The second event at today's itSMF-USA Academic Forum was a keynote address by Johnnie Foster, the Director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT).  CAIT is part of the Engineering School at Washington University at St. Louis.
CAIT is a bridge between academics and practitioners.  CAIT engages community partners, such as Mastercard and Boeing, in practical IT-related training and support.  Specifically, CAIT provides

I am attending the 2009 itSMF-USA Academic Forum.  This morning, our main activity was a simulation conducted by G2G3.  In the simulation, we were two different companies that had recently merged, and we had to respond to incidents as they arrived.  Depending on when the incidents were resolved, the business would make or lose money.  For both of our two simulation rounds, I was on the Service Desk.

If you are affiliated with a University or other higher education institution, as a full-time student, faculty, or staff, then you are eligible for our discounted ITIL v3 Foundations class, next taking place at Wake Forest University October 27-29, 2009.  This training includes training, plus the foundations exam on the final day of class.  This training from a commercial provider would be $2195; we offer the class at an academic discount: $600.
Please sign up here, and we will follow up with you!  Also, check out our ITIL v3 foundations page for more information!

The itSMF Higher Education SIG has a LinkedIn group that's open to anyone!  The LinkedIn group gives University practitioners a place to discuss IT Service Management--and we'll then summarize the discussions here on the University ITSM web site.
Please check out the group.  Thelma Simons from the University of Kansas just started a discussion about service catalogs!

One of my takeaways from the Lean Enterprise Institute's book "the Gold Mine" was the concept of a "gemba attitude."  Lean uses a lot of Japanese, and in Japanese "gemba" means "the real place."  Basically, a "gemba attitude" means that you go down to "the place" and actually observe work, rather than relying on second- or third-hand reports of how work is going.

We recently purchased "The Gold Mine/The Lean Manager Set" from the Lean Enterprise Institute. I just started reading "The Gold Mine."

One of Lean's metaphors is to think about a process in terms of rocks and lakes. Let's say that have a lake with a lot of rocks in it, just underneath the surface. As you remove water from the lake, the rocks start to show up. For lean, inventory is a type of "water" that is hiding "rocks" aka variation and waste. Inventory backlogs let you compensate for small issues e.g. if someone can perform a task quickly sometimes and slowly other times. As you remove inventory backlogs you start to uncover other issues in your process.

I'm happy to say I will be attending itSMFusion 2009 in Dallas, TX. If you have never attended an itSMFusion conference, I highly recommend it. It's one of the only times you can wear your ITIL pins and people will know what they are! :-)

Here are the sessions I hope to attend, in order of when they occur. You can see links to all these sessions at the itSMFusion 2009 agenda page.

• Academic Forum (Saturday and Sunday)
  

One neat thing about working with Continual Service Improvement is that I get to explore and research new areas of IT. This is how I found the eSCM-CL body of knowledge from Carnegie Mellon University, which is a framework for IT supplier management capabilities.

Well, I was looking into another area via Gartner, for IT "skills assessments." Skills assessments can be used to help identify who knows what in your department, and they can also help with building job descriptions. Lo and behold, there is a whole framework for IT skills assessment--and it's even partly written by the itSMF! It's called SFIA--Skills Framework for the Information Age.

In the second edition of "Programming Perl," Larry Wall the creator of Perl said programmers should have three virtues:

• Laziness: write labor-saving programs and document, so you don't have to do more work later
• Impatience: anticipate future needs so you don't have to re-tool your programs
• Hubris: wanting to boast about your programming, which means you have to write really good, maintainable code

I think it's fun to extrapolate these "virtues" to IT Service Management:

If services have a certain amount of waste, or "slack," in their implementation and operation, who exactly "pulls the slack out" of services? What groups are the natural champions for improved service management?