Conference Coverage:- Day 2 - The One About Gorillas

By John Worthington.

Spent most of today ‘walking the halls’, but did get a chance to see Chip Bell’s message on Partnering: The Secrets of Great Relationships.

What a way to start the day!

An entertaining and very useful keynote that really highlighted the importance of SLM and managing the customer relationship….it’s so easy to skip these critical elements of ITSM since it is very often not part of IT’s comfort zone, but it can make or break success as much as Incident, Problem or any of the core process areas…

I particularly liked his story about the Gorillas, which I’ve tried to summarize below...

Four gorillas were trained to not touch bananas when lowered into their cage, by squirting a fire hose at them. They eventually learned not to touch the bananas or they would get wet.

When a new gorilla was switched with an existing (trained) gorilla, the other gorillas would stop the new gorilla from getting a banana so they did not get wet.

Eventually, all the gorillas were replaced, even though the fire hose had never squirted them. The behavior was embedded in the group even though it was no longer necessary.

The point was, ‘how do we know when a process loses its relevance?’ A silo-ed approach to management is no longer effective, yet many (unenlightened) still keep people, process, products and partners in (often guarded) silos. Continuous improvement asks whether what we’re doing is still relevant to the business…

While I did not get a chance to see other sessions, I was able to tour the show and talk to many exhibitors. What a wealth of information!

Most of the feedback I got from both exhibitors and customer attendees was that there was pretty good focus of interests and I got the sense that the show was proceeding very much to everyone’s satisfaction.

I was able to explore more about how performance data is being leveraged in ITIL implementations and will continue this research and ‘blog it’ when I’m able.

Enjoy the show!

By John Worthington.