XLA 2.0: Bridging the gap between IT experiences and business goals

Speaker 1: 

Welcome to the IT Experience podcast. This is a podcast for those who are interested in IT experience management in large enterprises. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system to provide services to employees, then this is for you, brought to you by Happy Signals, more smiles, less time wasted. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

Hello and welcome to the Happy Signals IT Experience podcast. Today we have a special guest with us Weston Morris from Unisys. Weston is a renowned expert in the field of internal IT service experience management, and has helped many organizations implement successful strategies to improve their employee satisfaction and productivity. And the subject of the conversation today will be the concept of experience level agreements and how they can transform the organization's IT services. So, without further ado, welcome Weston to the show. 

Weston Morris: 

Sakari, I am thrilled to be here with you today. Looking forward to our conversation. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

Let’s introduce you to the audience. Many of our listeners might know you, but there's probably some that don't as well. So, would you like to introduce yourself, who you are? What, what is your role at Unisys? And maybe also a little bit different question. What makes you excited about coming to work every morning? 

Weston Morris: 

Hmm. Well, I'll start with the mundane and get to the exciting in just a second. Yeah. I'm the senior director for global strategy for our Digital Workplace Solutions business unit here at Unisys. I'm also the host of the digital Workplace Deep Dive podcast. And that kind of leads into things that, that excite me you know, being able to do something like this with you sake and have a conversation about what's happening and learn something. And, also I get a big kick out of being able to work together with somebody to collaborate and, and, and solve a problem. You know, just love being able to find, you know, a solution to a business problem. And especially as it relates to how like the topic we're talking about, how experience management and XLA and even hybrid work, how all these things can come together to solve a problem, whether it's a bank or an airline, a government agency, whatever it is, what they're doing, and connecting the dots with employee experience. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

That also creates a nice segue into sort of looking at the role of it. So solving business problems. It has a supporting role making employees productive and helping them to do their work every day. So if you look at the role of it, has it changed? And how would you see the role of IT service management with this experience focus in the workplace today? 

Weston Morris: 

I think it is changing quite a bit. If we were to look at, and there's, there's two different types of it, right? You might put, put put 'em in two buckets. There's the IT that's provided in-house by a company, and then there's outsourced it. At the end of the day, they're, they're both trying to accomplish the same thing, but sometimes they behave a little differently. They're measured a little differently. I think historically it has being used as a cost, you know, as a necessary evil <laugh> as something you have to do and to get to being able to, to run your business. But that's what's changing is for a couple reasons. One, there's been this pressure to say okay, it, how are you helping my business? Let's have that conversation. Here's what, here's what I do as a company, and how can you and it play a bigger role in a, in achieving those business goals as, as opposed to just saying, simply deliver it, meaning gimme a device, gimme my apps, gimme my people, you know, identity and access to cloud and, and services, and then give them a support function when things break. 

Weston Morris: 

That's, you know, what it does. But thinking about doing those things in the context of what the company does and actually enabling those is, is a, is a totally different approach. It's just, you know, switching gears and, and moving your head around in a, in a different direction. And, and the other factor I think that's, that's changing it is, is really this thing we're gonna talk about here, experience management and XLA, when IT or the CIO is starting to measure the experience of employees, they now are forced to have a conversation, a, about how that experience, how their service connects to experience, and how that experience connects to what the business is doing. And, and that actually leads up to, you know, I think we were talking a little bit about the difference between XLA 1.0 and XLA 2.0 as well. But those are, those are some aspects of how I see what it is supposed to be doing and how it's changing. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

And speaking of providing the IT service from an external service provider's point of view today, as opposed the expectations on what that means is quite different from what it was before in the very digital workplace of today. And then also with hybrid work. So any, do you have any short thoughts about, about like, what it means to provide experience for the digital workplace? 

Weston Morris: 

I think in the past, especially if we're talking about outsourced it a managed service provider would basically walk up to the table and say, okay, what do you need, <laugh>? And the, the client would say, well, I need you know, I've got this many devices I need you to support. We're using this operating system. I need this many patches. I have got this many gold images I need you to maintain. There's a certain number of tickets and incidents we're expecting. I'll need a service desk. I need these languages, I need these hours of service. And we'll, we'll check off the boxes, you know, outsourcing, we'll check off those boxes and say, yep, I can deliver that. Let's put a contract in place and we're gonna measure it with SLAs, service level agreements, you know, like average handle time and number of tickets, and how many how quickly do we patch 90% of your PCs? 

Weston Morris: 

Those sorts of things. And that contract remains pretty much fixed for three years, five years or, or whatever. And that service isn't, isn't even designed to evolve, and it isn't really focusing on the bigger picture. What does the company do? What does the business do? It's really focused on, I'm, I'm delivering these services just like I would be delivering electricity, you know, or other utilities. You know, what is the rate? What is the charge? And what you do with that, that's your problem. <Laugh> is, is kind of the old approach to things, but now as we're measuring experience and experience management, you're, you're really forced to have a different conversation. It, it gives you the opportunity to say, well, well, who, you know, who are your people? What are they doing? How is it connected to what your business is? And I'm going to look at those different personas and perhaps even provide different experience levels for those personas. 

Weston Morris: 

And we're gonna measure that experience with a goal of improving the experience over time. So already we're talking about the service evolving, right, right out of the gate. And then I think we'll talk a little bit later too about, you know, organizationally, you know, what is needed in order to deliver XLA today? O obviously you need an experience management organization that is doing the day-to-day evaluation of the XLA, and then, you know, making improvements. But we've also learned just recently the need to have a lifecycle management organization in place an experienced governance board, or as we're calling it now, an experienced evolution board that plans to evolve the XLA over time. And that could either be changing what are some of the data points that we measure, you know, as new technologies released, oh, maybe we should measure that now as part of this x. 

Weston Morris: 

And also as experience is improving what's considered good changes as well. So I might need to change that. And there may be XLA that you have in place that are very closely tied to a business activity, like a merger. And as soon as that merger is successfully complete, do I still need that XLA to measure the experience, you know, of the two different organizations that are coming together? No, probably not. So I can then put that into a maintenance motor, even retire that XLA, entirely big differences, you know, now versus just a few years ago. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

So is that, and the realization that there are big differences is that what also has led to how you see XLA 1.0 and 2.0 in this evolution of XLA? You want to just maybe for the audience go through what in your definition is XLA 1.0 and what is XLA 2.0? 

Weston Morris: 

XLA 1.0. I think we all started with, you know, this idea of measuring experience, and we asked, how do we do it <laugh>? And there's platforms out there that, that help to do that for us, right? And, and different components. There's you know, what, what your company does, happy signals, you're focusing very well, I might add on people happiness, what's going on on the people side of things through surveys. And that's not easy. You know, there's a lot of science behind measuring the subjective side of things. What do people feel about their IT service? And doing it in a way that, you know, you, you, you, you've got metrics that you can then act on. So that's, that's definitely part of it. I think in a lot of cases that's overlooked. Where people have started is with a platform that measures the digital experience score, they may say, or DEX tool. 

Weston Morris: 

There's several platforms out there that do that. One E [inaudible] next thing, eternity, Lakeside. These are platforms that are collecting what I call the, kind of oversimplifying it, the PC happiness, collecting data on the device, the performance, the reliability, and the operation of the devices, and collecting multiple data points on there to see, well, how is my device ha working? Because we all know if my PC's not happy, if it's having a bad day, I'm gonna have a bad day. <Laugh> typically, right? So there's the connection there, right? It's important to measure that. And, and these platforms produce a score. And a lot of times people are saying, well, that's my XLA, that score, that in itself. And I would say the, well, the, okay, if that's your XLA, then we'll call that XLA 1.0. Now we need to think about bringing in the people happiness side of things. 

Weston Morris: 

We should, there's other data sources as well. We're, we're, we're, right now we're recording this podcast in Zoom. Later I'll be in a Teams meeting. We should be measuring the unified communication and collaboration experience, the UC happiness as well. And that's why two years ago we purchased Unify Square at Unisys. The PowerSuite platform does a marvelous job of collecting that data and then bringing all that together, the PC happiness, the people happiness, the uc, happiness and producing XLA that measure all these different aspects of my, my experience at work and, and then having that data available. So now I've got the foundation for XLA 2.0, but XLA 2.0 still isn't that. It is defining your XLA around your business goals or around your people very specifically. So for example, we may talk with a manufacturing company or a pharmaceutical company or a bank, and the answer to the question we ask is gonna be different. 

Weston Morris: 

Which are your most important people in your organization that have an impact on your next business goal that you're trying to accomplish? And it may even be different from one bank to another. One, one bank we just spoke with customer of ours is growing by acquisitions, and they want to keep the small bank feel. And so for them, it's very important to, to, to do that. It says, well, let's measure that. Well, how, how do you have a small who has the biggest impact on your small banking field at small community field? Well, it's the tellers your frontline workers. Okay. Let's measure the experience specifically of your frontline workers. What's unique about them? Well, they have a shared device. They don't even have a dedicated pc. They move from teller station to teller station. Okay. Let's focus on what their experience is like as a result of that, not having a dedicated device. 

Weston Morris: 

How do they get help? When they're dealing with a, a person, a client that walks into the bank and they, something's not working. They don't want to call a service desk and spend 15 minutes. They, they've got a queue of people lined up. They need to quickly be able to move to another device and keep working. How easy is it for them to do that? How quickly can we get that device that did, did fail working again, so that that teller station's open? So those are the types of things, those types of the questions we would ask, so that we would have persona-based XLAs, and they're gonna be unique per, per as I said, per industry. And even within an industry unique for one client to another, we can also have XLA that are tied to business goals. I alluded to one earlier about our merger. 

Weston Morris: 

I, I'm just thinking of an example of a hospital system that was recently merging two big hospital systems during the pandemic. And it just made sense, to measure the experience of one of the companies that's, that's a part of the merger against the employees in the other part of the company. And, and we know they're gonna have some problems, right? Because when you merge, you typically standardize on one set of tools. If one group was using Zoom and the other one's using Google or Teams, and you say, okay, we're all gonna move to Teams, someone's probably not gonna be happy <laugh>. So we need to measure that experience and, and, and act on it in that way. So those, just to summarize then XLA 2.0 is collecting data from multiple sources, bringing it together. You've gotta have an XMO that's, that's monitoring it. And then defining XLA that are beyond just, you know, the basic PC experience looking at XLA that are defined by persona and XLA that are defined according to business goals and initiatives over time. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

That's, it's interesting because what you're describing is basically how do we make people able, how can it help people just be able to get the working package to do their work well, regardless of what their context is. And if I understood correctly, you do have some research around that. Like once you put the metrics in place and you collect some data, for example, around the use of experience data or XLA 1.0 data, XLA 2.0 data, there was some interesting data that you had around when people would be willing and how they see that trade-off in terms of knowing if it would improve it. 

Weston Morris: 

Yeah, it's, it's a pretty exciting research, and it, and I know it is very complimentary to your research report, which I absolutely love. I can't wait for the next one to come out your Global IT experience benchmark. And I'm just gonna refer to it first because I, when I was re-reading, the most recent one that you published at the end of last year, I think you said something like, 13% of the tickets are causing employees to lose 80% of their lost time, if I'm expressing it correctly. Did I get it right? Yeah, that's correct. And, and that reminded me of some research that, the research we did it and it's, it's just published here a few weeks ago, and we can make it available to your readers as well, or your listeners. It's called From Surviving to Thriving in Hybrid Work. 

Weston Morris: 

And we did this together with HFS. And one of the data points there was that first of all, 56% of employees say, Hey, you hired me to do a job, then give me the tools I need to do that job properly and, and make them work. Right? <laugh>, they said that was number three on their list behind pay and training <laugh> between, so it's high up there. So we better be paying attention it to that. So then the other statistic that that jumped out at me was about half of the employees are still losing between one and five hours a week. And that's the one that connects, you know, with the report that you have published Yeah. In your global IT experience benchmark that 13% of the problems are causing 80% of the time to be lost. So I, I, I would almost marry those together to say, okay, if half the people are losing between one and five hours, and actually if we look at the next tier up, the, the remaining 25% are losing more than six hours, and some are losing, losing as much as 10. 

Weston Morris: 

I mean, even at the low end of that scale, we're talking about almost 10% of my week every week is being consumed with me having to do with IT issues. That's terrible. <Laugh>. We need to fix that. Yeah. Now, the good news is, in that same survey we found that around 70% of employees said, Hey, I will allow you to measure the performance and usage of my device and my applications if, if you promised to get rid of those, you know that five hours a week that I'm losing or whatever, how many hours I'm losing. But, but the caution also was that a, a very large number of employees also said, Hey, don't be using that data to evaluate me as an employee, <laugh> and, and, and invade my privacy. So there's a very fine line with how we use this data, and I know in Europe it's, it's especially difficult to navigate that with workers' councils and, and whatnot. 

Weston Morris: 

In the US it's a little easier, but still you've gotta respect, you know, how people feel. And so it's really important if we are gonna collect this data for, for experience management and XLA with the goal of solving the problems, let's make that clear. Let's be very candid and explain this to our employees. This is what the data we're collecting, it's how we're using it, it, and, and be clear about how we're not using it as well. And, and with this research, I think this gives us the ammunition, so to speak, to go out and actually attack this problem and, and implement experience management, collect the data, and put in experience management organization, measure with XLA, and actually improve the experience of our employees. That's, that's gonna be the end goal. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

Yeah. And that's the human piece there. Like, we are looking at the device and application data, but one thing that we have found in our research as well is that the hours that, an employee would estimate that they have lost with IT issues often start before a ticket is raised, often starts with things or involves aspects that are not visible in that technical data. You might be walking over to a different desk to ask a colleague, do you know this problem? I'm having this issue with my device, then go to another one. Have you seen this? And then when they don't get the response or the solution from their vicinity, then they raise a ticket and then that time clock starts ticking with traditional IT metrics. And while it does tick, when, if you'll be looking at the data, so 13% cost 80%, but 87% of the tickets look fine, we basically, at a 90% level, maybe that's the SLA, you know, like to, to solve that amount of tickets within a certain amount of time. So once again, we get to the watermelon, the old topic that listeners know as well. Yeah. So what's the real cost of those issues? And this is something we discussed in the pre-recording session as well, like looking at the real cost, and we had some really good points about that. So maybe do you want to revisit the real business cost of IT issues? 

Weston Morris: 

Yeah. I, I, and, and I love it, how, how you Happy signals are able to collect this data. And I'm thinking as you were describing it about the, the time that's lost before I even call, because I'm sure it's different with the different s support types, you know, if I'm a doer versus supported and, and I feel like I'm a doer, right? I'm going to look up five things, on Google or probably chat GPT next as to how to fix my problem. And I'm gonna try those things before I call the service desk. So when I call the service desk, I don't want them to tell me to turn it on and off again. Yeah. Or try those five basic steps, recognize that about me, and jump straight to step six, right? Because I've already gone there. Take me to the Resolver group and, and get this problem fixed. 

Weston Morris: 

But, it's really important that you bring this up because it normally, we’re so focused on how much time we spent in it to fix a problem, and that, that has caused, I don't wanna say it's dangerous, but it's almost it's, it's the wrong focus because, and, and the leader, the, the vice president of our business unit was just talking about this the other day, that Joel, Joel Raper, that it's, it's so really wrong of us to be so focused on reducing the cost of a ticket without thinking of what is my co the cost to the person who's being helped, how much time are they losing? And that's why I love this data here, because it really backs it up that that's what we should be looking at reducing, even if it takes me longer on the support side to fix a problem or cost a bit more because of the investigation and the, the details we're digging up and the remediation, that's okay if I can show that I'm reducing the, the downtime of the employee. 

Weston Morris: 

So what is the downtime? That was your original question, finally getting around to it there, somebody <laugh> is for different, different support types, it could very well be, all that research I did, you know, looking on Google and everything before I even called the service desk, and I'm still not fixed. And then the time it took for Service Desk to fix it, so that, that one is a straightforward one. But what if the problem that I'm having caused me to lose my work? You know, I'm working on a presentation, I'm working on this podcast, right? Editing it, and all of a sudden crash everything, and the whole recording is destroyed and all the edits and everything, hours and hours of work. Well, it, you know, first of all, is that even being measured, it's, I don't think it is being measured officially in many organizations. 

Weston Morris: 

I know Happy Signals is helping to measure that, and that's great. So that's, that's an even bigger, bigger cost. But now let's look at it in terms of roles. Let's just say that five people in the organization had the exact same problem. Let's say it's a pharmaceutical and they lose, I'll lose four hours. Okay, we'll just make it easier. Four hours they lost. So I could list just say, okay, well it's four hours times their role their hourly rate, and that would be an easy way of measuring things. And it's pretty, you can substantiate that. And that's a, that's a good measure as well. Much better than just how much time did it take for me to fix the ticket, right? We're focusing on the employee, but let's look at the different roles. Somebody in HR if they lose four hours, what's the impact to the company, to the business of this pharmaceutical? 

Weston Morris: 

When HR lost four hours it's probably not something that's gonna impact the bottom line of the company, right? So let's just say, okay, for HR, we're just gonna measure that person's hourly rate times four. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, okay, that's the cost. Let's look at someone else in sales. Somebody in sales is having a difficulty uploading their orders. They've been out talking to doctors and collecting orders and they're ready to submit 'em. And the doctors are expecting those to come in like the next day. Well, if that order can't be submitted, it has to be delayed a day because of those four hours. Now what's the possible impact? Well, maybe those doctors are like, oh, man, that company is always late delivering my meds that I need. How am I take gonna take care of my patients? 

Weston Morris: 

I'm gonna switch. I'm going to a different pharmaceutical. They've been bugging me. I'm gonna switch. Now we're talking maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, I don't know, dollars for, for that loss. Let's look at somebody on the pill production line for that pharmaceutical. If they're down for four hours and it actually causes the line to shut down, that's a big deal, right? I, I mean, we're easily gonna be measuring that in, in hundreds of thousands of dollars probably, right? Let's look at the research scientists that's working on the next new drug. They're, they're working on their workstation, they're folding protein molecules, and, you know, they're coming up with the, the next new cure for cancer or whatever. If they are delayed repeatedly with this four hours, does that impact their ability to get this intellectual property produced in time compared to their competition? 

Weston Morris: 

Does their competition now beat them to market as a result of this? That could be millions. So that's, that's why it's really important to think about, first of all, to collect this data that, you know, where are we losing ours? Love it that you're doing that. And then to slice and dice it by a course problem type, well, can we automate and so on. But then also slice and dice it by persona with the question, what's the impact on the bottom line to the company when we do that? There'll be no question that experience management and XLA will have value in it. They will, they will expose these problems very quickly. And you'll see the results. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

And that connection between the experience and those bottom line and role-based losses of time can be quite difficult to show in advance to make, for example a company convinced about investing into experience management and the people and the tooling needed for that. So, and we spoke also about procurement a little bit. Like what, what role does pro procurement have and other outside roles that are maybe not in it, but are still influenced in the decision whether or not to take in experience management and invest in it. So how do you say that? Like, how is that dynamic in today's world? 

Weston Morris: 

I, I'm seeing that procurement has been slow to change how they're evaluating outsourcing companies. In selection if they're still using the old methods, they're gonna want to do just how I described how outsourcing approached it themselves. You know, what, what are the services you need and how are we gonna measure it? Let's put a contract in place and we'll look at driving down the price, you know, a little bit with efficiencies every year that, that goes against this idea of experience management and XLA, where, where the outsourcing company is really more of a partner with the company and, and having conversations about, well, what do you do as a business? What are the key roles in your company that the personas that are driving those business goals, and what is the experience that they need and how do we measure that experience? 

Weston Morris: 

This, as I said earlier, experience and experience management and XLA need to be more dynamic. It needs to be able to change and be more flexible. Cause I mean, we didn't expect the pandemic what's next, right? We need to be able to react to what's next and our contracts need to be in place that we can adjust a little bit more easily than the rigid contracts in the past. And these are the things that procurement needs to recognize in my opinion, and make changes for. The other thing is, is taking into account, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of having this experienced governance board where in the contract you can have this ability to change XLA to create new ones to change some of the data points that go into the existing XLA so that they're much more flexible than the very rigid SLAs of the past. 

Weston Morris: 

So those are a few of the things. Actually, one more just comes to my mind is this notion of penalties. There's a big focus on, on penalties and, and that's part of the, you know, part parcel to do with the SLAs. If you don't meet your SLAs, there's a penalty. If you exceed them, maybe you might get some sort of benefit. And that model can be counterproductive when we're looking at XLAs because it kind of creates an adversarial relationship between the outsourcing provider and the, and the client when instead you really need to have a super collaborative model when you're working on experience management and XLA. So that part's still being figured out. There's still a lot of discussion on that, you know, how do you deal with penalties and so on. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

That's we had a good example with a Norwegian client that outsourced IT to one of the big GSIs, and they had put in place with good intention an SLA on chat response. And what happened is that that SLA then cost agents to open multiple chats at the same time to be able to meet the SLA. And then at the same time, when the end user was on the other side of the chat, they were expecting it to be as interactive and as direct as the telephone is. So when they were then waiting for the chat responses, they were not happy. So actually they were able to improve the experience by removing the SLA so that there was no incentive for the agents to open several chats and they were able to solve a problem and then move on to the next chat. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

So just sometimes I think the XLA and SLA dynamic is something that needs to work well together. And XLA can then show where you can have that real impact on people and not just that well-intended logical one. And the dynamic in nature, I guess, of XLA is something like you've been mentioning several times that it needs to be open to change, needs to be open to adjusting the approach to the prevailing circumstances and changing environment that we're in. So we spoke about an experience management board or, or experience evolution board. We call it the XMO, the experience management office. But I think the one thing that is common in those different approaches is having different types of stakeholders, actually having those conversations so that the decisions aren't made in silos, but you do get the different viewpoints to be able to make the right choices when you do change, even if those changes are happening on a regular basis. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

I think this is an, a pretty good place to sort of start wrapping up the conversation around XLA. Like you mentioned in the beginning, you are a podcast host yourself. You write you write articles. You, you are influencing the, the way that the experience management industry as a whole is, is moving and how you're doing it at Unisys, so if people want to find you and talk to you, listen to the things that you have said, and read the things that we have written, what's the best way to find you, Weston? 

Weston Morris: 

Yeah, I'd say the best way to just reach out to me on LinkedIn follow me on LinkedIn I will often post I'll post about this one, <laugh> this podcast once it goes out, but also my episodes on the Digital Workplace Deep Dive. Welcome, I welcome your listeners to subscribe to that podcast as well. In fact, on that podcast we interviewed your CEO Sami Kallio and that was a very well received podcast that we did you know, several months ago. So there's just so much changing in the space. I enjoy being challenged as well, you know, post a question say, Hey, this is what we're doing, or, Hey, I've got some cool new thing that we're doing, and, and would love to share that with you. Love having those conversations. 

Sakari Kyrö: 

Perfect. Well, I'm really happy to have hosted you on the podcast today, and thank you for taking the time to come and as we wish our guests at the end of each episode. Stay safe and stay happy. Thank you for coming. 

Speaker 1: 

If you like this episode, giving the podcast a review helps others find this content as well. You can also visit our YouTube channel or our learning center at happysignals.com for some more video content. Join hundreds of like-minded IT professionals or pass the free ITSM certification course on ITSM Academy.