The DEX Value Engine: Inside Nexthink Professional Services | Bryan Hunter

Hey it change Makers, and welcome to the Deck Show with Tom mc grath. Let's get into it. Hello, change Makers, Welcome back to the Deck Show. You know, one of my favorite things on the show is is getting a next thinker on the show that we've never had before, because, as I'm sure you've heard me say before, we live in a truly inexhaustibly interesting company or a company with an inexhaustible resource of interesting people to talk to, and I've to say illustrative at this point.

It's not only that we've got a brand new guest today from Next Thing, but we have a next thinker. In all my seven years here, I've never had a chance to properly speak to before. He's Brian Hunter. I'm consulting senior manager at Professional Services.

How you doing, Brian, I'm doing real again. I'm excited to be here. Excellent, excellent, And I was just saying to Brian before we started recording, I was we haven't actually met before. How have we not met though, Brian?

How has that not happened? How has that not happened? How long have you been in Next Thing? Maybe it's just a.

Little over two years. It's been a whirlwind time too. I joined June of two thousand and four. Four goodness, my mask might not be up to it's a little longer than I and I thought.

Where are you based, Brian? I'm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US. My office is out of the Boston office. Though.

Nice, Well, we probably both you slightly more often than me occasionally passed through the Boston office. Man, But I think I've done it like once. Okay, I did it a few times a year, so I might might I see you out there? Maybe maybe?

Maybe not? Maybe not? But what were you doing before you came to the Next Thing, Brian? To a background, I actually worked for Next Think customer, So I was working for one of the Fortune one hundred companies for twenty two years prior to coming to the Next Think.

I did a lot of things over there, from end user all the way up to I ended up running their Next Think for their organization for seven years. As actually how I found out about the company gotcha. Like many such cases, like my previous co host in Flower, you know, people come out of come out from being customers to full time Next thinkers, and you do you do encounter them in professional services? Most of well, it think it is interesting you have had Next Thinkers from Professional Services join us before, but I thought, look, I thought we could focus in a little bit on this sometimes under sometimes it's undersung, you know, heroes of Next Think the PS team is there known around here.

Maybe you could begin, Brian, just give people a little bit, a little bit of the lay of the land of what it is that professional services do and why indeed there's such sort of such value partners by customers and Next Thinkers are like. Absolutely so professional services as a whole. We offer paid for and also annual services to customers that help them actually realize their goals with the platform. Next thing is a very capable platform.

It has a lot of different moving parts to it, and it can be very complicated for people to take on. So that's where professional services thankfully is there for customers. We help them understand how they can translate the ideas or the use cases or the value they're trying to receive into reality and then present that information back to their stakeholders. So it really is where the rubber hits the road, and we help bridge that gap for a lot of customers.

One hundred percent. And it's actually something that correct me if I'm wrong. If it's been singled out by Gartner in more one Magic Quadra and as a kind of one of the kind of distinguishing strength of nexte software. I believe you're correct.

You'll have to check and validate for. We're just going to make it. We're going to make that assumption together. Gotten half my number, They've got my number if I need to correct for record, and I will correct it internalisten as I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure that's the case.

But what But certainly we live, we live in an era where that kind of operationalization layer, as it were, is increasingly sought after, talked about important to customer. I can actually give you, I can give you a real life example. My last organization I was with, they had next Think We like I said, I managed it for seven years with them, from the time period I took over until the time period that we had at fully operational and we were on a regular cadience realizing regular value from the product was about four years.

Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. And then when I joined professional services, having a some of the customers I was with one of them, we realized the same degree in movement in about seven months. It is because we have the experience of what's come along, what works, what doesn't work, how to bridge those gaps inside your organization, and so we can definitely help accelerate that path to value for customers.

Guys, they are extremely interesting statistics and you hear the same over time. People will recognize the same story from We have a lot of customers come on the show and they say, oh, actually our background next with Decks goes back a lot further than this successful kind of project or you know, but first time around, you know, we didn't do it right, you know, and it took this approach with more guidance on that sort of dex shops layer to be successful. And of course the professional services you're in quite a privileged position in being so embedded inevitably with custom and those but also very close to the technology and the people who are building it.

Right, you're you're right between the two. What do you think you take from that privileged position that would be difficult for the rest for company to learn by itself. Yeah, so it's actually interesting because you do see how different organizations operate. So, like I said, next Thing has a lot of capabilities and a lot of complex interactions, and every other customer is different and so what might work for one definitely doesn't work for everyone else.

And so from the professional services side, you have to learn to think on your toes and you learn how you can almost bend the platform to meet what your customers are looking for. And so I think that would be something even if you go like talking to the product team. There's been many times where I've talked to them and they're like, I never thought of how you guys use that, and like, well, we have to because we have to, like I said earlier, make the rubber meet their own and help drive that value to our customer.

So we have to bridge that gap for them. And how how often then does an engagement start as can you can you help us to do this and actually results in something next thing does or builds differently as a consequence. I don't have exact metrics, but like the anecdotal point of view all the time, there's many customers who are putting forth like ideas that we help them bridge up. I'll give you a perfect example, the most recent one where they put in the binary usage data for like CPU and GPU usage and stuff like that that came from an engagement that I was with with the customer last year where we actually met with the PM team and we said, hey, this is something that's really useful.

These are the breakdowns is where she come to and they put on their backlog and they implemented it this year. And going back a little further, Brian correct me if I'm wrong, But the deck score itself, you know, you know that was a belief I came out of a customer's request or suggestion back in the day. I'm gonna believe you on that one. That's a little bit before my time.

We're just going to go an assumption here, Brian across the board. Okay, no fact check us today. I believe it's true. I'm pretty confident.

And we look at maybe another example of this. We were going to talk a bit more about hardware refresh. We had a very successful episode with Scott Pope recently kind of delving into hardware Refreshed a little bit, and we're going to go into it in a little bit more detail and from a different angle here today. But before we do, Brian, is is the Hardware Refreshed kind of story an example of something's come out of customer engagement.

Actually it is, so the one that we're going to talk about came about from one customer that I then worked with another customer on. So I worked actually between two customers to kind of build out a solutions framework that worked for them, and so far it is now being implemented in something close to fifty professional service customers environments. Because it's resonated so well with with the customers and their needs, that. Must be a really satisfying part of your role.

It is, It's led to a lot of conversations, so I've talked almost every one of those fifty customers. But yeah, it's definitely satisfying to see, like the people recognizing value out of what you've built and what the capabilities are and even so much though it's like maly just customers, but internally I've shown the product team it and there's been a lot of people on the product team that have been very interested in what we did and how we did it. And so, I mean, you know, the basic story on hardware refreshed, as most listeners will know by now, is that you know, simply making refreshed decisions based on device age.

It's an increasing the outloaded way of going about it. What do we feel we have to sort of add to that story? What nuances do we have to add to that in terms of you know, okay, if I guess if age isn't enough, what is what do you want to be measuring? What does a genuinely data back refreshed decision, Like what is it you were able to extrapolate to those of a fifty customers specific Yeah, it's it's experience.

Experience really is the key differentiator. Like it doesn't matter how old a device is. If if I'm trying to sweat a device for five years but the experience is terrible, I'm not doing my company any good. I'm trying to save in one area, but I'm discounting in another.

So being able to take both of those measurements together, take age and experience together in a way that the company agrees with, and then be able to put together a plan of action on how to build off of that is super important. And then to. Take a step further from that. What we've done really good from are what the platform currently does is we give them that disability experience, we give them visibility experience in like a moment in time.

So we can say, here's the users are having a bad experience, you should refresh them now. And the problem is is from an enterprise organization, you get your actual like you get your funding for measurements or funding for replacements like six months or a year ahead of time. So you need to be able to forecast what that's going to look like, which is very, very difficult. And that's actually what led to the type of implementation and use case that I built.

And was that with the custom scores that I've heard about Prime specific. It was a combination of custom scores, and since I was able to build custom scores, I knew how I was able to build it. I was then able to extrapulate out and then forecast into the future how many months it would be until a given device, if everything remained the same, would then hit the threshold be replaced. That's that's extremely cool, And I think we're going to touch predictive elopment a bit.

But first of all, what is it you're measuring and how is it you're able to turn lots of those individual signals into something you can actually make a decision based upon. Yeah, so as you as you said earlier, next think has the deck score. The deck score is already a great aggregate of those individual signals, and so for the customers I've worked with, we've we work with each customer individual and figure out like which aspects of the duck score really sing to them, which one really make it work.

And so from my original two customers, we just went with the endpoint deck score. That's a great aggregate of performance, it's a great aggregate git of reliability, and it kind of shows gives you a single number that you can base off of for your overall experience. I've had other customers who have only wanted to go with device performance or device reliability, or combination of the two. And so because we have all that data inside of the platform, it makes it really easy to be able to take it and then manipulate it for our needs.

So given the case of what I did is I took the device age, which was pulled from when the device was purchased from the vendor, utilizing our already existing library remote actions to get warranty information remote action I took that, I took the deck score and for dexscore that exists in the platform, and I brought them together inside of a flow inside of a formula where I brought them in, took them in the consideration of device personas, which is another key area of what I built off of, and I think we're going to talk a little bit about that later, but and I basically formulated that out into a score that gives me a number between zero and one, and then based on that, if you hit over the threshold, which is completely configurable by the customer, the device gets tagged for replacement, or if it's too new of a device, because you definitely don't want to replace advice it's a year old.

You have minimum and maximum device ages. You can then flag devices for investigations, so then you can automatically deliver those proactively to your support teams and have them investigate what's going on and help get those fixed so they don't end up being replacement, so you can then hold off on costs from that perspective. And tell us a bit about this concept purchase personas. What is one?

First of all, I have a mention of it. I don't know what it is. And why does knowing who is using the device matter as much as knowing the condition of the device itself. When you make.

Device personas is probably actually, I'll say phone in general is probably one of the most difficult conversations for a customer to be able to give, you, provide and answer. For a lot of times, when we think of personas, we think about the user who's using the device. Are you a road warrior? Are you a high performance user?

And those sorts of things. But for a lot of customers, being able to convert on to real actual data has been very difficult. So in order to help bridge that gap and make it easier for the customers I've been working with, I just ask them a simple question. When you go to purchase a device, you don't purchase a single device for everybody, correct, And they said, yep, I go what decisions do you use to make when you purchase those devices?

And then you figure out what those decisions are, those naturally become your device personas. So I'll give you example one of my customers, they purchased specific devices for their VIP users, They purchase pecific devices to their high performance users. They purchase specific devices for their shared devices or KIOSK devices or standard devices, and so you take all of those different persona device personas, and that's really where the suite sauce comes out of this because I may have a VIP user who I want to make sure they always have latest and greatest, so their devices will only last them three years.

That doesn't mean I have to get rid of the device if that device is no longer meeting the needs of what is current usage is if one of my other personas could easily consume that device, I just move it to the other persona as long as the experience is good and it's still within the thresholds of that PERSONA. Congratulations, you've now been able to extend that device in your organization longer term. Can you give some real, real world examples of the kind of transitions between rules which have made this kind of efficiency viable concept easily?

One Probably the most easy to understand ones are your design users. So design users need some very powerful machines. Those very powerful machines you need to run very powerful software like the Adobe Suites and things like that. Well, what happens if the device no longer meets what the newer software needs?

Well, do you throw away the device? No, you replace the device to give them the ones that they need to fulfill their roles. But now that devices consider to be very powerful for a user who just does standard work. So you can then pass it on to that user, and now you're not you're not replacing the device for the second user.

You've only paid for a place one device and you're extending the life of the original one. What about what about the line when it comes to extending useful device life you're getting more more value from them without eventually paying for it an employee experience. Where's the art in getting that balance right? Yeah, the art is really going to come down to the organization and the actual usage of the devices.

So that was one of the other key things that we built into the solution is that every one of those purchase personas could have a different threshold, and so you figure out what matters for your team. Like if I talk about my high performance devices, to me, the performance of the device matters more so than the age of the device. So I may weight my uh weight my replacement on the performance of the device. But if I have a standard device or maybe a shared device, maybe the performance doesn't matter as much because it's only utilized in small bursts by certain people.

So it's really going to come to understanding how the how those specific personas are used and then tweaking the threshold on an individual basis. That doesn't mean that you have to tweak the threshold to figure it out. You could just set up and run as default and then see what works and what doesn't work and adjust it. It's all about learning.

So one of the things that I tend to follow through with is an agile methodology of you don't let your progress stop because you're trying to reach perfection. You start working on it, you start measuring, and then you start adjusting as as a management goes, and so then you continue to move the needle forward every time. Very cool. What do you reckon how much of how much of professional services is literally innovation?

Like on a customer by customer basis? Is it is it ever wrote? You know? Is it almost always kind of require a degree of creative kind of engagement?

It does if you're going to be like a successful person professional services. So if you if you're coming in expecting that you're just going to be able to follow some guides and then deliver it, you're not going to really like excel very very far. So what you want is to be able to really think through problems and come up with creative solutions, Because if all you're telling customers is like, oh, I'm sorry, the platform doesn't do that, how likely are they going to continue to continue to invest in next thing?

If all they're being told is no, I can't do that. But if you can think of a creative way to solve their problem that helps solve them and then you can help take that back to the platform and help build the platform up, They're going to love that. They're going to love us, and they're gonna stick with us as long as as long as they can because they know that regardless of what comes out of what the platform does, we'll find solution that helps at least meet the need of what they're looking for.

We hear it a lot. We hear it a lot. You guys do amazing work. Any other areas of work which you are really exciting at the moment you collaborate with customers on you're able to highlight them a little bit.

Uh. Yeah, we're working on all sorts of things. I'm not going to call it for me, I'm a call for one of my other consultants. They actually built a solution that utilizes Adobe's webportal to pull in all of the licensing information for all the Adobe products and maps it across all the users in an instance, so you can identify what is being used and what isn't being used based on what they're licensed for versus what we typically do for Mexinc.

Which is what's installed. Because sometimes you may be license for software and you may not actually have it ever have it installed on anything. So being able to map that out has been incredibly useful and I think one of those customers he has also I think has assigned it in two different customers. One of them is saving about ten thousand a months in Adobe licensing and the other one saving about fifty thousand a month in Adobe licensing.

It's like the sam Ho grail, isn't it? This is a huge basically, it's it's been a huge thing. And again this is another creative way of using it, and he's utilizing multiple capabilities inside of next Ink. In particular, Flow has enabled a lot of these unique UH capabilities to happen because we can do these creative ideas inside of the sandbox type environment where we're not worrying about setting off credentials, we're not worrying about risking things.

We're just building everything and then reaching the data inside. Next with next. Think crazy, you guys come up with amazing, amazing stuff. Anything else, anything else, Brian, I was trying to think of if.

There was anything else, like really cool. How about how about? How about how about AI specifically? Like where where well, unnecessarily where you're you're you're pulling innovations out of a product that's not necessarily but in terms of insight, you're able to share on like real well customer concerns, priorities, experiences with AI that the DECKS is able to kind of really make a difference at at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, you're almost like painting a picture for AI tools capability where we can give them the visibility of the utilization of AI as well as the governance. But then we're gonna take another lever, another layer for it. Because in the US, Spark is becoming very very popular amongst our customers, and so we have a lot of ongoing Spark engagements where we're learning all the different ways that customers are looking to have their users engage with our tooling for Spark, and so we're figuring out working with the product team to help ensure that that is the best possible experience for our customers.

I can tell you right now, Like in the US, agent agent is a very popular choice. They're trying to look at from a Spark perspective. Yeah, yeah, it's incredible amount a buzz around spark at the moment, right it just remarkable. I've got some bad news for you, Brian.

You have a you have a guinea pig for a brand new feature. So we're gonna we're going to be trialing today. You know, look, Fewture guests at least if they listen to your episode, will will be pre appraised of this, will be forewarned of this new feature. It's a quick fire around, Brian, nothing too controversial, nothing to put you too much on the spot.

But I think you're going to thrive. I think you're gonna do a great job of it. Five quick fire around questions and then one more before we let you leave. Starting now, Brian, what's the one workplace technology frustration you would love to eliminate forever?

Obviously you've got that background as a customer and that you see trenches to draw from it. For me, it would actually probably be the performance impact of collaboration tools. Collaboration tools, especially in a remote workforce, has become so integral to everything that even from the next perspective that we do and all the collaboration tools literally destroy computers that they're running on. So if you're trying to share your screens like that, it definitely can block and knock the experience down quite a lot.

For I'm a Thomas Circlear from a next Thnker perspective, we see it all the time on our own machines. Do no do best piece of career advice you've ever received. Never be happy with where you are? Oh oh, never be content.

I don't know. In fact, it might be good career advice, might not be good spiritual advice prior. Yeah, I mean from from a yeah, from a career perspective. If if I was content with where I was, I would not be where I am today.

I'm never never happy with just being in the same old, same old. I'm always looking for what the next opportunity. Is not treading water, you might say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel that what emerging technology inside of inside the decks are you most excited about right now? I mean AI of course, like uh, even beyond like just what next thank has from AI.

AI gives our users the ability to understand data that's been very difficult for them to do in the past. A lot of what we've done in the past from a professional services of view is build dashboards, build queries, build things to help people interpret that data. Now that we have AI from like a workspace perspective, from your admins, or from a user perspective with Spark, it really helps bridge that gap. They don't have to know all the ins and outs have to do it.

They just let the AI interpret it for them. On a personal note, Brian, what app or tool can't you get through the working day with that? Probably Nexus? I use it quite often.

There's I don't know if I'm one of the most, but I'm probably one of the most prolific users of that tool. I've created like four or five different bots that the professional services team uses and a use on a daily basis. Amazing final, well, final quick fire around question. Then one more before you go, Brian, when you're not solving customer challenges, what's your preferred way to switch off?

And it's a combination, so I if I'm doing anything in computer wise, actually like when I said AI is very useful for me. I'm building my own AI workspace myself. I have AI servers in my house that I'm running localized AI solutions on. But when I'm not doing anything with computers, playing disc golf.

It's one of my favorite pastimes to just go out there and play a little bit of rounds of disc golf. Nice. Nice. This is a question we haven't asked anyone for a couple of months, but I'm bringing it back, Brian.

It's not a quick fire, quick fire round question. You don't have to be as snappy in your response. But what's your favorite thing about being a Next Thinker? I mean, truly, it's gonna be This is gonna be a twofold question or twofold answer as well.

First off, being able to be there and help shape the experiences of our customers, it's like no other I've been on the customer side, being able to help other customers get there has been superwarrying for me. But then on the other side, just the other Next thinkers you get to work with on a daily basis. Being able to meet and talk to people from all around the world and see everyone's different perspectives, it's not necessarily something you get to see in every company. So I really enjoy that.

What I said at the top of the conversation, Brian, it's not can it's true inexhaustible source of interesting people to talk to of this company, Brian. If people are listening and they're you know, they they're having the kind of experiences you've described of, you know, struggling with that operationalization layer. What can they do? Who can they reach out to, how can they make a quick difference.

So if they're having trouble struggling operational approvisational there, I mean, obviously look into the next thing. Professional services. There you get to help you. Yeah, but if truly, the deck slops framework and our Navigator framework have been incredibly helpful for customers being able to translate ideas into actions.

So true, Brian, thanks for coming on the show, and thanks to your whole team for a great work they do. We really appreciate it, love it. That's it for this week's Deck Show. We'll be back next week, and if you don't already, be sure to follow the show so you don't miss an episode until next time.