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The English novelist Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) once wrote… “Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

Seemingly, from the moment of our conception to our final hours, music can be an ongoing source of pleasure for nearly all of us.

However, could we be selling music short? Could music go beyond mere leisure and become an active part of a regular regime for our mental health? If so, what sort of music should we be playing to help us keep our sanity. Could even heavy metal music help us relax? Should Metallica and Iron Maiden be a regular part of chillout playlists?

Professional rock musician, online piano teaching specialist and TEDx speaker, Mark Deeks, comes to Spark26 to challenge our assumptions about music and helps us understand the increasingly important role music can play in our mental health wellness. Because the ripple effect of making music part of your wellbeing toolkit can be huge for your life, for your business, for your team, for you. Be prepared for a few surprises during the hour!

In this provocative session, IT Director, Mark Boyer, challenges the traditional model of IT support, where “great” often means recovering quickly from failure. Instead, we reimagine the service desk as an insight engine and experience architect—less focused on closing tickets, more invested in designing journeys where tickets aren’t needed in the first place.

He’ll explore:

• Why traditional SLAs, ticket queues, and time-to-close metrics miss the real point

• The promise and pitfalls of XLAs—when they reflect experience, and when they mask it

• How “zero-touch” support, predictive assistance, and contextual tools shift the game

• The untapped power of service desks as cultural change agents and user advocates

• Why tech isn’t the blocker—culture is

Mark's will share his thoughts on a bold reframing of support, where success is measured not by speed of recovery, but by how rarely users need to recover at all. Let’s design for confidence, not just resolution.

Key Takeaways:

• Rethink what ‘value’ means in modern IT support

• Use experience data as a design input, not a vanity metric

• Start transforming your service desk into a strategic experience hub

At 200mph, there's no room for complexity. Every system, every workflow, every decision is optimized for speed and precision. The McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team knows this better than anyone. Managing one of the world's most demanding competitive environments, they've partnered with Freshworks to help eliminate tool sprawl, automate critical workflows, and build IT operations that move at the speed the sport demands.

Freshworks' first-of-its-kind Global Cost of Complexity Report exposes what that costs: 47% of software ROI lost to fragmentation, employees wasting nearly a full workday weekly managing systems instead of solving problems, and organizations leaving billions on the table in unrealized productivity. This keynote draws on lessons from McLaren and other high-performance environments to reveal what separates high-velocity IT teams from everyone else. You'll walk away with a framework for identifying where complexity is costing you most, a roadmap for consolidating platforms without sacrifi cing capability, and the business case for why simplification isn't about doing less. It's about moving faster with greater impact.

What you'll learn:
● The hidden complexity tax hitting your ITSM operations: where time, morale, and customer satisfaction bleed away
● Performance lessons from extreme environments: what racing teams know about eliminating friction that IT leaders need to learn
● The strategic playbook: consolidating tools, automating workflows, and reclaiming 6.8 hours of weekly productivity per employee
● Why the fastest organizations aren't the busiest. They're the most ruthlessly focused on what actually drives results

Ever wonder why a Service Catalogue matters — or how to make it more than just a list of services? This practical, engaging session will show you how to turn your catalogue into a powerful tool for clarity, efficiency, and customer experience. We’ll break down what a Service Catalogue really is, why it’s essential for modern service management, and how to apply it in ways that deliver real value.

Through real-world examples and actionable insights, you’ll learn how to make your catalogue work for your organization, not just sit on a shelf. Whether you’re new to the concept or looking to refine your approach, this session will give you the confidence and know-how to make it matter.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the true purpose of a Service Catalogue and why it’s critical for business success.
• Learn practical steps to design and implement a catalogue that drives clarity and accountability.
• Discover how to use your catalogue to improve customer experience and streamline service delivery.

Join Sophie Hussey, Leadership & Service Management Consultant, to unlock the hidden potential of your Service Catalogue and transform the way you deliver services.

Everyone is talking about Chatbots and how AI will deliver improved Service Desks and customer experience in the coming years.

This is Arcadis’ journey of implementing their Chatbot, getting it wrong and then making it a success. By finding their direction, on what they wanted to achieve, how and when. Their story is about how not making a success of it first time, taking a step back, seeking guidance and inspiration from others and bringing together the right team, they were able to succeed. This is demonstrated by 5% of tickets logged via Chatbot and an improved MTTR and CSAT.

In this session, we’ll reveal the three most common friction points across global IT organizations, drawn from millions of experience data points. You’ll see where service desks consistently lose productivity and satisfaction, and how leading brands have turned those insights into measurable wins.

We’ll go beyond theory with real-world examples from enterprise customers who used experience data to:

1. Understand where and why your users are frustrated

2. Reduce ticket reassignments and speed up resolution

3. Recognize automation opportunities and let humans handle those tasks that actually need human touch

Expect practical guidance, proven frameworks, and actionable steps you can take immediately: whether you’re chasing XLAs, improving DEX, or simply trying to make ITSM work better for humans. Walk away with a clear playbook for prioritizing improvements that matter most.

We’ve all heard it: the relentless ring of the Service Desk phone during a major incident or a botched rollout. For years, we measured success by how fast we answered those calls—but what if the real victory is making sure those calls never happen in the first place?

Join me for a deep dive into my personal journey of shifting from "reactive firefighting" to "proactive invisibility." I’ll take you through the highs, the lows, and the technical pivots required to systematically reduce end-user disruption. We won't just talk about "fixing things faster"—we’ll discuss how we leveraged experimentation, aka Continual Service Improvement, to anticipate pain points before users even felt them.

What you’ll learn:

• The Anatomy of Noise: How to identify which disruptions are actually driving your call volume.
• The "Silent" Strategy: Practical steps to implement proactive problem management that actually sticks.
• Measuring What Matters: Why "Zero Calls" is a better KPI than "Average Handle Time," and how to sell that vision to leadership.

Come find out how we turned down the volume on the desk so our teams could finally focus on the work that moves the needle.

Spending a six-figure sum on your ITSM platform, but still failing to deliver measurable service improvement?

You aren't alone. We are promised Clarity and Control, but often end up with complexity, frustrated teams, and expensive shelfware that fails to deliver new business capabilities.

The problem isn't the tool; it's the lack of a playbook. This session cuts through the noise to expose the 7 Deadly Sins of ITSM Tooling, the fundamental strategic errors that guarantee you'll waste your investment.

Key Takeaways:

• The Diagnostic: A simple framework to identify exactly which strategic sins are sabotaging your service.
• The Playbook: A no-nonsense strategy to stop firefighting and start leading with purpose.
• The Execution: How to turn your disconnected shelfware into a fully orchestrated service engine.

If you're tired of wasting budget and are ready to make your tools actually work, be in this session.

Modern IT environments are fragmented - patched-together legacy systems, cloud silos, and disconnected tools leave IT teams stuck firefighting. In this session, we’ll explore how ITIM transforms IT from a source of friction into a performance advantage, giving service, support, and operations teams a single source of truth. We’ll highlight real-world impacts: anticipating incidents, driving reliable change, and turning infrastructure into a strategic asset. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to bridge the gap between fragmented IT environments and unified, high-performing operations.

Attendees will walk away with:

1. How infrastructure visibility turns complexity into operational confidence

Attendees will understand how ITIM creates a single source of truth across service, support, and operations, replacing silos with context-rich, actionable data

2. How to anticipate and prevent incidents instead of firefighting

They’ll learn strategies to move from reactive incident response to proactive, AI-enabled service management that reduces downtime and risk

3. How to make confident operational decisions at scale

Attendees will see how ITIM enables visibility, dependency mapping, and automated insights, giving teams the confidence to change, innovate, and scale without guesswork

This talk explores why successful AI implementation requires more than a technology investment—it demands organisational transformation around data quality, governance, and culture. We'll examine the three dimensions of readiness (technical, organisational, and process), review the current state reality of configuration data, incident management, and knowledge bases, and identify common pitfalls in AI adoption.

Together, CGI and MoJ embarked on a journey to reimagine service success utilising the Experience Optimisation Framework, designing an experience-led model from the ground up.

Along the way, we harnessed a shared language that bridged performance and real human impact. By co-creating experience indicators and evolving governance together, we unlocked deeper insight, proactive improvement, and a stronger, truly experience-focused service culture.

This session explores how Computacenter as leading IT service providers are shifting from traditional SLA-driven operations to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) that measure what really matters: the sentiment, outcomes, and productivity of end users.

We’ll examine how experience management has transformed service delivery, from proactive monitoring to data-driven insight loops that continuously improve employee and customer journeys. Attendees will hear about embedding experience as a core operational metric, aligning teams around user-centric goals, and demonstrating the tangible business value of exceptional experience. Join us to discover why, at CC, experience isn’t just part of the service, it is the service.

But true empathy is human attribute. It's about being there for others. It manifests itself in surprising ways and delivers powerful benefits.

James will talk about some of the ways cultivating authentic empathy can elevate your performance and unleash added value, address why simulation is not emulation, avoiding the uncanny valley and share some of the thinking behind the new IEEE standard on emulated empathy in AI:Human interactions.

Key takeaways of this session will be how to:

- Develop appropriate, authentic, and contextual empathy

- Effectively and ethically exploit AI

- Build empathy into metrics and management sytems

Discover how IT Service Management can unlock the strengths of neurodiverse talent and create teams where everyone thrives. This session shares lived experience, practical ITIL‑aligned tactics and simple changes that reduce cognitive load, improve communication and make work more human. Expect real stories, clear takeaways and ideas you can put into practice straight away.

In ITSM, the gap between what we intend and what stakeholders experience can quietly erode trust, even when we follow our carefully thought-out plans and processes perfectly. This talk explores how intent, empathy and credibility shape your relationships with stakeholders, from daily interactions to high pressure escalations. Drawing on real world experience from a variety of common service-based environments, I will show you how to understand stakeholder perspectives, influence outcomes and earn trust.

Key takeaways:

Be intentional and explicit - Stakeholders respond to your purpose and motivations, not just your words.

Invest the time – Don’t pay lip service, don’t document, really understand your stakeholders “why”.

Earn your credibility – Trust is fragile and whether it is lost in one go or over time, it is hard to get back.

Putting users at the heart of everything we do is easy to say, but far harder to sustain in complex organisations, tight delivery cycles, and policy-driven environments. This session explores what it really means to design and deliver services with users at the heart, not as an afterthought or a persona on a slide.

Drawing on real-world experience, this session will show how user-centred thinking can be embedded into everyday decision-making, prioritisation, and organisational culture. It will challenge common misconceptions about “doing user-centred design” and offer practical approaches that work even when time, data, or buy-in feel limited.

I hope as an attendee you will leave with a clear understanding of how to advocate for users, influence stakeholders and create services that genuinely meet user needs while still delivering organisational outcomes.

Key takeaways:

- How to move from talking about users to consistently designing with them

- Practical ways to keep user needs central under real-world constraints

- Techniques for influencing teams and leaders using user evidence

IT teams have long been seen as somewhere you go when something breaks or you need something new, but as organisations digitally transform, our role is evolving. Are IT teams simply a reactive support function, or are we integral to driving business outcomes and customer experience? This panel brings together industry leaders to explore how IT teams can position themselves as strategic partners rather than cost centres.

We’ll discuss the cultural, operational, and technological shifts needed to bridge the gap between “support” and “business,” and share practical insights on how to demonstrate value, influence decision-making, and align with organizational goals.

The new ITIL Experience publication helps service management professionals to capture, make sense of, and improve experience of users, customers, and colleagues. 

Roman will show how the new ITIL module helps:

- understand the views of different service stakeholders 

- capture, understand, and improve experience

- adjust improvement efforts for complexity of the modern world

- consider AI as an important actor in digital experience. 

In today’s complex digital ecosystems, reactive monitoring is no longer enough. This session introduces Dynatrace as a comprehensive observability solution that provides deep visibility across infrastructure, applications, and user experience. We’ll explore how data flows through the platform and how intelligent automation supports early incident detection and rapid remediation—reducing downtime and protecting business continuity.

Ember operates inside the service desk as a colleague, holding conversations with staff and students rather than pushing links or scripted flows. It interprets intent and cues, adapts tone and pace in the moment, records the reasoning behind its decisions, and knows when to step aside, handing work to human colleagues with context and clear next steps. Designed and delivered by Norman Managed Services at Northumbria University, Ember is live across more than 40 universities, making it one of the largest operational AI deployments in higher education professional services.

This session explores how behaviour and user experience were intentionally shaped, how simulation was used to test tone and judgement, and how ongoing quality analysis drives improvement over time. We will share what we learned along the way, and what changes when AI stops sitting on top of the service and starts working within it.

As digital and AI-driven workplaces grow more complex, so do access and security risks.
Discover how a GRC-first ITSM approach, powered by ServiceDesk Plus, helps you simplify access governance, secure employee offboarding, and align service management with key compliance standards, while protecting productivity and experience.

Employee digital journeys are becoming more intricate and harder to map with the expanding digital and AI landscape. This can lead to access creep and unaccounted privileges, opening up security loopholes. Standards and regulations such as ISO/IEC 27001, the NIS2 Directive, the PCI DSS, and the CIS Benchmarks can help address and fix these risks. However, when service desk leaders, IT directors, and CIOs aspire to comply with these standards, they also risk impacting the employee experience with excessive red tape.

Balancing compliance mandates with employee experience and productivity doesn't have to be a daunting exercise for everyone involved. It can be achieved with a GRC-first ITSM outlook and a few critical tweaks and enhancements to existing IT service delivery workflows.

In this session, we will explore how ServiceDesk Plus, the unified service management platform from ManageEngine, can help you:

• Build a centralized access governance and orchestration center for all access provisioning requests.
• Design and enforce security-first employee offboarding workflows.
• Align service management capabilities with controls across various compliance standards and regulations.

In this energetic session we look at how the service desk becomes the real human firewall, shaping the organisation’s first line of defence and putting the Information Security Management practice into action where it matters most.

We all know that it's now 'When' not 'If' when we talk about security incidents. We start with a real incident example to show how quickly things can turn when simple checks are missed. We then run a short incident simulation to test the first ten minutes of your response and show the habits that keep information safe under pressure. You will leave with clear, practical steps that both managers and analysts can put in place straight away, helping your teams strengthen identity checks, reduce avoidable risk, and build secure behaviour into everyday work.

Modern service desks are transforming rapidly as AI, automation, and analytics reshape how support is delivered. Spark26 highlights this evolution toward proactive, intelligent service operations, aligning closely with Ivanti’s strengths in AI powered ITSM, ITAM, and self healing capabilities.

Key Points:

• Ivanti’s AI-driven ITSM automates ticket classification, summarization, and knowledge creation, reducing manual effort and enabling faster, more accurate service delivery.
• Ivanti self-healing automation reduces service disruption through proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve endpoint and security issues before users are impacted.
• AI driven insights unify device health, asset data, and user experience signals, improving visibility and enabling earlier issue prediction.

Together, modern AI powered ITSM and ITAM enable organisations to shift from reactive ticketing to a proactive, autonomous service model that prevents issues before they happen.

This talk breaks down how I built a visible, respected voice in the ITSM space in just 12 months by showing up differently on LinkedIn. I’ll share the exact strategies I used to build reputation, create content that resonates, and open doors to new opportunities. No gimmicks, no fluff. Just real examples from a practitioner who started with zero visibility.

We’ll also explore how this approach can work even if you’re not naturally extroverted or into social media.

Drawing from real-world experiences, Matt explores the emotional side of leadership—how to guide teams through mistakes, build trust, and create a culture where experimentation feels safe. Attendees will learn how to reframe daily challenges as opportunities for learning and innovation. With empathy and humor, Matt shows how to move beyond firefighting and fear, empowering service desk teams to grow stronger, more confident, and more connected through the power of purposeful experimentation.