PINK16 Day 2 – Ship Wrecks, Innovation & Sacrificial Firings

IT Excellence Awards

Day 2 opened on a real high with the Pink Elephant ITSM Excellence awards. The winners were:

Best Innovation: Utopic

Practitioner of the year award: Robert Nessler of the state of Colorado

Project of the year award: Assurant

A huge congratulations to all the award winners and nominees – you’re all rock stars! The full list of nominees and winners can be found here.

Chairman & Founder, Delphi Group Tom Koulopoulos

@TKspeaks was the morning speaker for day 2. Tom opened by explaining why connectivity is everything:

Tom explained that innovation is key: “Only through disruption does innovation occur. The challenge is, we don’t like disruption, we love the pattern. We’re moving from an era of digitisation to an era of datafication. Ignoring disruption and innovation is no longer an option”. As uncertainty increases, so does opportunity”. Tom went on to outline the four types of innovation:

  1. The device – we can’t have iTunes without the iPod.
  2. The data – we add in  iTunes so that people can listen to music.
  3. Personalise the experience – genius playlist
  4. Tell customers what they need based on our behaviour – Amazon suggestions

This leads to a fifth step; Is when innovation is automated to be systemic within the process.

The second part of Tom’s session focussed on the Datification process. Tom explained that for effective datification “deliver experience first, mobile enable, add personalisation, reduce friction, and create an ecosystem.”

The final part of Tom’s presentation focused on collaboration. As Tom explained it “collaboration will help us solve the big audacious problems from climate change to world hunger. Problems won’t be solved by individuals; they will be solved by groups and teams”. Tom’s final piece of advice was this:

Turning A Vicious Cycle Into A Value Cycle – Gary Case, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant

Next up was Gary Case from Pink Elephant. Gary’s session was a back to basics session on how Incident Problem & Change Management rule the world. Think about it; without them your Service Desk gets overrun because there’s no root cause analysis getting done. Things start getting missed and balls are dropped. To add insult to injury; Changes are deployed into the live environment that may fix one thing but break everything else. As Gary explained it “we need to have defined processes in order to be effective. We need to be great at communication to keep the business informed.

Gary went on to explain about the importance of Service Targets stating “We need to have Service Targets as well as SLAs in place otherwise how will we know what to aim for?” When asked how to stop people from bypassing the process; Gary’s take was for us to lead by example; or as he put it “IT people! Stop bypassing the Service Desk and follow your own cotton picking processes!”

Gary’s passion for Problem Management was plain to see. When he was explaining it to the audience he said this “if you want to improve availability, performance and customer satisfaction then do Problem Management.” He also suggested that for such an important process, Problem Management does have a name that will make people panic. Let’s face it in the real world, how many business professional will happily admit to having oodles of Problems? I’m with Gary that it’s time for a name change to something like Opportunity Management. Hey AXELOS – maybe one for ITIL 4?

Gary then moved on to talk about Change Management. He referenced the Gartner analysis that between 70 and 80% of Incidents were caused by Change and how we need to do better. When asked how he would deal with people by passing the process, Gary replied “for blatant process refusers, if you implement a Change without following the process, consider yourself gone”. Or as @knappst3r  put it:

Gary finished with this: “value proposition goes beyond SLAs. It’s all about the business.”

Enterprise Service Management: It’s Time To Share ITSM Best Practices Outside Of IT – Alan Berkson, Director Of Community Outreach, Freshdesk

The final session of the morning was @berkson0’s take on Enterprise Service Management. Alan started his session by explaining what it was like working in IT supporting traders at an investment bank “you haven’t lived until you’ve had a trader screaming at you because a trade floor app isn’t working”. As someone who did a 4 year stint in London working for an investment bank I feel your pain Alan.

Alan continued by explaining that Enterprise Service Management was common sense “by applying ITSM principles outside IT we can set expectations and measure how well we met them”. Alan talked about the drivers for Enterprise ITSM; consumerism, business function demand, better ITSM solutions and increased vendor marketing.

The next part of Alan’s presentation focused on the benefits of Enterprise Service Management:

  • Better service
  • Increased governance and control
  • Better customer experience
  • Improved efficiencies and operational costs
  • Better ROI
  • Improved visibility into operational performance
  • Standardisation

The final part of the session was a practical guide to introducing Enterprise Service Successfully. the golden rule according to Alan is this “don’t treat Enterprise Service Management as an IT project” I completely agree with this. If you speak techie language to the business, they won’t understand you never mind buying in leading to an Elliot from Scrubs situation:

Allow for differences and don’t try to help other corporate service providers before helping yourself (or as Elliot would say “get your own fricking house in order first”).

That’s all for today, come back soon for the rest of day 2 as well as the final day of the conference!

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