Pink14 - Highlights, Pink Think Tank & Personal Re-Vitalization

Energized, Motivated and Focused To Face Today's & Tomorrow's Challenges

Pink14 Inspiration

Its hard to believe that 2 weeks have passed already since so many folks in the ITSM community gathered together at Pink's 18th Annual IT Service Management Conference. It is also a personal wonder to me that I have had the privilege of attending and participating in every single one of these amazing events! As you can well imagine a lot of energy, time and effort goes into putting this show together and then orchestrating its execution. For many of us at Pink it is a 12 Month labour of love since we start planning next year's event even before the current year's program kicks off. However, despite the effort it is by far the most exciting thing I have the opportunity to be involved in each year. The analogy I shared with several of my ITSM friends is that Pink14 is a bit like going to Summer Camp. You look forward to it for months and then it finally arrives. While your there the program is intense but you don't mind since you are seeing so many people you know, having a blast, being encourage and are motivated to improve. Despite the bone weariness at the end of the week you come away refreshed and energized with your batteries topped up to face the dragons of every day life with a new perspective. Pink14 made this true on many levels! Starting with the excellent keynotes we enjoyed this year, the event started with a Blast Off right from the opening Key Note by Colonel Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station and fellow Canadian. Col. Hadfield encouraged everyone in the audience to stretch for those goals which are important with his inspirational talk on “The Sky Is Not The Limit” Col Hadfield inspired me and the entire audience by sharing his personal story and perspective on how blessed we truly are to live on such a beautiful planet “Space Craft Earth" and the role we need to take in its care and for each other as leaders. This message was drilled home in spades later that day by Caroline Casey one of the most determined, driven and amazing woman I have heard speak. In her talk “Looking Past Limits” she drove home her ideas through a powerful personal testimony where she demonstrated through her story that limitations and constraints should not stop or hinder people from achieving the goals they set for themselves. The passion and pure energy of her session made sure that there was not a dry eye in the entire ballroom. In short these two amazing speakers kicked off the first day with the message that despite the many challenges we face at home, at work and in our lives we can overcome and achieve our goals through belief determination, collaboration and leadership. The next day Andrian Gostick brought it all home tying in these core principles with a session on his book “All In” describing how how the right type of Culture led by strong and effective leadership creates the type of organization that produces outstanding results. All of these messages were very appropriate for an audience that often faces discouragement and many personal and organizational challenges related to IT Service Management within their places of work.

Pink Think Tank 2014

Building on the theme of Organizational Challenges, the 2nd major personal highlight of this year's event was the honour and privilege off participating in Pink's 1st Annual Think Tank session. In keeping with our Mission to Research, Document and Promote Best Practices the goal of the assembled Think Tank was to address the current and growing challenge of managing multi supplier environments. To achieve this objective a small group of individuals were selected from a long list of potential candidates based on their published thought leadership which addressed some element of this very real and major challenge facing professionals in the IT community. The Think Tank Members Consisted of:
Going into this session each individual understood that the goal was not only to debate the problem but also to offer the industry practical guidance on how to address the challenge. The key issue or problem statement that was defined was nicknamed The Squeeze and can be described as the fact that internal IT organizations are experiencing two major pressure points which are adding to growing complexity of suppliers in the IT Value system. The Squeeze Top Down: From the top down business units are engaging in business process outsourcing such as Payroll, Finance, Supply Chain or HR where traditional IT Systems are now part of packaged supplier relationship agreements and which are being entered into directly by the business with our without internal IT involvement. Bottom Up: While at the same time traditional infrastructure and network environments are increasingly becoming commoditized and are either being moved to a cloud based PaaS solutions where classic data centre technology is becoming virtualized (infrastructure is now software). Or outsourced to Managed Service Providers who promise “Your Mess For Less". In addition to these trends many organizations realize that generally available enterprise applications such Email, Collaboration, or CRM suites do not provide strategic advantage or market differentiation and based on this conclusion are moving to outsource these IT services to 3rd parties. All of these trends lead to the growing reality that the IT Value System is becoming more and more complex and that they state of general IT Governance Maturity and Specifically Supplier Management is woefully inadequate to deal with this issue which drove the statement by Jame's Finister ”Your Not Ready” and this interestingly enough coming from a person who spends most of his time addressing this exact challenge as a leader of Tata's Supplier/Service Integration Services. In truth most organizations are far from ready to deal with this growing complexity they already find them selves in. Most organizations have yet to successfully address the complexity and non standardization of practice within internal IT groups let alone addressing the integration of multiple 3rd party suppliers. To add additional support to this observation Jack Probst and I co-authored a Research Paper that was shared with the attendees of Pink14 that demonstrates that rather than moving forward with improvements around Supplier Management and Supplier Integration organizations are in fact regressing or have no plans to address this issue. Danger, Danger Will Robinson!
So What Is To Be Done? This is where the practical guidance needs to come in During the Pink Think Tank the members defined specific improvement opportunities at 2 levels Governance: Sr. Leaders need to understand the challenges presented by current sourcing trends and realize that more than ever strong governance policies, frameworks, structures and roles which oversee both internal and external IT functions need to be established to manage this current and growing complexity. In the session I used the analogy of the Roman Empire where diverse countries, cultures and peoples were held together by a federated governance approach (A Republic). In this Republic (at least that is how it started) a central body working with local management made clear which policies, principles and practices needed to be consistent across the entire diverse empire and which areas could vary. As an example think of the concept of “The Roman Road System” which spanned the entire empire allowing both commercial and military objectives to be realized. In today's IT Organization these can be understood in the context of both processes and services. For example:
  • Process Roman Road: Incident Management - 1 support process and tool consistent across all members of the empire.
  • Service Roman Road: Email - 1 email service and system shared across the entire federated empire.
The key to this analogy is that while some aspects of the empire were required to be standardized many other aspects were encouraged to flourish and remain diverse. To accomplish this objective what COBIT 5 calls Governance of Enterprise IT (GEIT) needs to be established and managed. Management: At at management or process level a key finding was that while organizations have been focusing on ITSM for decades very few organizations have moved beyond Service Operations and Service Transition process areas. A key recommendation the Think Tank is that organizations need to shift their focus and CSI improvements beyond the typical aspects of Incident and Change Management to areas which directly address these challenges. Examples being: Service Catalog, Service Level Management, Supplier Management to name the primary enabling processes. Working with the premise that what is not defined cannot be controlled, managed or improved it is critical to define what is being sourced and the aspects of how to measure as well as manage service providers. While this is only a high level summary of the findings, the good news is that the group has agreed to continue to document and share the detailed findings in the form of whitepapers and further content to share with the industry. As a view of what was presented at the Pink14 event Rob England has shared the initial presentation deck on Slideshare
Coming soon will be announcements on a Social Media Web presence for the group and forthcoming papers. Troy's Thoughts What Are Yours? “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ? Albert Einstein

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