Configuration Management and the Cloud

Many organizations today are focused on making the annual planning process more strategic. There is an increased understanding that the portfolio of projects has to be managed against organizational goals and objectives. That can mean perfectly good projects must stop or change because they no longer align with what the organization needs to achieve. Simultaneously, organizations are driving themselves to become more flexible and adaptable, further driving change into projects. Are these two concepts creating a harmony among executives and execution teams, or are they causing confusion and challenges?

The recent research report Top Down Planning and Bottom Up Execution – Harmony or Discord? reveals some surprising results. Join the author of the report, Andy Jordan, as he discusses the findings and offers recommendations to ensure your projects stay aligned with strategic objectives. Topics will include:

• Open communication around planning
• Importance of a formal portfolio
• Frequency of planning cycles
• The role of Agile in planning
• Importance of PPM maturity level

David Werner from CA Technologies will join Andy for the live presentation and Q&A from the audience. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the report.

Nearly all business transformations today are technology-dependent and focus on breaking traditional business silos. CIOs are in a unique position to exploit their knowledge of both business and technology to influence or even drive the direction of the transformation. Join this session featuring guest speaker Marc Cecere of Forrester Research to unveil the different types of roles CIOs play in business transformation. Determine which role you can play as Leader, Diplomat, Influencer, and Tactician to achieve success.

Join us for a discussion between Claus Moldt, former Global CIO at SalesForce.com, and David Roth, CEO of AppFirst. Learn best practices from two of the world’s leading organizations on how they’ve achieved web-scale IT.

During this webinar, we’ll explore:
- How the right breadth and granularity of metrics is required to successfully achieve and manage web-scale, and transform IT to a Service
- Best practices established at companies like SalesForce.com and eBay
- Strategies for sizing environments when migrating to virtual or cloud services
- The benefits of an IT as a Service model

One of the more challenging aspects of cloud adoption is identifying if an application is a good fit for cloud, and what cloud is the best. Gravitant has taken their extensive knowledge and developed a wizard-based tool that determines the business value of moving to the cloud, the amount of effort it will take to make the application cloud ready and what type of cloud is the best fit for this particular app. Join us to learn more about the key criteria to consider when assessing an application and how we enable IT to assist the business in this determination.

Matt Aaron, Service Desk Supervisor at Independence Blue Cross, has been around a number of different organizations with varying degrees of automation. Currently, his organization does not leverage this technology. During this talk, Matt will discuss the value that automation can bring, what he is currently missing, and the steps that he is taking to implement that automation to bring efficiency, accuracy, and better customer service to his organization.

IT looks to cloud service management to establish greater enterprise cost and operational transparency. Here are 5 essential steps that IT leaders must take to enact a successful cloud service management program that drives razor-sharp business alignment for all line-of-business stakeholders.

HP services for Cloud Service Automation are designed to help customers start and manage their private or hybrid cloud implementations. This session offers an overview of this comprehensive management solution, including HP Cloud Service Automation for heterogeneous clouds. This tool delivers the management and governance capabilities you need for building and operating a successful private cloud.

Join Mike Gare to hear more about how to simplify security configuration management and automation for servers.

IBM intention to share the details of a our exciting solution comprising our best-in-class automation and security configuration management capabilities - all leveraging the BigFix platform. That means a single agent, console and server to provide a comprehensive offering for Data Center Ops and IT Security Professionals - all at the lowest TCO.

Michael Gare is a Product Manager with more than 20 years of experience with global organizations including Computerland, Nortel Networks and IBM. Mike has a broad range of experience in Telecommunications, Mobile technologies, Data Center Automation and Cloud Computing. He has performed a variety of leadership roles, all of which, involved working directly with customers.

He is currently a software product manager in IBM responsible for a number of solutions focused on automating the lifecycle management of servers.

IBM® SmartCloud® Orchestrator makes complex cloud services easy to manage. Built on OpenStack, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator provides common cloud services for multi tier application environments on top of compute, network and storage while supporting multiple hypervisors and multi-vendor platforms. It’s designed to simplify and speed the creation and execution of process workflows that then help shorten deployment and change processes in the cloud. With standardization and automation of cloud services through a flexible orchestration engine, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator (SCO) provides ongoing service lifecycle management and the flexible platform to automate assets that most organizations are already using.

Align your IT services with company goals through an automated process and policy-driven approach. Modern Service Delivery solutions provide you with the tools your IT organisation requires in order to transform from a reactive to a proactive delivery model.

Regardless of the size of your business now you can experience the rewards in operational productivity and increased profitability through IT automation. By implementing a comprehensive and integrated solution with the power, flexibility and scalability to meet your needs today and expand as your business grows, IT automation enables a pro-active approach to improved operations and customer satisfaction. From Software Inventory to Remote Desktop Management, companies can get the tools, technology and resources that make complete IT automation possible.

As an ITSM professional with 35 years of IT experience in various technical, management, training, and consulting roles, Mike has seen hundreds of implementation efforts and he will share some of his experiences with the audience. His goal in this presentation is to drive home the importance of having good Processes in place and asking the right questions.

Some of the things Mike will share include:
- Why it is important to develop a Process first
- Real life examples
- Important questions that need to be asked
- Selecting tools that support your Process
- Don’t forget this is ITSM (don’t get bogged down with the technical stuff)

Today’s support centers spend a lot of money and resources on technology, including phones, service management, remote support, self-help, and knowledge base systems. Unfortunately, most organizations only leverage the most basic functions within these tools, rather than exploiting the wide variety of available features. Often this is due to user learning being left to “tribal knowledge” versus formalized training. In addition, support centers make processes more complicated by not integrating systems in order to provide a seamless path for both customers and support agents. When systems aren’t fully utilized or integrated, agents are forced to jump between multiple tools and processes, slowing down issue resolution and creating inconsistent and poor support experiences for customers.

In this webinar, Sara Lisch, Business Solutions Manager at Bomgar, will outline how organizations can fully utilize integrated web-based technologies to better resolve issues and provide a stellar customer experience. Sara will cover:

- Basic and advanced usage of remote support, chat, knowledge base and ticket management tools
- How to utilize built-in features to enable a consistent support experience and a more streamlined workflow
- Best practices for integrating systems and processes to provide a seamless experience for customers and agents

See the value that modern self-service adds to users, not just IT. Are you intrigued by formless IT, crowdsourcing, Google-esque knowledge, white glove service, or mystical app stores? Join this session to see how modernized self-service techniques are the forefront of automated service management.

IT Service Management is all about on-boarding, delivering and managing “services”. This session will discuss the automation opportunities around a seamless service on-boarding process. Whether you are delivering IT as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, or Software as a Service the process, the ability to reach maturity for regarding demand and supply of services, depends a great deal on the level and quality of automation that aligns closely with processes to deliver service value. We will discuss Service Information Systems, data driven approaches via Configuration Management Systems and automated provisioning or orchestration systems.

IT professionals who are responsible to deliver IT services to the business, protect the enterprise, secure the data, and deliver reliable services are being challenged with the plethora of consumer-grade technologies that are being brought into the workplace, management of Cloud and SaaS solutions, BYO programs, and many other Disruptive Trends. Service Management processes and supporting technologies must evolve, and quickly, to keep pace with the business. In addition, how IT delivers these services to the business must change, impacting the Service Desk and Portals. Join host Andrew Harsch, Director of Portfolio marketing and his guests; Chris Orr, VP Solution Architecture and Ed Vaccaro, VP Product Management at Unisys ITSM, on how to move from the theory of great support to an actionable plan to modernize the service management framework.

Based on the popular How to Implement and Mature Basic ITIL Change Management blog series on ITSMTransition.com, Greg Sanker presents a proven approach to start and mature basic Change Management. He shows how starting small, engaging staff, and maturing in logical steps maximizes the business value of your Change Management program.

About Greg:

Greg Sanker is an ITSM practitioner with endless passion for Excellence. He blogs about Enabling Excellence in IT Service Management at ITSMTransition.com

His expertise includes IT Service Management, Network and IT Operations Management, and Organizational Management of Change.

We all have our preferences when it comes to what type of car we drive. The reality is that a manual and automatic are equally good so it depends on what you are after. The same applies to IT Service Management. In today’s cost-cutting approach to business, it is easy to assume that an ‘automate everything’ approach is the way to go. But can automation be too much? Can customer service suffers? This session will look at considerations that should be accounted for when developing a strategy to automate services.

Good practice frameworks and their consultants tell us that our processes precede the tool. After all: “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

Practitioners know it seldom works this way. We often don’t know what we want. We don’t have enough data to justify a particular process or process improvement. Our requirements are changing constantly, and past preferences are outdated.

The solution is simple: ignore the consultants, and be willing to adapt to the tool. This doesn’t mean caving in to the tool vendor. This presentation will provide plenty of advice on implementing, improving, and getting the most of your tool, based on years of implementing and managing ITSM automation tools for dozens of organizations in every industry with multiple tools.