Welcome to The Innovation Today podcast where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry Dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation brought to you by service now your partner in digital transformation thank you for joining us today for another episodes of innovation Today podcast I'm your host San F Innovation officer APAC at service now today we're really excited to welcome Carrie blunt Global head of V Solutions at fuu welcome Carrie thank you very much lovely to be here I'm super excited to jump into the topic for today service operations can you but first can you tell a little bit about yourself and your role yeah sure uh so I've been at Fujitsu a long time I've been doing service now a long time uh it's something I'm really passionate about this is a topic that I uh I really love I would almost consider service operations to be part of my service now superhero origin story right so I originally worked in operations and that's that's where my background is and I was always a bit kind of jealous about the service guys because they seem to be able to affect more change into an organization than I was able to at the operations level and so uh I switched to do more service related things and I found out that actually the service guys were a bit kind of jealous of the operations guys cuz they had all the data and the Insight you know really we were operating independently and uh not delivering the value we should have done so uh I think uh service operations you know there's a lot of names for it there's a lot of kind of parts of it but uh that kind of combination of those two worlds is something that I'm passionate about because I think it really delivers value for customers and I really like that uh carry is really about connecting the silos of processes bring ITF itm and it operation uh coming together I thought TCO could be really a complex uh you know market and Industry and the customers probably you know using the lens of Telco what are most frequent questions and requests as you're getting from your clients yeah Telco is interesting because it's obviously one of the largest most complicated areas in terms of the number of assets the uh the importance of the service to people you know people expect it to be on and running all of the time yeah we're very much used to it almost as a utility and so those that complexity those challenges bring a real focus on the importance of service operations and being able to manage High volumes of changes and complexities in these environments and um keeping the the resilience of the service high as well so I think Telos is a really interesting area yeah it's truly about customer experience as well with a good service operation and good customer experience I couldn't imagine the day that I would be drop off from the nightbook now kri how is fisu approaching the service operation uniquely in the market yeah we um have a lot of insight into a lot of Industries and we uh that that visibility across lots of Vis uh lots of Industries and areas uh means that we are able to kind of learn from how we're implementing on One customer and take it to another customer um and dealing with that complexity as a service provider ourselves uh really gives us some uh real insight into the way customer organizations operate often we'll we'll go into a customer and talk to them about their operations and they will say oh yeah we're unique we're different uh our operation is totally different from from everybody else's but actually they're not always that different as they think they are you know there's just really good good hygiene and good service operations practices that they can be applying um that we apply to our own organizations uh that they can pick up and adopt uh regardless of the uniqueness of your industry right and that's soort true and then and I I have to bring up the next question it seems like we can't go on you know a minute without talking about AI right you know what's the top of mind for your customers as Prospect when it comes to Ai and service operations coming together yeah so obviously gen is the big Topic at the moment right everyone's talking uh different uh chat GPT and kind of things those kinds of technologies have really opened up the AI conversation and customers always a bit surprised to know that there's they could be applying AI in their itom and it operations already they think that gen is a is a you know the new thing and like this is really cutting edge and actually the principles of applying machine learning for your event management and uh you know correlating all your events and things like that are are actually really not new technologies right um they're things that have been around for a while and you know using AI in that context is actually a relatively easy step when you've got everything in in the platform like service now so I think customers are really um surprised and excited and really pleased that they can accelerate their Journey with AI without having to learn kind of a load of new complex AI tools you know it's all there ready for them to use and car I totally agree with your insights that that's all AI matters I was you know sharing a lot of customers the data machine learning using a probably based on mathematical statistics model that's from probably 00 years ago absolutely yeah yeah and I'm me this whole excitement around gen around the skus set that it brings us to human we just wondering you know where your composition is really evolving around where how are we going to start with their AI Journey yeah the whole AI Journey it's obviously difficult for customers always to know where to where to start right so yeah we could be applying AI at the service end we could be applying it at the operations and I always think that you need to start from where you are try to automate as much as possible and then if AI helps you to automate then even better right so uh stick with uh stick with kind of first principles uh look at the uh the operations content the data uh what events have you got coming in uh look at your service tickets what what's the what's hot in terms of uh service outages and events and then look to try and apply automation as much as possible and just follow those good principles and at some point you'll go ah we could we could do this better with with AI or we could we could completely get rid of this uh bit of work uh for our people by having it automated by an AI and at that point that's the obviously the point where you need to start considering it but you don't have to consider it from day one right it's really about turning to become from a firefighter to be more proactive the predictive management you you're talking about and probably about Skilling operations so I think that's where AI andine comes in absolutely yeah yeah you know um I just want to Pivot the questions a little bit I think we we started talking about Telos you know what what other Industries you working with to apply service operations today there's lots of Industries where service operations can and should be important you know more than you more than you think we mentioned on Telco just because of the size and and complexity but you start to see it operations being applied in all sorts of Industries you know you take for example manufacturing and utilities uh and also obviously the operational technology side as well so we talked about we're talking about it really in most cases but we've now got the capability to merge the it and OT worlds together and apply the great principles that we already apply to our it assets and our it operations to our OT operations as well so I think that's a really interesting exciting area and um we have lots of uh customer conversations uh where uh they're really interested in uh the principle of bringing those two things together um and managing them together and the same with uh security operations as well so it's a Gateway into really good security operations so every industry is really interested in their security you know cyber security is big on the agenda and so as a Gateway into that conversation you know it operations is is right there at the front of everyone's mind yeah definitely I think we're definitely seeing more attacks not just on it systems but also on allti devices the cameras you know the the Productions uh machineries as well yeah everything's connected now so we've got to worry about it yeah so the the real the conversion of it and OT is really become really real for your customers absolutely yes yeah and uh Industries where you wouldn't have thought that um traditionally they didn't need to worry about it right yeah but uh now you see the sort of cyber security attacks on the news suddenly it's right at the top of uh you know the C CEO you know the SE suite are really uh interested in it and so it's coming up in conversation lots more and it was really connected it was just not talking about software in hway suppos also the devices that is uh you know you being used by for example industry like manufacturing utilities that use a lot can you share like probably you know possible examples of manufacturing customers that you work with and how they have benefited from IT service operations yeah so for manufacturing customers particularly downtime is obviously a big issue for them right if your production line is not running uh then you're losing money straight away and there's a high level of sensitivity from you know Factory floor managers um they have traditionally been very kind of resistant to to the it guys coming in and messing with their stuff right because uh the factory floor teams are obviously incentivized to keep the factory floor running all the time and they don't want to hand over any control uh but uh you can start to see when you introduce service operations and you bring those Factory floor managers into the fold and you can they can understand how they could reduce their downtime or improve their productivity by applying the principles of it operations and service operations then uh you can you can get them on board right they're they're interested suddenly as long as they can have the visibility through you know workspaces and things like that then uh then they're all on board yeah and this is how traditionally like business department is being organized it and then asot departments often silos and um this is where I think service now coming from a service operation about connecting the people the systems as well as the processes what are the misconceptions that organization have when they approaching service operations that you in in your clients s the market one of the things we see quite often is organizations seeing some concept like say devops and they say okay we're going to be a devops organization and I and I say to them where are you with your service operations where how how far are you with your iton journey and they go oh we've not implemented that yet uh and I start say to them well we need to get some basic principles going here right so uh let's look at your uh data model let's look at the consistency of the data uh let's make sure that you've got good practices happening in your organization because you don't want to layer on a technology change and a organizational change like devops at the same time you're actually taking on far too much so let's get your uh your service operations your Automation and Improvement in what you've got today then let's transform your organization to be a devops model later so just take things slowly Implement based on sort of simple principles let's try and simplify let's try and automate let's try and optimize and then let's look at the devops or Sr or something like that in terms of your organization definitely I think this is really about setting that whole foundation and we are talking about having really good cmdb and laying on top the building blocks absolutely they're really about the dep of process one some of the es and like you know the problems are a lot for JS and God knows what is coming around the corner and you really need to have that visibility and also the actionable insights around around that you know where do you think we're hitting next when it comes to service Ops yeah I think there'll always be this need to optimize and automate as much as possible we've obviously talked about AI uh I think we're only just learning where all the use cases are for AI so we've been doing some interesting things for example at fitsu with visual AIS right so that we'll analyze pictures and then um have those feed into a service operations type uh landscape and so I think there's Technologies like that that people haven't really considered properly uh but which could provide some real benefits to their organization uh so I think those things are exciting things they are new areas that we're opening up the eyes of customers to see and I think that's probably more and more of those kind kind of AI related concepts are going to happen and as more and more things go to the cloud uh obviously Cloud operations has becomes a a much more important thing I think we'll continue to see more maturity in that area and more importance of managing your Cloud assets alongside everything else those things are going to be the things that people are worrying about for the next few years I'm not sure but just in the next few years probably the next decade that talking about Carri I've been has it been a great conversation but just kind of like um wanting to end of anything else you want to add especially for our clients will or prospects is it really about starting off their Journey any advice you want to give them yeah I say don't be afraid and start simple right uh look at those foundational principles um you know organizations like fitsu come in and help you get it right from the start rather than learning by making the mistakes and having to go backwards and and fix things so yeah come and come and talk to a partner try and get that conversation going use their knowledge of previous implementations to make sure that your implementation goes well krie thank you so much for joining us today and also foru being a great partner as well as a customer self service now this has been really a great uh conversation yeah thank you very much for having me it's been really good and thank you to all of our listeners Please Subscribe and share if you like what you heard today and be sure for join us for the next episode [Music]