on and sharing your wisdom.

Scott Weller: My pleasure. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more content by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS at ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’ve had a handful of excellent conversations in the past few weeks about digital transformation – what it really means, the distance between recognizing its importance and knowing how to take action, and the biggest barriers that stand in the way of success even once you have a clear idea of your digital objectives. Based on what I’ve heard, it seems that for many organizations it is time for a digital rebirth.

There are a handful of reasons why I believe this, the first of which is that it is undoubtedly a critical aspect of your company’s success or failure in what is our digital present and our digital future. So, it’s incredibly important to get this right, and similar to our conversations around Servitization and business model shifts, doing so is trickier than it sounds because it is a matter of making some foundational changes. Digital transformation isn’t about a never-ending quest of technology investments, it’s about reshaping your business to compete in the digital era. My recent conversations have illustrated that there’s in many instances a missing of the urgency that is very real, and/or a lack of clarity on what it takes to make the changes needed.

In a recent conversation I hosted with Philip Carter of IDC, he spoke about a company’s digital identity and digital destiny. I’m curious – do you know your digital identity? Have you considered your digital destiny? My bet is many do not and have not, and that’s because we haven’t properly defined what digital transformation means for our business. The first step in your digital rebirth needs to be defining these terms, for your business, in a way that only you can do. Only then you can determine what your digital transformation needs to look like and take meaningful steps toward achieving success. If when you think about digital transformation and what it really means your head just spins, here are four surefire signs you need to consider a digital rebirth.

#1: You Haven’t Yet Realized/Admitted Your Company is a Technology Company

Every company today is a technology company, and this truth will only be multiplied as we step into the future. Out-and-out resistance is futile, and even hesitancy is putting you significantly behind. At one point we looked at digital transformation from the perspective of using technology to automate manual processes, but at this point the definition of digital transformation has broadened to becoming a digital company.

This can mean digitizing internally in a way that optimizes your use of resources, automates tasks to maximize output, streamlining the customer journey to create a seamless customer experience, and enabling the level of fast-paced, data-driven decision making that is needed today. But it can also mean using digital tools to create outcomes-based service offerings and even digital services for your customers. The options are limitless and unique to your needs and goals, but the truth is universal.

In Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 report, the firm states, “Amid the challenges of 2020, two truths became evident. More companies than ever have embraced the axiom that every business is a technology business, and they’ve ignited a new era of exponential transformation as technology continuously reshapes industries and the human experience.” The report goes on to highlight the difference in performance between companies who embrace and take action on this reality versus those who lag, stating that digital leaders (the top 10 percent of companies leading technology innovation) achieve 2–3x revenue growth as compared to their competitors. Accenture refers to this widening divide as the “Digital Achievement Gap.”

#2: You Lack Technology-Adept Leadership

Who then is leading us into this new world of digital potential? That’s a very important question. I see all too often leadership within organizations that holds its company back from success for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is overall resistance to change – the, “we’ve always done it this way and it works just fine” mentality. Other times it is overwhelm – not knowing where to start. And sometimes it is ego standing in the way of admitting the need of more digital expertise. It can be many different things, but to keep pace in the way you need to in the digital era, you must have technology adept-leadership.

As Accenture’s report states, “During the pandemic, it became starkly clear that there is no leadership without technology leadership. Rapid digital acceleration during the pandemic has cemented technology as the cornerstone of global leadership.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean every leader has to be a technology guru. But it also doesn’t mean that every leader should go out and hire a digital leader just to shirk the responsibility of a foundational understanding, vision, and acumen. Technology-adept leadership also isn’t the be-all and end-all of digital success – we know that we know that people and processes are what most commonly foil these efforts. Today’s leaders need to combine keen technology awareness with agile and courageous decisions and ample amounts of emotional intelligence.

#3: Your Digital Transformation Efforts are Siloed

In the recent IDC conversation I mentioned earlier, Carter pointed out a statistic highlighting the fact that only 26 percent of organizations achieve ROI with their digital transformation efforts. The number one reason for this is the widespread existence of organizational siloes. There will be no true digital success if these siloes aren’t broken down to where the company is working toward an aligned vision for their digital destiny and working collectively on the digital transformation initiatives that will get them there.

You hear many conversations about how the business and IT are working closer on technology decisions. The Accenture report states that “83% of executives agree that their organization’s business and technology strategies are becoming inseparable—even indistinguishable.” The closer the communication and partnership across all functions of the business, the greater the impact your digital transformations efforts will have.

We discussed here the topic of building a digital dream team. The idea is that a team is formed that combines stakeholders from each function of the business with someone designated to “coach” – often a head of innovation-type title. This team approach helps to ensure that there are common, measured objectives; that duplicative investments and efforts aren’t taking place; that digital decisions are being made with the customer journey in mind; and that true progress is being made in prioritizing the efforts that will best help you reach your digital destiny.

#4: Your Tech Stack/Strategy Are Antiquated

This one may sound obvious – it might be time for a digital rebirth if your technology is aging. Well, yes. But you might be surprised just how many companies or leaders have outdated technology strategies or systems and simply don’t see them as such. It’s important to stay abreast of how digital has evolved, and continues to evolve, and evaluate how that evolution should impact your strategy.

We did an article recently with Cimcorp, discussing the five tenets of their modern approach to IT. We discuss the need to rethink the role of IT within your business, the benefit of relinquishing some control, the value of a platform approach, and more. The premise of Cimcorp’s thinking is to determine how to work smarter rather than harder so that the IT team has the bandwidth to focus more on the company’s digital strategy and digital future rather than its time being all-consumed by hands-on IT management. This thinking is incredibly smart, and what will set apart leaders from laggards.

In terms of the tech itself, Accenture states that “90% of business and IT executives in our survey agree that to be agile and resilient, their organizations need to fast forward their digital transformation with cloud at its core. Building a competitive technology stack starts with accumulating technical wealth—cloud strategies and microservices are the key. Enterprises need an adaptive technology foundation, and they can’t afford to be weighed down by legacy systems. As enterprises merge their technology and business strategies, they will start to play a bigger role facilitating people’s relationship with tech. This requires building trust—not just in products and services, but in the technologies behind them.”

I can imagine for someone reading this that is thinking a digital rebirth may be warranted, the idea likely seems very daunting. I won’t lie to you and say that it isn’t, but it is imperative. There is so much that rests on a company’s ability to be not just digitally competent but digitally competitive that it isn’t something you can ignore or delay. Daunting or not, mastering digital is simply a must.

By Tom Paquin

Is the customer always right? Obviously not. If a customer comes into a store and says that they are deserving of a 60% discount on their order because they had a hard time finding a parking spot, it’s okay to say ‘no’ to them.

I’d argue that any utterance, complaint, or assertion of any kind from a customer be met with a proportional amount of scrutiny. Because people don’t necessarily know what they want. Sometimes you need to show them what they want.

I will use a video game example, so skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to reach about Nintendo. Every few years, wide-eyed analysts and fans make broad assertions that Nintendo is about to release some sort of “dream” console, or game collection, or localization of a beloved Japanese game. These things never happen, and instead Nintendo releases modest hardware upgrades or $60 re-releases of mediocre games.

Nintendo does this rather than capitulate to fan demands because it is cheaper, it specifically targets the young demographic that Nintendo has always targeted, and because it has proven to be incredibly successful. Podcaster and journalist Justin McElroy frequently says, of Nintendo, “They won’t sell what you want them to, but you’ll want what they sell you.”

This is a similar strategy to the one employed by Apple, who, rather than acquiesce to the demand that they build a $500 “Netbook” (remember netbooks?) in the late aughts, built the exact opposite—a nearly $2,000 computer called the MacBook Air, that had something called a “Solid State Hard Drive”. And what type of computer has endured for over a decade?

Doing that requires you to understand your customers better than they do, and to study your customers in a non-binary fashion. The Simpsons has shown what happens when you just ask people what they want:

There is no value in getting a list of customer wants, you need to understand their behavior. In service, there are a variety of ways that you can do this.

One key consideration is to consider not just asset and employee output when measuring service processes, but also customer output. If assets are IoT-enabled, what is the length of time between exception and customer contact? When given an array of service times, how far into the future does the customer, on average, book an appointment for a specific need?

Then, of course, you can begin to benchmark elements against one another. What is the correlation between NPS and time from ticket to invoice? What length of product ownership yields the most repairs, errors, and scraps?

Finally, you can begin to involve customers directly in the service process, and see what attrition rates are with utilities like appointment assistance, “where’s my tech”, and other such tools. Doing so allows you to see what customers really value, anticipate their needs, and build service solutions that meet the contour of your business without needlessly cutting into your bottom-line. Because you know your business best, and your customers should want what you are serving them.

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