IT Service Week

Yesterday I attended the first day of the ITSM Cruise to Excellence put on by the Local Los Angeles ITSMF group. This year it was held at the Westin in Long Beach rather than on an actual cruise boat like last year’s event. The conference featured guest speakers discussing ITIL v3, the federated CMDB, Service Catalogs, and how to measure ITIL performance. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of effort that the vendors made on their booths at the event. CA, IBM, Column Technologies, ASG, BMC, Frontrange, EXIN, Newscale, and Managed Objects all had well designed booths at the event. Two of the noted sessions were discussing the federated CMDB by ASG’s CTO John Conner and a workshop discussing how an actionable service catalog can benefit the business by Newscale’s founder and CTO Rodrigo Flores.

In Conner’s session, Federating Configuration Management Databases, he discussed some of the importance placed on a CMDB to describe what parts of the business are managed by IT. Conner stressed that IT organizations should push forward to become integrated components of the business rather than a cost center. He also stated that companies will always federate there data sources. Using the analogy of the United States governing it’s states in showing how a Master CMDB governs the underlying data sources.

In Flores’ workshop, an Actionable Service Catalog, he discussed some of the benefits an enterprise can take by putting forward an IT Service Catalog for the business users. He likened the IT Process owner to that of a product manager. Someone that describes the framework and develops requirements from the business to hand off to the delivery team or “Engineering.” One of his keynote take aways for the workshop was that, “We have to set expectations because if we don’t they will.” In this message he was referring to the end-users of the catalog and how Web 2.0, Google, Amazon, and other technologies will shape expectations placed on the business’ IT department in the coming years.

Overall, I was impressed with the vendor displays, however, since it was a smaller conference I think they could have pushed all of the sessions into one days rather than two. Most of the sessions seemed to be more of a pitch for their vendor’s products, although, it was good to get their perspective on the future of IT Service Management.

Tags: actionable service catalog, asg, cruise to excellence, federated cmdb, it process owner, ITIL v3, ITSM, ITSMF USA, newscale, Service Catalog

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.