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.

Where is the "Science" in Services

Day two opened up with Dr. Richard Straub giving a keynote that talked about the global transformation going on that's moved us from an agrarian society, to an industrial one to now a services-based one.


He gave a number of great examples from IBM's transformation from a hardware company to a services company, and then applied those to the general concepts to what Service Science is and why we should care.

Some of the key issues that Dr. Straub covered on Service Science included:

• What is it?
  
• Why now?
• Is it a new academic discipline, or a combination of existing disciplines?
• What need does it fill?
  
• What research is it based on?
• What role does business play in the evolution of Service Science?
• What need does it fill for companies and national governments?
• What can students who study it expect to learn?

It was the best example I've seen bringing together the concepts out of academia and showing how important they are to industry and how we need to work together.

Our Exhibitors

After our first two keynotes we moved into the cocktail reception and there was a lot of dialogue between our partners and our members.

A number of great conversations got started here that carried on into the networking dinners and then the bars later on that night.

Alcatel-Lucent Services for Enterprise

Stuart Cooper, Executive Vice President, Global Services, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Group followed the opening keynote with a great presentation talking about Alcatel-Lucent's transformation to a services company.

Stuart talked about each stage of the transformation that Alcatel-Lucent has gone through that gives their business partners global resources that they can use to expand their solution portfolio, gain new expertise, and improve customer satisfaction. These services and solutions were developed to complement their existing services and help them deliver more effectively, our services are available when they need them and can be tailored to meet their unique requirements, as well as their customers' requirements.

The prize for the best and most interesting examples so far definitely goes to Stuart as he described some of the work they had done with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The examples around transformation in Endonasal Brain Surgery were extremely well done and we're thankful that this happened way after we had finished lunch. :)

This was a great example of how a company has transformed from a single company model (traditional hardware provider) to a blended-services company.

"Services without Boundaries"

JB Wood, CEO of AFSMI, SSPA and TPSA, kicked off the event with a session called "Services without Boundaries" noting that technology solution providers survived the beginning of the global downturn relatively unscathed. In 2008, top line revenues held and bottom line profits, on average, improved for hardware, software, and services providers. However, 2009 is proving a very different experience.

JB talked about how companies can begin breaking down organizational, financial and geographic barriers to maximize services success.” He started with a review of public and proprietary industry data that shows three distinct trends impacting technology providers in 2009:

• Product revenues and margins are clearly under pressure.
• With a decrease in product revenues, services revenues are becoming a larger percentage of overall company revenues.
• There is immense pressure on services organizations to secure revenues and improve profitability.

Unfortunately, there is little or no money to invest in traditional business optimization tactics that drive incremental improvements. Services organizations must identify tactics that create step function improvements in profitability.


The presentation then turned to an important framework that services organizations can apply to identify opportunities in both organizational and offering convergence that break down existing barriers in services delivery. Organizational convergence creates leverage between the historically stove piped services lines within product companies. Offering convergence changes the way customers consume technology solutions. Together, these approaches create new models for developing, selling, and delivering technology services to customers with ever tightening budgets.

JB ended the presentation with a roadmap for horizon 1, 2, and 3 activities that services organizations can pursue to start navigating these challenging times.

TSE 2009 Kicks off Today

Today starts the beginning of our Technology Services Europe Conference 2009 - Services without Boundaries in beautiful Barcelona. There is a definite energy in the air as service leaders from the biggest companies on the continent and from around the world gather for the next three days to discuss how to successfully meet the needs of European customers in this challenging economic environment.

We have world-class executive speakers from IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Agilent Technologies, McAfee, EMC, OpenAir, Sun Microsystems, Philips Healthcare and more attending the event. There are representatives from 16 different countries and 60 companies, and a number of key partners are also attending the event including OpenAir, ISS, CLIC, HHL, SRII, Service 800 and Impact Learning Systems, Martin Wiesend & Partner and ITG.

The event today kicks off at 16:00 with JB Wood, President and CEO of AFSMI, SRII, SSPA and TPSA talking about Services without Boundaries. He will be followed by Stuart Cooper, Executive Vice President, Global Services of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Group.

Following the opening day keynotes we will have a reception with our partners and then networking dinners in the evening.

We will be posting live updates throughout the event with pictures, interviews and snapshots of the key insights. Stay tuned for more.