#itsmf

The annual conference put together by itSMF Norway has a reputation for being something special, and the 2016 edition didn’t break the mould. Completely fitting with this year’s overarching theme of ‘superheroes’, Dr Geeta Sekhon, an Indian consultant to the United Nations on Human Trafficking, delivered a powerful keynote. She touched many a heart both by the moving content of her talk and by the way she engaged with participants during the conference. Hats off to the conference organizers for going out on a limb and confronting the participants with the broader societal context — it’s not often that you hear words such as “divine” and “destiny” at an ITSM conference.

Follow that

The second keynote speaker, Charles Betz (Armstrong Process Group, USA), was confronted with the classic “follow that” challenge. With the audience still discreetly drying their eyes, he made a dignified transition from the societally significant to the more mundane concerns of the ITSM community. Charlie is one of our industry’s most rigorous thinkers and he gave an overview of the significance of Agile and DevOps for ITSM practitioners. As usual, Charlie challenged conventional mental models, encouraging the participants to take a different perspective. To take an example, he talked about how in many organization, project management is on the decline, in favour of investment in product management (including development). Product development requires radically different mental models, and Charlie gave a money back guarantee on his recommendation to buy one of Don Reinertsen’s seminal books on lean product development.

After the two plenary keynotes, attended by about 400 attendees, the conference changed to track-mode with about eight parallel sessions to choose from. What follows is my personal selection.

Sound affects

The Cloud, DevOps and Service Desk vNext - ITChronicles

I have been wanting to blog about the combination of Cloud and DevOps and Service Desk – the subject of a presentation I did with Kathleen Wilson at itSMF USA Fusion 15 earlier this month. It covered some of the lessons learned and changes in approach that were required to grow cloud scale services. Also, I am co-authoring on “Service Desk 2.0” with Aale Roos that I hope will be published soon by TSO. There are connected patterns across all these subjects that I thought I would bring together here.

IT Service Management Conference (itSMF – Norway) Early Bird Registration

itSMF Conference Norway

itSMF Norway opened early bird registrations to the public today for their annual IT service management conference held in Oslo, Norway on March 2-3, 2015. In its thirteenth year, the 2015 itSMF Norway Annual Conference expects 800 attendees, making it the largest IT service management-focused conference in Europe.

Early bird registrations are available now at an…