What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas! NOT!

This week is the 12th Annual Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference where record numbers of IT professionals (~2000 +) have descended on the town that never sleeps with the theme of “Another Brick in the Wall”.  This year’s conference is one for the record books in more ways than one, but this one cannot stay in Vegas. The Pinkers pulled off a first ever and all I can say is “only in Vegas”. The President of Pink Elephant, David Ratcliffe, opened the conference by riding in on an elephant draped in a Pinker blanket. The questions that picture brings boggles my mind, but the biggest one is, “what will the Pinkers do next year to beat this one”? Only in Vegas will you find a full size elephant available to be ridden into a hotel ballroom dressed in his finest pink outfit! Who says IT guys/gals are just geeks with no sense of humor.

The overriding theme of the conference is the topic and training for ITIL v3, thus many organizations are growing in maturity and seeking to advance their ITSM (IT Service Management) and BSM (Business Service Management) initiatives in order to better integrate to their businesses. Just a year ago, I spent more time explaining what ITSM / BSM are and then how technology might support those initiatives. This year the awareness is there and organizations are seeking solutions that will assist them in reaching higher levels of business integration via BSM technologies.

On the same theme of IT maturity, CMDB (configuration management database) still continues to be a hot topic, but more so in terms of what it provides for initiatives that: better manage service availability/performance, change control and service impact knowledge. Early CMDB initiatives revolved around “finding” and “tracking” things. ITIL v3 brings the focus to the service and while understanding “things” in the environment, it’s the impact these “things” have on a service that is driving more mature CMDB initiatives.

Service catalogs are also another hot topic also brought on by the evolution of the ITIL v3 documentation with the focus on the service. Many organizations are working on initiatives to identify and track their services. The key to this will not only be the initial provisioning of these services, but the ability to track it in the CMDB with the supporting technology infrastructure with service rules enabling the proactive management of the services. This is interesting because it isn’t the service level that is holding the relevance any longer, but the ability to proactively manage risk and impact insuring quality service availability and performance.

ITIL v3 introduces the notion of the 4 P’s:  People, Process, Products and Providers. Managing services is no doubt a complex undertaking if products (technologies) are not leveraged to assist in process efficiency and providing information for analysis versus previous adventures in manual data manipulation.

In my humble observation, this is the year of integrated CMDB’s layered with service catalog definitions and proactive management in terms that the support the business more than ever before.

-- Michele Hudnall