Configuration Management and the Cloud

The help desk has become increasingly important to not only determine problems that might arise within an application but also to determine a customer's level of satisfaction with the application and preferred features and recommendations. As such, the help desk has morphed to include functions that were traditionally outside of the Help Desk role. Such services include Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing. As more and more companies become aware of the wealth of information available throughout the Customer Journey, we will find more valuable data to improve the efficiency, satisfaction, and effectiveness of solving our customer's pain points both today and tomorrow. Why? Because "We Hear for You."

In this presentation you will learn;

1. Emerging communication channels that meet the customer where they are
2. Improvements in ensuring agents are more skilled at addressing customer problems
3. The importance of analytics in honing the customer journey through real-time insights that enable companies to "hear" their concerns
4. How automation can be used to improve efficiency

2020 asked businesses, organizations and IT teams to be agile, proactive and to challenge their modus operandi. It also challenged IT Service Management teams to champion businesses’ digital journeys in a way that no-one could have predicted in December 2019.

In this special end-of-year panel, ITSM experts come together to share ‘stories from the field’ in a year unlike any other, predictions for what 2021 may bring and advice and tips for service management professionals to embrace the coming year with the same dexterity, calmness and leadership they displayed in 2020.

From technologies and tools, to strategies for adopting and embracing cultural shifts, our experts will be sharing use cases and looking at:

- How AIOps and an AI-first approach enabled cutting-edge ITSM teams to survive COVID-19
- How to plan for the future of your ITSM strategy given the acceleration of Digital Transformation initiatives in 2020
- Tips for maintaining a work-life balance when the business depends on you more than ever
- And more

Creating animated videos of your support documents will help to ease the workload on your Service Desk. Videos grab staff attention, make the guides much easier to use, improve user confidence and reduce repeating calls to the IT service desk, freeing up support staff to do more value-adding activities. This should form a key part of any Shift Left strategy.

With budget pressures increasing, headcount is under pressure, maximising productivity is vital and growing staff confidence and digital dexterity is key to achieving that. Service desks are also under ever-increasing pressures, with an ever-growing range of products and services to support, each with a range of capability, from learner to advanced. Convincing end-users to self-learn and self-support is an important aspect of not only improving end-users productivity but also the productivity of the IT
service desk.

In this webinar we will explore:
- Arguments for video-based support guides, and where to focus first.
- Options for resourcing their creation.
- The skills required to create engaging videos.
- The process for creating engaging videos
- Options for delivery of videos to support new technology deployments.
- Engaging staff to encourage use of self-help video guides.

This presentation leverages the presenter's experience working with the major cloud vendors on their respective managed service programmes. This provides a unique insight into the service desk operations and tooling being utilized within a range of leading-edge organisations.

The topics covered are:
- How to manage your workloads with next-gen monitoring & AI: What changes with the deployment of serverless & microservices and what are the impacts of accessing the workloads in a multi-cloud environment through a Cloud Management Portal.
- How automation and DevOps enables: self-service, compliance, security governance, API integration, and implementation of standard processes such as patching.
- Remote working: internally and externally managing customers that are also remote, the skills and tools that enable employees & organisations to provide quality services.
- Security: embedded in design and operations from day zero, real time compliance, granular role-based access, and use of AI to identify anomalies,
- Cloud based working brings a range of new commercial models, covering the purchase, operation, and optimisation of cloud services. This includes the evolution of the service levels agreement.
- Vendor based tools are catching up with the third-party vendors. How do you take advantage of these options that often provide some cost benefits.

The key learning points will be:
- Insight into the adoption of automation within service desk operations.
- Examples of the best practice in the use of next generation monitoring tools and the value created.
- Overview of the leading tools being used to enhance service desk operations
- Where cloud security sits within the service desk operations and why it’s critical to embed security from day one of the design.
- The applications being used to enable successful remote service desk operations in the current pandemic.

In today’s complex organizations, they often have a centralized IT Operations team that works with Data Owners, GRC, and Security teams. The rate of change and the dynamic nature of web applications has outstripped the human capacity to analyze and respond.

These teams use many modern frameworks and methodologies such as Cloud services, NIST, MITRE, OWASP, CIS, DevOps, and PCI; and tools that make it possible to deploy and maintain data integrity and make operations easier. However, these frameworks, methodologies, and tools also cause complexities which makes it difficult to identify issues and hone in on probable root cause before customers are impacted.

In this session, we will be discussing how IT service management, Data Owners, GRC, and Security teams can collaborate better, enhance business continuity and provide resolutions faster.

A marriage brings together two individuals with their own personalities, strengths and flaws. Successful marriages take compromise and commitment to build on the strengths and overcome the flaws.

This presentation describes why many ITIL and DevOps practitioners have been at odds with other, and asks “can and should the two approaches ever be married?” and “If so, how do we make the marriage work?”

The presentation will focus on 4 secrets to compatibility, and gives specific examples of:
• When to use ITIL or DevOps approaches
• How real organizations have used them
• Where combining the two approaches does NOT work

Compatibility Secret #1: The Personality Test
Compatibility Secret #2: The Common Goal
Compatibility Secret #3: Playing to Each Other’s Strengths (and acknowledging flaws)
Compatibility Secret #4: Resolving Conflicts

About David Cannon
David has been at the forefront of helping organizations understand and adjust to major shifts in the technology industry over the past 3 decades.

He is known for crafting industry best practices for Strategy and IT Operations and uses them extensively to help organizations function more effectively and efficiently. He has led consulting practices in Forrester, Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software – focused on IT management and strategy.

David is the co-author of the ITIL 2007 Service Operation book, author of the ITIL 2011 Service Strategy book and lead editor of the ITIL 4 Digital and IT Strategy book. He was awarded two lifetime achievement awards by the itSMF.

Cloud infrastructures require highly-customized solutions for their various system. Migrating “the right way” to the Cloud and managing a Hybrid Cloud environment is harder than industry pundits would lead you to believe. Many end up resorting to band aid solutions and human power that turn out to be costly in the end.

Join Jared Reimer, Founder and CEO of Cascadeo in this session as he discusses workload solution for migration and monitoring. As you’re moving workloads and even once they’re moved -- how can you be sure everything is working properly and adequately monitored? How do you provide consistent operational view of both environments?

Jared Reimer is the Founder and CEO of Cascadeo, a Seattle-based cloud consulting firm with operations in the US and Asia. Cascadeo is uniquely positioned as a leading vendor-neutral, cloud-centric engineering and managed services firm. Areas of focus include large-scale distributed systems, cloud architecture and migration, deployment automation, monitoring systems, and hybrid cloud networking. Jared holds a MS in computer science and engineering from UW, and operated one of the very first ISPs in the Northwest. He resides in Mercer Island, WA with his wife, two dogs,
and three young children. Jared enjoys world travel, camping, cooking, and SCUBA, is a retired
single-engine airplane pilot, a passionate electric vehicle enthusiast, a serial entrepreneur and
an accomplished downhill skier. He served as a senior technical advisor to HBO’s award-
winning “Silicon Valley" series.

It can feel like DevOps and ITSM are from different ends of the universe. However, to achieve ultimate success in either, they must be part of the same world. We will explore how DevOps and ITSM fit together and need each other to achieve true continuous flow that will drive the successful organizations of the future.

In this webinar we will cover:
- Alien Worlds (DevOps, ITSM and Lean)
- Continuous (meaning in DevOps/ITSM worlds)
- Connecting Points (building the bridge for DevOps and ITSM)
- Marrying DevOps/ITSM

The two contrasting worlds of DevOps and IT Service Management appear often to be in conflict and competition with each other. The reality of course is that both are needed for successful service delivery – and they complement each other. There is a need to find ways to work together and use the best parts of each approach in harmony.

In addition, there is much that people from both backgrounds can learn from each other – for ITSM professionals there is much to gain from using modern techniques for delivering work and projects with speed and agility. For DevOps professionals there is much to learn from ITSM’ers about how to manage organisational and people change.

This session lays out some clear practical options for how the two can work together – with practical tips on how to get going.

Daniel Breston will chaperone the couple through their marriage rituals and then act as a counsellor during their wedded bliss to help them overcome the challenges all foresee during their marriage.

Imagine two people want to get married. They are very different in terms of language, culture, things they like to do, the ways they behave, and their friends. Their parents have different thoughts on who their children should marry based on their past experiences.

A dream made in heaven? Bets on how fast the divorce will occur? You read that ISTM underpins DevOps and they should lead a long life together. Their children, they happy couple have discussed this will be called Agile, lean, Kanban, Digital and Metrics. These children will go the best clouds for learning and will benefit from 21st century education. Together they will create an online store full of services and products that the world will cherish.

Of course, it could just end in a ugly divorce and bankruptcy! But as we have just come out of lockdown in the UK, let’s hope there is a happy ending!

To ensure this the family must discover:
• Why Agile misbehaves and how to help Agile become a valued community member
• Why lean is such a tease, but how overtime, becomes the glue that holds the family together
• How Kanban becomes a learned instructor teaching all of their friends (customers, staff, vendor partners) how to help the family create value from their online services
• What Metrics adds as with a quick mind alerts the family on the satisfaction and happiness they have in their family, for their customers and the community
• How the neighbours (stakeholders, product owners, Cxx) feel about the family and discover that actually they can make or break the wedded bliss
• Find out how the evil Regulators and Vendors want to end this marriage and how the family reacts
• See how Digital changes everything making the family ready for the 2021 and beyond

All of the above you will learn in this session.

It’s inevitable that a good service desk attracts traffic. But what happens when the traffic picks up, the
requests come heavy and the time grows shorter for responding effectively? A new approach is
required and innovation must speak to the matter. This session will open up the kinds of challenges and suggest relevantly appropriate responses to make the IT Service desk a more tamed and manageable center of activity --- without having pull your hair out to do it!

We will learn:
1) What makes a good IT service desk effective and desirable?
2) How does it respond to requests with sound and clear management?
3) When does the level of activity warrant sounding the alarm?
4) What innovative range of responses may be considered?
5) How do we keep the IT service desk tamed and timely?

Ninety percent of chatbot projects failed in 2019—yet 100 percent of customers are optimistic about their benefits and are willing to deploy them again in 2020.


In this session, we cover the key reasons for the failure of chatbot projects, such as offering robotic & scripted experiences, lack of AI capabilities, and long time-to-value. With the emergence of true Conversational AI, companies can now take advantage of cutting-edge AI that is far more accessible and can deliver tangible business results from Day One.

Over the last few months, we have seen a dramatic shift on how companies operate. Now, more than ever, due to the Coronavirus outbreak, employees need to be empowered to work from home. Companies must not delay the digital transformation required to become remote-first or remote-enabled. They must leverage the latest AI and Automation models as their building blocks to increase employee productivity while controlling headcount needed for their service desk teams and overall IT operations.
Join this interactive webinar if you are interested in learning about the following topics:
Shifting focus to the employee and having an omnichannel self-service experience that is available 24x7.
Implementing automated agents to resolve employee repetitive service requests without human agent’s involvement.
Using Intelligence Augmentations (IA) to enable service desk agents resolve tickets more expediently.

Configuration Management as a Critical Security Control

This presentation will provide an overview of the key role that Configuration Management plays in a strong cybersecurity posture.
· Key Definitions
· Components of Security-Focused Configuration Management
· Role of Configuration Management in Security Governance
· Critical Security Controls
· Risks & Vulnerabilities Associated with Poor Configuration Management
· Security-Focused Configuration Management Best Practices
· The Use & Value of Tools & Automation
· Benefits of a Security-Focused Configuration Management Approach
· Q&A

Mike Battistella is the President of Solutions3 LLC, an IT Management professional services and training organization focusing on IT Service Management, Cybersecurity, IT Operations Management, and Technical & Soft Skill Training. Solutions3 provides full lifecycle IT Management solutions in the commercial and federal markets. Mike is also sought after to fill the role of fractional CTO and/or advisor to the CIO for small-mid-sized organizations.

Every business is different but there are some common points of failure to avoid when it comes to successful ITSM. There are certainly some difficult technical break points and challenges, but mature IT shops develop the talent, methods, and tools to address technical challenges. The more common points of frustration and failure are the result of misunderstanding and misalignment between the business and IT. We all recognize that IT and the business can end up with different priorities and sometimes they do not seem to be communicating in the same language.

To effectively streamline configuration and change and release management IT will need to develop the ability to align with business to understand what is truly needed for success outcomes. This can involve understanding priorities at the board of directors and senior executive levels as well in addition to the input received from local subject matter experts and power users.

This workshop will address leadership and teaming solutions to common challenges. Participants will learn from case studies and the collective experience of senior managers how to understand the answers to some important ITSM questions, including:

• Who is in charge? And why?
• Is the direction real?
• How complex have you made the solution?
• Who reaches for the check? – How to engage the business economically.
• Are you realizing the full benefits of using a target state architecture and roadmap?
• Who Is setting the pace?
• What are the “The Moments” and how do we deal with them?
• When do we declare victory?

The workshop presenters each have decades of experience in the design, implementation, and maintenance of complex IT solutions for large businesses. They bring a strong complement of IT, Finance, and business expertise. Raising your awareness of the concerns addressed in the workshop will not only help you to be successful in your current role but it will help to prepare you for more senior roles in your career.

In this webinar you will learn:
- Why companies fail to localise products profitably – based on 30 years PLCM deployment in US multinationals
- An overview of the solutions I have deployed in global manufacturing, telecommunications and services business which reduced cost and drove profitability
- Pragmatic process evolution in “normally dysfunctional” business driving client satisfaction AND bottom line profitability
- The benefits of using global standards such TMFORUM, ITIL, LEAN to drive end to end service delivery in multiple verticals
- Pragmatic business transformation steps

About Ian Beckett
Dynamic senior leader in strategic technology management, with more than 30 years experience as a visionary leader at the forefront of international technical product and service delivery for multinational corporations. Demonstrated track record of fostering process excellence across global business units driving innovation, optimising service delivery, minimising waste with resulting positive impact on the bottom line. Strongly market-savvy, with a history of bringing new products into international markets and establishing new business units in targeted regions. Renowned for driving business transformation to position companies in highly competitive markets. Dedicated problem solver able to quickly identify and address business pain points.