Friend of a friend

I have created my foaf.rdf file. Now let's see what happens. The foaf project predicts that I'll have many friends soon...

Tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management at NOMS 2008

Next Friday, April 11th, On the last day of NOMS 2008 in Salvador, Brazil, Jacques Sauve and I will give a tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management (look it up at the conference website under program -> tutorials).

Here's a description of the tutorial. Join in, it should be fun. If successful, we could make a roadshow of it :)

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The importance and difficulty of managing IT resources and services is driving IT organizations to adopt best practices developed over the last few years. The paradigm being used to project IT to the enterprise and its clients, partners and suppliers is the "IT Service". The tutorial examines IT Service Management (ITSM) in its various aspects. The complete lifecycle of a service is covered, including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. Best practices for service management are examined with the help of the very popular IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework in its latest version (v3).
Service providers are increasingly focusing on aligning IT services with business goals and, to that end, Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) is currently in the initial stages of formalization and product offerings. The second part of the tutorial maps the state-of-the-art in this rapidly emerging field. The tutorial will cover definitions of BDIM, challenges posed by IT-business alignment and will provide concrete application examples as well as a description of current BDIM tools available.
The tutorial provides a mix of practical aspects, recent research results and descriptions of real tools concerning ITSM and BDIM.The attendee will understand and appreciate the terms ITSM, ITIL, IT governance, COBIT, and will gain familiarity with important IT processes dealing with service design, service transition and service operation.

IT professionals - yes we can

From a CompTIA survey (see Infoworld article) I found out that: 1) US IT professionals mostly classify themselves as conservatives (at least more conservative than the general US population), and that 2) they'd split their vote equally between Obama and McCain with Clinton distant third. 1) seems surprising. Wonder if that goes for Europe too. This polls was taken at the beginning of March, things might have changed since then.

Vladimir Tosic's book

Vladimir Tosic of NICTA, Australia is editing a book on "Information Technology Aligned with Business Objectives and Values: Integrating Software Engineering, System Management, and Governance". The book will be be published by IGI in 2009. Find a call for chapter at http://www.nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/igi_book. Deadline for chapter submission is March 31st, 2008.

BDIM 2008 program online

The program of the Third IEEE Workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM '08) is online at http://www.businessdrivenitmanagement.org/bdim2008/program. We will have a keynote address by Prof. Mark Burgess of University College of Oslo, Norway title "Business promises", applying promise theory to IT management.
The rest of the program is divided in four sections on Service Design, Risk, trust, security and economic aspects of BDIM, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement.
Workshop registration is open at http://www2.dcc.ufmg.br/eventos/noms2008/.

Many eyes

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg at IBM research have created ManyEyes, a social experiment allowing people to visualize datasets and share their comments with people either on the ManyEyes site or on other forums. Pretty cool.

Questions I'm pondering right now

What are the most pressing problems to do with information management in the ITSM domain?
Why the wikipedia ITSM page describe ITSM as "an enabler of IT Governance (or information management) objectives". This is interesting, and it's totally opposite the way I'm thinking about it right now: information management as an enabler of ITSM.
Can't trace back who might have edited the ITSM page to that effect let alone what they meant. I asked a clarification in the talk page