I was at the UK itSMF conference this week – presenting and also with an exhibitor booth. The show was smaller (less attendees and exhibitors) than previous years although the consensus was that there was a good mix of people and that it was a good networking event. There were still a large number of presentations in streams.
Debate in the plenary sessions focused on next years ‘big 4 ‘ agenda, which I’m pleased to say included Customer Experience..! Also Axelos made some noise both in terms of physical presence in the exhibitor area and also to announce a new Agile/Prince2 initiative, Cyber resilience program and also some words around what might happen with ITIL.
For this in the next period the word(s) seem to be ‘ITIL and…’ – IE so rather than try to rebuild the somewhat creaking edifice that is ITIL at present, the current focus will be on how it relates and interacts with other areas. I hope there will be more on this in a variety of forums around one key area – collaboration, particularly with the development and increased visibility of DevOps and agile/fast methods – which were mentioned at the show but not enough to be honest.
My session looked a the dichotomy between talk of such new areas (as well as social/cloud/mobile etc) and also the need to focus on basics. I asked the attendees who considered their ITSM to cover the basic functions (which I define below as Service Desk, Service Catalog/design, ITSM Engine (Incident.Problem/Change) and CSI)
Amazingly only about 5% of the room admitted to being able to do this..! So we clearly have a problem around basic functions, that makes us even more stretched when thinking about new areas to focus on.
However my point is that we really need to do both.
We need to do the basics, yet we also need to move forward, faster… and collaborate for success..!
You can view the presentation slides here
http://www.slideshare.net/barclayrae/it-smf-conference-2014-ppt-barclay-rae
Moving forward it would be good to see more real positive discussion in ITSM circles about how to collaborate – both across IT organisations (Dev and OPS) and of course the wider picture of how Enterprises beyond IT are using ITSM and ITIL concepts to achieve success,automation and real ‘supply chain’ service delivery. Until recently only one or 2 of the ITSM vendors had really picked this up, but no there are many more who are changing their marketing and sales approaches to meet this new exciting demand. See my recent report for ITSM review on Outside IT.
DevOps still remains a hugely mis-understood term (certainly for marketeers) as we see adverts for ‘DevOps teams’ and articles about ‘DevOps systems’ – its an approach and culture, not another system or standard…
Another term that gets mis-interpreted is SIAM (Service Integration and Management). This in theory is a single approach to supplier and IT supply chain management – usually the need to co-ordinate a number of suppliers to deliver co-ordinated services.
This is an area I’ll be exploring more in future and also it will be the key topic a the next itSMF SLM SIG (special interest group) event on 13th January 2015 – in Central London (details TBA).
I’m delighted to be taking over as chair of this group and will be driving involvement and engagement around SLM topics, as well as hopefully publicising and sharing these with the wider itSMF community in due course.
To follow that I was delighted that my colleague and predecessor Karen Brusch won the itSMF contributor of the year award at the conference – this is much deserved as Karen’s drive and leadership has made the SIG a success over the years – Thanks Karen…!
Delighted also to see Rob Spencer win an award for his submission of the year – Rob also presented the ITIL Manifesto project at the conference and hopefully this will continue to gain traction and more…………. COLLABORATION.
How will you be working to collaborate more and achieve ‘joined up’ success…?
