IFS Digitalization CollABorative: End of Year Retrospective, Feedback, and Look Ahead to 2025
Date of Meeting: 12 December 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time
Sarah Nicastro Presentation:
Slide: Agenda
- What we're going to go through today, I'm just going to recap what this year has looked like in terms of the CollABorative sessions. And then I want to share a couple things among the group and then we'll close with just some free form, if you have any feedback if you have any things you would like to see happen in this group next year, if there's any discussion, we want to have, if there's any questions you want to ask one another or Jessica or I, whatever comes up, we can get through that. So that is our plan for today.
Slide: 2024 Retrospective – Sessions Delivered
- So, if we take a look at what we've covered this year. I know there are some folks that are new to the session, so I'll just explain. We typically alternate month to month between what we call Think Tanks and then Tech Talks.
- Think Tanks, the idea there is that those sessions are more topical in nature. They're not necessarily specific to IFS technology. They're more so specific to a trend or challenge or theme that is relevant in the service space and the goal there is for us to sort of have some discussion and some dialogue to basically share knowledge on that theme or topic.
- The Tech Talks are where we bring in someone that leads a different function of the IFS business to share some insights on you know what it is their function is working on, working toward what innovations are upcoming, what feedback they're navigating through, what changes have come, etcetera. And then also give you all an opportunity within those sessions to give them some real time feedback, to ask questions, put them in the hot seat, things like that. So those are the two types of sessions that we alternate between. And as long as we've been having the CollABoratives, we've had sessions every month with the exception of July and August, just because so many folks are on summer holiday. So, with that said, this is what this year look like.
- So, we did a Think Tank on Customer Centricity in the Digital Age back in January. We had a guest speaker join us in February. She is the CEO of a HR consulting firm and not only consulting, but they actually do for hire project work for organizations. So, they will go in and help them make some changes, or do some innovation and do those projects. So, she came and spoke about some of the trends in recruitment, recruiting, hiring and retention. And actually took a couple of open job descriptions and did some real time coaching on those. So that was interesting. And then in April, we had a meet the Member session with Lance Schultz from KLN Family Brands and in June we had another meet the member session with Niklas Andersson of Nederman talking about their journey.
- On the Tech Talk side, we had a R&D session in March with Andrew Lichey. In May, we had our Chief Sustainability Officer, Sophie Graham on to speak about that. September was Unified Support with Raymond Jones. October Jessica did a summary of Unleashed for a reminder for the people that were there and a recap for people that weren't able to attend, and then last month we had Bob De Caux talking about AI. So that's what we tackled this year.
Slide: 2025: A Look Ahead – Tentative Calendar
- This is what our calendar tentatively looks like going into our sessions for next year. So, it's always tough. We try and ask for a lot of feedback from you all on what topics you want to see covered, etcetera. And it's harder than you would think to try and fit everything into just 10 sessions. And so we did our best to consider everyone's feedback and some of the more nuanced things, maybe how we can fit them into another topical conversation, etcetera.
- So, this is what the calendar looks like for 2025, which is obviously coming up quickly. In January we will have a tech talk on maximizing the value of your technology investment with Brendan Viggers, Global Head of Business Value Engineering of IFS. February will be a session with Vaibs Kumar on Data/Cybersecurity. March and October will be a meet the member session. We are still organising who they will be. In April, we did add a session on acquisitions because that was one of the most common feedback points is you all wanting to better understand what companies IFS acquired. What are their solution sets? Who are they relevant for? Etcetera. And while we can't dedicate a session to each one of them, we can do an overview and then give you all ways to get more information on any of them if you would like. May will be a session on creating a collaborative IT strategy. In June, September and November from an IFS perspective, some of the sessions that tend to be highly attended such as the session on AI, the session on Unified Support, the R&D sessions, we have organised for those months.
Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in 2024?
Customer 1
- F: We are currently going through a digitalization transformation. We have tried digital transformation really aggressively and as a result the IT budget or the IT cost, I should say, the budget not necessarily, but the IT cost has doubled in our organization. The cost of delivering our service. And we need to take a real close look at the overall profitability with the cost of everything having gone up and our company not being in a position where we can approach our clients and say, pay more per hour, pay more for these services, pay more. And maybe that's our own wrongdoing. But we can't relay all of the cost increases back to our clients. So, we have to take a look at ourselves and increase our profitability, find out where the cost is going. And hate to admit, make some hard decisions and say maybe certain clients aren't working out for the organization the way that they used to be anymore, and start saying no when letting some clients go. It's a very sensitive topic. But overall as a company we've got to take a look at how do we move forward. And how do we truly implement the things that we have today without turning on another IT project. How do we get good at what we're doing today. Standardize the process. Even with the intricacies. How do we deliver service better, faster, more efficient internally without sacrificing our quality and secure in the future of the company.
Customer 2
- F: What I learnt was about different cultures. We are working at rolling out in different countries and we just rolled out in Hong Kong. It is very different to the Dutch that I am used to. It was a very easy project with no changes or feedback. They just got on with the change and did what they were told. This never happens and it really surprised me. We are about to roll out to the America’s. I have never dealt with Brazil before so this will also be a lesson. But there are some differences in the USA with different regions. So, learning about the different cultures really surprised me.
Customer 3
- F: We are currently in the process of upgrading to IFS Cloud. We are really focused on this project, however my lesson was that we should have also been focusing on the updates. This is also very important as we don’t want to fall behind and make the upgrade even more difficult. This is something I would recommended people to focus on too. We also hope to lessen the time frame for each release update, by applying those lessons learned from the previous ones. It may take us a month at the moment, but we are hoping to drop that down to 2 weeks in the future.
Next CollABoratives:
- 21 January 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Assets CollABorative: Think Tank - EAM Predictions for 2025
- 23 January 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Service CollABorative: Meet the Member - Remote Service w/ Vivint
- 28 January 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Digitalization CollABorative: Tech Talk - Maximizing the Value of Your Technology Investment with Brendan Viggers
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