The Holiday decorations have been taken down, New Year’s resolutions made and broken, Valentine’s Day chocolate wrappers blowing in the wind—and just when you thought things were finally winding down…enter Pink Elephant. The ITSM extravaganza, set for February 19-22, will send IT professionals, near and far, on a pilgrimage to the City of Sin! This year, you’ll find ServiceNow around every corner—with a large exhibit hall presence and full house of customer sessions—we’ll be impossible to miss!

We’ve put together a list of “must see” sessions delivered mostly by ServiceNow customers. Buckle up - you ain’t seen IT like this before:

Monday, February 20, 2012

10:40-11:55 AM Panel Discussion: Social IT (Omnicare, Loyola Marymount University, ServiceNow)

Last year when social IT entered the ITSM discussion, much of the talk was theory. Fast forward a year and today the theory is reality. Join this panel of IT service professionals to hear what social IT means to their service management efforts today.

12:10-1:25 PM Panel Discussion: Conducting The Symphony While Writing The Music – Mapping ITIL To ISO/IEC 20000 (Fermilab, Intellectual Ventures, ServiceNow)

This panel discussion will map ITSM / ITIL good practices to the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. For each ISO 20000 program area, the panelists will outline strategies employed, successes and struggles, lessons learned, and the journey through continuous service and process improvement. ISO/IEC 20000 certification is often a Herculean task, which can only be achieved through diligence and cultural change across the entire IT organization. Truly, being the project manager is a bit like conducting a symphony while you’re still writing the music!

12:10-1:25 PM Mobility, Big Data & Precognition (ServiceNow)

Join ServiceNow’s Chris Dancy on a journey to the future. This session will look at the impact of “big data” on the enterprise, users’ perceptions of support and how support will evolve to eventually support precognitive issues. Soon navigating the streams of this “big data” will become a skill set that every IT professional will need. How will supporting this virtual time travel change the way you interact with risk, governance and the steady footing that IT has had until this point? This session will redefine your feelings of IT, technology and your future.

1:40-2:55 PM IT Unification Against All Odds (Temple-Inland, Emory University, ServiceNow)

Susan Roy of Temple-Inland and Farah Remtulla of Emory University, will discuss the unification of their IT organizations. Facing decentralized services, aging technology and sub-cultures with their own way of doing things, these ITSM leaders transformed service offering and saved money along the way. This session will highlight some of the strategies used and offer advice for starting your own process definition journey.

1:40-2:55 PM Service Catalog—Backwards! (Ohio State University)

You don’t always have to do things by the book! And, Ohio State University has a winning success story to share with you about how their IT organization deviated from the norm to achieve desired results. Tracey will explain why, and how her team started with a list of 230 'things we think we did' and defined/accepted a definition of a 'service', then ran these 'things' through that filter and came up with 44 'services' that made the start to their catalog. She will also provide details about implementation of service catalog management process, including key project activities and lessons.

3:15-4:30 PM Motivation Through Gamifiction (Omnicare)

In May of 2011, Kim and the Omnicare team radically changed their Service Desk operating model. In order to influence cultural changes in the Service Desk, contests were introduced that focused on customer-impacting operating metrics using a form of Social IT. The Service Desk created a role-playing game methodology which provides recognition for their performance while improving overall service levels. This seemingly modest development quickly led to significant improvements in service delivery and call resolution. Join Kim and her team to find out how they are successfully applying game theory (i.e. Gamification) to IT Service Delivery.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

10:40-11:55 AM Discussion Panel: Cloudy With A Chance Of ITSM (ServiceNow, Consulting-Portal, Cherwell Software, Rob England, Northrop Grumman)

Join Troy and his panel of industry experts and IT practitioners for this interactive discussion as they examine all sides of cloud computing, including how ITIL, ITSM and other industry standards fit in.

12:10-1:25 PM The Right Prescription For ITSM Success (Ohio Health)

OhioHealth (Winner of the 2008 Project of the Year Award) returns with an update! OhioHealth understood that to make change stick, they had to change human behavior, too. By using a contemporary model for behavioral change, they tapped into personal, social and structural levels of motivation and ability and achieved great success! In fact, their success has secured them a spot on Computerworld’s prestigious Top 100 Places to Work in IT for 2011.

12:10-1:25 PM Project of the Year Winner…One Year Later (Ohio State University)

Join Brian as he walks you through the year that followed Ohio State University’s award winning ITSM project. Brian will bring you up to speed on OSU’s start-up and establishment of its ITSM program, including assessments, strategies and project timelines. He’ll share with you what worked, what didn’t work and most importantly, lessons learned. Brian will reveal his organization’s culture during and after the project, focusing on the momentum which drove the project and cemented its success.

See you there! Don’t forget to use the hashtag #pink12.