The concurrent breakouts

We have great breakouts going on right now -- all of them being led by members of SSPA, AFSMI and TPSA.

Keynote #2 - Gregory M. Sebasky, Senior Vice President and CEO, Global Customer Services, Philips Medical Systems

Greg Sebasky followed JB wood with a fabulous presentation titled "Seasons of Ownership - Delivering Services from the Customer’s Perspective." It built on a number of JB's remarks around value-added support and products/services convergence and gave incredible insights into the transformation that Philip's is making.

He hit on a number of important themes including:

• How they are using net promoter scores to identify and drive transformation priorities in their healthcare business
• How they have built their transformation around a 'seasons of ownership' which has change the entire way they interact with their end customers
• Gave a superb example of how multiple parts of Philip's come together to build a differentiating capability in the 'Ambient Experience'

At the end of his session Greg hosted a number of questions from the audience and a small group gather around him for further Q&A as the main group headed off into the first round of concurrent breakout sessions.

Keynote #1 - JB Wood and the future of services

The event started with Tom Pridham, Senior Vice President of Membership Development and the Executive Director of SRII welcoming everyone to our first annual European Conference. After a brief welcome in both English and French (who knew he had it in him!) - Tom gave a quick overview of the next 2.5 days and then welcomed J.B. Wood to the stage.


J.B. Wood is the CEO and President of AFSMI, SSPA, TPSA and SRII. He was the first keynote speaker and spent an hour talking about the major market trends impacting the technology services industry and the implications for Europe today and in the future. A couple of key points he highlighted included the following:

• Current opportunities to improve the business include moving PS organizations from a GEO based structure to a competency based structure
• Cross-services convergence
• The importance of figuring out who owns consumption - and most importantly - how to move support organizations into the role that drives that for the organization
• The importance of a key new industry metric: DTR (Days-To-Repurchase)

He ended the session with a talk on the future of the services business: Value-Added Support. The path to start changing support organizations to becoming the proactive driver of value and consumption for end customers.

t-4 hours behind the scenes

Everyone from the event staff to the tech expo partners are busy getting everything set up for the big day...

T-6 hours and counting

Today is the first day of our Technology Services Europe 2008 conference. Members, Speakers and Partners for AFSMI, SSPA and TPSA have been arriving since Monday to enjoy the best that Paris has to offer and engaging in final preparations for this event.

The conference agenda this year features over 30 sessions presented by experienced practitioners and industry thought leaders, offering a unique opportunity for European services managers to gain new ideas, network with peers and challenge current business and strategic assumptions.

As of Monday we had over 225 confirmed attendees representing the largest European and global technology companies - our largest European conference ever.

I will be blogging live throughout the event to keep you up to date on the latest insights and key takeaways from industry leaders from around the world as well as excerpts from key 1:1 interviews with industry leaders and partners.