What is AI good for when you’re overwhelmed by so much data?

Absolutely nothing! (going by the lyrics of Edwin Starr) especially if you have so much data, you don’t even know where to begin, and it is starting to look a lot like a messy teenager’s bedroom. In these situations, we often think big, when actually we need to start small. When we break things down into smaller manageable chunks, we often find that we get through things a lot easier and are still working towards our main goal of clean, usable, and reliable data.

Collecting Data

When I was at school, I knew I wanted to work in Information Technology. I would spend hours playing on my computer at home (desktop PC), surfing the internet, programming, trying to crack the Windows Operating System and tinkering with the hardware. I was desperate to get a job in an IT department and be fully immersed in the amazing world of technology.

Fast forward and I’m 25 years into my career, and as you can imagine, I have been on many courses, gained certifications, read hundreds of books and articles, listened to many podcasts, attended tech events, have had mentors and been introduced to inspirational people who I’ve learnt from over the years. My career journey has provided me with many lessons learnt, and now, 25 years on, I have an eclectic display of information stored on my bookshelf, in the cloud, on external hard drives, USB sticks and in my head!

The struggle however, is real, when trying to retrieve information when I need it. In the world today, it is all about efficiency, quality, and speed to market. We as consumers expect this from all products and services, so how can we as individuals be the best version of ourselves from everything we have learnt over the years?

Data Overload

I had this problem, and I had information everywhere. I love to learn and am always swotting up on something, whether it be new technology, self-help, philosophy, spiritualism, women’s health, travel, the list is endless. But it was frustrating for me to learn all these amazing things and not bring them to good use in my day-to-day, or worse still, forget them.

I love a book, mainly because I can see it on my bookshelf which is a great trigger for helping me remember the great tools I have to hand. I also have a slight obsession with putting sticky-notes on the pages where I found inspirational quotes or pockets of helpful information that I can refer to. But then as the book collection grows, the documents, web page listings, podcast saving grows too.

Data Frameworks

So how do I manage all this information? We have all been introduced to multiple frameworks, such as ITIL’s four dimensions, COBITs cascade, Agile-Scrum methodology, Prince2 and once again the list is endless. Depending on your job role, you might not need to know everything in these frameworks, and equally, depending on your role, you may view things in a unique way to how the authors suggest you should be using a framework.

We all have our own view of the world, and how we consume and interpret information. This is the reason organisations have hundreds of copies of the same file, just slightly tweaked to make it suitable for another person / team / department to understand.

When I work on a new project, I like to make sure that I personalise the right solution for my clients. It’s important to understand how people feel about a particular problem they are having and why it’s important for them to fix the issue. Common requests are to reduce failure costs and escalations; improve the performance and efficiency of teams; increase their customer portfolio; create and offer a new product or solution and/or make financial savings for a larger profit margin. From a consultant perspective, we all have a similar approach to how we might help support our clients, but it is the quality, efficiency, and speed to market in how we deliver that is the biggest success factor.

Quality, Efficiency and Speed to Market

When a new piece of work comes in, I have my go-to presentation deck, which outlines the approach I would take. This is standard and I might find I need to do a few tweaks, and that is fine also. But now I want to immerse myself in my client’s world. I want to truly understand what the problem is and how I can help them. This is what gets me out of bed every morning. I am filled with joy when I am given a new client to work with and help towards the goal they are trying to achieve. This is why I love being a consultant. For me, it’s about helping others fulfill their dreams and I love to help them on that journey.

Love is a strong word, but I really am passionate about what I do, and because I’m passionate, I am a perfectionist. I want to deliver brilliant work every time. I will think of past experiences and where I might have seen or done this before. I scroll back through old presentations and conduct online research about the client to learn more about them and what their competitors might be doing. When I start looking for content and tools to use, I go through my files, and then back to my bookshelf. I know all this stuff, but I don’t want to miss a golden nugget that could potentially excel my client to new heights. I will have everything spread out everywhere, feeling extremely excited, but often thinking there must be a more efficient way of doing this!

Need for Speed

At the end of my last job, I once again had learnt so much over my two-year tenure and felt saddened that I might forget some of these amazing techniques that I had recently learnt. This is when I started to build out my own personal Service Design framework.

Taking my typical approach to a standard project, I used this as my frame, and within each step I started to build out my data. This would include the following:

• What is the goal / outcome of this stage?
• Who are the stakeholders I need to engage with?
• What inputs would I need before I engage?
• What kind of workshops would I need to have and how long do they need to be?
• What are the expected outputs at the end of this stage?
• List of useful resources: books, websites, tools, templates
• Template pack for each stage.

Next to every input and output, I used a key identifier to show where this idea came from. Whether it was from ITIL, COBIT, Prince2, Agile-Scrum, Service Design or Design Thinking.

Having this framework helped me to merge all my learnings into an easy step-by-step guide, enabling me to work more efficiently, effectively, and deliver quality. It has helped me work faster for sure, but I still wondered how can I be even better?

What is AI good for?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been around for years, but it’s only been the past five years where it has really taken off. AI is data. Big data. There are many tools on the market that promise businesses a reduction of cost, team efficiency and speed to market through AI, but if you can’t sort out your back-end data, then it’s no good to anyone.

In a previous company that I worked for, a small team of us designed and developed a tool that had all the templates we needed to create a Service Design Package. The tool would insert the client’s name throughout the files. This was a basic but necessary requirement, and once we had selected the templates needed, we had reduced the teams time from 3-5 days writing a Service Design, down to just 10 minutes to create the document, and 24 hours to personalise the solution to our clients’ specific requirements. The improvement was huge! We had increased our speed to market, was working more efficiently and delivering a higher quality of work because we could focus on the more intricate personalised details, and not the repetitive stuff that would absorb all our time.

Game Changer

This time around, I wanted to build a Service Design Assistant using our AI platform, Tenjin, as an automation platform, utilising the latest Conversational AI techniques and Large Language Models, it interfaces with multiple points of data, knowledge, information, and systems. I worked with our Intelligent Automation, Data & AI team to build this out. We took the standard approach framework (used by almost every consultant world-wide) and programmed the module to help answer Service Design questions and provide advice. The Service Design Assistant provides suggested approaches based on the problem experienced by the client and will share useful information on how to prepare for a stage in the approach, the expected outcomes, useful resources and help on how to use the resource tool templates.

This is a game-changer, in driving quality, but also speed in information retrieval. The Assistant allows others to share experiences, case studies, new tools, templates and help answer questions that haven’t been answered previously. The Assistant will continue to evolve, and like anything with AI will get better over time, as new content is being created and answers reviewed to ensure information is kept up to date. New consultants coming into the field have a reliable source of information, and experienced consultants have an efficient way of storing information for future projects with a personal assistant to hand.

Goodbye Data Search

I look forward to the day when I no longer have to search online directories, websites, dig out an old USB stick, external hard drive, or cover my table in books. It’s quite liberating to know you have a single source of data and your own personal encyclopaedia – remember those?!

What’s Next?

When I embarked on the creation of our AI Service Design Assistant within Tenjin, I could already start to see how it would fit into the wider tooling ecosystem, and how it would link into other workflows. AI is not about replacing Service Design, the function is far too complex with so many solutions based on a client’s requirements, but I do see AI increasing productivity and enabling people to work more efficiently and effectively in their jobs. This was just one application of the model; the use cases are endless!

So, when you are looking at your AI strategy, think big, but start small, and you will achieve remarkable things.

If you would like to learn more about Tenjin, click on this link and if you would like to learn how to create your own reliable, repeatable, adaptable Service Design model, join me at the itSMF conference, where I will be giving a presentation on the 12^th of November. If you are unable to make the conference, please feel free to reach out to me for a chat.