Moving your ITIL Implementation Forward

This afternoon I 'attended' an itSMF e-symposium entitled: 'Moving your ITIL Implementation Forward - what are your next steps?' Before I summarise my thoughts on the whole thing I must say that I didn't think that any of the presentations, or indeed answers to the questions, addressed the question posed. It was really more of an introduction to ITIL and IT Governance than what I interpreted it to be, i.e. a high-level process for planning and implementing ITIL with focus on the first steps of visioning, road-map etc. Admittedly the summaries of the presentations immediately suggested that it was not going to deliver what I hoped, but still I thought it worth attending. So... coffee in hand and Mind Manager at the ready, I listened to the music before the symposium began.

The Interface
The enterprise web-cast platform is provided by Brightcast. Having pre-registered for the event I received a reminder e-mail the night before and it was a simple matter to login with my username and password. As a spectator rather than presenter there was no need for me to dial up to listen, just delivered as you would expect through your PC soundcard. Limited controls during the live symposium as there was no way of pausing when I wanted to nip to the toilet / get a drink. However, there were tabs to make it easy to submit questions (shame you could not view which other questions had already been asked) and download the presentations in PDF format. Finally there was a tab to take the CPD test to get your certificate.

The Presentations

Sharon Taylor - What's going on out there?
This was fundamentally an updated version of the presentation she delivered at the itSMF conference last year. A few points:
- She believes that ITIL v3 will achieve an increase in the measurement of both Business value and ROI.
- Observed that the ITIL was previously geared towards a purely operational audience and now this is broader including CIOs and the wider business.
- Ran through some of the areas that people are picking from v3 for early adoption.
      - Service Portfolio Management
      - Service Catalogue Management
      - ROI Business cases
      - Event and request management
      - Supplier Management
      - Service Measurement
- She has this idea that everyone is actually doing ITIL because v3 is based on v2. Personally I think this is a nice concept but don't believe this to be truly the case in reality.
- As with v2, Sharon stressed the importance of picking and choosing what is needed for your organisation and the benefits of an incremental approach to implementation.
- When asked about the v3 qualifications capability and lifecycle streams she advised that the syllabi are complete and going through checks for consistency between the streams. The sample exams are in pilot as part of QA and there will be a further pilot with accredited training providers, i.e. a way to go and will be some sonths before release.

Check back on Friday for my summary of Malcolm Fry's 'ITIL V3 Essentials and the Role of a CMDB' and Harvey Davison's 'What Should Configuration do for Change?'