itSMF USA On-Line Conference: Expanding Your Toolkit Part I

ITIL emphasizes the alignment of IT services with the business, integrating processes and improving communications. Yet, it doesn’t emphasize the need for a communication plan. Have you considered defining a communication plan for your department?

Creating a communications plan for your IT organization will help define communication efforts so that your message is consistent and the value of your services is clearly articulated. In this session, learn how a communication plan can change your company’s perception of IT, enable you to promote your value, keep you on the same page as your leadership team, and keep your department aligned with the company’s goals.

Participants will learn how to create a communications plan that leverages social media and how to use the communication plan to convince management of the importance of sending a consistent message. You will leave this session with the tools to emulate the best marketing companies in the world, right from your IT shop.

Join hosts Jason Stonehouse and Eddie Vidal as we sit down with President Marc Halcrow from the itSMF (SIG) COBIT group. Learn how SIG COBIT can help your career and what the group has planned for 2015.

Higher Ed IT organizations continue to see accelerated demand and complexity without a correlating increase in resources. As such, many have looked to IT service desk consolidation as a means to enable fewer staff members to yield higher contact volumes, and develop a higher skill set though familiarization of a wider range of contacts. This webinar will discuss tactical and strategic steps to with consideration across people, process and technologies.

Shellina Damji will provide an overview of the Kepner-Tregoe® methodology and discuss the benefits of using a Structured Root Cause Analysis methodology within your Problem Management process.

Mike Malcangio, from ServiceNow, will discuss the integration of Kepner-Tregoe into the ServiceNow Problem Management module.

Speak at Fusion 15? Learn How…from our next guest, Fusion 15 Program Chair, Jill Zimmerman as she shares knowledge, advice and helpful tips to help you become a speaker at Fusion 15.

Is there a future in the IT Service Management Industry? Will Service Management remain relevant in Higher Ed? Join itSMF USA President, Charles Araujo, and HE SIG President, Jeffrey Toaddy, on January 8th as they discuss the future of the IT Service Management industry, Charles' vision for itSMF USA and what it all means for Higher Ed professionals.

IT measurements are meaningless if they don’t provide information to make accurate and timely decisions. Yet many IT organizations produce reams of operational reports that provide tons of information yet still leave everyone blind as to what actions to take or whether IT benefits are truly being realized. This session provides a solid practical approach for closing the loop between what kinds of metrics should be reported on and how IT can leverage results and a program of continual service improvement for effective decision making. As a result of this session, attendees will learn about what kinds of metrics matter most and how these fit into an overall model for making key decisions. In addition, attendees will get access to a simple EXCEL-based metrics model that they can use right away within their own IT organization.

Lisa Kass, 2014 itSMF Member of the Year winner and President of Higher Ed SIG will discuss the latest updates on Higher Ed SIG and share with us her thoughts on winning this years Member of the Year award.

A recap of the hot topics from FUSION 14

In this session, Rob, Christian, and Johann will delve into how the ITSM processes were incorporated into COBIT5. They will share how ITSM and COBIT are complementary and align with one another. They will also dispel any myths with one framework replacing the other.

Rick Joslin, Executive Director of Certification & Training for HDI joins us to discuss Knowledge Management and the power of sharing.

Join Doug Tedder, FSM @dougtedder and Eddie Vidal @eddievidal for our next itSMF USA #intheknow podcast on Tuesday August 19th at 1PM Eastern.

Learn about the recent itSMF BIG meeting and get a behind the scenes look into the future and how itSMF can create and deliver value to our members.

Guests are Kevin Ritter and Marco Osuna

Building a service catalog? Not sure what IT services your learning institution really delivers? Not sure what your IT services really are? Desire a sanity check on your current catalog/portfolio? This session is for you! Learn what IT services are all about and how to define IT support and business facing services. Learn how to package the many IT technologies and functions into consumable packages usable by learning faculty, administrators and students. Gain access to a comprehensive set of service descriptions and resources to get a jump start on your own IT service management initiatives!

Presented by Randy Steinberg, Migration Technologies
Hosted by Eric Dannenberg, Boston University

Is the BRM role strategic, tactical, operational, or some combination of the three? And how do you determine how well you are fulfilling that role?

As part of the BRM team within his organization, Bob took on the task of developing a BRM specific Maturity Assessment, which would take into account BRM responsibilities as documented within his company, as described in industry white papers and articles, and as formally defined within ITIL.

Bob will highlight the process they took to define and categorize the BRM responsibilities, establish maturity levels that reflected realistic measures for progress and milestones, and then evaluate the team’s level of maturity within each area.

Bob offers this as a launching point for discussion within your organization on how to define and measure the role of Business Relationship Management, not to establish a definitive BRM Model that would apply in all situations.

Many organizations and tool providers use their Incident Management process to fulfill service requests. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, a separate work stream and process for Request Fulfillment might be justified to handle high volume, pre-approved, standard, repeatable requests.

This session will discuss the current state of Request Fulfillment at Miami University. In an environment where over 430 applications and systems are supported, a "one size fits most" model was adopted that allowed for standardization of request models so that service requests could be fulfilled correctly the first time.

Updates coming to priSM

Service Integration - The IT Supply Chain

Barclay Rae

To borrow a passage from “The Definitive Guide to IT Service Metrics”, In order for any metric to provide benefit, we must understand our goals and expectations for the metric rooted in the success of the process, service or product we are measuring. Metrics are the source of valuable information for any organization and can provide an abundance of benefits, including:

•Demonstrating organizational maturity
•Driving and changing behavior of the organization and staff
•Discovering opportunities for improvement
•Justification for change and the cost of change