The Top 10 Most Important ITSM Events Of 2013?

[stephenmann]

As 2014 starts, and we continue to see the annual influx of enterprise IT prediction lists, it's worth looking back on last year to remind ourselves of some of the important "events" of 2013.

There is nothing scientific applied here, just me sitting at my PC trying to capture what I personally remember from 2013. They are quite literally the first 10 important things I could think of, listed in chronological order — but for me this is indicative of them meaning something:

1. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
2. Knowledge13 ®
3. Plus! The Standard+Case Approach
4. AXELOS rebooting ITIL, the IT service management (ITSM) best practice framework
5. The Gartner ITSSM Magic Quadrant
6. SM Congress
7. The itSMF USA and Forrester's annual ITSM Survey
8. The ServiceNow Dublin release
9. The itSMF UK's "Big 4"
10. The ITSM Review's growth

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

2013 started with the release of an IT book that's actually enjoyable to read — it really is a novel about IT. The Phoenix Project was released in January and continues to be recommended by its readers to other IT professionals.

In many ways it's the public airing of enterprise IT's dirty laundry along with some great advice for improvement. The Phoenix Project might seem far-fetched if you don't work in IT but for most IT professionals I imagine it will offer many OMG and light-bulb moments.

Knowledge13

The ServiceNow annual customer conference continues to grow — in May 2013 4000 IT professional descended upon Las Vegas to talk ITSM, cloud, automation, ServiceNow, and more. Up from 2000 attendees is 2012 it was one of the largest ITSM events of 2013 and, importantly, over 90% of presentations were delivered by customers.

If you want more stats then please read my Make Attending Knowledge14 Your Professional New Year Resolution blog. Knowledge14 will be even bigger and better, our customers will make it so.

Plus! The Standard+Case Approach

In May, Rob England released yet another book — Plus! The Standard+Case Approach. This time Rob tackles the issue of IT organizations being bound to ITIL-espoused incident management and other responder best practice and the fact that they have focused too much on process efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.

Reading Plus! does at least two things for the reader: it allows them to see the need for something more than the standard one-size-fits-all approach to incident management; along with providing much-needed practical advice on how to change the status quo. Along with Ale Roos Service Desk 2.0, Plus! should be seen as a wake-up call to process-bound service desks.

AXELOS rebooting ITIL, the IT service management (ITSM) best practice framework

Although the joint venture was announced in April, change didn't start to appear until July 2013 with some initial "Future of ITIL" workshops in London — more information can be found here. In the second half of the year, AXELOS continued to listen to its ITIL-ecosystem stakeholders and, in December, delivered a document called "Product Development Road Map Priorities."

It's not all been plain sailing for AXELOS though. The increase in the royalties charged to Exam Institutes has been passed on to Accredited Training Organizations (ATOs) and then one assumes onto exam-sitting customers in 2014. One of the largest global ATOs, Pink Elephant, wrote this open letter to customers.

The 2013 Gartner ITSSM Magic Quadrant

The Gartner ITSSM (IT Service Support Management) MQ emerged from the ashes of the discontinued Gartner Service Desk MQ in 2012. This 2013 update was a chance to see if any vendors had made it to the Leaders or Visionaries quadrants but alas none had.

For customers the ITSSM MQ, or other analyst firm reports of a similar nature, continues to be a crucial aide to quickly understanding the ITSM tool market landscape. For some customers it is the long list from which their RFP short list is created.

SM Congress

While everyone will have their own views on the inaugural Service Management Congress one has to admire the chutzpah of Charles Araujo and the itSMF USA. Standing tall to declare that the ITSM industry (i.e. its members and customers) is at best "off the yellow brick road" and at worst "broken," the itSMF USA funded and facilitated the convening of a small number of ITSM industry notables, pundits, prognosticators, and futurists to help imagine a new future for ITSM.

It was in many ways another plea to the enterprise IT status quo to not only do things differently but to also think differently about its employees, its services (and their outcomes), and its customers and consumers. Along with The Phoenix Project, Plus!, the efforts of AXELOS, and the later-mentioned itSMF UK Big 4 hopefully it will be part of a growing movement to improve the ITSM industry.

The itSMF USA and Forrester's annual ITSM Survey

Presented at the joint itSMF USA and HDI FUSION13 event in Nashville in October 2013, the latest itSMF USA and Forrester ITSM industry survey delivered a varied mix of statistics. I believe the formal report has still to be published but Courtney Bartlett's Forrester blog outlines some of the highlights.

Two important results, mentioned in the blog, are that:

• Less are planning, and more are doing, a service catalog
• 2013 was the breakout year for SaaS (in terms of ITSM tools).

ITSM tools now have to deliver so much more on the back of the "Consumerization of IT."

The ServiceNow Dublin release

Along with the Knowledge13 bullet you might see this as yet another ServiceNow plug. But if you read the Dublin release blog you will hopefully see where I am coming from. It's about helping the IT organization beyond the traditional ITSM process workflow and automation.

So not only did the Dublin release deliver new ITSM- and shared-services-enabling capabilities it also added those that help make the IT organization more relevant and valuable to their enterprise peers. I'm referring in particular to the custom app creation and mobility enhancements such that new or changed application are easily consumable throughout the enterprise:

• All applications are instantly mobile — whether ServiceNow apps or bespoke apps created on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform by customers and partners — there is nothing additional to design, build, and configure or to purchase to make apps mobile
• As service catalogs continue to play a more important role in IT service delivery and management, ServiceNow App Creator now delivers one-click publishing to the service catalog.

Again it is a response to the "Consumerization of IT" and increased customer and consumer expectations over IT service delivery and speed of change.

The itSMF UK's "Big 4"

The itSMF UK used its annual conference and social media channels to create a list of four hot topics for members to tackle in 2014. Thankfully they are pretty grounded in enterprise IT reality:

• Back to basics — getting the ITSM basics right
• Skills — hopefully the much-needed focus on the first part of "people, process, and technology"
• Managing complexity — with a big nod to multi-sourcing and SIAM)
• ITSM and Agile.

The official itSMF UK Big 4 Agenda page is here if you want to read more. And it will be interesting to watch this evolve, along with other industry initiatives, in 2014.

The ITSM Review's growth

There is a continued thirst and need for industry knowledge and good practice. Not only on the available ITSM tools, and their differentiators, but also on the experiences and successes of others. The growth of the ITSM Review in terms of both content volume and readership numbers is testament to this.

Somewhat uniquely, the ITSM Review's funding model allows its content to be freely available to all and therefore the ITSM Review has been able to grow readership 210% on 2012. This ITSM Review blog details more interesting readership statistics including the most popular search terms.

That's my ten. But this is just a quickly written blog so I'm sure there are many other things that I should have included. I can't help think that I should have mentioned the continued rise of some global itSMF chapters such as itSMF Norway and itSMF Estonia with their successful annual conferences and itSMF India's first conference.

What did I miss in your opinion?