Mark Boyer on stage
// about

Joining the dots between strategy, execution and how people actually work.

Global Services Director at Softcat. Speaker, writer, and a careful student of how IT services actually get designed, sold, delivered and led — not how the frameworks say they should.

// the story

Two decades on the inside.

I have spent over two decades in IT services. I have worked across the UK, the Nordics, Spain, Eastern Europe, South America, India and New Zealand — with large service providers like SCC, CDW and T-Systems, and now at Softcat as Global Services Director.

That experience has put me on the inside of how technology services actually get sold, designed, built, run and improved — across global enterprise, regulated industries, mid-market and public sector. It is operational rather than theoretical, and commercial rather than abstract.

That sounds like a career summary. It is not meant to be.

What those years have actually taught me is that the IT services industry has built an entire profession around the assumption that better processes produce better outcomes — and then spent decades wondering why technically excellent services still leave people frustrated, confused or ignored.

That question has led me into behavioural science, design thinking, customer journey mapping, value stream analysis. Not as frameworks to adopt wholesale, but as lenses that sharpen how you think about services. A major influence on my thinking is Rory Sutherland's work — particularly his argument that conventional logic, applied to human problems, consistently produces the wrong answer.

I sit at the intersection of strategy and execution. I care about making sure what an organisation says, what it sells, and what it can genuinely deliver all line up.

// what I believe

Six things I'd bet on.

The IT services industry needs to move beyond procedural thinking and towards something more thoughtful, more human, more creative and more effective.

Brilliance in the service desk is often evidence of failure in the service — exceptional people spending their days buffering users from things that were never designed to be easy to live with.

Frameworks should be foundations, not prisons. Quoting ITIL in a boardroom is like quoting the Highway Code on a first date — technically correct, but deeply unattractive.

Feelings are not a side effect of service delivery. They are the product. Until we design for how people actually think, feel and behave, we will keep building services that work on paper and fail in practice.

The next great idea for IT services will not come from IT services. It will come from art, from design, from psychology, from culture.

If we cannot change our own profession, we have no business claiming we know how to lead change for anyone else.

// how I lead

Servant leadership. High standards.

My leadership style is rooted in servant leadership, but with high standards. I care deeply about creating the conditions for people to do their best work — building high-performing teams and environments where people can thrive. At the same time, I value candour, accountability and challenge.

At Softcat, I lead a service operations organisation that works with thousands of customers across every sector. The stories I tell on stage come from that work. They are not hypothetical.

I do not see myself as a custodian of the status quo. I want substance over appearance, clear thinking over fashionable language, and honest conversations over easy consensus.

Mark Boyer at Bahrain F1
// off the clock

Beyond the day job.

Outside of work, I am an Arsenal supporter — which means I understand both the value of patience and the danger of assuming past performance guarantees future results.

I am also a devoted Formula 1 obsessive. I find a lot of overlap between the operational discipline of a paddock and the operating model of a service organisation. Tight feedback loops. Continuous tuning. The honest measurement of what actually moves the lap time, versus what just looks good on the dashboard.

// get in touch

Want to talk?

Whether it is about speaking, writing, collaboration or just a conversation — I am always happy to hear from people who care about making services better.

Get in Touch