Like a Virgin – ITSM for the Very First Time

Well I’m finally back in the real world after the whirlwind experience that was the Service Desk and IT Support Show in London (SITS14) last week in London. Whilst it wasn’t the first time that SysAid was exhibiting, it was personally my first visit to the show, and I’m pleased to say that it lived up to the hype.

The great thing about SITS is that its free, so even with travel costs from outside of the UK you’re likely to find that it’s a more cost-effective option for you to attend than other high profile ITSM events. If you haven’t got yourself to an event like this yet, get talking to your manager. The learning experience and opportunity to interact with peers and industry superstars (including Joe the IT Guy of course) is priceless.

---

Let’s Start With a Low and End With a High

First of all, I need to highlight one downside to this particular event. The busy exhibition hall made it incredibly noisy in the speaker rooms, which meant that it was often very hard to hear the presentations if you didn’t get the right seat. Everybody had told me that I was not to miss Patrick Bolger’s session on Reimagining the Role of IT, but unfortunately I did – not because I wasn’t in his session, but because I was sitting off on the side and could hardly hear anything he said.

The event is obviously first and foremost an exhibition, and the content comes second, but the content (what I saw of it) is really good – it seems a shame to ruin it by having it drowned out by the likes of us noisy vendors on the showroom floor. I can only hope that this will change as the event moves to a new venue next year.

Key Takeaways

It’s hard to provide an overview of all the “ITSM Goodness” (I might need to check if that term is copyrighted by the ITSM Contributor of the Year – Barclay Rae – congratulations by the way) in one article without it turning into an essay, but I’ll do my best to sum up with a few snippets of advice from two of my favorite sessions.

Service Desks: Step Up Your Game – Dave Jones, Pink Elephant

• Officially there are four P’s (People, Product, Process and Partners) but it will serve you well to remember that there is also a fifth – Performance.
• ITSM must always remember to ask “are we making a difference?”
• In order to make improvements you need to know what you’re doing now and where you want to be. Only then will you be able to find a quick resolution in the shortest amount of time.
• Metrics are of course critical to improvement in ITSM, but you need to measure more than just the technical. Do you measure people and performance?
• When it comes to customer satisfaction rates it will always vary from one company to another, but if your rates are below 70% then alarm bells should be ringing.

Is ITIL Ready for a DevOps Approach? – Kaimar Karu, AXELOS

• Remember that DevOps is most definitely NOT:
  • A process
  • A job description
  • A piece of software

• Common goals between ITIL and DevOps are:
  • To increase business value
  • To remove silos that separate the different arts of the organization
  • To enable business to work with IT

• Key takeways to be gained from this approach:
  • Get rid of silos
  • Get rid of blame
  • Bring pain forward, meaning involving the managers and operations, e.g. if the CIO is on pager duty and gets woken up in the middle of the night, it’s unlikely that he is going to allow that same issue to happen again

• Cloud benefits:
  • Flexibility
  • Scalability
  • Focus on non-commodity

Kaimar’s final words of wisdom were to “automate everything” but that this comes with a caveat – only automate the stuff that it actually makes sense to automate.

The Wonderful Sarah Lahav and Joe The IT Guy

Of course it goes without saying that the best presentation was delivered by SysAid! Sarah and Joe gave practical advice on how to adjust your service desk to BYOD. Rather than provide you with an inadequate overview that won’t do the double act justice, I suggest we wait for the live video that we will be publishing in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

We Had a Blast

The event was a huge success for SysAid, and in particular I personally loved my time working at the booth. Nothing in the world of ITSM beats talking with IT professionals about their challenges, goals, aspirations, etc, regardless of whether or not they are interested in our technology.

It was also an absolute delight to finally meet some of my ITSM heroes in person, like the lovable and effervescent Andrea Kis, her funny and smart colleague from Tata James Finister, fellow Yankee with a twang Daniel Breston, the always stylish Kaimar Karu, the seasoned moderator and creator of ITSM Goodness Barclay Rae, the most awesome guy in India (and maybe the whole world) with the biggest smile Suresh GP, and of course the man I most adore besides my husband 😉 who truly knows how to explain ITSM and ITIL simply and logically – Stuart Rance (always a pleasure, sir!)

To the entire SITS team (and in particular Laura Venables – we are so sad that you are leaving) thank you for putting on a brilliant event. I’m already working on my bribery plan to ensure that the SysAid team brings me along next year (the weather in the UK should be better in June right?).

Save the date now for next year’s event. It’s on 3-4 June 2015 at Olympia, London.

---

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