Australian technology services provider Kinetic IT has won a coveted innovation award at the annual itSMF Australia Service Industry Awards.
The Australian-owned and operated company has won the Innovation of the Year – Business Services category for its cloud-native Automated Virtual Agent (AVA) product deployment into the day-to-day IT operations of aviation leader Qantas. The winners were announced at last night’s itSMF gala awards in Brisbane.
Automated Virtual Agent (AVA)
AVA, a serverless conversational AI solution developed by Kinetic IT within Amazon Web Services, is a key enabler for enterprise IT operations during times of reduced services, particularly throughout a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The AVA product is available 24/7 to support customers with large call-handling environments; at Qantas, AVA completes simple IT requests such as resetting passwords or unlocking an employee’s account. This supports in-house service desks exponentially increasing their call handling capacity and gives technical specialists significantly more capacity to focus on resolving complex IT problems.
AVA’s work within Qantas has resulted in an average saving of more than 200 hours of staff time a month due to streamlining the resolution of such simple requests, and an +85% customer service experience score; the majority of feedback indicating service quality is on par or better than before AVA was introduced.
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Kinetic IT welcomes the itSMF award
Kinetic IT’s Chief Marketing Officer Brett Roberts welcomed the recognition of AVA as an outstanding innovation that supports businesses.
“At Kinetic IT, we proudly use technology to enhance the human experience. I want to thank itSMF for recognising our efforts in this pursuit with the Innovation of the Year – Business Services win, as well as all the specialists, developers, technical leads, analysts and more in our Kinetic IT crew who came together to bring AVA to life. Congratulations to everyone involved!
“Our AVA product is delivering user-centric outcomes and outstanding service experiences for customers across Australia through very challenging times,” he says. “Thank you to our customer, Qantas, for partnering with us to deliver AVA – now recognised by itSMF as a nationally-acclaimed innovation and homegrown success story.”
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Recognising Simon Dorst
The night continued to deliver great news, with long-time Kinetic IT crew member Simon Dorst being recognised with the Services Management Lifetime Contribution itSMF award.
The award is given to an individual who, over the course of their IT career, has made an outstanding and highly significant contribution within the IT service management (ITSM) domain and continues to inspire the entire community.
Simon’s IT career
Originally from the Netherlands, Simon became Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) trained and certified in 1992. Since then, he has spent most of his career educating and advising people and organisations throughout the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia of the benefits of service management and its application.
Simon’s current role is Manager, Service Management Services and, alongside the company, has continued to push broader industry adoption and maturing practice in ITSM, and is an accredited training provider and examination provider for ITIL and service integration and management (SIAM) courses.
Over the past decade, Simon has spoken at almost every Australian itSMF National Conference and has been a regular speaker at conferences and seminars for a number of other industry bodies such as EXIN, BCS, ITSM Zone, Scopism, AXELOS and itSMF International.
Brett says:
“Simon is a pragmatic and keen-witted thinker, combining his technical background and experience, service orientation and industry best practice with analytics and service management. He is a staunch advocate and champion of SIAM, and has been a key member of the team continuing to deliver ITIL training throughout the pandemic – recognised, again, as a leading initiative with a finalist nomination in the business impact category at last night’s itSMF awards.”
“Simon’s long-term achievements and contributions to the ITSM profession are highly deserving of recognition through this, the Service Management Lifetime Contribution award. Congratulations Simon!”
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Kinetic IT making an impact on businesses
Kinetic IT was also a nominee in the Innovation of the Year – Business Impact category for delivering critical professional training using a hybrid model when COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and subsequent physical distancing restrictions, put a pause on in-person delivery.
As a national provider of best practice ITIL and service integration and management (SIAM) training since 2003, Kinetic IT proactively pivoted to a hybrid online learning environment to ensure critical training could continue. This included supporting trainees with bookable, COVID-safe learning spaces at Kinetic IT’s corporate locations to minimise distractions for students as they dialled into Microsoft Teams-based training sessions. Classroom exercises were completely redesigned to ensure strong social networking opportunities for trainees remained despite the virtual environment, as well as incorporating a multi-device approach to maintain engagement and improve learning outcomes.
Brett says:
“Ensuring that those working in the Australian IT sector can keep pace with a rapidly changing global industry, while also maintaining best practice qualifications and knowledge, is a key focus for us. A strong local technology sector supports a strong pipeline of talent in the Australian market for years to come; well done to our SIAM specialists for having your extraordinary work to adapt ITIL and SIAM training recognised by itSMF.”
Kinetic IT is one of the largest Australian-owned and -operated technology services providers, with about 1400 crew embedded across customer locations in Perth, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Darwin.
Throughout the years, Kinetic IT has been recognised for its customer-centric services at the itSMF awards, including innovations in public education.
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Visit Kinetic IT’s website to read more about AVA. You can also find more information about the itSMF Australian Service Awards on the organisation’s website.
