Monday, March 01, 2010
One conference slips away and another starts to come together.
It is remarkable how quickly an Exhibit Hall blossoms out of an empty and cavernous room, and how quickly it disappears again. Two hours before the Pink 2010 Exhibit Hall opened, it was still a din of forklift safety-beepers, a pile of cases and pallets and many unassembled displays, and a bustle of roadies, exhibitors and hotel staff assembling reality. Well, what passes for reality in an Exhibit Hall. The “walls” are black curtains, the shiny stands are cardboard and plastic, the tables under the drop-cloths are battered particle-board. It is more like theatre scenery than anything else. A few hours after the doors close, it vanishes in a puff of courier waybills and forklift exhaust.
The conference is over for another year. Extraordinarily, Pink are well advanced in planning next year’s. Same time same bat-channel. Trust me, you need to be at the next conference, Las Vegas, February 20-23 2011. (You can trust me, I used to sell software). I’m not going to say the name of the conference… watch this space for possible rumoured changes.
You need to be there in 2011 because it is one of the best-run, best attended, best-content, best-vibe conferences I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a few. Readers will know I’m no great fan of Las Vegas. I’m too much of an intellectual snob to enjoy the top-side of Vegas, and Vegas is too mild for me to enjoy the underbelly (it’s not prudery that puts me off). That didn’t matter to me at the conference: I existed in a bubble of stimulating ideas, great company and constant good cheer, whether in the Bellagio or out on the Strip. Many of you won’t agree about Las Vegas - it is a big part of the attraction of the conference. That’s great, whatever floats your boat. For the others who are like me, come anyway - Las Vegas is just a raucous rhinestoned backdrop to a great conference. The number of people who have been to three, four or even more of the Pink conferences attest to its value.
Las Vegas actually framed some ideas about ITIL for me. The Bellagio is one of the least-bad-taste venues in town. Las Vegas in winter is almost exactly the same climate as Wellington in summer except without the wind, i.e. about perfect. And I found some great crystal jewelry for our 15th wedding anniversary which was a few days after I got back. So the town was good to me. So was the conference.
Actualy the Bellagio is pretty classy in its own Vegas way. I’m at airport Immigration in Los Angeles trying to get into the USA. The uniformed officer looks at my US address, gives me a hard up-and-down look and says “Bellagio? Is the conference paying for you?”. So obviously it’s a lot classier than I am.
I’d like to thank all the people who introduced yourselves at the IT Skeptic’s booth in the Exhibit Hall or around the conference. Blogging is a lonely one-way game sometimes - it is so wonderful to get real feedback from real people. A big thanks to Chris Dancy and his side-kick Robert for helping me out so much - and all the Pinkers! More thanks goes to them and to many others for fun and friendship. Especially I’m grateful to David and Fatima for being such gracious hosts.
This is sounding like awards night - I’ll be thanking my mother next. This event gave me more ideas and information than a year of web-surfing, more new friends than school, more networking value than LinkedIn, and more fun than two Vegas strippers in a sleeping bag. Be there next year.
You can see the Pink President’s reflections on the conference here.
Photos by Chris Dancy. See the end of the conference here
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
EHOBOK Planning Worksheet
For those of you who will be visiting the Exhibition Hall (which is hopefully all of you), here is a worksheet you should fill out before you come to conference to make sure you are prepared for assessing the products on display.
Use this worksheet in conjunction with the EHOBOK Exhibition Hall Body of Knowledge - see previous posts here on this blog or those of you who enroll for my Exhibition Hall optimizer session will get a nice PDF version of the EHOBOK.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The IT Skeptic’s Situation Room discussion panels
Please come along to my Situation Room discussion panels:
The Situation Room: The Real Benefits Of Professional Certification will feature:
- Rob England, (The IT Skeptic) - moderator
- Richard Pharro (APM Group, administrators and accreditors of the ITIL certification scheme)
- Aidan Lawes (independant and vocal critic of the scheme)
- Julia Chapelle (Loyalist a north american examination institute)
- Pierre Bernard (Pink Elephant)
and The Situation Room: A CMDB – Really? will feature:
- Rob England, (The IT Skeptic) - moderator
- Doug Mueller (BMC, a leading CMDB vendor)
- Randal Locke (CA, also a leading CMDB vendor)
- Bill Iffland (Progress Energy) Bill has a CMDB presentation at the conference Slow & Steady Wins The Race – But Is There A Finish Line?
- Chris Dancy (ServiceSphere) Chris is an outspoken proponent of pragmatic ITSM
- Glenn O’Donnell (Forrester) Glenn co-wrote the book “The CMDB Imperative” with Carlos Casanova
Both these discussion panels have top teams of luminaries with differing points of view. Come along for some lively debate! Ask questions!
Friday, February 12, 2010
SaaS Service Management solution form our platinum sponsor
Today we talk to Matt French, the Marketing Director at Service-now.com, who are the Platinum Sponsor of the 14th Annual ITSM Conference.
Skep: Service-now.com provides service management tools using the model of On-Demand or SaaS or ASP (Application Service Provider) or “the Cloud” or whatever folk want to call it. How does that stack up cost-wise against buying a tool and implementing it in-house?
Matt: There’s a big difference between SaaS and ASP. It’s the difference between a modern application and hosted software built in the 1990s – we’ll get into that more later…
Ask a Service-now.com customer and you’ll find that although total cost of ownership was a factor in the decision criteria, simplicity, flexibility and partnership were the real decision drivers.
When evaluating the total cost of software it is important to look well beyond licensing. Sure, Service-now.com can save organizations a boatload of cash on licensing costs with an affordable and predictable subscription fee. The savings really accelerate through the substantial reduction of implementation and reimplementation (upgrade) costs and infrastructure costs. Our approach helps IT be more self-sufficient and frees resources to focus on core competencies.
Service-now.com customers get into production faster than on-premise deployments and continue to evolve their application as needs change without fear of ‘version-lock.’ Today’s client-server ITSM software often impedes agility and can’t effectively support the business by forcing costly six figure reimplementations every few years.
Meanwhile, three times per year for the past five years Service-now.com has simply and automatically applied significant new functionality to customer instances while preserving all of their customizations.
Skep: Your business model depends on economies of scale and getting clients onto a common platform. Doesn’t that mean your services/products are the Lowest Common Denominator, the one-size-fits-all standardised design? Surely the tool ends up looking like a “Mao suit”?
Matt: We’ve all been in the ITSM business for quite some time. Rarely do we speak to an enterprise IT organization that believes a pure out-of-box system will meet their needs. While Service-now.com supports ITIL guidelines, 100% of our customers have customized the application to accommodate their unique ITSM processes and goals, and many have built custom applications on the Service-now.com platform.
This might sound like vendor nuance but it is imperative that a “SaaS” consumer ask the right questions about tool flexibility, get hands-on with the tool, and understand the cost of various approaches before they subscribe. Why? Because there are many one-size-fits-all SaaS offerings out there and an increasing number of ASP offerings posing as “SaaS” that were never designed to be delivered over the Internet or customized without incurring significant cost.
One key to successful outsourcing is to retain control of governance and higher-level management. How can your clients monitor you and hold you accountable?
We are not a traditional software vendor. We provide a service based on partnership and honesty and as a service provider our success is literally and directly tied to the success of our customers.
Each Service-now.com instance comes equipped with system monitoring tools and dashboards that are exposed to the customer. A support portal allows customers to monitor the status and performance of their application and view all open incident and change records. All changes and system accesses are tracked within the system for governance purposes. This coupled with a 99.97% availability SLA results in governance and ongoing accountability.
Skep: What happens when you come out with a new version? Isn’t it simpler to upgrade a system and easier to do the change control when it is in--house rather than hosted externally?
Matt: I think we can agree there is nothing simple about upgrading on-premise, legacy software. Many ITSM organizations have faced the upgrade predicament – either spend large amounts of time, money and resources on a disruptive reimplementation, or look for something modern to eliminate upgrade hassles.
We’ve been automatically upgrading customer instances for almost five years now and it just works. Service-now.com customers are given the opportunity to apply upgrades directly to their production environment or their development environment. Many new features and applications are available via plugins, which are not automatically applied to instances. This gives customers complete control of their ITSM tool change control process.
Skep: How’s business? During a recession, one of the advantages of a service-provider model as compared to a vendor model is the on-going revenue stream. Did you see that? And now that things are warming up again, are you seeing any shifts in business patterns?
Matt: Business has never been better. We’ve doubled our recurring revenue every year since inception and expect to do the same at the end of FY2010. We have been cash-flow positive for three years. We’ve experienced widespread adoption in shared services (HR and facilities) environments and with the continued rapid adoption of Service-now.com in ITSM, we are well positioned to continue our aggressive growth.
There’s no doubt the new economy has driven organizations to think and operate differently. Necessity has spawned innovation over the years. We help IT organizations capitalize on the changing landscape by offering a tool alternative that reduces costs, but most importantly drives efficiency. However, as I said previously, simplicity, flexibility and partnership are the keys to customer success, not cost.
Skep: You guys are big on the concept of Web 2.0. How’s your customer community developing?
Matt: Between local and virtual Service-now.com user groups, Service-now.com user conferences, a culture of transparency and existing social networks (including the Service-now.community), our customers and partners have many options to work together. We’ve simply made sure to be where our customers are and to interact with them how they like to interact. We are constantly looking for ways to expand and improve our community.
Our success depends on customer and partner interaction. We inject customers and partners in the development process. Virtually every functional enhancement can be linked back to a customer or user community request.
Skep: Service-now.com were early proponents of the ASP (Application Service Provider) model for service management. Were there any competitors around and are they still about?
Matt: We believe we offer technology and service that is vastly different than anything offered in the IT service management market. We see a kinship with companies like NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon and Workday. (BTW, I don’t think these SaaS vendors would categorize their offering as ASP.)
Service-now.com represents a new breed of modern software. SaaS has long been pigeonholed as one-size-fits-all and built for smaller organizations. Our customers are proof that modern SaaS is ready for the large enterprise.
We think it is great that SaaS has entered mainstream, but just because the box says it’s SaaS, it doesn’t mean it’s SaaS. Proceed with caution. Here are few items to discuss with the “SaaS” vendor while in the exhibit hall:
· How is the application administered and who is involved?
· How do I change or customize the application?
· How is the application upgraded, how long will it take to upgrade, and who pays for the upgrade?
· How long does an upgrade take?
· Ask for five references.
Skep: Are you happy with 358 customers? Will SaaS always be a niche or do you see it going mainstream in service management?
Matt: 365 customers in five years is simply a good start. Especially when compared to some of the legacy vendors who have a decades-old install base and thousands of customers.
SaaS is mainstream today. Service-now.com customers include the largest businesses in the world. Our growth has been, and will continue to be, exponential because it is in our DNA to make customers successful by delivering a great service. Our business succeeds when we accomplish this simple objective.
Skep: It’s only a few weeks away. Any special surprises for us at the Pink conference? Go on, you can give us a hint.
Matt: We’re just happy that virtually every block of sessions includes at least one Service-now.com customer presenting on various ITSM topics. Be sure to attend Monday’s panel discussion, “IT Leaders Share Their Perspective on Software as a Service” to hear from Chris Pope of NYSE Euronext, Greg Lazzaro of VeriSign, Amy Irwin of Pepsi Americas, and Carolyn Dugas of Clark County, Nevada.
Pink Elephant To Announce ITIL® Award Winners
TORONTO, ON – February 12, 2010 – Pink Elephant will announce the winners of the 2010 ITIL Awards at its 14th Annual International IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, February 21 – 24, 2010.
The awards honor the best in five categories: ITIL Project of the Year; ITIL Practitioner of the Year; ITIL Case Study of the Year; Pink Elephant Student of the Year; and Innovation of the Year.
ITIL Project of the Year: This is presented to a practitioner organization that has shown a significant commitment to ITIL. The organization must have a clearly defined project with dedicated management; a project start date occurring at least six months before the conference commences; clearly documented and communicated goals; high involvement from ITIL-certified staff; and measurable project benefits.
This year’s finalists are: BMO and NorthWestel
ITIL Practitioner of the Year: ITIL Practitioner of the Year goes to an IT practitioner who has placed best practices at the core of their organization’s IT operations. This individual has also championed the strategic benefits of ITIL and shown a commitment to sharing knowledge about ITIL inside and outside their organization.
This year’s finalists are: Peter Barrotti from University Health Network and Elaine Lauritzen from Brigham Young University.
ITIL Case Study of the Year: This award is probably one of the most prestigious, because it is chosen by conference attendees. During the conference, Pink Elephant tabulates evaluation results from all the ITIL case studies. The award is given to the individual who delivered the most compelling session and received the highest score.
Finalists are announced during the conference.
Pink Elephant Student of the Year: This is presented to the Pink student with the highest exam score in the ITIL Service Manager course. Successful completion of the course requires a high level of commitment and a demonstrated knowledge of the goals, benefits, challenges and integration points of the ITIL processes.
The winner is announced during the conference.
Innovation of the Year: This award recognizes a product or service developed by the vendor community that has made the greatest contribution to IT Service Management in the last calendar year.
This year’s finalists are: EMC, Cherwell and Service-now.com.
“For years, Pink Elephant has worked diligently to increase awareness of ITIL’s best practice framework on a global scale,” says George Spalding, Pink Elephant Vice President. “Part of this work has included the introduction of an awards program to further illustrate and promote ITIL’s benefits. While competition was fierce, this year’s winners truly exemplify the best ITIL has to offer. Congratulations to all finalists.”
Sunday, February 07, 2010
EHOBOK give-away maturity model
Here’s a Complementary Guidance supplement to EHOBOK, the Exhibit Hall Body of Knowledge. It was submitted by a friend of mine (thanks!) who wishes it to be credited to Phoenix the dog:
You might consider including toy/give-away strategies in the maturity model
- Level 1 – Keeps everything in the conference bag, lugging it all thru the airport and back home b4 realising 90% of it is guff better recycled at the green vendor booth. Wears the T-Shirt
- Level 2 – Tosses the obvious guff but shows no discretion at vendor stands, taking every giveaway and all the brocuhres
- Level 3 – Actively searches out the good stuff from the vendor stands but takes a heap of rubbish as well due to lack of prior experience
- Level 4 – Only takes the good stuff from the stands but only manages to get 1 of each, and misses the 2 coolest giveaways altogether
- Level 5 – Wins the Guitar from the GuitarHero comp; wins 5 of the 7 “drop your business card” prizes; gets multiple sets of the coolest giveaways; gets their PA to transport it all back to the office due to a late business meeting on the final day with the keynote speaker
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Exhibit Hall Configuration
Further to our recent discussions about Exhibit Strategy domain of the EHOBOK, The Exhibition Hall Optimizer Body of Knowledge, here is an example of an Exhibit Hall Configuration for the upcoming conference (if you are wondering, the round circles are tables for breakfast and lunch).
PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS PARTICULAR PATH. This is an example only, drawn before I knew where the vendors are, and most critically before I knew where any ice-cream, chocolate, massage, swag, games or coffee are. This highlights how essential Exhibit Reconnaissance is. The only useful piece of information on this map is to start at booth 203, the IT Skeptic.
Of course the vendors will soon invent a GUI 3D interactive version of this configuration map integrated into their CMDBs which will give you far more productivity and ROI compared to this printable graphic but for now you will just have to struggle on with this format.
Monday, February 01, 2010
A conversation with one of our new exhibitors
Today we have a chat with one of the Conference exhibitors that I for one had never heard of. That’s probably because I’m in New Zealand and almost all of you aren’t, but it interested me.
Come along to the Exhibit Hall to see a whole bunch of new exhibitors joining in with the ITSM Conference for the first time:
- Apollo (root cause analysis is hot!)
- Biomni (...and service catalogue is hotter!),
- Fruition (great name! and a people-focused approach),
- Hagrid Solutions (interesting tools all the way from Australia: gidday mate!),
- KACE (with an appliance approach to ITSM)
- Kovair (from the lifecycle angle),
- LANDesk (the name says it all: coming from a support background),
- Matrix42 (some of whom I met in the Netherlands: taking an e-commerce approach),
- OTRS Inc. (doing exciting stuff in the open source space),
- TecAccess (an important space: accessibility and disability),
...and Inforonics. So welcome Matt Hooper of Inforonics.
Skep: Inforonics seem to be into a few things but the primary business is managed services and hosted systems, is that right?
Matt: We are a fully integrated support organization. ITIL V2 Service Support really described what we excelled at. Our current breakdown in services is about 30% technical support outsourcing, everything from Tier0 - high volume customer service to Tier2 deep application troubleshooting. Some of our customers are Vlingo, LiveWire Mobile, Kadient, BlueSocket. 40% of our business comes from managed services both hosted and remote: Kronos, Macy’s, MZinga, and many other smaller corporations. The last 20% of our business is driven from training and consulting. We provide a full-service customized training program geared toward a clients specific technologies. We leverage ITIL, PMBOK, and several other frameworks to bring structured processes definition to the support of their solutions. Clients like MARS (makers of M&M’s), Norwegian Cruise Line, Partners Healthcare have utilized us for these types of services.
Skep: How do you see “The Cloud”? Are you guys cloud providers? Will you be?
Matt: It’s another square in our buzzword bingo. Really, when you have been a provider of hosted services for over 45 years there is nothing new about the services over the internet “cloud”. Inforonics was player in the “multi-tenancy” IT time sharing world in the 60’s and 70’s. In the internet era Inforonics built and supported the Thomas Register Online, grew and spun-off a white-labeled hosting company called Inquent Technologies to NetworkSolution that at the time supported over 450,000 ecommerce based websites. Today Inforonics hosts and supports over 30 of some of the most referenced SaaS/OnDemand successes. So when you have been a strategic player in internet provisioned services like us, you don’t get overly caught up in the buzz. For us it’s business as usual, this our roots so we consider ourselves more of a rainmaker than a cloud provider.
Skep: Do you generally use Unicenter tools?
Matt: CA is a strategic partner, along with Compuware and several other major vendors. However, 80% of our solutions for managing tickets, requests, events and alarms comes from our own tools built on open source platforms.
ISV tools are mostly brought into our solutions when either a customer requires a specific capability (J2ee monitoring for instance) or they want an on-demand solution that requires a more rigorous framework.
Skep: Do you do any ITSM consulting? How heavily are you into ITIL, COBIT, ISO20000 etc?
Matt: In August of 2009, Inforonics acquired the IP of Vigilant Enterprise Solutions, a major ITSM consulting firm in the states. Since then we have integrated the services from Vigilant into the Inforonics portfolio. So adding to our strong Incident, Problem, Release and Service Desk capabilities, we have brought in the CMS/CMDB Change, Capacity, Performance, Portfolio and SLM expertise from Vigilant. Having just completed our SAS70 certfication in the early part of 2009, we quickly started working on our compliance for ISO20000. We have put the whole company through ITIL simulations and are working on certifications for ITIL V3 and CObIT.
Skep: What else are Inforonics into? You build software too right?
Matt: Inforonics has created a technology to monitor rich media, AJAX, and other highly interactive web content, we call it Total Web View (TWV). TWV allows us to watch for performance and availability like other tools in the market, but it solves one challenge we could not find in any other vendor, forcing us to create it ourselves. Our clients with a rich media typically do not serve all their own content in a web page. This content comes from numerous channels and content delivery networks. Our technology not only monitors the content for its quality, performance and content, it can also make determinations of whether it came from the right channel or source. This brings a strong value to the protection of the brand for our clients business, as frequently they are impacted by faulty advertisers or other mis-configurations.
We have also created an application maintenance and support methodology called Paragon4. It’s roots were started in the .com explosion where time to market was everything and quality was suffering. This agile like SDLC brings support and manageability to the forefront of design and architecture making value easier to sustain because fit for purpose and fit for use are cohesively managed, documented and developed. Sounds like a no brainer, I know, but people still are not doing this and our methodology addresses the challenge of why head-on, starting with requirements elicitation.
Skep: What message will you be bringing to Las Vegas? Why should folk come see you in the Exhibit Hall?
Matt: Stress free support - no longer a dream…
Skep: Groan!
Matt: Why come to Inforonics booth? Besides the intellectual stimulation, great gifts, chance to meet Matt Hooper, we will also have a certified deep tissue massage therapist, because the show takes a toll on your body.
So relief for your mind, spirit and body… I think people should come to our booth.
Skep: Inforonics is part of the Exhibition Hall’s First Timer Pavilion. Why did you decide to become part of this group of vendors? In fact, why did you choose this show?
Matt: In my previous company I sponsored the Pink Elephant show several times and received great value out of the relationships built, opportunities to speak and be part of panels, and the general networking. Part of my role with Inforonics is to help set direction and to create strategy. So there was no better place for us to hear the latest thought leadership for IT Service Management than with the Pink Conference. We opted to sponsor above just attending, because we wanted a chance to interact with attendees and here their feedback on the market needs and Inforonics offerings.
Skep: Will Inforonics staff be wearing coordinated clothing?
Matt: Wow - does this question bring up some internal debates. We have decided on suits-no-ties or business casual. I think it helps set people at ease, makes us look a bit more professional. Plus it flatters our figures, and in this competitive space we’ll take every advantage we can.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Exhibit Utilization
In the last of our series of posts laying out the components of EHOBOK, The Exhibition Hall Optimizer Body of Knowledge V2 (already V2 thanks to a recent Refresh). This describes four domains:
Exhibit Strategy: planning your EH engagement to optimize the experience
Exhibit Engagement: executing on your strategy by engaging with the EH
Exhibit Assessment: determining the exhibit’s reliability and value to you
Exhibit Utilization-with-a-z: realising (with an “s”) the value of individual exhibits
Today we present Exhibit Utilization, extracting ROI on your EH visits. There are five Utilization practices to squeeze the juice out of your trip:
Detoxification
Talk to vendors long enough - especially accompanied by shiny demos, cute booth staff and some alcohol – and you sometimes start to believe some of it.
Wait until your alcohol levels return to somewhere near normal (in my experience this can take up to a week – your mileage may vary). Then sit down and browse your open problems log, a few major incident reports, the last auditors report and/or your current year budget. Finally make a verbal report to your boss and/or your most curmudgeonly peers about what you saw. That should deprogram you.
Capitalisation
There always exists the small possibility that someone in the EH was promoting something that is actually a good fit to your requirements and will be of benefit to your organisation. Hopefully you have kept an eye out for this during Exhibit Assessment, but it is very easy to go numb and glaze over under the barrage of hype, so go through the Definitive Exhibit Library one more time.
Cull out everything that is pure crystalline bull excrement. Pull out the one or two remaining artefacts to see if they have any future value for you. Match them carefully against the Six Cs again – you might be pleasantly surprised. This is pure gold for Reporting, the next practice.
Put the remainder in the conference binder on a shelf, along with all the presentations you will never look at again.
Reporting
This is the top priority activity after attending any conference. In a previous life, colleagues used to wonder how come I got to go to the world conference year after year? The answer was simple: the first time I went, I sent back breaking news while I was still there, ferreted out answers to particular issues we had in our region, and I produced a long report and a “brown bag” lunchtime presentation as soon as I got back. And I continued that every time I went. The bosses knew they got a return on their investment of sending me (I made sure they knew).
Make use of your Definitive Exhibit Library full of exhibitor bumph to remember what you saw and what the news is.
Networks
Make sure you network your heart out in the EH, not just with exhibitors but also with fellow browsers. And then
(a) include all valuable contacts in your post-conference report (e.g,. a developer from one of your suppliers who you pulled out of a bar one morning so now you can go to him for help in future, circumventing their support and sales)
(b) every time you use those contacts in future make sure your boss knows you did and remind the boss of where you made the connection
Booty
Don’t forget to hand out all the goodies in your Exhibition Asset Store. You may also have supplemented the swag with some purchases from the conference shop. Distributing this booty ensures you make up brownie points with those who actually missed you, and slightly soften the resentment of your peers who didn’t get to go.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Executive CLub
Brenda Iniguez is working for Pink Elephant for the second time, which is always a good sign that someone is happy in their job (her job is “Strategic Business Development” – I never did ask her what that is). But you don’t need any signs with Brenda: she is clearly having a ball. Brenda has had senior roles in the IT industry and consults at all levels. But nothing fires her up quite like the cultural challenges of the generational gaps in the IT industry. I had banged my head on the issue in the past but I never grokked what a fundamental challenge it is until talking with Brenda.
Brenda has an interesting gig at the upcoming IT Service Management conference: The Executive Club. This consists of three specialized sessions specifically designed for senior IT managers. Facilitated by Brenda, this is your exclusive opportunity to hear tips for successfully leading and managing change at the most senior level of IT. Brenda starts by presenting her ‘Executive Club Tip Of The Day’. Then, she’ll cite real world examples from her Consultant’s Case Book to illustrate her key points. Don’t forget to bring your most pressing issues and questions. These sessions feature roundtable discussions and include a question and answer period. Overall, this is an excellent opportunity to expand your senior level network and compare notes with others in similar situations.
And one of the sessions will focus on the generational question. I spoke recently with Brenda about the Executive Club and about this thorny issue. See our conversion here
After seeing that video I think you will agree Brenda is both interesting and fun to talk with. Don’t miss her sessions at the conference.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Exclusive Offers For Select Cirque du Soleil Shows
Cirque du Soleil is pleased to offer attendees of our conference 35% off select performances of CRISS ANGEL® Believe™, KÀ™, Mystère™ & Zumanity™, The Sensual Side of Cirque du Soleil™ (for those 18 and older). Known for the spectacular and awe-inspiring shows, a ticket to one these shows will complete your trip to las Vegas! To secure your tickets, please call 866-241-2833 and mention DELEGATE OFFER. For Mystère™ orders, please call 702-894-7722 or 1-800-392-1999. Best available seating (no discount) is available for Viva ELVIS™, “O™” and The Beatles™ LOVE™ by Cirque du Soleil®.
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MGM Grand
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February 17 – 28
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February 19 – 28
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Subject to availability. Seating is based on best available and no holds will be accepted. For more information about the shows, please visit http://www.cirquedusoleil.com
Download the Cirque du Soleil special offer flyer.
Friday, January 15, 2010
EHOBOK Exhibit Assessment
Continuing our series of posts about EHOBOK, The Exhibition Hall Optimizer Body of Knowledge, recall that we are already up to EHOBOK V2 thanks to a recent Refresh. This describes four domains:
Exhibit Strategy (ES): planning your EH engagement to optimize the experience
Exhibit Engagement (EE): executing on your strategy by engaging with the EH
Exhibit Assessment (EA): determining the exhibit’s reliability and value to you
Exhibit Utilization-with-a-z (EU): realising (with an “s”) the value of individual exhibits
Today we present Exhibit Assessment: how to evaluate whether a booth is worth a visit.
Overall, we calculate the value of a booth in terms of its Utility and Warranty. Utility measures how useful the product or service is to us, and Warranty the reliability of the provider. So you might like to rate each booth in the Exhibit Hall (EH) on the sum of these two scores, then set some minimum threshold, or pick the top 10 or 20.
To assist you we present the Six “C”s of Evaluation:
Context
Your OWN personal needs and agenda: what’s in it for you?
Your company strategy, IT strategy
Current portfolio, future plans
BEST use of funds: how does this compare to other proposals?
Current initiatives: does this align with the bosses’ current fads?
Fit with the culture of your organisation: innovative or conservative? Mature or cowboy?
Contribution
What will the tool or service do?
What value does it deliver?
What reference visits, head-office demos, conferences and overseas training courses does the vendor offer?
Compliance
In the ITSM world, product compliance is assessed by PinkVERIFY or by OGC’s ITIL process compliance accreditation evaluation endorsement scheme.
Pink has joined the OGC scheme, as well as offering PinkVERIFY. Both assessments are conducted simultaneously using the same methodology.
The usefulness of these stamps of approval is hotly debated but the market demand for them is insatiable – it makes managers happy. Hopefully these schemes will stamp out some of the more execrable faults in tools:
- Changing a record type from incident or request to problem or change (instead of spawning a separate problem or change record)
- No ownership of records (it is OK to assign a record to many people for multiple tasks, but the tool should separately identify one single owner)
- No workflow (how can a process tool not have workflow?)
Credibility
…of the provider:
Participation/contribution in the industry
Contributions to BOKs (bodies of knowledge: COBIT, ITIL, ISO20000 etc)
On the ground local skills – watch out for show ponies: the experts they fly in for the presales and then you seldom ever see again
Source of Crap Factoids. Visit the IT Skeptic blog to see which vendors generate CFs: pure bull-excrement that almost sound like a fact, and will be presented so often that everyone will think it true
Silver-bullet solutions, promising OOTB (out of the box). You only get these from Santa Claus. Ensure they also provide process documentation and advice, training, consulting, and implementation services.
Caution
Don’t get swept up in hype. There are so many fad waves: CMDB, SOA, federation, BSM, open, SaaS, on-demand, cloud, lean, green, social…
Don’t fall for anecdote: someone else’s ROI, vendor’s pet references. The vendors pour millions into their reference sites in free consulting, cut-price software, and speaking tours. And even if they didn’t, the fact that someone else achieved a certain ROI is irrelevant unless their organisation, goals and project happen to be absolutely identical to yours.
People Practices Things. It doesn’t matter how cool the technology is: you gotta sell it internally, it has to stick with your organisation and processes.
Cost
People Practices Things. Factor in human change costs, and process engineering. If software is more than 25% of your costs, you underestimated the rest.
Look at TCO not just the sticker price. E.g. some tools have many times the administrative staff requirements of others, or the implementation development effort, or the effort to upgrade.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
What IT Managers Need To Know About Process Maturity
Today we talk to a Pinker who comes to our industry from a more left-field path. Terry was an academic and before that an actor ("a very, very long time ago” says Terry), so he bring a creative, thoughtful and fresh approach to the subject of ITSM. Personally I consider the acting classes I took to be one of the most important life skills I gained as an adult, certainly more so than my degree in computer science. I look forward to hearing more from Terry at the conference, where he is looking at organisational process maturity. Are your processes “defined”? Are they fully “optimized”? Do you know what these mean and why it’s important to know? Attend Terry’s session and you’ll learn about the key concepts of process maturity. Terry will provide an overview of the different process maturity stages and explain why understanding a maturity level is a necessary step in implementing ITIL best practices.
Skep: Your session on “What IT Managers Need To Know About Process Maturity” is scheduled several times during the conference. Are you expecting a big audience?
Terry: This particular topic, “What IT Managers Need to Know About Process Maturity” is one that I’ve presented during past conferences to moderately large crowds and to generally positive response. I suppose that’s one reason why the mighty Pink Elephant decided in its infinite wisdom to schedule the session again and send me yet once more into the breach, dear friends.
If you look closely at the schedule you’ll see that although the session is scheduled for three deliveries, two out of three of those deliveries take place at 7:15 in the morning. Because of that, I’m well aware (and very appreciative) of the fact that anyone who shows up for this session is really – I mean really - interested in this topic and hungry for knowledge about process maturity. For that reason, I’ve made it a point to revise my presentation and make sure I’ve added to my understanding of the topic. Although I still cover some of the same basics as in previous years, I’ve updated the slide material and, of course, I’ll be talking about what I’ve learned from recent assessment experiences since my last presentation.
Skep: What does process maturity actually measure? It is a bit like ISO9000 isn’t it in that it doesn’t say much about the actually quality of the output just the quality of the system…
Terry: First of all, I find the COBIT model (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) to be a useful one regarding organizational process maturity measurements – if you’ll allow me to reference it rather than ISO 9000.
Measuring process maturity is one way…and I stress that it is only one way among others…for IT Senior Management to look at how well IT is being managed. By using the process maturity model to ask questions based on industry good practices – what their peers are doing – it can serve as a basis of comparison to identify an adequate level of management and control over an organization’s own IT processes.
Of course, cost-benefit should drive the level and degree of the process maturity assessment: what and how much should be assessed at this particular point in time.
Also, to some degree it depends on what an organization actually decides to measure in an assessment. The bigger question an organization needs to consider before doing a maturity assessment isn’t necessarily just “what” but “why.” There needs to be clarity around purpose because if there isn’t, it can sour the results of the assessment.
Organizations can do an assessment to capture a baseline of how they currently go about accomplishing something and to what degree their efforts might be compared with another way of accomplishing the same thing so that they can then make some decisions regarding gap analysis, improvement (if desired) resource investment, etc.
A maturity assessment is not a report card or some kind of audit; it’s an evaluation that is not a judgment and that’s very important to stress because if people who are participating in the assessment believe they are being judged in any way, it can skew the data. People will go into protection mode. They will become defensive. And you can’t blame them for doing so. In such a case the baseline will be inaccurate. The integrity of the starting point for future growth and improvement efforts will be compromised.
I like to tell organizations this is the single most important time in the lifecycle of their improvement efforts and absolute honesty is required because every improvement effort and plan is going to be based upon what is contained in this assessment. So it is absolutely crucial that the methods employed in conducting the assessment be honest, fair and as objective as possible.
What is actually measured in a good maturity assessment are outcomes that are the result of expectations regarding the performance of specific activities and the measurement and reporting of those activities. The assessor looks for hard evidence (metrics, reports, documentation) that is related to those specific activities and their performance.
Skep: So what is the ROI on process maturity improvement? Where is the business benefit?
Terry: Strictly speaking, ROI may be hard to demonstrate if by ROI you mean dollars-to-dollars. But if we take a balanced scorecard approach or Value on Investment (VOI) approach, the benefits to the business of doing a process maturity assessment as the beginning of an overall approach to process improvement are easy to identify.
The maturity models used in a good maturity assessment provide a generic profile of the stages through which the organization evolves for management and control of IT processes. They provide a kind of scale that allows differences of effectiveness and efficiency to be easily measured and which can lend itself to pragmatic comparisons. They support gap analysis to identify what needs to be done to achieve certain levels of defined accomplishment that act as the basis for setting “as-is” and “to-be” positions.”
In general, Rob, once a maturity assessment is completed, an organization has valuable insight into how their IT organization is managed in the enterprise.
Skep: Is there something fundamental about the CMM maturity model of ad hoc-repeatable-defined-managed-optimized, or are there other equally useful process maturity models (I don’t know of one)? Is there more than one path to the top of the mountain?
Terry: Good question, Rob. I invite your curious, experienced, and well-informed readers to enlighten us both since I do not profess to be an expert in this topic, which means I am as curious as any of your readers to know about any maturity assessment models out there that are based on something other than the five levels of CMM.
To my knowledge and within the range of my experience and study, I haven’t come across any that are not CMM-based. Know of any others, folks? If anyone mentions one now that checks out, I’ll gladly refer to it in my presentation and give proper acknowledgement.
Skep: What is in it for an individual reader attending your session? How will they benefit personally? What will they take away?
Terry: Before answering your question I reviewed some of the feedback I received from past sessions. Although the comments were for the most part very brief (people were in a hurry to get to the morning keynote speaker who for two years in a row was a very funny Craig Ferguson), the comments below were frequently repeated in some form:
1) “Lots of good ideas to take back to my organization for discussion about doing an assessment” (I hope that this remains so)
2) “Wish there had been more time for more details about actual implementations” (sorry, but my time constraint remains and this is not a case study session)
3) “Excellent refresher about the Capability Model to carry into other sessions and workshops at the conference” (this session is designed in part as a “lead-in” to other sessions
4) “Too much information about Pink Elephant’s maturity assessment tool” (I’ve eliminated all reference to our PinkScan product)
5) “The speaker was energetic, passionate, and knowledgeable about the topic” (I will get a good night’s sleep and show-up fortified with sufficient amounts of caffeine , I remain engaged and challenged by this topic and I look forward to seeing everyone in Vegas.)
Thanks for this opportunity, Rob. If your readers have any other questions, please feel free to contact me at t - dot - sherman - at - pinkelephant - dot - com
Skep: Make this a must-attend session to help you better understand other conference presentations that refer to process maturity, assessments, and best practices for implementing ITIL processes. I will.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Exclusive Offers For Select Cirque du Soleil Shows
As an attendee of Pink’s Conference, Cirque du Soleil is pleased to offer special savings off select performances. Known for the spectacular and awe-inspiring shows, a ticket to one of these shows will complete your trip to Las Vegas! More details coming soon!
Sunday, January 03, 2010
EHOBOK Exhibit Engagement
In an earlier post we introduced EHOBOK, The Exhibition Hall Optimizer Body of Knowledge: the framework for helping you make the most of your Exhibit Hall (EH) experience.
We described three EHOBOK domains. Well, we’ve had an EHOBOK Refresh and today we present to you EHOBOK V2, where we introduce a fourth domain, Exhibit Assessment
Exhibit Strategy (ES): planning your EH engagement to optimize the experience
Exhibit Engagement (EE): executing on your strategy by engaging with the EH
Exhibit Assessment (EA): determining the exhibit’s reliability and value to you
Exhibit Utilization-with-a-z (EU): realising (with an “s”) the value of individual exhibits
We have already described Exhibit Strategy. Today we present Exhibit Engagement: how to work with the EH as a whole. There are three practices:
1) Tracking
Know where you have been. This is a challenge in a big EH. Many of us have had the embarrassing experience of engaging with someone on a vendor stand only to realise we’ve talked to them before. They all start to blur together: the men in corporate-branded golf-shirts in primary colours or slightly-loud-suits like garish bankers; and the power-dressed women in skirt-suits and heels, or identical corporate golf shirts. (We discussed this in more depth with our recent post on Exhibit Plumage)
So you might like to tick booths off your EH map as you work your way through the route you planned as part of Exhibit Strategy. As we said in the Exhibit Strategy post, you will want to walk the route at least twice, which makes tracking where you have been all the more important. The only thing worse than talking to a salesman is redundantly talking to a salesman.
2) Definitive Exhibit Library
Store all your printed matter from the EH in a bag or envelope in your suitcase. Its value as information is usually approaching zero but it has real value to you in helping prepare your conference report for your boss. So I usually keep it all until years later I find it on a shelf and bin it.
3) Exhibition Asset Store
Of much greater value are the assets gathered from the EH. This refers of course to squeeze balls, USB chargers, memory sticks, puzzle cubes and other gadgetry. Place these into four categories to determine how many you need of each. An asset may be in more than one category:
• Personal desk toy
• Gifts for colleagues and friends (one each)
• Gifts for children (several each)
• Dog chews
At some conferences you may also receive clothing. Very occasionally this qualifies as a wearable asset, but most of the time it has value only if you wash your own car.