Project Mangement Roundtable: Seeing the Crisis Before It Comes

Among the many factors that continue to drive change in today’s ever-evolving business landscape, two stand out: digital transformation and COVID-19. With COVID-19, IT organizations and service management teams are shifting priorities. The challenges with supporting remote workforces suddenly changed, resulting in new mandatory requirements for an agile, flexible, yet resilient approach to delivering better employee experiences while trying to maintain business growth.

Digital interactions are the new norm, where large populations of remote workers require support services by IT services. The best modern support experiences leverage AI and hyperautomation to give employees a personalized and frictionless experience across all channels. Scaling service experience with self-help AI-driven resolutions and end-to-end automation to augment business tasks, actions, and workflows are the key to accelerating business transformation.

The agility, iterative approach, and reactive nature of DevOps took the place of the endless preparatory and super conservative planning for even the smallest change typically common in older IT environments. However, the extremely dynamic nature of modern application stacks and deployments has created a new set of problems.

In this session you will learn:
- Limitations of DevOps for modern systems from the lack of visibility in elastic infrastructures to the difficulty in finding the root cause of service disruption
- Capabilities of Artificial Intelligence to uncover new patterns in operations undetected by traditional tools
- The value of AIOps to identify the root cause and deliver actionable automation for modern applications

2021 brings great change and great opportunity. As organizations power up both their technology and their people, in many cases as a direct result of pandemic pivots, ITSM must match these choices by powering up our collaboration, cross-team communication, and organizational support from all levels - end-user to the boardroom.

In this talk I want to focus on a specific area of ITSM that is particularly affected by this rapid acceleration of technology: end-user security breaches. Accelerated adoption of technology increases opportunity for cyber-criminals to slip past our defences. Accelerating technology, without accelerating Digital Transformation, is a recipe for social engineering disaster.

To combat this, let’s re-engineer ourselves, as ITSM, to team up with our end-users and put a wrench in the social engineering tactics of cyber criminals by bringing together the powerhouse resources of the agile, collaborative culture of DevOps (Development and Operations), and the process and control of ITSM (Information Technology Service Management).

Three key pieces: First, the ITSM team: effective, innovative ITSM starts with a strong, unified, IT team working within a DevOps inspired ethos of agile communication and collaboration.
Next, CSuite buy-in of the budget, technology, and training. The brass tacks of business is profit and a solid ITSM framework can optimally communicate budget, analytics, and ROI.
Third, empower the end-user. Educate, support, and listen.

Takeaways
⁃ Effective ITSM starts with your IT team - Create a strong, unified, team working within a culture of communication and collaboration.
⁃ CSuite buy-in: A solid ITSM framework can to the optimal budget, analytics, and ROI.
⁃ Empower the end user - accelerated adoption of technology leaves wide gaps for cybercrime to slip past our defenses. Educate, support, and listen.

Jill Mead and Erich Selvig are not foreign to the traditional ITSM stigma. Jill, winning the most painful process award in a Fortune 50 technology organization. Erich, the owner of a product platform where the engineering community created the infamous burning dumpster fire emoji in its honor. Jill and Erich share practical advice on how to align your ITSM organization with DevOps.

The security function in most development environments is broken. With engineers focused on features and devops allowing them to move rapidly and self-provision around their own hurdles, it’s impossible for reactive, traditional security tools to keep up with an ever changing production environment. Even with a security engineer within the team, the chance of catching every bad-default in Terraform, or hidden * in a wide-open IAM policy is next to impossible with the ever growing suite of cloud services. In this talk, we’ll show how to, with very little effort, shift security left into code, enabling automated scanning and highlighting of security risks at build time, with helpful remediation advice for all. Knowing is the first step to improving, and automation makes knowing easy. You bring your DevOps pipeline, we’ll show you how.

As DevOps takes root at organizations, the day-to-day practices in IT change in ways that are foreign to many auditors. This talk discusses how and why these new practices can potentially improve compliance and accelerate audit practices.

Why do you want to combine DevOps with your IT Service Management? What is it that you want to achieve?

Explore briefly what are the definitions of some key terms like: DevOps; End User Computing; Application Lifecycle management; Agile; Continuous improvement: Continuous Development. How much do you care about the specifics, versus the general principles, of each? How you might want to use such terms / methods in different ways to achieve your objectives.

With budget pressures increasing and the pace of digital change accelerating, the drive to implement new solutions quickly is growing. Maximising skills and productivity is vital and growing staff confidence and digital dexterity is key to achieving that.

To effectively introduce new systems and technologies, we need to engage with and harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of frontline staff, IT specialist staff and partners to implement digital change effectively.

In this webinar we will explore a number of ways to help develop your best approach to strengthen your ITSM offering:
-How your size and the way you operate determines:
-How you adopt and adapt different methodologies.
-How different skillsets and teams can be combined to better effect.
-How you engage (or ignore) your end-users in those embryonic systems early lifecycle stages.
What you might be trying to achieve:
-Faster development times
-Better engagement with change
-Delivering quicker productivity changes post-implementation
-Not building issues (more “technical debt”) for the future…

With adoption of Cloud, Digital and Data growing at exponential rates, the need for mature digital operational practices continues to be a key challenge for organisations. With the growing emergence of techniques such as SRE, FinOps, GitOps, MLOps and the expectation for teams to deliver against DevOps and Agile practices, organisations need to be able pull all of these together into a cohesive framework to deliver against their digital transformation goals.

Over the past 6 years, Contino has been working with the world’s leading brands to transform their Operations and ITSM functions to move towards a modern operational approach, combining the rigour and discipline of ITSM with the proven engineering principles of Cloud & DevOps.

Join us on this webinar to learn more about:

-What do the ITSM processes and controls translate to in a cloud-first or cloud-native environment?
-How do techniques such as SRE, FinOps, GitOps, MLOps fit into your Digital Operations Framework Cloud Operations playbook?
-How to move towards a DevOps & Agile operating model whilst still adhering to controls and regulatory requirements?
-How to federate operational responsibilities to engineering teams by adopting modern team topologies, whilst still maintaining operational rigour within your organisation?
-What role do SLIs and SLOs play in your operational metrics?
-How to get started and build your own Digital Operations playbook.

Reporting only at the technical level in Information Technology only impedes ITSM success. The goal is to drive business performance, growth, and sustainability through technology. To begin, you need to understand the current ITSM environment that manages the technology performance. Once this is understood, set the intentions to mature business performance through the use of metrics. In this webinar, I'll cover ITSM metrics and the essential business maturity metrics that provide a well rounded outlet to measure ITSM and its impact or influence to business performance.

- IT as a strategic business unit
- Business Maturity metrics provide the business perspective
- Maturity Metrics bundle for ITSM and business performance

Requiring non-security specialists to describe their posture and informing the management hierarchies on our current security posture is difficult. The language is foreign and does not lend itself to exactness. The eternal question is “Are we secure? The expected answer then cannot be “It depends…”, but rather an aggregated statement, very close to a single “Yes” or “No”.

In case of a negative response, it is also expected to hear of the gaps and the plans to fill them to become secure again.

To accomplish this aggregated statement, a traditional assurance cycle of up to a year is too slow. The product owners need to have security activities in their backlog, they need to know when circumstances change to be able to address them based on risk. The management hierarchy needs to be informed with the current security posture and what implications that brings.

The road to prevent breaches is paved with measurements, a quick feed-back loop and AI assisted decision making. All meant to push security decisions out in the organization.

Here one could add the analogy of driving a car, where the driver, or senior manager, has to take decisions based on situational awareness and information provided by the car. The driver does not need to know the exact oil pressure or the cooling temperature, but rather if it has reached a hazardous level. The driver cannot base decisions on oil pressure solely by dipping the stick before starting the journey, which would be equivalent to classic compliance.

To prevent breaches senior management need to know that circumstances have changed, when they change, and ultimately that they are about to change.

In this webinar you will be inspired by a Proof of Concept and an idea of how to implement and extend it.

The metrics that mattered in March 2020 may not be the metrics that matter in May 2021. With the pandemic forcing Digital Transformation initiatives to accelerate at a previously unrecognizable pace, we’re bringing together ITSM experts to explore and debate the essential metrics that ITSM and business leaders value.

From why it’s crucial to approach metrics with discipline and excitement to the best ways to measure success, we’ll be discussing :

-Which metrics align to business outcomes, and why they’re of utmost importance
-Which metrics directly align to revenue and should be focused on
-Which perspectives are important when forming your ESM metrics strategy
-Why metrics should be a priority, not an afterthought for ITSM leaders
-And more

Panelists:
Julia Bell, IT Security Manager, Technology Integration Services (TIS) at Haslam College of Business
Evan Carlson, Chief Revenue Officer at EasyVista
Andy Bennett, Vice President of Technology, CISO at Apollo-Is

Service management frameworks all tell us of the importance of service value. But how do we measure that value? And how do we use those measurements to manage our services? In this presentation, we look at service value in the context of service systems. A typology of service values is described. We recommend metrics for measuring each type of service value. Finally, we look at who uses those measurements and how they contribute to managing services.

Stuck with manual and repetitive IT Service Management processes from 15 years ago? Are your business partners complaining that the velocity of IT change is too slow? Is your user experience with IT services below par?

In the age of digital disruption and new delivery methodologies such as Agile, DevSecOps, CI/CD, and the cloud, IT service management practices must evolve to support the demands of the business and advancements in technology.

Luckily, due to advanced capabilities in market leading ITSM platforms and refreshed service management frameworks such as ITIL 4, companies are able to overcome common service management challenges of the past. Join us for conversation as we share real world examples of how organizations, at enterprise scale, can uplift their IT delivery capabilities in a significant and rapid way through the use of automation.

With the consumerization of enterprise IT, employees are expecting the same level of service excellence from IT service management (ITSM) solutions. Users expect enterprise services to be delivered instantly, in the device and channel of their preference, with a high degree of personalization and without having to talk to someone. Leading enterprises are now transforming toward ITSM+ by embracing cognitive AI, Robotic Process Automation and Conversational Experience, which promise to boost productivity while using fewer resources, achieving greater cost savings and delivering an engaging customer experience for enhanced satisfaction.

In this talk, we will start by drawing the Service Desk Journey, from Help Desk to Today's Segregated Service Desk, highlighting business and operational challenges affecting Employees, Customers and Service Desk Service Agents. We will then introduce the new paradigm shift of ITSM+, and present in great details the a novel five-layer reference architecture. We will walk the audience through each of the comprising layers and conclude with how to get started in this disruptive digital transformation.

Most organizations engaged in transformation today are moving from left to right in digitally-driven maturity models. The objectives are well known: increase agility, boost productivity, and provide seamless digital experiences for consumers.
Architects play a pivotal role as the curators of this transformation. In this session, Asanka will share his experience on how architects can contribute and introduce a framework to follow on refactoring enterprises.

Fueled by extreme connectedness, data explosions, cloud computing, and the rise of AI and the democratization of AIOps, AI and cognitive bot automation has becoming the most integral part of any organization’s Digital Transformation (DX) strategy. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has also permeated most organizational and social environments to become an engine for innovation and a driving force in just about all enterprises. However, with RPA, it takes more than just an IT or DX strategy to deploy a digital workforce to automate or utilize cognitive bots to improve the user experience and business insights. This session addresses how Enterprise RPA is all about Botifying the “BOT”, Business, Organization, and Technology to provide insights only humans were capable of doing up to this point or numberX human productivity and performance i.e. 10x more. This session also shares insights and advice on how RP4A, not just RPA would deliver on the advantage of freeing humans to focus on tasks that do require emotional intelligence, consciousness reasoning, ethical judging, and the human factor interactions with customers, rather than performing repetitive and boring tasks.