Magic in Vegas

Your intrepid Chairman was this week in the rather deserted desert city of Las Vegas at IBM' Tivoli's  Pulse service management event.  

Pulse is aimed at a broad range of industries not just the communications and media worlds, so a chance to meet and talk with a wide range of people who are all concerned with delivering business effectiveness through better IT infrastructures.

First a bit on an explanation. The term Service Management, much used this week, is not quite the same animal as the communications and cable industries use it. It's the software use of the word service (i.e. SOA)  - that is to say a business service as provided to an enterprise rather than a communications service.  That said, presentations ranging from such diverse enterprises as Harley-Davidson and the Dutch Police, shared remarkably similar issues to the stuff we in the comms business worry about.

Get rid of the silos! Transform business processes to be closer to the business mission! Transform the IT infrastructure to be more tightly coupled to both the processes and business need! Cut operating costs! Become more agile! Deliver more for less, and so it went on. Another key theme, close to the Forum's heart, was that using industry standards and best practices can significantly cut risks and timescales.

So what were my take-aways? Well it confirmed to me that the transformation needs of the communications industry are not at all unique and that the moves we have been making in shifting the Forum's work to be more in line with cross industry IT standards like ITIL and SOA are absolutely right. And while I think that the communications business could provide some good experiences to other industries, I think we have a lot to learn from others too.

So I'm going to make sure we get some more non-communications industry speakers and thinkers into the Forum's world. I'm glad to say that we have the CTO of Amazon speaking at the upcoming Management World 2009 in Nice as well as several speakers from companies like Reuters and NBC. Whether they can quite match the sartorial pizzazz of the leather clad CTO from Harley Davidson this week I'm not sure !

Anyway, kudos to IBM for a great event which included a very memorable and humorous keynote form basketball player turned entrepreneur *** philanthropist, Magic Johnson, standing in for Michael Phelps who has been in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. Glad to see that despite the global downturn, IBM still knows how to party!