University ITSM

Kevin Ritter from State Farm presented on "Battle of the Wills--SLM and Interdependencies with other ITIL(tm) Disciplines."

From his presentation it sounds like State Farm has a lot of ITSM employees and that the organization is very familiar with ITSM. Kevin is in the service level management group.

At 10 AM, Robert Benyon from Rhodes University in South Africa presented on "A Framework for the Implementation of Service Management." He only got 50 minutes to speak (like all the track sessions) but he was really good! Robert studied ITSM for his Master's degree at Rhodes University, plus he works in their IS department.

For some reason this conference has six keynote addresses. Our first, this morning at 8:15 AM, was a lead solo pilot for the Blue Angels.

The pilot has since gone on to create a company that does process consulting. He showed us several videos from when he was a pilot, and used them to illustrate the four steps to his process cycle: "belief," "brief," "contracts," and "debrief."

Belief means that people have to believe it is possible for them to succeed.

Mike and I went to the government/education BoF session this morning... from 7:15 AM-8 AM. Dennis from Harvard University led the session. We went from about 6 attendees to maybe two dozen by 8 AM. Other attendees included a former Gartner analyst, reps from the City of Charlotte, and several other universities such as the University of Kansas.

I watched the first two hours of the GamingWorks "Apollo 13" simulation. First, the participants spent 30 minutes defining what process they were going to use for handling issues. Second, the participants were put through 30 minutes of incidents being handled by the "customer" (the astronauts), such as a large explosion that caused several incidents. Third, ISO 20000-certified observers reviewed the participants and the "mission director" (a GamingWorks employee) explained how the process could have been improved.

We went to the simulation orientation today at 1 PM. Ironically, the itSMF conference's laptop went down, so they just read aloud what we were supposed to know: there were four simulations, run by BMC, HP, GamingWorks (a Dutch company), and Pink (Elephant). We were to be quiet in the back and observe the simulations.

We were worried that there wouldn't be enough space for us, because the web site wouldn't let Mike register even as an observer for the simulations. A bunch of seats were empty, though, and they were even looking for simulation participants.