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Join your Educational Symposium host Pete McGarahan, as he facilitates the practitioner power panels to share practical insight into hot industry topics. Learn what's been successful to bring about  support organizations success.  We believe this format will give you what you have been looking for in other support events – an opportunity to hear it and see it from your industry peers.

For a more interactive and in-depth discussion, select one of  the Educational Symposium tracks:

1. Back to Basic Best Practices – focus on how to enhance your support organization utilizing the latest best practices to create a best in class, continuous improvement environment.
2. Support Leadership - discuss key leadership essentials and tactics that are necessary for today's support executive to succeed.
3. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundational Best Practices – learn about the impact ITIL has on the enterprise support organization and how to best implement it’s framework of best practices.

Look at this agenda!

Tuesday, July, 27th
5p – 7p	Educational Symposium Welcome Reception & Registration
Wednesday, July 28th Educational Symposium
7:30a – 9:00a	Continental Breakfast & Registration
9:00a – 10:00a	State of the Support Industry Pete McGarahan, Executive Industry Fellow – STI Knowledge Pete McGarahan will discuss industry trends, directions, challenges and opportunities that impact the support of business, customers and technology.  What needs to be done by the support organization to sell and deliver value to your customers?
10:00a – 11:00a	For the People, By the People: he Difference between Best Practice Theory and Reality Power Panel I In theory many of the best practices and metrics make sense, but do they really work?  Can they be made to work or work better?  There is a difference between theoretical and reality-based best practice implementation and results. This interactive panel is comprised of support practitioners who are responsible for their enterprise support organization. Hear how they use (or don’t use) many of the industry best practices and metrics. What is worth the effort, what is not and what really matters in the selling, implementing, and measuring the results of best practices.  This panel is sure to start a controversy and wrap it up with conclusions! Best practices to be discussed are: Total Contact Ownership (TCO) First Contact Resolution (FCR) Phone-centric metrics vs. self-service metrics vs. value metrics Email management Staffing, Scheduling and Utilization
11:15a – 12:00p	Workshop #1 1.  Best Practices: Leveraging Data & Your Tools to Create Meaningful Reports 2. Leadership: A Self-Service Strategy for Driving Service Level Enhancements Together With Cost Reductions Self-Service Support - Cox Communications Case Study Most organizations today are faced with a seemingly unsolvable challenge: provide easy and ever expanding access to end users – and do so while reducing operational costs and strengthening information security.  No longer is compromising the degree of security to ensure appropriate productivity and/or to effectively contain administrative costs an acceptable solution.  This session will examine how Self-Service Identity Management solutions enable organizations to achieve improved operational efficiencies without sacrificing security – by freeing the service desk staff to focus on higher value tasks, while end users are empowered with self-service password reset and line of business managers are accountable for user provisioning and IT access as determined by corporate security policy. This session will include a case study delivered by Cox Communications, the third largest cable company in the U.S., and will show how it built a business case for self-service identity management, implemented Courion’s Identity Management Suite and delivered measurable business results as tracked through its help desk. It will discuss how Cox secured executive buy-in, defined its key metrics, took a phased approach to solution deployment, marketed to its internal IT end users, and drove user adoption to a self-service framework to improve operational efficiencies as measured by: Achieved >77% user profile registration and approximately 90% password reset automation in 5 months Saved $200,000 annually for corporate location alone Reduced FTE’s by 28% via managed attrition of Help Desk staff year-over-year Focused Help Desk staff on higher value work 3. ITIL: What is ITIL? Why should I care? The latest buzzword around IT and other support organizations is “ITIL.”  Everybody is talking about how ITIL, (standing for IT Infrastructure Library), is supposed to help increase productivity, decrease firefighting, control costs, and in general solve all our organizational issues.  But what is ITIL, really?  How can you separate the fact from the fiction?  Is ITIL only for IT organizations or can it help other support organizations too?  What can it do for you?  This session will cover the scope and content of ITIL, review the core processes and functions and discuss how they relate to the practical challenges of running an IT or other support organization today.  We will discuss the benefits that can be achieved by applying ITIL principles in your organization and provide a solid basic understanding on which the subsequent sessions in this track will build.
12:00p – 1:30p	Lunch
1:45p – 3:30p	Director Forum - Outsourcing Q&A What are the realities of outsourcing? What are the realized benefits? Is it really less expensive? Are there other unforeseen costs or considerations involved? How do I best utilize an outsourcer? What are best practices in managing an Outsourced vendor for a win-win? What about the offshoring movement?
1:45p – 2:30p	Workshop #2 1. Best Practices: A Case Study of T-Mobile’s Knowledge Management Implementation Come see how T-Mobile has implemented a  "back to basic" best practices approach with their Knowledge management implementation. In this presentation you will discover how T-Mobile used The Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) methodology, developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation to launch their Knowledge Management initiatives.   T-Mobile will explain their lifecycle approach to this implementation from the choosing of the software, implementation, usage to what their expectations are for the system in the future. What you can expect to walk away with from this session: Why a Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) methodology is important to your Help Desk A high level definition of a KCS methodology How to implement a KCS Methodology to your Help Desk How to integrate your case management system with a knowledge management system Lessons learned with deploying a knowledge management system to your Help Desk If you don't have a knowledge management methodology in place, then you should.  Knowledge management is now becoming the fastest growing way to better support your customers and you do not want to be left behind.  Please join us in discovering the importance of a knowledge centered support methodology and how it will better your professionals performance and the overall support of your customers. 2. Leadership: Staying Competitive with Knowledge-Powered Support In today's business environment, the ability to respond quickly to a customer's question is imperative. Whether affected by mergers, downsizing, new additions to their product line or a high rate of turnover, more and more companies are beginning to realize the importance of an effective knowledge management solution to not only customer satisfaction, but also, their bottom line. With the right knowledge infrastructure in place, a company can adapt to changing conditions in the IT environment while keeping their users happy. An adaptive, knowledge-powered organization will allow an organization to support a consistent knowledge capture and QA process without having to restructure the database every time a new product is introduced. It will allow organizations to keep knowledge - their most valuable asset - into a shareable, scalable knowledge base, rather just in the minds of their employees. It will allow knowledge sharing across organizational groups so that there is consistency across the entire IT organization. And, because it can learn from each use, an adaptive knowledge management system ensures that the knowledge base is always current and consistent. This presentation will focus on the benefits that organizations can achieve from integrating an adaptive knowledge-powered support solution into their customer service and support initiatives. It will feature the guiding principles for adaptive knowledge management and provide a strategy for ensuring an organization's long-term KM success. 3. ITIL: Knowledge Management
2:45p – 3:30p	Workshop #3 1. Best Practices: Designing a Self-Service Portal that Works One size does not fit all.   Customers with varying expertise, different levels of affiliation with the enterprise and with different problems need very different self-service experiences.   How can you deliver the right form of help to each customer when they come to your web site?  How can you create an appropriate online resolution process for particular "classes" of problems?  How can you segment your customers and use that segmentation to deliver the right information and knowledge?  One size does not fit all customers - this is critical to understand as a business and can have enormous implications for customer satisfaction and adoption of cost-effective self-service. Personalized, automated customer service is possible. 2. Leadership: Delivering the Right Services for the Right Cost 3. ITIL: Relating ITIL to the Service Desk What is this ITIL thing I have been hearing about and how does it relate to my Service Desk? ITIL has been embraced as the standard for Service Management in many countries worldwide, and is currently being used by Microsoftâ and IBMâ.  The ITIL philosophy adopts a process driven approach which is scaleable to fit both large and small IT organizations. IT Service Management, of which the Service Desk is a part of, is a strategic framework that brings together the technology, people and processes, to increase effectiveness, reduce costs, and increase productivity.  By relating ITIL philosophy to the Service Desk, you can provide IT with real insight into the evolving needs of the user community it serves, and provide a means to act on these needs in a structured, logical manner.
3:45p – 4:30p	For the People, By the People – “Is Self-Service Support Sustainable?” Power Panel II What are the right types of issues for self-service? How do you measure successful resolution? How do you avoid losing customers when pushing self-service vs. phone support? Power Panel participants will share experiences and opinions as to what self-service reality looks like. Our panelists of practitioners will discuss what worked, what didn’t and why!
6:00p – 8:00p	Awards Banquet
Thursday, July 29th Educational Symposium
7:30a – 9:00a	Continental Breakfast
9:00a – 10:00a	Benchmarking Your Way to a Center of Excellence by Dr. Jon Anton, Purdue University In the past two years, the customer service contact center, and the employee help desk, have taken on mission critical roles in the new, and highly competitive business strategies of most companies, both large and small. Because of their importance in a company’s success, top executives are asking the difficult question, “does our contact center and/or help desk do a good enough job as compared to our competitors and/or our peers.”  In his keynote address, Dr. Jon Anton will demonstrate the following to attendees: How you benchmark your center’s performance against the performance of a peer group of similar centers. How you do a performance gap analysis to determine the cost of negative gaps and where the improvement opportunities are. How performance gaps relate specifically to the sixteen processes in a center that support the customer contact experience. How performance improvement can lead to certification of your center as a “Center of Excellence.” Why centers that have achieve certification actually have lower annual operating costs than those that are not certified.
10:15a-12:00p	Director Forum - XMBA for Support Leaders This session is designed for support leaders who want the ‘net-net’ about what they need to know in Business. We will also discuss what every support leader should know to run their support organization like a business. Introducing attendees to the concept of the Management Portfolio and how it can be used to help them with business alignment, staffing, training, service portfolio management, marketing, budgeting, project management as well as the support strategy, assessment and continuous roadmap.
10:15a – 11:00a	Workshop #4 1. Best Practices: Supporting Custom Apps: Best Practices for Reducing Problem Resolution Time A recent Gartner poll of IT professionals found that custom applications are the most difficult to manage and that Global 2000 companies typically support 500-1000 applications, most of which are custom apps. On average, the application problem resolution process involves 6.5 experts who replicate the problem some 4.8 times before they establish its root cause. Multiply that out and you have a huge, expensive time sink! This session will present best practices for reducing problem resolution time, including a first-hand account of how a company has dramatically reduced support costs and improved performance and availability of their custom applications by implementing an Enterprise Application Support System. 2. Leadership: Maximizing The Support Center with Limited Resources 3. ITIL: Secrets of Successfully Implementing ITIL
11:15a – 12:00p	Workshop #5 1. Best Practices: Quality Assurance Monitoring & Coaching Aimed at Improving Performance 2. Leadership: Building the Business Case for New IT Investments 3. ITIL: ITIL Best Practices: Information Assurance Vulnerability Alert Case Study Information Assurance Vulnerability Alerts (IAVA), from the perspective of the Help Desk - and multi-level support staff, is equivalent to an incoming mortar round.  It shifts the strategic efforts of the staff and puts them on a short-notice tactical combat mission. Disguised as guerilla warfare, the efforts to address the requirements of an IAVA actually follow a structured ITIL Service Support roadmap.  An enterprise wide effort that once took two weeks to address has been reduced to the ability to meet a three-day suspense deadline. Upon the IAVA deadline, the process demonstrates how the Support organization can meet the needs of two customers – the ARL customers, and the Department of Defense…and get it done with the invisible ITIL processes. On a practical basis though, the participants will leave the presentation understanding that they don’t have to throw the baby out with bath water.  ITIL processes exist in all organizations – the key is to understand what works and what needs improvement.
12:00p – 1:30p	Lunch
12:00p - 1:30p	Director's Luncheon - Designing an Effective Customer Satisfaction Strategy Measuring customer satisfaction is a challenge. Annual surveys vs. transactional surveys. The plan should involve obtaining and communicating results, setting outcome expectations and delivering on implied promises in the satisfaction surveys. In creating this plan, support leaders demonstrate a commitment to view customer satisfaction as a key component in defining service and support success. This corporate commitment translates into the allocation of tools, programs and processes that will enable the mission to be successful.
1:45p – 2:30p	Workshop #6 1. Best Practices: Designing an Effective Customer Satisfaction Strategy For years call center and help desk managers have focused on improving productivity in call handling, and have virtually ignored any attempts to document the voice of the caller.  Recently, our research showed that only 28% of all centers have a continuous caller satisfaction, or customer listening, program in place.  Furthermore, our statistics show that 62% do only an annual customer satisfaction check, but of all those that do caller satisfaction at all, a staggering 76% do not drive the results to other departments in the company - yet there is plenty of demand for feedback from calling customers. Because of this new reality, many call center and help desk managers are actively seeking ways to measure their performance as perceived by the caller, and at the same time get feedback on products and services.  This presentation will address the importance of real-time caller feedback measurement, and more importantly ensuring that the reported results are behaviorally actionable at all levels in the company.  Attendees will learn the following: how to drive caller feedback to all levels of the company, especially to the front-line agent directly, how to use caller feedback to conduct on-the-fly market research, how case studies of modern centers show the benefits of how to use caller feedback to  drive quality improvements. 2. Leadership: Government Business Case for Investing in the Support Organization The Department of State has almost 40,000 employees and contractors who are connected to its IT systems supported with a budget of almost $1 billion per year.  There are over 30 separate Help Desks operated and managed by the Departments 26 Bureaus and major offices.  The CIO office operates a centralized Help Desk (InfoCenter) which has responsibility for providing Tier 1 and Tier 2 support to users in the United States and world wide at the Departments 260 Embassies and Missions.  The InfoCenter is in the process of consolidation of Help Desk functions across the State Department.  The InfoCenter has recently adopted STI’s framework of certification and best practices to include in their strategy for consolidation of Help Desks.  There are numerous technical, operational, bureaucratic, and political considerations, which are being addressed in this strategy.  This presentation will cover the lessons learned and practical role, which STI’s certification process plays in the Leadership Role, which the InfoCenter is taking across the State Department. 3. ITIL: ISO 9000 Vs. ITIL Vs. Six Sigma For IT organizations seeking to establish a commitment to excellence supported by the use of continuous improvement methodologies, the world can be a confusing place.  What standards and methods are available to fulfill this commitment?  If your organization does ISO 9000, does it still need ITIL?  How does Six Sigma fit into the picture? In this session we will try to clear up the confusion.  We will present a concise introduction to how the three areas of ISO 9000, Six Sigma and ITIL relate to one another and to other structured improvement methods and systems.  We will talk about how to put the pieces together into an integrated approach to excellence in IT service provision.
2:45p – 3:30p	1. For the People, By the People – “Why is Root Cause Analysis challenging?” Power Panel III Everyone has a reason as to why they cannot perform regular Root Cause Analysis. Power Panelists will discuss how to break through the barriers that prevent support organizations from performing RCA. They will share how they take advantage of their data, analysis and recommendations derived from routine RCA.  Easy – no!  Worth the effort to do it and do it right – definitely!  You will leave with something that will help you be more diligent about RCA.
3:45p – 4:30p	Lessons in Support Leadership Today’s support challenges and opportunities require leadership. It’s more than creating the vision and setting the example, it requires great communication skills, business knowledge and values that inspire your team to action. Leadership is about relentless follow-up and follow-through to drive results. The closing session for the 2004 STI Knowledge Educational Symposium will leave you wanting to make a difference, impact change and lead your teams to success.

Special bonus for on-line registration!

Register from this web site and receive a complimentary help desk book from the Resource Center^*.   To learn more about these books, click on the open book icons to the left of each title.  Choose from:

Revolutionizing Support Staff Training
Managing the Implementation of New Support Systems
Using Service Goals & Metrics to Improve Performance
Effective Leadership for the Support Organization
Delivering Legendary Customer Service
Coaching for Improved Work Performance
Coaching for World Class Customer Support

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Dress is business casual.

Registration Fees

The per student registration fee for this conferencer is $895, and includes the conference, conference materials, continental breakfast every day, lunch during the Symposium, the Awards Dinner and Ceremony.

To register, call (708) 246-0320 or click on the "Register" button below.

Payment is due prior to the seminar.  If payment is not received, a credit card hold will be required for participation.  This card will only be processed if payment has not been received within two weeks following the seminar.

Cancellation Policy.  Registrants may cancel up to fourteen days in advance of the seminar start date for a full refund, less administrative fees of $400.  Or, you may transfer your registration to another member of your company at no additional charge.  Registrants canceling within fourteen days of the seminar will receive credit, less administrative fees of $400, toward any other Resource Center seminar.  In the unlikely event that a seminar must be cancelled, you will be notified at least one week prior to the seminar date. Seminar provider is not responsible for losses due to cancellation including losses on advanced purchase airfares.

Seminar agenda subject to change.