Everything ITSM in Less Than Three Days

Well FUSION 14 was a whirlwind of ITSM Goodness (the royalties check is in the post Barclay Rae). Working the SysAid booth, trying to attend conference sessions, meetings with clever people, and the informal networking can be tough when you’re small. Although IT service management (ITSM) BFG Michael Slabodnick was also probably looking forward to the weekend at home post-FUSION 14.

This blog is a quick snapshot of the event, which SysAid will build upon over the next few months via our blog sites:I have written a number of blogs about metrics and KPIs recently, each focussing on a different area of IT service management. Here are some links in case you’ve missed any of them.

• https://www.sysaid.com/blog
• http://www.joetheitguy.com/

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Key Takeaways

The conference sessions started with an interactive presentation that, for me, set the scene for the issues and opportunities that would run throughout the conference – courtesy of Jenny Rains, Cinda Daly, and the customer service demi-god that is Roy Atkinson.

Some of their key points, based on recent HDI research, were that:

• “Service organizations are still challenged to demonstrate business value and to support sustainable business growth.”
• “Service and support models are changing to streamline, enhance mobile and remote support, bolster shift-left, AND become the single point of contact for all business services.”
• Automation and self-service are growing in use. Two great statistics were that: remote control technology is now (unbelievably) more common in support centers than incident management technology, and 85% of organizations now provide some type of self-help facility.
• The use of ITSM tools and techniques outside of IT continues to grow. 25% of organizations have already taken ITSM outside of IT, with another 26% currently doing, or planning to do, so.
• Knowledge management is in vogue (again). Ranked second to incident management as the most important technology required for successful end-user support.

Look out for the full HDI “Service Management: Not Just for IT Anymore” report that will be available soon.

We shouldn’t fail to recognize the West Coast alternative to FUSION 14 – DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES14) – where some of the people you might expect to see at FUSION (such as Glenn O’Donnell, Gene Kim, Rob England, and Kaimar Karu) were having fun. You can read a summary by Mirco Hering here. There were of course DevOps sessions at FUSION 14 but my spies tell me that they weren’t as well attended by ITSM practitioners as the more traditionally-focused ITSM sessions. It makes me wonder how involved, or interested, Ops (including ITSM) people are in the opportunities of DevOps.

A Little More Information

As not everyone was lucky enough to attend the event, we thought it might be useful to pull together a list of recommended reading to help you learn more about these key takeaways:

• Service Desk 2.0, by Aale Roos
• Remote support, by Roy Atkinson
• Self-service, by Joe the IT Guy
• Automation, by Forrester
• Outside IT, by Stephen Mann
• Knowledge management, by Aprill Allen (a KM blogroll)
• DevOps, by Rob England (a collection of tagged blogs)

Other Topics

There were over 80 track sessions, with advice provided on a wide variety of other ITSM topics such as:

• Adaptive service models (Christian Nissen)
• Problem management (both John Custy and Jayne Groll)
• Service catalog (Rob Stroud)
• COBIT and ITIL self-assessments (Mauricio Corona)
• The consumerization of service (Bob Osborn)
• Cloud (John Clark)
• Security (both Marvin Stein and Gerben Verstraete)
• CSI (both Malcolm Fry and Roger Williams)
• Service level management (Kirk Bergman)
• ITSM Next (Matt Hooper)
• Metrics (both Julianne Vargo and Gary Case).

I’m sure many of the presenters won’t mind you messaging them via Twitter if you want to find out more about their sessions.

Overall

I really enjoyed the conference, though I have to admit that a big part of this was seeing the industry people I know and love again, and talking with new people while working in the Expo Hall. This is often the case, as (wo)manning the booth takes up a big part of the conference for vendor attendees at the expense of the conference sessions.

My biggest gripe, as with many of the larger industry conferences, is that too many great speakers are scheduled at the same time. Not only is it Sophie’s Choice based on what (well who) I know, and I realize I shouldn’t moan about the wealth of knowledge on tap, but having too many of my friends speaking at the same time also prevents me (and probably others) from trying out new speakers. Maybe at the next conference I should only attend the sessions of people I don’t know – a higher risk strategy, but we all know that higher risk investments can provide higher returns.

Finally, over the next few months Joe the IT Guy will be blogging around these and other topics covered at FUSION 14. And, if you feel like you missed out, then there’s always next year – FUSION 15 runs from November 1-4 2015 in New Orleans.

That’s my 2 cents on FUSION 14, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on FUSION 14 if you were lucky enough to be there too.

Like this article? You may also like: FUSION14: Bringing the ITSM Community Together for the Greater Good.

Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook where we are always listening.