Reflections on the Australian IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) Conference, August 2015

In this post, I'd like to share my thoughts and reflections from the  Australian IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) Conference held in Sydney Australia on August 20 & 21, 2015.

 The conference was held over 2 days instead of 3 like previous years.  I felt a little rushed to see my bookmarked presentations, network with peers and catch-up with vendors. However justifying 3 days away from work is very hard so it was a good compromise. 

 The four topic streams this year were:
  1. Building SM Foundations, 
  2. SM Innovation, 
  3. People, Culture, Community, Capability,
  4. Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise.

These streams presented a healthy blend of topics and I found it refreshing to see speakers were not the traditional ITIL practitioner/manager. This also appeared to attract some new delegates who were also not working in this specific field. 

 Overall I thought the conference was well run with no great issues (although queueing for a barista style coffee took awhile - I have an addiction to feed). 

 While it was great to meet friends old and new, I'd like to acknowledge Dave O'Readon of Silver Six for winning the Innovation of the Year Award for his product CIO-Pulse.com. 

 I noted a couple of new vendors this year and there were no ITIL education/training vendors (or maybe the consulting companies were offering and I missed it). The Birds-of-a-Feather sessions were very limited and perhaps the ITSMF could leverage the breakout sessions that are used in the DevOps Days conference instead of speakers?

 On the social media front, the conference app was very handy and there were healthy conversations on twitter (using #smconfau). 

 Key areas of future interest for me from the conference include:

  1. Changing organisational/leadership culture (Servant Leadership, Entrepreneurial/Startup principles, being more risk taking & not conservative);
  2. Service Integration and Management (SIAM);
  3. NenGen ITSM (Site Reliability Engineering, implementing large scale Continuous Delivery & Devops, IT4IT);
  4. Other areas include CyberSecurity, Service Catalogue & Business Service Management.
Here is a short 9 minute video I compiled from the conference:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Employing value streams in Enterprise Service Management

Image
Introduction Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the technical extension of pre-existing Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) to other areas of an enterprise (e.g. Corporate or Shared Services). Successful ESM balances efficiencies gained from employing standardised process management, tooling and reporting with the nuances of organisational capabilities such as Finance, HR, Facilities and so forth. ESM leverages the industry proven service management concepts from ITSM that have been available for more than 20 years. Further to this, ESM operations implement similar concepts as ITSM including a service desk for 1st level support, end to end process management, request/issue management software, self-service knowledge bases and more recently chatbots and AI. Value streams are born from Lean manufacturing and comprise of a series of steps an organisation undertakes to create and deliver value to customers, typically in the forms of products and services. In the IT co
Read more

Using the Lean Canvas for an IT solution proof of concept

Image
I was assisting a client with sourcing some new IT solutions. For one particular IT need, the client had shortlisted a potential solution with a trusted vendor but they needed to explore the potential solution further to understand its capabilities in more detail. They were unclear as to whether they should directly source with this vendor or go to the wider market (with a Request for Proposal (RFP)) to address this particular need. Further to this, it was unclear how long this project would run for so it was important to understand the time and effort that may be involved without consuming too many resources.  The client was seeking to employ a specific approach for this potential solution, where a “fail fast” lean Proof of Concept (PoC) would be conducted to rapidly test whether the potential solution was fit for purpose without spending unnecessary time and effort required to conduct a RFP. To start, we confirmed the following principles to guide the PoC: Do not develop
Read more

Improving your IT service delivery and operations with ChatOps

Image
Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. In response, IT leaders are seeking to leverage technologies and delivery models such as cloud, infrastructure as code, Continuous Delivery (CD), Big Data and IT Process Automation.  This intersection of contemporary concepts is deriving new IT delivery patterns which are impacting on traditional IT service management (ITSM). From my recent experiences working with Australian enterprise-sized IT organisations, it is my view that ITSM & Operations teams are not keeping pace with their peers in application development to meet current business demands. ITSM and Operations cannot remain effective and efficient if the teams continue to work in disjointed practices that are underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. To remedy this situation, ITSM & Operations teams need
Read more