Fusion 2012, jointly hosted by itSMF USA and HDI, is just around the corner. I’m attending along with many others representing Global Knowledge. Overall the agenda looks excellent. However, given other commitments I have to carefully choose which sessions I will attend. Here’s a list of my top four along with why I chose those sessions:

Session 304: Service Portfolio Management: Implementation and Lessons Learned 

Time: Monday, October 29^th, 3:00 PM

Speakers: Lisa Cuppett and Craig Hoven

Why: Based on classroom interaction with one of the speakers, I am familiar with some of what this session is based on. Previously I only knew about this specific service portfolio at a high-level and was always interested in learning more of the behind-the-scenes details. I was happy to see this session on the schedule, as it will connect the dots for me about a specific service portfolio implementation that I am aware of. This would be an excellent session for everyone to attend, as this session will relate good, useful, hands-on information about how to implement the service pipeline and service catalog aspects of a service portfolio.

Session 606: Best Practices in Process Automation and Event Management

Time: Tuesday, October 30^th, 2:45 PM

Speaker: Antonio Rolle

Why: Event management, system automation, and monitoring are areas that I’ve spent much of my career directly involved in establishing, implementing, and improving. My experience in this area tends to be specific to financial services organizations, however, in those environments we typically had to deal with event management challenges ahead of most other industries and organizations. I am interested in this session because it will show me what others are thinking and doing in terms of event management and process automation.

Session 703: Titanic Lessons for IT

Time: Wednesday, October 31^st, 9:00 AM

Speaker: Glenn LeClair

Why: One of the best ways to communicate, learn, and understand service management concepts is through the effective use of analogy. In this session, Glenn promises to use analogy to show how concepts from the service lifecycle apply to something everyone is familiar with: the disaster that struck the Titanic. What’s most interesting about this session to me is that in the description there is recognition that IT operational staff often gets blamed when problems are realized when in fact those problems were actually created much earlier in the lifecycle.

Session 805: Why IT Security Depends on Service Management

Time: Wednesday, October 31^st, 10:15 AM

Speaker: Craig Klingler

Why: Security is an important topic that affects every organization. Sadly, ITIL has, over the years, given less than useful treatment to the topic of security, and ITIL 2011 is best described as immature in terms of the guidance it gives around information security. It is good to see a session like this because it tells me that other leaders in the service management field consider security important and that time has been devoted to address this topic. As an industry we need to be more mindful of security, and this session addresses this topic.

While my time is limited at ITSMF Fusion 2012, these are my must-see sessions. See you there!

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