1) Support exists to ensure the value of IT services to users and is focused on business needs rather than technology. 2) As automation hides technical complexity, users' focus has shifted from "how to make things work" to "what can be done". This increases demand for support. 3) Support must rely on user communities to provide signals on emerging needs and supplement support capabilities.

1. Socializing Support
Why It Will Happen
An archestra notebook.
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

2. Preface…
“IT Service Management” exists in order to assure the value of IT services to the
service users. It is fundamentally customer-orientated.
“IT Services” have always come in two flavors: technical services and business
services. Service users, who are the customers of IT, are focused on the business,
not on the technology.
Technical Support and User Support are two different responsibilities that are
interrelated.
Supporting “IT Services” makes sense when it means that User reliance on IT
results in Users meeting their requirements for their business performance.

3. Support evolution: not optional, even if not better.
Automation continues to further hide technical
complexity from users, even as it adds more
functionality.
Business
performance
Increasing user awareness
of opportunities
Automation has also spawned empowered selfaware communities.
diversity of
demand
As a result of automation, a natural shift of users’
attention has been from “how to make things work”
to “what to do with things”. (e.g., from how to drive
the car, to where do I want to drive...)
The community’s own intelligence about what can be
done is communicated very rapidly and in the heat of
the moment. This increases the demand for things
and the demand for their supportability.
Facing that increase, scalability and breadth in
support must find a balance between depth and
agility. Support organizations must rely on the
community itself to provide signals of where it is
going, and to bring supplemental depth as needed.
people
Capability
solutions
processes
Environment
solutions
capacity of
supply
tools
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

4. Understanding Drivers
“motivators”
“catalysts”
“causes”
The demand side of “drivers”
usually adds up to expectations,
norms and preferences that exist
as preconditions
“DRIVERS”
“priorities”
“guides”
“rules”
“methods”
Overall, being Provider-driven does NOT mean that
support is offered only in terms of “supply”. Instead, it
means that support exists primarily (not exclusively) in
terms of what the Provider requires from the Users.
Requirements reflect both demand and supply
objectives.
The supply side of “drivers”
usually adds up to policies,
evaluations and processes being
actively used
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research
“needs”
Being Community-driven does NOT mean that support
is offered only in terms of “demand”. Instead, it means
that support exists primarily (not exclusively) in terms
of what the User in the community requires from the
Provider. Requirements reflect both demand and
supply objectives.

5. The New Default
“Services” have always been managed through an alignment of proximity, skills,
and knowledge provided for users.
Meanwhile, the service user’s point of view emphasized choosing relevant services
and getting satisfactory support of those obtained.
Powerful technologies for communications, mobility and search have fostered a
dramatic increase in individuals’ independence and their expectation of
personalization.
In turn, personalization imposes its perspectives on the basics of the service
support, by driving the user orientation instead of the technical orientation.
To keep up with responsibilities for the population of services users, the support
effort must be effective and relevant in those personalized perspectives. Users will
simply go find the support that best fits in their environment.

6. TODAY’s User Perspectives and Objectives
Technology innovations have allowed individuals to amplify how they naturally do things to make
sense of their experiences. That especially affects their activity and interactions.
The “social” aspect of experience is a powerful source of orientation, providing stability in what
otherwise would be continual exposure to the overload of awareness generated by the web.
The individual’s sense of having a “presence”, both at-large and amongst interrelated persons, is
largely about having confidence as an actor.
Orientation and confidence are readily recognizable as the basis of demand for personalization in
experience. Meanwhile, independence through technology has made it more readily apparent that
the User is more important to the Community than the legacy support organization is to the User.
The User observes the diversity and value of personalized effort primarily within the community. By
empowering the user, personalization makes the user more capable of generating benefit both to
and from the community.
In effect, Personalization is the most powerful driver of the shift of focus from Provider-driven
support to Community-driven support.

7. Support as a Service
Being “community-driven” is neither a new stance nor an exclusive one.
Most markets, and of course marketing, are built on the idea that meeting the demands of
a community is what makes providers valuable. Outside of not-for-profit or research
scenarios , very few markets exist where a given provider is bigger or more important than
the kind of market it serves.
For organizations charged primarily with supporting users of services, the capability to
address community demand and personalization may not need to replace other current
capabilities, but it must be present.
The capability itself manifests as a “service” to users: already running, available on
demand, within mutual expectations of the requester and provider.
Socializing the service means tailoring it to address the expectations created by the
experience of the users in their community. The support of the service is built into that
tailoring, and/or is similarly tailored itself.

8. Support as a Service
Service Population
COMMUNITY
Portal
Engagement
SOCIAL NETWORK
USER PRESENCE
Service Providers have long been aware of the need to manage their
influence on their target service population. But the strong emergence of the
population’s awareness of itself as a community is a new flavor of the
population. Meanwhile, the centrally accessible enterprise “portal” has been
superseded by the distributed, searchable network. And the Provider’s
engagement with the members of the population has shifted focus to being
on what the individual needs as an actor instead of as a user.

9. The User’s Operating Environment
(PERSONALIZATION)
SOCIAL NETWORK
Self-service
News
USER PRESENCE
Collaboration
Reputation
Familiarity
Individuals who are participants in a larger group rely on certain
modes and characteristics of experience
that strengthen the benefits of their individual awareness and the
reliability of their individual choices. This is the virtual operating
environment leveraged by service users, made more accessible and
persistent by technologies available directly to individuals.
Convenience

10. Adapting Support to the Perspectives that are Drivers
Personalization is a set of perspectives that apply as both
physical and logical experience,
to be understood and addressed by providers in
determining and delivering support.
Now this means delivering support that has direct relevance within
the Service User’s perspective on the value of the experience of
being a business actor in the community.
High-value experiences proactively fortify the Users’
orientation and confidence.

11. The new strategic role of the Provider has a recognizable pattern of
support interests, projected by the community it serves through the
personalization pursued by the members of the community. The
Provider addresses both the orientation and the confidence of the user.
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

12. Socializing Support as business alignment
Management
Approach
User environment enhanced
Example reinforcement tactic Supporting tactical resources
Cultivate
Collaboration and Reputation
Context sensitivity
Skill and Communication
Share
News and Familiarity
Preference detection
Knowledge and Search
Enable
Self-service and Convenience
Location awareness
Proximity and Mobile
Support tactically reinforces the effectiveness of
the Users’ increasingly personalized leveraging
of their environment of operation. Resource
development and deployment by the Support
Service provider aims at being supportive
through being integrated, distributed, and
continuously available within the user’s
environment.
Meanwhile, being a proactive presence in
the user environment largely means
explicitly sponsoring both the networking
and the user presence in the supported
community, to increase early detection and
cooperation. Ultimately, much of what
should be done in Community-driven
Support amounts to good marketing.

13. Solutions for socializing Service Support
• Support exists primarily (not exclusively) in terms of what the User in
the community requires from the Provider
• Integrated, distributed, and continuously available within the user’s
environment
• Increases early detection and cooperation regarding User intent
• Addresses the expectations created by the experience of the users in
their community