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.

Tomorrow (March 18, 2008) AJAXWorld kicks off in New York. The conference will feature 80+ technical sessions, Keynotes, Power Panels and General Session Demos on the Rich Internet Technology and how to build front-end applications for users. What does it mean for IT Services? AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, has really had a few years to mature since Jesse James Garrett made it popular back in 2005. Now, more than ever, enterprises are taking advantage of building AJAX applications to meet business critical situations.

An interesting technical session that will be available at AJAXWorld this year is Mission Critical AJAX: Making Test Ordering Easier and Faster at Quest Diagnostics by David Rapperport and Rob Tweed. The session will detail how Quest Diagnostics needed to create a mission critical service catalog for it’s lab techs to order new lab equipment and diagnostic supplies. Quest used the technology of AJAX to build a custom internal interface that would be reliable, stable, and achieve it’s mission critical service levels.

Not only Service Catalogs can take advantage of AJAX for IT Service Management applications. IT Service Desk applications such as HP Service Manager takes advantage of the web tier delivering a Change Management Calendar and Employee Self Service (ESS) Tier for an enterprise’s end-users to quickly get help when they do not want to wait on the phone for a Help Desk Analyst. LiveTime Service Manager, a Service Desk product for Small to Medium Businesses, is built completely out of Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. Every year Pink Elephant gives out an Innovation of the Year award to the most innovative idea in ITIL. Maybe this is the year that someone integrates ITIL Strategies that effectively utilize the iPhone? I recently downloaded my copy of the SDK to start on a few little side projects. Imagine what the world would be like if your Desktop Engineers didn’t have to walk back to their desk to update an Incident Ticket? What if they could do it straight from their iPhone? Now that’s what I call Service!

TURNERSVILLE, N.J. The Computer Measurement Group (CMG), the Information Technology professionals responsible for planning, measuring, analyzing, and managing the world’s largest IT infrastructures, announced today its call for papers and presentations for the 34th International Conference to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 7th through 12th, 2008 at the Paris Hotel.The 2008 CMG conference will cover load and stress testing, benchmarking, performance optimization, software performance engineering, resource management, capacity analysis, modeling, and cost management with special emphasis on Virtualization, Capacity Planning for green data centers, IT and Business Service Management, Performance Visualization and Service Oriented Infrastructures and Architectures.

“For over 30 years, CMG continues to be the source of unbiased and objective expert information and practical, real life experiences,” said Jaqui Lynch, CMG’08 general chair and chief of staff, “Submissions for papers and presentations at all levels are welcome and we especially encourage papers on user experiences as well as ones that share one’s knowledge and expertise.”

All paper and presentation submissions will be evaluated through a blind peer-referee process. These presentations inform attendees from various levels of expertise, including Introductory, Tutorial, Advanced,
and Management levels. Editorial assistance is available for accepted papers. Mentors are available for writing assistance. Mentor assistance may be requested at any point in the writing process, including before the paper is started.

For more information about paper and presentation submission processes, please visit: http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2008/call-for-papers.html

CMG, (http://www.cmg.org) is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis, and modeling.