Thanks to my good friends at eG Innovations, I attended the recent itSMFusa FUSION 300 conference, so I thought I’d spew a few words about what I thought about the event. (Spew being the operative word here, as I left the event with a nasty stomach flue.)
The highlight of the
conference for me (by far) was listening to Erin Gruwell talk about the Freedom
Writers. While I’ve not had to deal with Crypts and Bloods in any of my classes
so far, there have been students who really had no interest in what I had to
say...
All of us in the ‘ITIL community’ would do well to follow Erin’s philosophy (see below)…but let’s get back to the itSMF show.
[By fostering an educational philosophy that valued and promoted diversity, she transformed her students' lives.]
The event was well organized, had plenty of content, and provided an excellent opportunity to network; but I left with kind of an empty feeling, and I don’t think it was just from some bad barbeque.
The attendees were rigidly scheduled; you could either
attend a breakout session or a vendor exhibit but only when permitted by the
event organizers. I (and others) felt like this was not providing customers
with the flexibility to set their own agenda and certainly minimized the time
for any extensive dialog.
The ‘race’ theme was fun, but was focused on getting people in front of as many booths as possible, collecting stickers to ‘win’ and gain entry to a drawing for prizes. So we had not only the usual trinket hunters but sticker seekers too.
But what bothered me the most was standing in a booth and trying to explain the value of “data flow and dependency based event correlation” in ITSM implementations to hordes of trinket hunters and sticker seekers. Those that seemed to have a real need were mostly overloaded by the constant flow (spews) of information coming from speakers, vendors and consultants (like me) to have any patience left for this kind of conversation.
Even more worrisome,
according to a Simmons
Market Research Bureau study, 91% of respondents ranked the trade show as
"extremely useful" as a source for product purchasing information.
This was higher than any other source, including on-site visits from reps.
But of course making your decision of ITSM tools based entirely on a demo at a trade show is a lot like buying a car without a test drive. Most people will want to validate the claims made in the booth by that man behind the curtain (right?).
So, if you want to SEE and UNDERSTAND HOW a product such as eG Innovations “can tell you that a backup running on a VM guest is choking up the disk on the host, slowing down other guests…” then for god’s sake leverage eG’s SaaS model and FIND OUT.
The eG product (I have not seen others) can also correlate issues across services as well as across a Virtual Machine; I’m just not at all sure the folks we talked to understood (or cared).
Products like these are likely to do much more for customers than five-year visions of ITSM nirvana and “out-of-the-box ITIL”.
If the product works, let me see it and don’t tell me “it’s in the next release” or, “it’s part of our ITSM vision”. I want you to show me real functionality NOW, and why it helps my ITSM objectives.
From a consulting perspective, it would have been nice to see more from other best practice disciplines such as CobiT, ISO (not just ISO 20K), PMI/PRINCE2, BPM and others.
While I understand the focus was on ITIL/ITSM, it should be increasingly apparent that unless ITIL guidance is increasingly integrated with other disciplines it’s likely to sit on a shelf.
1) As a supplier, the traditional zombie-like hordes we see at most trade shows just leave me dazed and confused.
2) As a customer, I’d like more direct comparisons, especially between the big gorillas and the ‘little guys’. The traditional pitches give me a headache.
3) As a consultant, I’d like more breadth of coverage on how ITSM integrates with other disciplines. A 3 day (2 ½) dose of ITIL makes my head spin.
So while I'm being critical of the show --- (it was beneficial and both my client and eG Innovations felt it was worthwhile) --- I left feeling a bit sick. If you missed the itSMFusa show this year, get the slides off the web and be glad you did not eat the barbeque.
Better luck next year.