Gartner are predicting that, after a few years of experimentation and early adopter successes, 2013 will be the year of larger scale adoption of Big Data technologies. According to a recent worldwide Gartner survey of IT leaders, 42% of respondents stated they had either invested in Big Data technology, or were planning to do so within a year.

I was at a Best Practice event in London recently when I ran into an old student of mine from ITIL® V2 days. Nick Webb, an ITSM consultant specialising in Telecoms and Defence fields is now an ITIL® expert (of course) but even back then was always one for left field thinking. When I invited him to guest blog for us he said “I’ve got something that might be suitable about cloud services. It’s a bit radical” he uttered. I’ve read it and suggest debating this one with ITSM colleagues after a few beers….!

There I was the other week talking to Mike Culshaw, then of the North West of England NHS but now with Serco. Mike has always been a passionate, level headed, very capable service manager but that day I could sense something different. He seemed to need to get something off his chest. I mentioned our Global Knowledge blog page and asked if he might like to be a guest contributor. That was all the invitation he needed as we started talking about his idea for “Personal Service Level Agreements” (PSLA). He wasn’t sure if it was the ramblings of a madman or the start of a revolution! This is a little like how our conversation went…

I’ve been working on some of the content for the Post Graduate Certificate in IT Service Management. I’ve found this quite different from the other courses I’ve developed in the past. Up to this point I’ve developed classroom courses, workshops or e-learning, mostly based on the official ITIL® curriculum. The modules I’ve worked on are probably more similar to the eLearning development than classroom but the academic aspect has added additional layers.

Those of us who have been around IT for a number of years have all probably had the misfortune and felt the frustration of working in an organisation where silos have been an all too prominent part of daily life. Networks, Tech Support, Service Desk, Desk Top, etc. where reciprocal operation was just blaming each other and a related management system, a post-it not stuck on your screen. Common goals? Never!

The morning after the itSMF UK Awards Dinner is possibly not the best time to schedule the session that was most likely to pique attendees’ interest.

But Aale Roos’ presentation on Unlearning ITIL® was one that many wanted to hear, even if the initial slides were more about the well-known inaccuracies between ITIL® v3 and the 2011 editions.

2012 marked the completion of my first year with Global Knowledge after I joined in June 2011. In that time both myself and the rest of the ITIL® team members were hard (!) at work completing the writing, updating (and generally making a nuisance of ourselves with Martin Burt and the printers) the ITIL® courses. For the uninitiated that’s one Foundation, 5 Lifecycles, 4 Capabilities and Managing Across the Lifecycle.

I believe the one key quality you need to succeed in a service management role is passion; Passion for life, for the role, for service and developing your or other organisations’ cultures. Here’s a very personal view of how passion drives me to reach my service management Nirvana and how I measure I’m there.

So, there I was preparing to meet and greet the new ITIL Foundation class last Monday morning and my heart sank a little.
A quick glance at the course register showed that, yet again, it was an all male class – where are all the ladies? We know you’re out there and that women make excellent service managers but why are our training courses almost female free zones? A quick count up of all the students passing through our accredited ITIL training programme in the last 12 months shows that less than 15% of attendees are female.

Here we are going to take a look at 10 customer service mantras that we should all be wary of if we want to stay in the service provision business and how so much of the common sense that ITIL® espouses can help to deliver them.