Interview: Kenny Little, Alemba Asia Pacific

In our annual Leaders in Technology series, we ask the experts what the year ahead holds. Today we talk automation and digitisation with Alemba Asia Pacific’s Kenny Little.

Which technologies do you think will be game changers in 2020?

Industry analysts such as McKinsey suggest that organisations looking to deliver, support and manage digital services need to focus on internal customers — their employees — as well as external ones, to achieve the best business outcomes. Therefore, innovations in technologies that improve the customer and employee self-service experience and are underpinned by automation, AI and analytics all have the potential to positively impact service support and delivery in 2020 and beyond.

How are AI, IoT and cyber threats changing your industry sector?

AI-enabled capabilities such as chatbots, AIOps, virtual agents, AI-assisted knowledge management and decision support are beginning to change the ways in which IT service desks operate. Alemba is continuing to investigate and adopt AI technologies such as predictive intelligence and trend identification into our software to keep pace with the changing service landscape.

Information security will continue to grow and have an increasing impact on ITSM. The ongoing focus, legal and cultural, on the value and importance of personal information is steadily increasing the complexity of processes that need to be implemented and adhered to within organisations. ITSM has a key role to play in achieving this state.

Which innovations or disruptions are your customers most concerned about in the year ahead?

Many of our customers worry about providing services that keep pace with changing customer expectations in a digital age. They are concerned that they must invest in large-scale process automation in order to provide the ‘Amazon experience’ customers have come to expect. While this is a significant challenge, we believe that there is also an opportunity to approach process automation in an iterative, step-by-step way. We encourage our customers to look closely at their services, identify candidates for automation and then automate, with a ‘rinse and repeat’ approach. This way they can show business value step by step and continue to get sponsorship for future initiatives.

What will be the biggest growth opportunities for your company in 2020?

In many instances, organisations lack the process maturity level, executive sponsorship, budget and right-fit technology sets to deliver online services to their internal and external customers. Alemba aims to provide our customers with a proven, cost-effective platform that will enable them to take solid strides towards delivering online services with supporting digital processes. We believe that digitisation does not happen overnight, but if the foundations are put in place properly and there is an internal drive for continuous improvement, then there’s a lot of value to be gained along the digital journey.

We have seen a big growth opportunity with Alemba software helping local and federal government organisations take meaningful steps towards digitisation. By offering a well-costed, deeply functional service platform, we are helping government organisations achieve best overall value at each step of the way to digital maturity.

Kenny Little has worked in the IT industry for more than 20 years, specialising in IT service management, cloud and IT business management. He is passionate about helping customers adapt services to the new pace of digital business and embrace opportunities that disruptive technologies bring.

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