Conference Coverage:- Day 1 - Track by Track

itSMF Show Notes - by John Worthington.

The show is very well attended and organized. After being a little disappointed at IBM’s breakfast being full (I got there right at start-time), and managing some last minute booth issues, however I was able to attend a few sessions… Here’s some thoughts and comments:

Welcome and Opening Keynote by John Heller, CIO – Caterpillar

You’d have to be brain dead not to be impressed with Caterpillar’s results; record sales and profits that show no signs of letting up (year over year profit increase of 85% in 2004). A reminder of why IT exists in the first place (to serve the needs of the business); my thought was I wished the room were full of business executives that could have heard the message “IT Service Management Improves the Value of IT to the Business”. Anything the ITIL community can do to get this message to the business side of the house helps us all….John was a great speaker and seemed quite committed to ITSM…

I was particularly interested in his comments about supply chain challenges increasing the importance of ITSM….(more on that in a minute)…anyway, I thought a great opening keynote.

Track 1 – From Silos to Service Management by Sanofi-Aventis

Pretty much re-enforced the keynote’s message and illustrated a real world implementation that included business case development and awareness campaigns; clearly a lot of effort and time went into this and it was well presented.

Again, what stuck with me was a comment that establishment of cross functional (cross silo) teams was “the biggest key” to success. Initial team member comments were “this will never work”….breaking down those barriers can be a major hurdle…

Track 6 – ITSM & Distributed Sourcing: It’s not a Question of “If” but of “How” by Michael McGaughey, Capgemini Energy.

I thought this was a great presentation and the slides were full of content. Interesting how critical service definition is and how distributed sourcing can dramatically complicate what is often already a complicated process.

Interesting that customers will be insisting on ITIL/BS15000 and are often requesting outsourcers to ‘show us your ITIL training'… John Heller’s comments on supply chain challenges are closely related to this ‘distributed sourcing’ and if internal silos are difficult to manage one can imagine how complex external silos are.

Track 3 – Gaps: Your Gateway to Excellence, Panel Discussion

Ended the day with a panel discussion about what hurdles clients encountered during their ITIL implementations, which centered around definition of SLAs and SLM in particular, root cause analysis and Problem Management challenges…..more cross silo discussion associated with problem review boards, etc….an interesting and informative exchange.

Overall Comments

Great information from the real world and very valuable…while I understand the focus on Change and Configuration, I’d like to explore more the area of performance management and how that plays into supply chain, distributed sourcing and cross-silo problem management.

I’ve had experience with a tool that can provide silos (inter-enterprise, distributed sourcing and/or supply chain environments) end-to-end service performance data across every layer of every component and automatically isolate whish layer of which component is the source of a problem.

I’d like to find out more how people are leveraging (or not) performance data to benefit the service support process areas. I think this is an area that can accelerate gains, and will be looking for feedback…. more tomorrow!


John M. Worthington - IT Service Management Consulting
MyServiceMonitor.