ITSM Weekly the Podcast (Week29) - Guest Speaker:Matt Blair & Taj Peeran

For the next gen of IT professionals the business landscape is a theory not a law.  With so much dynamics in the underlying operations of marketing, sales, manufacturing, IT is going to be challenged to bring a new game to the table.  Students need to be Business Students with Technology skills.  Product development and innovation is going to be a the mainstay of the engineering folks.   The role of the IT professional will be to manage the "pure sciences" capability, including intellectual property into a monetized outcome of technology (applied science).  Creating and protecting value models based on business benefits driven by technology will be no easy task.  The CIO of the future will have to have deep and diverse skills, if role exists at all.

Listen in to this weeks podcast as we talk to Matt Blair & Taj Peeran 2 students working to get their Masters in Information Services (MSIS).
Show notes here: http://www.servicesphere.com/blog/2010/8/22/itsm-weekly-the-podcast-episode-29.html

ITSM Weekly The Podcast (Episode 29) from ServiceSphere on Vimeo.

Dancing as Fast as We Can, Utility, Warranty and the “I” in team. 

What happens when a CIO, a Service Desk Manager and an Industry Junkie Chat Weekly?!

Your Hosts:  Chris Dancy, Matthew Hooper and Matt Beran (twitter #ITSMWP)

REAL LIFE STUDENTS OF ITSM!

Special Guest:  Matthew Blair - Matt Blair is the President of the MSIS Association - a networking, personal development and community service organization that runs a parallel with the Masters in Information Systems (MSIS) program in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.  He writes about current IT issues in his blog,MattMinute, and also has intern experience in audit, project management and process refinement.  He holds a Bachelors in Finance and Accounting and will be graduating with a Masters in Information Systems in May 2011.  He can be reached via LinkedIn or e-mail at mablair@indiana.edu.

Special Guest:  Taj Peeran is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Information Systems at Kelley School of Business, and at the moment interning at Mead Johnson, Evansville for the Global PMO Group. With an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and a keen interest in technology and software development, he worked for Wipro Technologies for 4 years, where he focused on developing and architecting solutions on the J2ee platform. On the MSIS program he says - 'The program has an excellent blend of technology and business subjects. The focus of the program is to empower its students to understand the different aspects of managing and governing IT'. He can be reached via LinkedIn or email: apeeran@indiana.edu

Series:  ITSM and Higher Education

Submit Questions:  Anonymously or Email or Call In: (765) 236-6383 or Twitter Questions/Comments #ITSMWP

Sponsor:  Cherwell Software 

Sponsor Special: Higher Education and ITSM Software

Episode 29 Topics:

• Black Decker World Headquarters
• College Internships
• George Spaulding of Pink Elephant has a Question, Tools from 2005, what will tools in 2015 look like?
• ASL
• Microsoft Office Live
• Sky Drive
• Yahtzee (3 Matts one podcast)
• Mobile Apps or WAP?
• Google Apps Marketplace
• Utility and Warranty
• Chomp (Yelp for Applications)
• TuCows
• GoDaddy Customer Service
• Thursday nights, call someone for work
• What didn’t college prepare you for?
• Brown Nosing
• It pays well when the IT Bar is set low
• CMMI
• Reactivity is going to get worse
• Building a Wall for a Flood that Already Happened
• Online Privacy
• World Wide Web – ARAPNET
• Microsoft BOB
• Google, Microsoft and Apple (in one word)

Why are we still fighting fires?

"We have spent so much money on monitoring tools and consulting, why are we still fighting fires?" I heard this from a recent prospect. The simple answer is because we live in a complex and high demand world. As IT proffesionals we are trying to do a lot with a little; little training, little vision, little strategy, little focus. Organizational process alone is not going to cut it. If we want to fight fires, then we have to campaign like Smokey the Bear. "Only you can prevent forest fires!" was his motto. What is yours?

How about these? "Only you can prevent outages from unplanned changes!"- By implementing some more rigourous controls around change and release management.
"Only you can prevent unnecessary downtime by distracting priorities!" - By implementing better incident management procudures, you could avoid the "SWOT" call mentality that takes the engineers attention off of restoring the service and diverts it into CYO for mangaement.
"Only you can prevent business impact from IT service failure!" - By properly planning and validating your infrastrcuture through capacity and load testing, infratstucure validation for fail-over and applicaiton profiling, you can ensure your build and release managment processes are catching issues before your users do.

Why are you still fighting fires? Probably because your processes are like disconnected piles of twigs and your culture is overly reactive.