The Enterprise Digital Podcast

Barclay and Ian are joined by Neil Keating of XLabs to talk about XLAs, DEX and experience management, and how organisations can get a better picture of the experience they are delivering.Neil explains how XLAs bring together sentiment, operational and technical data, and why looking at those things separately can give a very different picture of what is happening. An IT team might think everything is going well based on its usual measures, while the people using the service are having a very different experience.They also look at the difference between DEX and experience management. Neil sees DEX as one part of a wider approach that can include IT, HR, finance and areas such as employee onboarding.There’s a discussion about CSAT and why surveys after a ticket is closed only tell you so much. Neil talks about other ways of finding out what people are experiencing, including interviews, focus groups, observation and his experience champion approach.The conversation also gets into XLAs and service level agreements, including what happened with SLA penalties in the MSP world and the risk of repeating the same mistakes with experience agreements.Neil explains why improvement needs to be worth the investment, rather than simply trying to make everything better for everyone. They also discuss personas, and why Neil prefers to develop them from experience data rather than decide them in advance.And, as always, we finish with some completely unrelated trivia. This time: why is there underwear buried in Swiss soil?

Barclay and Ian are joined by Brian Parks of Synapse Software, who spent twenty years as a software engineer, three of them at Cherwell, and now runs a business archiving ITSM data for organisations coming off platforms that no longer exist.Brian still calls himself a software engineer while admitting he barely writes code, which opens up a longer conversation about what the job has become. His team leans on AI for the boilerplate, the database layer, the API endpoints, the first version of a UI. Vibe coding, in his view, is something else entirely and shouldn't be confused with engineering. What he's found is that the time freed up goes into requirements, testing and validation, all the things he says he should have been doing more of anyway.On AI initiatives, his warning is about data. Foundation models handle general questions well, but organisations asking AI to work with their own knowledge base need that knowledge base to be good. He also makes a case for retiring the word generative in favour of synthesising, on the basis that nothing is being invented from nothing.Barclay raises the environmental cost, and Brian, who lives in a farming community, has strong views on data centres being built on farmland. It goes into sustainability, whether the green movement has reached AI at all, and the fact that nobody can properly account for the cost of training a model. Ian brings in Ford rehiring hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI and recalling vehicles as a result.Trivia this week involves Doom running on a display made of E. coli cells, at roughly 599 years per playthrough. Barclay's camera also gave up, so he spends the episode as a voice.Watch the full conversation below.

In this mini episode, Barclay Rae talks to Stephen Mann of ITSM.tools about one of the industry's most persistent habits: replacing the ITSM tool every three to five years and hoping this one will be different.They discuss why the tool usually gets the blame when the real issues are organisational, what needs to be in place before any selection decision is made, and why treating ITSM tools as business applications rather than technical ones changes who should be involved. They also get into the current wave of AI-first marketing and why capability without the people side rarely delivers.

Barclay and Ian are joined by Alistair Reid-Pearson, Chief Digital Information Officer at Greater Manchester Mental Health and author of Bit Bob: Artificial Earth.The conversation focuses on storytelling in a business context, and the missing "so what" behind the dashboards, charts and ticket volumes that dominate ITSM reporting. Alistair makes the case that data needs a story alongside it to mean anything, particularly in environments where the work has real human consequences.They also get into neurodiversity and how Alistair's autism shapes the way he communicates and writes, why the IT industry needs to move on from the superhero complex of dramatic fixes toward quieter preventative work, and what shift left looks like inside the NHS ten year plan and mental health services.Plus a 46,000 year old worm, a proton beam therapy centre built in Minecraft, and postcards from the future. Because why not.

Barclay and Ian are back from the Service Desk and IT Support Show with their first reflections on SITS26. The industry looks healthy, the MSP side felt bigger and more established, and AI was on every stand, sometimes at the expense of the conversation about value.They unpack the survey result from their keynote, where 55% of respondents said AI capabilities had improved their service, and ask why that story isn't being told more clearly by vendors. The pitch too often leads with the feature rather than the time saved, the work made easier, or the value returned.Plus retro arcade games on the show floor, silent disco keynotes, and the industry's definitive sandwich preference.