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"We're trying to make sure investment is not being driven by the technology or the bureaucracy," Evans said Tuesday in a keynote address to the IT Service Management Forum.
Karen Evans set the stage and did justice to IT Service Management as she tied the importance of ITSM back to the goals of the audience in meeting and exceeding their requirements for IT performance and business alignment.
This was a great conference because of three key attributes:
(a) the high quality of the presentations,
(b) the 'intimate' feel, which allowed for great networking, and
(c) the flawless logistics.
By far, the best conference I ever attended.
The line-up of the keynote speakers was very impressive. It is obvious to me this kind of conference fills a big void.
In a next edition, I would like to see some more presentations dealing with how Service Management helps government IT groups with the Federal Enterprise Architecture mandate.
The idea of Ken Wendle is to add a 'Government' track to the private enterprise conference, and to have a semi-annual conference on the East coast and on the West coast.
I thought this made good sense, because the govt people are interested to find out more about how big organizations [e.g. Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch] have implemented IT Service Management, while the private sector organizations can also learn something from the public sector.
The braking and restraining factor will be the amount of time and energy the itSMF will have to bring up to organize two events instead of one. Also, the number of volunteers to chair the tracks might be a limiting factor.
It will be interesting adding a Government track to the Long Beach show, and, holding it at the end of the annual Federal Government budget cycle.
My concerns for conferences not held around the DC area are travel restraints.
The good news is we do not seem to have much risk in adding the track to Long Beach, then keeping our eyes and ears open and making adjustments where necessary. However, conference venues need to be planned out two years to secure the ideal locations.
Having participated on the last two conferences, I can personally say that it is a lot of work for the volunteers, not only the coordination and logistics, but we must constantly come up with intriguing content that will add value to a broad audience.
I spoke with a lady at the Washington show, and I asked her if the attendance to a show is in any way predicated upon the travel distance. She said there is definitely a relation but INVERSE!
She said that a show in Las Vegas or in LA or in New Orleans is much more attractive to federal govt employees than one in Wash DC!
This is obviously anecdotal proof, and I don't understand the mechanics of short term travel requests within federal entities, but it is definitely something worth investigating.
And on the same hand, I ran into a gentleman who said he would never receive travel authorization if the destinations were "fun" places like Las Vegas, Orlando, etc, but didn't have too much problem going to St. Louis!
Not sure if he was being facetious, he sounded serious! We have much to learn.
The Washington Conference was a complete success as I look back upon the comments and stated feelings of the State and Local agency practitioners which participated in Track 3 and the Panel.
One comment was "it is nice to know that there are others out there with the same day-to-day problems and successes"
We have learned that the Canadians (on a whole) are a couple years ahead of the US in ITSM. It was extremely interesting to find out how they had established their process and watched them mature.
I have included a picture with this post of my hero!
I hope to see her in Long Beach...............................
From scanning badges at itSMF (and ITSM training and consulting vendor) conferences and events over the past several years, there have been more Canadian than US Governmental agencies represented.
My even more unscientific assertion is that until recently, Canadians have been more open than their North American neighbors to working in a standard process-based framework that was "not invented there." The Canadian govenment agencies are also closer to the British government - an original sponsor of ITIL.
That said, things are changing in the US. Strange is the fruit that the MCI and Enron bankruptcies and Basel II have borne in the form of legislated regulatory interest (and corresponding audit and management interest) in process-based IT operations practice and assessment.
itSMF conferences should focus on not only the solution that ITSM provides, but the problems they solve.
the picture didn't appear. did you use the attach file option?
It appears right below the text field for the post. You can select the Browse button to find it on your hard disk and it will be uploaded and inserted into the message body.
The only restriction is that it must be less than 102Kbytes. If your picture is bigger than that, let me know and I'll find a way to get it up.
I know I am jumping in this a little late, but I would just like to say that this conference in my mind was a huge success. Thank you to Beverly and all those involved in organizing this conference, including the track leaders. It was a tremendous experience for me to be allowed to present at this coference.
The key note speakers were very well put together. I am not sure if you get that level of speaker on the government level if you don't have the conference in the DC area. I think I like the recomendation of creating a track for government in the current fall conference, and then expanding the government only conference to include private business as well.
In addition I am on a mission to generate interest in this field at the small government and business level. I am going to start a new thread to disucss this though.
In all it was fun to attend, be a part of, and present at.
Huge success
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