Conference Coverage:- Day 1 - Featuring The Big One

Greetings from the ITSM-USA in the "Windy City" - Chicago, Illinois USA.

Reported by John Jasinski.

Nicknamed not for the weather but self-promoting politicians in the early days.

Today the wind is still blowing but the story is Service. Over 1300 people started out the 5th Annual IT Service Management (www.itsmfusa.org) Conference today with an IBM breakfast before moving to keynote presentation by the CIO of Caterpillar, John Heller and then onto a choice of 30 break-out educational sessions on a variety of IT Service topics.

My day focused on a mix of metrics, governance, Version 3 refresh and implementation. Some brief comments are provided below.

The first session covered metrics and how we could be doing better. Most interesting was the linking of heavy metrics focus to process dysfunction. Spend too much time measuring and you're likely to miss the real objective, measuring on delivery of customer requirements. The session also provided a reminder of metric focus: value, performance, compliance and quality on end-to-end internal, 3rd party and external customers. Emerging trends include the reporting approaches of exceptions vs. norms, operations vs. outcomes, action focus and cascading for teams.

Governance was my second session which covered moving IT from cost center and how ITIL relates to COBIT. The speaker began by reminding the audience that IT Finacial Management is the least used of all ITIL processes. Then he followed up with the importance of COBIT control (DS6)objectives for finance and the need for making customers aware of costs.

My next session was the big one. Sharon Taylor, Chief Architect for version 3 provided an update on progress. She explained the phases of the approach, the involvement of paid authors and consistency of content. Tony Betts, Chief Project Manager also joined Sharon for responding to questions. Of particular note is the possbility of free content on selected areas of ITIL content. Stay tuned to ITSMF news for updates.

The day finished with a quick overview of the methods and madness of implementations. The speaker emphasized fixing current problems before attemtping to set SLA's with the customer. A strategy was presented that combats over-emphasis on documentation with the use of quick reference cards and tangible quick wins.

HP rounded out the day with a keynote talk of leadership and commitment to ITIL by Services VP Mike Rigodanzo. And, thanks for PINK for a nice evening reception.

What I see in this conference is that the ITSMF has the opportunity to become a solid best practice source to help everyone in the IT Shop.

More tomorrow.

JJ