The Enterprise Digital Podcast

Barclay and Ian are joined by Alistair Reid-Pearson, Chief Digital Information Officer at Greater Manchester Mental Health and author of Bit Bob: Artificial Earth.
The conversation focuses on storytelling in a business context, and the missing "so what" behind the dashboards, charts and ticket volumes that dominate ITSM reporting. Alistair makes the case that data needs a story alongside it to mean anything, particularly in environments where the work has real human consequences.
They also get into neurodiversity and how Alistair's autism shapes the way he communicates and writes, why the IT industry needs to move on from the superhero complex of dramatic fixes toward quieter preventative work, and what shift left looks like inside the NHS ten year plan and mental health services.
Plus a 46,000 year old worm, a proton beam therapy centre built in Minecraft, and postcards from the future. Because why not.

Barclay and Ian are back from the Service Desk and IT Support Show with their first reflections on SITS26. The industry looks healthy, the MSP side felt bigger and more established, and AI was on every stand, sometimes at the expense of the conversation about value.
They unpack the survey result from their keynote, where 55% of respondents said AI capabilities had improved their service, and ask why that story isn't being told more clearly by vendors. The pitch too often leads with the feature rather than the time saved, the work made easier, or the value returned.
Plus retro arcade games on the show floor, silent disco keynotes, and the industry's definitive sandwich preference.

Barclay and Ian are back with a preview of what's happening at SITS26 next week, and the pulse check they're putting out in the run-up.
The Enterprise Digital Podcast has its keynote on day two, and rather than walk on with a fixed view, Barclay and Ian are using the survey to shape what they cover. They run through the questions in this episode, from the practical (how would you describe your organisation's ITSM maturity, has AI made any difference to the service you deliver) to the hypothetical (a hundred thousand pounds to spend on one area of service delivery, technology, people, or training) to the unexpected (best sandwich).
There's no consulting stand this year. Instead, Barclay, Ian and Steve Cave will be at a dedicated interview area with a film crew, gathering views from visitors that will feed directly into the keynote. They'll also be on the SDI stand at points during the show. If you're attending, drop by.
Trivia this week is the UK government's £2 billion commitment to deploying quantum computers at scale by the early 2030s. Cynicism aside, a positive direction.

Sami Kallio, CEO and co-founder of HappySignals, joins Barclay and Ian to reflect on 12 years of measuring employee experience in IT — and what the data tells us about how the industry has and hasn't changed.
The conversation covers why happiness scores alone don't tell the full story, and why lost time has become one of the more honest indicators of whether IT is genuinely helping people do their jobs. Sami shares early findings from the upcoming benchmark report, including the perhaps surprising persistence of local IT support as a top complaint, and emerging data on AI adoption suggesting around half of employees already feel more efficient as a result.
There's also a candid discussion about the growing partnership between HappySignals and Nexthink, and what it means to combine perception data with technical telemetry. And Sami offers his view on where experience management needs to go: from something that happens after the fact to something that shapes service delivery from the start.

Rob Akershoek joins Barclay and Ian this week for a conversation that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who's ever tried to get a straight answer out of their organisation about what IT services it actually delivers.
Most organisations can't produce a reliable, consolidated list of their applications and digital products, and that gap has direct implications for managing cost, risk, and value. Rob makes the case for treating the application portfolio as a foundational backbone, not an administrative exercise, and explains why the problem keeps recurring every time a new technology wave arrives, from SaaS to cloud to AI.
The discussion covers why top-down and bottom-up approaches both have limits, how domain-based ownership structures can make the problem manageable at scale, and why the CMDB as currently used rarely does the job. Rob introduces the idea of a "licence to operate" for applications, a simple but effective policy mechanism that forces registration before contracts, infrastructure, or budgets can move forward.
Ian brings his software asset management background to push back on whether discovery tools can fill the gap (Rob's view: they can't, not on their own), and Barclay draws on his own experience of organisations that have been circling this problem for years without resolution.
Ian's trivia this week involves a digitally simulated fruit fly brain. It's relevant by the end. Just about.