The Company
Pimp din Lotus Notes
IT Service Management
Min sosiale hverdag
IT Podium
Blog
Små steg i vardagen
October was a busy event month
October was a busy event month in the Nordic countries. It started September 26/27 with the itSMF Denmark autumn event at the Klampenborg horse racetrack.
Usually, most events take place at a hotel or conference center, so I love when a new place is explored. This conference had about 140 attendees and note – this event was free, you only paid for the evening dinner! itSMFDK had put together a program that included motivation, Kepner-Tregoe, SAM, legal cloud, itSMF in the future and an excellent closing session by Mark Smalley.
A week later I was traveling east to beautiful Helsinki and the itSMF Finland conference "Learning to fly". For those of you who don't know much about Scandinavia, traveling between Norway, Denmark and Sweden is more or less like visiting your cousin, just another dialect. Going to Finland was like going to another continent, and I put that in a most positive context.
The Finnish 2-day event rounded up 350 participants, which was an all-time high, and the conference was pumped with energy. The program included several ITSM "celebrities" such as Howard Kendall, Matthew Burrows, Chris Dancy and Rob Luddy.
Both days had at least one session in English, so the non-Scandinavian speaking could get value out of the conference as well. Finns always throw a great party, so that alone would be a reason for attending.
On October 22 we held the itSMF Sweden 1-day autumn event. This took place just after the itSMF International AGM (annual general meeting). New to this event was that it had two parallel sessions, one in Swedish and one in English.
A number of well-known people spoke or attended and shared their experience. Ivor Macfarlane, Peter Brooks, Colin Rudd, Robert Falkowitz among others.
During these events I made some interesting observations. "ITIL is dead", "itSMF community will vanish", that’s what some people say in our industry, but I can now tell you that it’s certainly not the situation in the Nordic countries. I have never felt more enthusiasm, engagement and openness from the members as I have here. I am sure that our community has made a leap up the maturity stairs and people sincerely do care.
Discussions were very constructive as facts were thrown up on the table and I could notice a difference; people took the time to listen.
There was also a huge shift in the interaction between competitors. Ever been representing a company at an exhibition? Then you'll know that vendors compare and always try to top each other. Every vendor I talked to was very open and willing to share knowledge. Meetings today are not company to company – they are person to person.
We are living in an exciting time where personality and openness becomes the primary asset. The most efficient way of filling your cup of knowledge is to connect and collaborate, working better – together.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank all my wonderful colleagues for their warm and friendly treatment.
Ticket market
One of his major concerns was the ticket integrations to vendors. Their main services were outsourced and were heavily dependent on the availability off the gateways.
He pointed out the challenge that every third year there would be new negotiations and most likely a new vendor would be contracted. This mean that he was forced to setup an integration project to secure that effected services would continue to work.
In the best of times he wished for a single integration that would be consistent (as consistent as integration can be) and that the vendors would pick the tickets that where addressed to them. So just pushing his ticket out and get a resolution within the SLA.
From my experience all customers with outsourced services struggle with the same issues.
A great initiative is http://networkedhelpdesk.org that aims to create a standardized and open API .The vision is that customers can share any ticket in their help desk with any other help desk, regardless of the software being used.
As we are living in a social media era, a lot of knowledge is out there. If I would like some support I could drop my question in Facebook, tweet it or write a question to a proper community. I'm sure that I would get help and sooner or later get a solution to my problem, but I would always be dependent on other people’s helpfulness.
So let’s get to the point of the subject. If there was a place where I could put my question and set a price for solving it and everyone (business and private) could pick it up, resolve it and then cash out the price.
The key thing here is that the customer sets the price and by that gets more attention.
An example could look like:
I'm at a conference and starting a presentation in 20 min. My presentation is stored in drop box and I try downloading it. I discover that my mobile connection is so slow and I’m not able to find the cause. At this moment, solving the issue is of highest priority. I open my ticket market app and write the description of my case and set the price of 1000 Eur.
Bet there is a number of people/organizations that would like to make 1000 Eur. As the reward is high it would drive as a high priority.
All low reward ticket naturally gets longer resolution time, but could still be interesting for them that have low allocation.
Viewing this from a business perspective should offer the possibility to raise the utilization on staff when internal load is low.
I do recognize that enterprises need to buy (because we all know that IT choose things that can be bought) the illusion of guaranteed service. Here is the spot for the ticket broker service. They are the ones that take care of transport and "invest" of support. You could then buy guarantees with a certain vendor and it would be handled by the broker.
This blog post was mostly written from a technical aspect, limiting the workload in a world that keeps on changing....faster and faster.
Country Manager - Symfoni Sverige
Jag är också författare och förläggare och jag brinner för IT och forskning kring den mänskliga hjärnan.
Utifrån det kommer jag att skriva om hur man kan skapa effektivitet för personer och grupper.
