Bill Willis, deputy CIO for the State of North Carolina, gave the closing keynote, called "ITSM--Doing it in real life."

They were given a mandate to consolidate the executive branch's IT. By training a bunch of people in ITIL foundations and other certificates, they dramatically cut IT costs and improved project success. They have four ITIL Service Managers.

Grisha Alpernas from the city of Portland, Oregon gave a great presentation called "How did it happen that we did something right (without even knowing it)?"

Portland centralized IT in 2001. Their old IT system (structure etc) was bad and they had to throw it out. They re-organized into three areas: the service desk (inter-active), technical services (pro-active), and technical support (re-active). In one year they reduced their staff by 17% and their managerial staff by 25%.

Gary Case, a speaker from Pink Elephant, held a two-hour workshop called "ITIL(r) Process Implementation Strategy."

He said you can implement processes in 6-8 months, but they'll have no value. Culture has to change: you have to change people. He typically runs a three-year schedule to implement the 10 ITIL v2 processes. He said configuration management at a big organization could take him five years to implement.

People ask "WIIFM"--what's in it for me? You have to make the case because process change is about changing how people behave.

Favorite quote from the conference so far (in reference to a conversation about people or organizations trying to solve underlying process problems with "tools" or systems):

"A fool with a tool is still a fool."

This session was about managing cultural change during a process improvement effort. They used a "travel" metaphor for their whole communication and rollout plan (ie each staff member was a "traveler", advocates were appointed as "travel guides", a "travel map" showed the entire journey and each checkpoint along the way). It looked like they had actually done a nice job. Lots of good info in the slides.

This session was about using reporting to encourage and enforce compliance to established controls and processes. Three phases:

Recommend

* Define controls and measurements

Record

* Audit for compliance and quality

Report

* Metrics, trending and scorecards

The session gave me a lot of good ideas for controls we can establish for PM processes and associated reports. The slide deck for the presentation has a lot of information we can use.

This was a case study of how they had done financial reporting in conjunction with the rollout of ITIL at GE. They started with a categorization of their operational services:

* Enhancements - optional/"discretionary" items like changes to reports and forms (basically, our Service Requests at WFU, I think)
* Application Subscriptions - ERP and other apps necessary to run the business
* Client Services - email, Exchange, desktop hardware and software, file servers

My last workshop of the day was called "Improving the 'Best' of Problem Management," by Christopher Jones from MeadWestvaco. This was the second year he gave this talk--it was apparently very popular last year.

The two goals of problem management are to prevent incidents and to minimize unpreventable incidents. For them problem management means

* find the "true" root cause--for them, when you can no longer ask "why?"
* publish known errors
* select and implement solutions to problems (in conjunction with change management)

Ian Clayton talked about how to prepare for an ISO 20000 certification. ISO 20000 is the ISO standard for IT Service Management.

He stressed that standards are minimum acceptable levels of performance, much like passing your driver's test. He said auditors are free to use their own interpretation when auditing you against ISO 20000. You should ask your auditor how they're going to evaluate you: against ITIL v3, or ITIL v2, or something else.

He recommended a six step cycle for preparing for audits:

1. verify the reference model (e.g. ITIL v3)
2. assess your readiness

I went to a talk by "the two Davids," David Cannon and David Wheeldon, called "ITIL(r) v3--Service Operations: Deliver on the Promise." I hadn't thought about it, but it makes sense: all the ITIL experts were in this track (the ITIL v3 track). These two Davids wrote parts of the ITIL v3 books.