It’s Edinburgh baby! IT500 and Scot-Tech will be hosting Scotland’s biggest ITSM and IT Operations Management conference at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh this October. This conference will follow previous IT500 & Scot-Tech events such as IT in the park 2015 and the IT500 Learning Conference; both of which gained great acclaim from speakers, sponsors and attendees alike. The 2015 conference had over 200 IT professionals gathered in one place to share ideas, hear case studies and learn about new products and services.
Delegates were a good mix from both public and private sectors. Speakers included the CTO of Arnold Clark, CIO of St Andrews University and senior representatives from Standard Life, the Scottish Government and Fife Council. Over 95% of delegates surveyed post event stated that they intend to return with many indicating that they would also be bringing additional colleagues. The event facilitated great networking opportunities with high levels of engagement and a real buzz. New faces, sparkly new products, case studies and workshops – what’s not to love?
Event Highlights
On October 25th 2016 the crack team of IT500 & Scot-Tech will take IT in the Park a step further, adding industry hot topics such as SIAM, DevOps and ITAM to complement their existing core messages around best practice and value driven IT services. The agenda promises to be exciting and action packed; here is a list of some of the presenters and experts who will be speaking on the day:
John Custy – Services Management Education, Consulting and Training at JPC Group
Claire Agutter – ITSM professional & online education specialist, The ITSM Zone
It’s ServiceNow baby! ServiceNow have announced their Now Forum event schedule for Europe and will be visiting Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London in October. Now Forums are events for ServiceNow customers and partners and are packed with content covering everything from key note speeches and real life customer case studies to thought leadership and sparkly new functionality.
For our money, if you are a ServiceNow customer or are in the market for a new ITSM toolset, these events are well worth going to. The event is free to attend and ServiceNow provide some great content. Along with sales presentations there’s also great break out sessions, thought leadership keynotes and case studies from recent customers so you can get a real feel for the tool and how it can benefit your organisation.
Are you planning to go to one of the Now forums? Let us know in the comments!
It’s the London Olympia baby! Last week was the 2016 Service Desk & IT Support Show or SITS for short. SITS is a annual, free event in central London dedicated to all things tech support and ITSM related.
Taking all of 5 seconds to get a Batman reference into his content, this was clearly destined to be my favorite session of the day. Daniel opened by talking about the iceberg of ignorance, in other words, the further away you get from service delivery, the few problems that you see. Daniel continued by discussing how one of the biggest challenges faced by managers is taking the time to improve.
Daniel introduced the ITIL, Agile and Lean triumvirate explaining how it’s not enough to have best practice, we must be responsive to the needs of the business and efficient in the way we deliver enterprise services.
The next part of Daniel’s presentation focused on how DevOps is a way to do better faster safer on a continual basis. Daniel talked about the need to focus on the entire value stream of better faster safer from strategy right through to operations.
Daniel went on to talk about measurements and advocated putting your business reports in a language your company understands for example from zero to we got this! He also introduced a brand new metric which I think our friends at AXELOS towers should be all over in terms of including it in the next ITIL refresh.
The final part of Daniel’s session focused on behavior. As Daniel put it “DevOps starts with management talking to people and finding out what their problem are.” Daniel talked about the 3 ways to manage effectively environment:
You built it, you run it
Project to product
Strangle the complexity – lose the nonsense
His final point? Don’t forget to celebrate your successes along the way, preferably with beer!
Sarah opened her session by talking about the recent LinkedIn hack; asking her audience how many of them were able to understand if their personal data had been compromised from the e-mail response issues by LinkedIn – ie the importance of asking the right questions.
Sarah went on to talk about the public cloud and private cloud and the pros and cons of each approach. Public clouds are typically easy to use, flexible and operated by a third party but may be unreliable and less secure than an in house solution. Private clouds are organisation specific, customisable and more secure but can be more costly and require in house expertise.
The next part of the session looked at how a hybrid model can give organisations the best of both worlds without increasing risk. Sarah went on to talk about case studies of the SysAid product from General Cable. Fluortek and LAN Airlines who has the impressive statistic of being able to handle seven times the number of Incidents since using SysAid.
Sarah concluded by explaining with the evolution of SaaS and cloud, it takes new skills to manage your estate effectively, Sarah’s advice? Every organisation is different so in terms of cloud provision, capture the requirements of your organisation and then plan accordingly.
Transforming The Service Desk With SIAM & Lean – Joe Bicknell, ServiceNow
The final session we attended was Joe’s session on Service desk transformation. Joe opened with the frankly terrifying statistic of outside the workplace, 84% of requests are automated, inside the workplace only 33% of requests are automated. The upshot? The average employee spends around 15 hours of their working week faffing about trying to battle the admin mountain.
Joe went on to explain the ServiceNow way of thinking “we believe everyone in your organisation requests something and everyone in your business is a service provider in some way.”
Joe used ServiceNow to demonstrate how ITSM can be applied to the entire organisation, streamlining processes and removing silos. His top three takeaways?
Own IT Service Management in your business; it’s the key link between the front and back office.
Change the way you work, don’t use technology to compliment what you do
Take the workshop to your organisation and start to take Service outside of IT
Did you go to #SITS16? Let us know in the comments!!
It’s Covent Garden baby! The BCS Configuration Management Group held their annual conference on Tuesday. The CMSG was set up in 1995 to provide a forum for the promotion of Configuration Management as a discrete management process. The group now covers the transition areas of Change, Release and Software Asset Management, including the specialist UK SAM Networking Group.
First up was Roo Reynolds on driving transformation in a government environment. Roo’s first task was a quick public service announcement on Larry, the cat that lives at Number 10 (where the Prime Minister lives for non UK readers). Apparently, whilst appearing cute and fluffy. Larry actually has a vicious streak so if you’re ever invited to Downing Street, consider yourself warned – the last thing you want is a Rabbit of Caerbannog scenario.
Roo talked about the challenges of working in a government environment and his transformation mission:
Roo talked about the importance of putting your customers at the centre of the requirements gathering phase “your users are unlikely to grow wings so they no longer need lifts” As Roo put it “transformation doesn’t have to be huge, the smallest things can make a difference.”
Here are Roo’s top tips for driving transformation:
Start with the needs of the user; genuinely put the user first
Work with people who are committed
#2016cmsg be the pig not the chicken in the agile delivery. Have some skin in the game. #bcscmsg
Vawns Murphy Senior ITSM Analyst, Enterprise Opinions – Going From Good To Great Using ITIL & DevOps
I was up next talking about my practical experience of using ITIL and DevOps to make things better in the real world. My session focused on a real life client engagement where we went from IT Ops and Dev teams literally snarling at each other from different sides of the room to a happy, collaborative environment with a 99.91% Change success rate and a 50% reduction in deployment time. There was also a lot of talk about Star Wars , the Avengers and erm, Frozen. You can check out the slides here.
Up next was Connor from Springer Nature on continuous delivery. Connor talked about the need for common sense in a delivery environment: “keep things simple, have conventions around how software is built and tested.”
Connor went on to explain the importance of automation explaining “we need to make doing the right thing easy and the wrong thing impossible.
Security is internal and external. DDoS can be legislate testing caused by unmet needs. Listen and respond. @drakekin#2016CMSG
Connor gave practical guidance on continuous delivery, talking about the benefits of consumer driven contracts for micro services, and why automated testing is so important “most of your tests should be automated because people are fallible”.
Security is internal and external. DDoS can be legislate testing caused by unmet needs. Listen and respond. @drakekin#2016CMSG
Connor talked about how there’s no silver bullet; “you need discipline and willpower but having good processes makes things easier. If you make it easy for people to try new things there will engage and they will try”
My favorite piece of wisdom from Connor’s session was this: “You need to have an exit process, broken gets fixed, crappy lives on forever”. Be warned people!
Patrick Bolger, Chief Evangelist, Hornbill – Rethinking Your ITSM
Patrick’s session was all about rethinking your ITSM from Shadow IT to Agile. He started by talking about being schooled by his daughter on iPhone usage:
The first part of Pat’s session focused on the rise of Shadow IT and how we risk alienating our customers if we don’t keep up. The first step to sorting it out? Investing in your Service Desk
Shadow IT won't go away. It will only increase (significantly). If you want to stay relevant invest in Service Desk. @patb0512#2016CMSG
Pat concluded by talking about the importance of being inclusive when driving transformational: “change is a threat when done to us but an opportunity when done by us”. A very powerful message and a great way to maintain focus on the customer when managing change.
Robert Cowham, Consultant, Perforce Software – DevOps In The Cloud, A Pathway To Heaven?
The last session we attended was Robert’s presentation on DevOps and the cloud. Robert opened by talking about the background of DevOps and how it links into Agile. Robert then went on to explain the impact of DevOps on continuous delivery on development and discussed the impact of cycle times.
The next part of Robert’s session focused on the impact of the cloud, advantages and the big players including Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
Robert went on to talk about the practicalities of applying DevOps in a cloud environment discussing how to maximise pipeline flow, automation, feedback, micro services and release technology & containers.
Robert finished his session by demonstrating a functioning pipeline – a fascinating example of real life application.
For our money the CMSG conference was a great day, informative, lots of practical guidance and lots of subject matter expertise. A huge thanks to the BCS for inviting us and we hope to be back next year.
Did you attend the CMSG conference? Let us know in the comments!
It’s nearly time for SITS16! The Service Desk & IT Support Show is one of the biggest UK based exhibitions for IT Service Professionals, it’s also completely free to attend. The event takes place every year across two days in London. The exhibition has over 200 products and services from the leading suppliers of ITSM software, integration tools, IT training, consulting and managed services. The event has over 50 free-to-attend seminars and keynotes and more than 20 facilitated roundtable discussions on everything from becoming a more responsive Service Desk to do we really need both Incident & Problem Management?
What: The ITSM Review Excellence Awards Where: Crowne Plaza, Reading When: 25th November 2016
The Categories
ITSM Professional of the Year
[End-user ITSM professionals, Consultants, Contractors or Licensing Specialists]
ITSM Implementation / Project of the Year
[ITSM teams or ITSM service providers]
ITSM Tool Provider of the Year
[Tool or technology suppliers]
ITSM Partner of the Year
[ITSM service providers, resellers or partners]
ITSM Innovation of the Year
[Recognizing new ideas, innovation and creative approaches]
ITSM Community Contribution of the Year
[Recognizing ITSM professionals that have gone above and beyond to support others]
Please direct your clients to this form in order to vote for you. Award short lists will be announced in September and final interviews/ voting winners will be decided by our independent industry panel in October.
How To Book
Secure a table for £1,000 to seat between 8 – 12 guests or reserve single seats for £100 per person (maximum of 5 single tickets) for a great way to reward staff and/or entertain your clients. This will include Kir Royale on arrival, 3-course meal, ½ bottle of wine per person, disco and host company logo on your table.
To book a table, please pay directly via the Just Giving Page. We ask that you email us to confirm you have made a payment and how many people will be on your table.
I caught up with Daniel Breston ahead of tomorrow’s IT500 conference in Edinburgh to talk about his session with Helen Beal.
The session will involve Daniel and Helen working with the audience to figure out what good looks like and how to develop a culture of sharing and collaboration. Delegates will take away a chart of behaviours from zero to “let’s do this”. The session will focus on how to use the principles of DevOps to deliver real value to your organisation, as Daniel put it “In DevOps you know you are having a good day when you are enabling business objectives”.
You should attend this session if:
You would like to find out more about DevOps and practical tips on how to get started.
The official bit:
One of the biggest threats to organisations today in unmanaged technology. Shadow IT, technology solutions not meeting business needs, performance indicators not driving behavioural change, knowledge not being shared and automation capabilities being misapplied. What would happen if you had a way of going from idea (strategy) to realisation based on a communicative, collaborative and improving culture? This is DevOps, a mindset using technology to define “great” removing business obstacles and enabling goals on a daily basis, top down. Learn how to apply the principles of CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Metrics & Sharing) to create sustainable development, delivery and improvement.
I spoke to Simone Jo Moore and Mark Smalley ahead of their session at IT500 tomorrow. Their workshop will focus on driving the right behaviors to ensure IT and the business work together effectively. The audience will get to participate to identify and formulate behaviours between both partners so that they can collaborate and be more productive.
The session will look at:
How you can change behaviour
What drives certain types of behaviours
Carrot versus stick approach
Deep rooted value & belief systems
You should attend this session if:
You’re interested in emotional intelligence and looking at changing mindsets to drive transformation.
The official bit:
This highly participative workshop will will improve your personal and organisational performance. We’ll explore how behavious affects results and how behaviour is determined by an iceberg of factors that include values, beliefs and emotions.We will look at the changes to be made that can improve behaviour and results.
The BCS Configuration Management Special Interest Group are holding their annual conference in London on the 7th of June.
The theme of the conference is transitioning the future and the event will have three streams:
DevOps
Change Configuration & Release Management
SAM Licensing & Strategy
This is the 11th conference run by the BCS CMG. The main conference objectives are to share experiences in how Configuration Management supports and enables Change Management in software development and ITIL Service Management. Software Asset Management (SAM) and licensing are critical to today’s organizations and the conference will detail new approaches and strategies to aid today’s practitioners. Best practices in adopting an integrated approach, and communicating and selling this to the rest of the organisation are essential elements.
The Conference will bring together managers and practitioners working across the service lifecycle (which incorporates the application lifecycle) together in an open forum.
Event Breakdown
What: The BCS CMSG Conference; Transitioning The Future
Normally by the third day of a conference, people are wandering round looking tired, lost and a bit hungover. Not so at Knowledge 16 when we rocked up to a packed auditorium for the day 3 keynote.
Pat shared the stage with representatives from the University of Melbourne and Desjardins of Canada who shared details of their ServiceNow projects; with Desjardins reporting an impressive 30% increase in productivity since implementation.
Pat talked about the effort and care that goes into each ServiceNow release “we want to make sure that when customers use their ServiceNow platform they love it”.
With that, it was time for Fred Luddy, CPO of ServiceNow to join the stage. He opened by sharing his main aim for the ServiceNow platform:
Pat was then joined onstage by Pascal Gibert, GM & VP Platform Business Unit at ServiceNow and Allan Leinwand CTO at ServiceNow. The first order of business was to share the exciting news that with the Helsinki release, ServiceNow is aligned with the ECMA5 script standard. Why is this important? ECMA has “strict mode” for more thorough error checking and 5.1 is aligned to ISO/IEC 16262:2011.
Yay ECMA5..let me know what it means but sounds cool and something Jack Bauer has 24hrs to fix #know16
Pascal and Allan went on to talk about using delegated development for control saying “pre Helsinki if someone wanted to develop on the platform we had to give them admin rights. That’s a lot of rope. Post Helsinki we can assigned roles in a defined environment”.
I thought I’d round off the day with some fun facts about ServiceNow. Here’s what I found out over the course of #KNOW16:
ServiceNow was started by Fred Luddy, the ex-CTO of Peregrine Systems, in 2004 with the intention of making a better IT service management (ITSM) tool: “The IT industry deserves a tool that just works. We’re going to give it to them”
ServiceNow customers include Boots, eBay, ING Group, Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, GE, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and NASA. That’s right people ServiceNow look after everyone from the makers of Coke to astronauts – how amazing is that?
In 2012, ServiceNow became a publicly traded company becoming the first technology company taken public by Morgan Stanley since Facebook.
