Demand better of the system first.
Before anyone is blamed, examine clarity, process, decision rights, capability and incentives. Most underperformance is designed in, not chosen.
The record · for boards, investors and search
I run services businesses, and I have a view on what replaces them.
Global Services Director at Softcat, accountable for a £550M services portfolio and around 300 people. Before that: a £250M P&L at T-Systems, the integration of an 800-person acquisition at CDW, and a global IT estate owned end to end from the customer’s side of the table. This page is the record. The rest of the site is the argument.
01 · Scope
£550M
Services portfolio, current accountability
£250M
Northern Europe P&L run at T-Systems
800
Person MSP acquisition integrated
~300
People across five service functions
02 · What changed, and why
Four decisions worth explaining.
Scope tells you how big the job was. It does not tell you whether the person was any good at it. So: what I owned, what I decided to do about it, and what moved as a result.
SoftcatGlobal Services Director · 2025–present
Five service functions were duplicating each other’s effort and running five different systems of working. I designed the Unified Services Framework to collapse that into one, with a digital operations spine underneath it and career pathways built alongside, so people could see a route through the new model rather than just a new process. Year one: 20% services growth, customer NPS to 68, 80+ delivery partners orchestrated through a single model. I then wrote the business case and board paper for the AI and automation platform that carries it forward.
T-SystemsHead of Service Management, Northern Europe
A £250M portfolio under sustained cost-out pressure, which usually means margin goes one way. It went the other, by more than 20%, through two moves rather than one. Operational cost came down through a shoring programme that moved delivery from Eastern Europe into a growing Indian capability. And the Technical Service Manager role was rebuilt from reactive operational cover into customer success, owning the commercial growth of the portfolio offerings. That was 2017, before the industry had agreed on the label. TRI*M held above 90 throughout.
CDWHead of Services, Kelway
An 800-person managed services acquisition had to become one business rather than two sharing a logo. I designed how they would integrate across people, process and tooling, and built the UK Service Operations Centre from a clean sheet. Services revenue grew from £50M to £250M over the period.
The WorkshopDirector of IT Service Operations · the customer side
A global estate across five countries and four time zones, 170+ services, and a function nobody much enjoyed being served by. Employee satisfaction rose 50 points in six months, to 86. That came from defining what the function was actually for, simplifying the operating model, refining how work flowed through it, and being deliberate about who was in the team. Purpose, mastery and autonomy first. Then intentional attrition and better recruitment.
03 · How I lead
High standards, high autonomy.
I set a demanding direction because I think organisations routinely settle for less than they are capable of. The job is not to set the pace and expect people to keep up. It is to build the clarity, decision rights and challenge that turn pace into momentum the organisation owns rather than depends on me for.
01
02
Strong direction, protected dissent.
A firm view gets more robust when people can argue with it. If nobody is disagreeing with me, the model is broken, not the vision.
03
Make the future legible.
Seeing connections early is not leadership on its own. It only counts once other people can understand it, challenge it and build it with you.
04
Critique with an alternative.
Challenging orthodoxy without offering a credible route forward is performance, not leadership. I try to bring the replacement, not just the objection.
That is the description. Here it is from people who reported to me, in their own words. The dates are theirs, and they are old: the behaviour has not changed, but the recent testimony is something I am collecting rather than something I can show you yet.
“He always gave his direct reports the necessary freedom to manage their own regions in their own styles, whilst ensuring the company ethos was maintained and goals achieved.”
Kevin Crowther · direct report · 2013“He has challenged me to undertake tasks outside of my comfort zone and allowed me to explore new potential career paths.”
Kerry Roffey · direct report · 2017“Mark has been willing to entrust me to complete projects often outside of my sphere of experience and my comfort zone, something many managers wouldn’t do.”
Benjamin Knight · Kelway · 2013“A good technical background, a proven ability to lead and mentor, excellent commercial awareness, and an ability to communicate effectively at all levels.”
Rob Gallagher · peer, Kelway · 2013
04 · The through line
Both sides of the table, twice over.
I have run managed services at scale and I have been the customer holding providers to account. Very few people in this industry have done both, and it changes how you design services, how you buy them, and how honestly you talk about them.
Twice now I have been the person who turns two organisations into one operating model: the acquisition integration at Kelway, and the Unified Services Framework at Softcat a decade later. That is the same job at different scale. Deciding what the business is going to be good at, then rebuilding people, process and tooling around that answer rather than around whatever each part was doing before.
It is also why the arguments elsewhere on this site are not commentary. The Human Operating Model and Shift Right came out of running the businesses above, and they get tested against them. The fuller profile is here, and the CV is here.
Conversations
Worth a conversation?
I am always glad to talk with chairs, investors and services leaders about what happens to the economics of this industry when AI removes work rather than just automating it, and about what a services business has to look like on the other side of that.