ITSM Weekly the Podcast (Week23) -Women in Tech Series Guest Speaker: Lisa Rowe & Neil Thomas

There is no doubt that IT has been a male dominitated industry.  This month we focus our attention on females who have made a real impact to the IT industry, both through their place within volunteer organizations, as well as within the corporate scene.

To kick off the series we have invited Lisa Rowe on our show.  You'll love Lisa's frank discussion of the "gender debate", and take away some great tips about career development.

Our other special guest is Neil Thomas, who will be heading up the ITSM Weekly the Podcast UK version.

Great show notes are here as always: Plus links to our sponsor of the Women in Technology series Hornbill
http://www.servicesphere.com/blog/2010/7/12/itsm-weekly-the-podcast-week-23.html


ITSM Weekly The Podcast (Week 23) from ServiceSphere on Vimeo.

Show Hosts:
Christopher Dancy
Matt Beran
Matthew Hooper

Submit Questions:  Anonymously or Email or Call In: (765) 236-6383

Week 23 Topics:  

• Martha’s Vineyard
• itSMF USA, Connect Learn Grow Podcast
• Sustainability SIG
• 100 degrees Celsius
• Jeffrey Brooks (I was asked just to randomly insert this)
• Estrogen
• Women in Technology
• SIM Women
• Are American Less Evolved “Professionally” than Europeans
• BJ (Baby Jesus)
• Women's Suffrage
• Woman in the Workforce
• Beran’s Women
• Allan Pease and Allan Pease at Pink Elephant 2010
• Johnny Weir
• Steven Mann
• ITSM Weekly UK
• EMEA
• Hooper and Colleague Driving
• Lisa on Twitter
• Neil Twitter
• The Ego Tweet Profile
• Service Desk Managers from Antarctica
• South American Help desk
• Benjamin Button
• Leadership Tweets
• Brokeback ITSM (Levels of Man Crush)
• Rhettfulence The Tweet
• ITSM Tool Vendors and Marketing Spin
• Rhett Glauser of Service-Now
• ITMM IT Marketing Management
• HP’s 48 Upper Social Network
• ITSM Vendors (Training, Software, Consulting) (RT’s of QUALITY from ITSM)
• ITSM Vendors (Training, Software, Consulting) (SPAM and CONTENT)
• Good Vendors ITSM Vendors on Twitter-
• Cherwell Software
• Numara Software
• Who’s your DADDY!
• ICCM Solutions
• VIVIT HP Community
• The Digital Fuel Twitter
• NSFW VIDEO (iPhone 4 Video)
• HDI Presentation on NEW MEDIA Marketing
• Service-Now Facebook
• The Future of your Desktop (Future-vision from ServiceSphere)
• KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support)

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.