Strategic Service Leadership:

Creating Services That Matter to the Business

About the Program

In today's rapidly evolving business environment with continuing technological disruptions, service leadership has expanded far beyond just managing operational efficiency and team performance. The expectation and opportunity for Service leaders is to align technology and services with business outcomes, cultivate strong partnerships, and continuously demonstrate and communicate value. Strategic Service Leadership is about doing the right things-not just doing things right-and ensuring that their services are meaningful to the business and contribute quantifiable value to the business.

Strategic service leaders must understand where they are today, where they want to go, and how they will get there. This requires an honest assessment of current performance across service strategy, support models, processes, people, tools, and metrics. From this baseline, leaders can envision a future state and create a continuous improvement roadmap that bridges the gap between today's reality and tomorrow's objectives. By embracing change and leading with purpose, service leaders not only create business relevant services, but they also shape cultures that inspire, engage, and endure.

By the end of the session, we will have gained knowledge of:

• Assessing your current environment, understand relevant best practices and service strategies and create your own service strategy, roadmap and priorities for continuous improvement.
• Developing valued partnerships with business to better understand your technological demands and service requirements while keeping them current on all planned technology changes and rollouts.
• Always learning and improving your Leadership skills while mentoring and developing team members to increase their performance and broadening their impact.
• The powerful impact of always listening and leading by example in developing resilient, self-reliant teams.

Presented by: Peter McGarahan

Peter McGarahan is an accomplished professional guiding and impacting the customer experience, service and support industries. He served as the Senior Director of IT Infrastructure Services at First American Financial Company for the past 12 years. With over 40 years of experience in IT, Business, and Service leadership, Peter has established himself as an industry expert and global thought-leader in customer and technical service management.

Recognized for his exceptional knowledge and ability to present complex information in a captivating manner, Peter has received numerous accolades and awards throughout his career. He consistently ranks as one of the top-rated speakers at renowned industry events such as HDI, Pick Elephant, ICMI, CCW and CMP. As the founder of McGarahan & Associates, Peter dedicated himself to sharing his wealth of experience and lessons learned. He actively contributes to the industry through writing articles, publishing papers, and delivering insightful presentations at conferences worldwide.

Under Peter's leadership, the Taco Bell support organization achieved industry recognition, earning the prestigious Help Desk Institute Team Excellence Award in 1995. In 1999, he was honored by IT Support News as one of the "Top 25 Professionals in the Service and Support Industry." Peter's tireless dedication to mentoring and leadership coaching earned him the title of "The Legend of the Year" as voted by support professionals in 2002 and 2004 at the Help Desk Professionals conference. In recognition of his extraordinary contributions and unwavering commitment to the technical support industry, Peter was inducted into the HDI Hall of Fame in 2017 and achieved the HDI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. In 2023, Peter was inducted into the IT Service Management Hall of Fame by Pink Elephant.

 Agenda

1:00 PM to 1:05 PM – Networking 
1:05 PM to 1:15 PM - Introduction 
1:15 PM to 2:15 PM – Program
2:15 PM to 2:30 PM – Closing Remarks, Survey, Prize Drawing
2:30 PM – Event Ends

Date/Time

March 27, 2026 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Membership

Interested in becoming an HDI member, click here.
Click to learn about "What's the ROI on an HDI membership?"

Sponsors

Platinum Sponsor: The MIL Corporation

Gold Sponsor: Splashtop 

Web Sponsor: ASPG

Sponsor HDI Capital Area

HDI Capital Area Local Chapter provides a unique opportunity for our sponsors. We hold several meetings per year both virtual and in-person in the DC Metro area.  Our members and attendees are over 90% managers and above. This means the decision makers are in the room with you. Sponsoring our chapter will provide your company or organization exposure to federal, state, and local government agencies, healthcare, higher education, large IT systems integrators, commercial companies, schools, and small businesses.

You will have the opportunity to network and dine with the decision makers at every meeting. In addition, your company will reach our members and attendees through advertising on our newsletters and meeting announcements. The opportunities are endless. For more information, click here or email sponsorship@hdicapitalarea.com.

Learn. Grow. Achieve

Learn. Grow. Achieve encompasses what HDI’s Capital Area Local Chapter stands for – Creating unique opportunities for members and sponsors to learn from experts in the industry and one another, which results in an improvement of skills to unlock the power to reach new professional heights.

The HDI Capital Area Local Chapter offers you the opportunity to network with a dynamic community of technical customer service and support and IT service management industry leaders in the Maryland, Northern Virginia and Washington, DC area.

We come together to educate, network, learn, and form lifelong relationships. We welcome you to visit our website at https://www.hdicapitalarea.com/ or if you have questions, contact president@hdicapitalarea.com.