A special thanks

To our conference team - we could not have had this great event without all of your hard work.

Thank you ALL.

Closing keynote: Service Engineering - What do we mean by it and do we really need it?

Professor Klaus-Peter Fahnrich took the stage after lunch and took one of the most complex topics discussed at the event and kept the audience riveted (even after a great lunch and wine!). He started by talking about his favorite words "services. components. services. componentized. service engineering." To say that he was a bundle of energy would be doing his presentation a dis-service - I think he had enough energy on that stage to power half of Barcelona.

Here's the abstract on what he discussed:

Service engineering is a notion that arose in the early 1990s. It was meant to bring an engineering perspective into the service businesses, and thus was pretty provocative. A brief characterization of service engineering could be described as: The attempt to use engineering—like models, methods, and tools—to improve the quality and effectiveness of certain classes of services. This attempt was, of course, criticized by prominent members of the services marketing community because it was believed that services, by nature, could not be the object of an engineering approach. Furthermore it was argued that the role of customers in this approach would not be represented appropriately. On the other hand, practitioners from various industries were highly interested in this concept, and by 2000, the discipline was established. This presentation will provide an overview of the achievements in service engineering thus far, and will try to answer the question of whether we really need it.

Clearly there is tremendous thinking going on in services engineering and the concepts around service components and Professor Fanrich made it real through his examples. We are clearly only at the beginning of this journey - but it's obvious after watching this presentation that all of us have a lot to learn and we should all expect a LOT of change. I'd encourage everyone to find out more about this concept (and also check out his presentation).

Day 3 - the last set of breakouts

After the association updates there were three more concurrent break:

• Member Case Study - Aligning End-User and Decision-Maker Needs to Create Differentiated Services. Eric Sisi, Vice President, EMEA Technical Support & Services, McAfee
• Member Case Study - From Services to Solutions: Philips Utilization Services. Barbara Taylor, Customer Services Business Development Manager, Philips Healthcare and Kees Rutjes, Program Manager, Philips Healthcare

• Member Case Study - True Partner Enablement. Mick Turnbull, PS Director UK&I and ECEMEA, Genesys Telecommunications

I had a chance to sit in on the McAfee presentation which had great example after great example on how McAfee understood their end-user needs and then tailored services to match. There were numerous questions at the end and Eric kept everyone engaged all the way through - great presentation.

Day 3 - opening with Association Updates

Day 3 opened with JB Wood giving an update on AFSMI, Stephen Smith giving an update on the SSPA and Thomas Lah giving an update on TPSA.

The SSPA update covered a bunch of topics starting with a 20 year look back at tech support (the SSPA turned 20 years old on January 1st of this year!) - then moving to observations on the state of the industry today and finally with a view toward how to address support challenges in the future. Stephen introduced some new ways to think about the business which tied in very strongly to our closing keynotes concepts around services and components. All in all it was a great update with a lot of very good questions.

End of day two

Day two ended with another set of concurrent breakout sessions and a networking reception in the exhibition with our partners. The design of this event flowed extremely well with all of the breakout rooms right off the exhibition hall - definitely something we'll appreciate when we do this again in Barcelona next year!

CIO's expectations

After lunch, Didier Lambert, CIO, Essilor and Former President of CIGREF gave a presentation on how the CIO views the world and the impact it has on service providers (many of the people in the room). It was interesting, insightful and full of good advice on the CIO's role (he's not the end customer - his users are) - and what that means from a relationship perspective.

He used real-world examples to show that disagreements between suppliers and customers are very often related to a lack of understanding of each other's constraints and objectives.

The session was packed (as were all of the keynotes) and there were some excellent questions at the end.

First concurrent breakouts

We had two concurrent breakouts: the Industry Panel on Service Science and Service Innovation: How to Drive Economic Return and a member case study on Balancing Flexibility and Standardization for Optimal Service Delivery in Heterogeneous Markets by EMC.

I had the chance to attend the first breakout which Thomas Lah moderated. The panelists included:

• Prof. Dr. Gerhard Satzger, Director, Karlsruhe Service Research Institute
• Dr. Wil Janssen, Manager of Business Development, Telematica Instituut/NOVAY, The Netherlands
• Kris Singh, President, SRII & Director, Strategic Programs, Service Science Research, IBM Almaden Research Center

The discussion was engaging and clearly crossed the boundaries that often separate academic and business discussions. There clearly is a lot that all of us can and should be doing in this area and this really panel discussion really highlighted a couple of unique opportunities for industry and academia to collaborate.