Through the SupportWorld Live program, HDI empowers IT support and service management leaders to tackle the challenges they’re facing every day by creating an educational program that addresses each and every one of them. Through our conference program, we support a convergence of ideas, strategies, tactics, and case studies that seek to elevate support and service management today and into the future.
We appreciate your commitment to the industry and welcome your submissions. Note that SupportWorld Live features five learning tracks that not only tell leaders how it’s done but show them how to do it. We’ve also added sample topics you might want to consider presenting on.
Be sure to view the speaker toolkit for critical guidance on how to make your submissions successful. Thank you for your time.
This year’s tracks include:
Leading World-Class Teams
The sessions in this track deliver strategic guidance for building and leading a rock-solid culture. Learn best practices for connecting a global, hybrid team, being a transformational leader, creating a culture and workplace that prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion, and unlocking your team’s potential.
Potential topics to address include:
- Transformational leadership in the digital enterprise – supporting a culture of continuous improvement
- Women in IT leadership
- Career-planning and roadmaps for aspiring leaders: where you want to go, what you need to get there, and how best to get after it
- Differences between coaching and mentoring, clarifying the role of sponsors vs. mentors
- Managing hybrid/distributed teams, working across time zones, and sustaining culture and engagement
- Conflict management and resolution
- Best practices and practical advice for identifying and fostering rising talent
- How to ensure Voice of the Customer and employee experience programs complement each other
- Upskilling staff to use and support new technology suites
Modernizing Service Management
From change management to experience management, cybersecurity to robotics and AI, process improvement to process automation, the sessions in this track hold the keys to modernizing your organization’s service management practices. Learn how to power up your organization with forward-thinking approaches to generative AI, knowledge management, swarming, self-service, digital transformation, frameworks and much more.
Potential topics to address include:
- Combining and optimizing service management frameworks and methodologies - terms, practices, differences, similarities, and what it all means for your team
- How to manage BPO and MSP partners to maximize benefits and avoid pitfalls
- Best practices for managing vendor and partner relationships
- The evolving impact of AI, machine learning, and automation on service management and the support organization
- Providing support in a DevOps world
- The pros/cons of Agile for desktop support and the service desk
- Advanced problem management, including root cause analysis, call categorization, and utilizing knowledge base articles
- Creating a knowledge-based culture
- Why design thinking matters in service management
- Supporting a culture of continuous improvement
- Aligning service level management with experience management
- Transitioning from an IT mentality to a business mentality
- Enterprise service management – expanding the benefits of SM beyond IT
- Maximizing next-gen service management tool investments to extend capabilities beyond IT
- Implementing collaboration tools (i.e., Slack, Microsoft Teams)
- Best practices for selecting and implementing new technologies
- Governance frameworks for the enterprise
- Why every organization must include cyber-risk in all of their decisions
- Creating processes and plans to effectively track IT and non-IT organizational assets to assign responsibility, ensure accountability, and achieve and maintain accuracy
- Implementing a CMDB and linking it to your hardware asset management initiative
Optimizing the Support Organization
The sessions in this track dive into the concepts and best practices that promote process improvement and operational efficiency and effectiveness. Learn how to optimize day-to-day operations and implement new strategies, all while maintaining your focus on quality, value, and continuous service improvement.
Potential topics to address include:
- Defining, implementing, and creating new services
- Building clear processes that account for all day-to-day and critical considerations
- AI Ops – sifting through the hype to see through the single pane of glass
- Assessing the risks and opportunities of generative AI and large language models for enterprises (i.e, using ChatGPT for work purposes, understanding where data goes and how it becomes accessible)
- How to optimize your support organization for challenging times and get the most out of your available budget
- Implementing and succeeding with walk-up support, remote support, etc.
- Promoting consistency between service delivery teams, service management practices, and business priorities
- Best practices and practical considerations for consolidating support teams/departments while maintaining service quality
- Developing a unique roadmap for a modern service desk that aligns organizational and IT strategies and direction
- Critical incident management and communications
- Business continuity and disaster recovery planning
- Establishing quality assurance for non-phone interactions, including self-service
- Practical shift-left – keeping quality and customer sat high while lowering costs, improving response, and eliminating stubborn support issues
- Proactive approaches to delivering great service (self-healing, machine learning, etc.)
- Managing and measuring desktop support – understanding the difference between telemetry, monitoring, and measuring
- Supporting VIP/executive users and customers
- Create a roadmap for developing your cybersecurity program and finding training partners
Case Studies: Achieving Service Excellence
This track features real-world case studies that take a deep dive into the elements of strategic service and support in action, including managing support as a business, consolidating and optimizing operations, innovating rapidly and effectively, and building strategic relationships with internal stakeholders, as well as solution and service providers.
Potential topics to address include:
- The evolving impact of AI, machine learning, and automation on service management and the support organization
- Maintaining or gaining service efficiencies in challenging environments
- How to achieve a holistic view of your organization and design services based on that view
- Building a nimble IT organization
- Customer satisfaction and measuring excellence
- Value stream mapping
- Linking IT and support goals to organizational goals and success
- Educating the organization on the value of service management and building alliances outside IT
Evolving the Customer and Employee Experience
This track takes a deep dive into the true impact of exceptional experience management, covering everything from transforming the employee experience to differentiating the customer experience. Delivering innovative approaches to elevating both, learn about the best practices, strategies, philosophies, and methodologies to engage your customers, employees, and stakeholders throughout the organization.
Potential topics to address include:
- Transforming organizational culture (not just IT) through experience, experience management offices, and experience level agreements (XLAs)
- Understanding and improving the customer/employee/user expectations and experience
- Aligning SLAs with XLAs and Voice of the Customer
- Customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, etc.
- How an escalation culture is created, how to avoid it, and how to fix it
- Streamlining processes by applying the guiding principle of optimize and automate (Kaizen)
- Recognizing issues related to mental health
- Combating burnout, coaching struggling employees
- Morale and engagement in the hybrid and remote workplace
- Amplifying company culture and building community across business areas, departments, geographic locations
- Onboarding and training employees in a remote environment
- Leveraging a part-time or outsourced workforce
- Designing and implementing innovative approaches to the customer experience
- Quantifying and improving the customer journey
- Using data and analytics to support a compelling story that engages customers, executives, and stakeholders
- Identifying better ways to gather customer and user feedback
- Reducing customer effort during interactions and engagements
- Expanding avenues/channels for engagement, making sure to meet customers wherever they are
- Feedback, customer effort, channel optimization, and customer journey mapping
- Using customer experience and journey mapping to add and communicate the value of IT to the organization
- Communicating changes made in response to feedback (establishing a continuous feedback loop)
- Identifying and leveraging key stakeholders
- Transforming the words we use in IT to tell effective stories, find champions, support DEI, and help drive transformation