itSMF UK Board elects new Vice Chair

Bracknell, Berks, 12 December 2016

The Board of itSMF UK are pleased to announce the election of Martin Neville to the post of Vice Chair.

Martin has been a service management professional for over 15 years and is passionate about the subject, bringing a customer focus rather than technical perspective to the projects on which he is engaged. A Chartered Accountant and MBA, he was elected to the itSMF UK Board in October 2015 as the representative for Corporate and larger Enterprise members. He is also chair of the Conference Committee, which oversees the running of the Forum’s Annual Conference and Exhibition.

Martin is employed as Principal Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services, and outside of work he even finds time to be a martial arts black belt, a county level fencer and a ‘half decent’ archer.

itSMF UK Chair Rosemary Gurney said, "I'm delighted to welcome Martin Neville to this key role on the Board, and I am confident that his business and organisational change management experience will be a great asset for itSMF UK during a period of significant transformation in the coming months."

7th June 2016

Barclay Rae presents Adrian Chiffi and his team with the PSMF certificate

We do have to increase membership rates from time to time unfortunately, and details of the 2016-17 rates are listed below.

If you are considering membership, remember to sign up or renew before the end of April to take advantage of the old rates!

Prices are exclusive of VAT at 20%

Abid has been on the executive board of AXELOS as chief financial officer since the business was formed in 2013. During this period the company has grown to more than 80 employees and launched several new additions to the AXELOS Global Best Practice portfolio including PRINCE2 Agile™ and RESILIA™ - a portfolio of publications, training and awareness tools aimed at putting employees at the centre of an organization’s cyber resilience strategy.

He said: “It is a privilege to be named the CEO of AXELOS and to be given the opportunity to lead this company on the next stage of its development. Over the past two years we have made significant progress in developing the Global Best Practice portfolio and meeting our core objective of making organizations more effective.”

He added: “2016 is set to be another exciting year for the business. In February we will launch ITIL Practitioner – the new qualification of the world’s most widely adopted service management framework. We will also be further developing our new AXELOS Professional Development Programme, which enables professionals to develop their skills and knowledge, and our RESILIA portfolio, helping organizations improve their ability to prevent and respond to cyber attacks.”

Abid replaces Peter Hepworth, who is moving to a senior role within Capita and will remain on the AXELOS board as chairman.

Peter Hepworth said: “The key thing I have learnt during my time as CEO is that the passion for the Global Best Practice portfolio around the world is as strong as ever. Since forming AXELOS we have listened to the passion of practitioners and adopted our strategy to meet their needs. I welcome Abid to his new role and look forward to seeing the organization continue to grow in 2016 and beyond.”

Opening address from Rosemary Gurney, Chair of ITSMF UK, at ITSM15:

Welcome to the itSMF UK 2015 conference at this year’s new venue, The Sofitel London Heathrow and with their usual attention to detail, our events management team have of course arranged for suitably wintery weather to greet our overseas friends from ITSMF Finland and ITSMF Russia, along with other delegates from Denmark, Iceland, Japan, The Netherlands, Mauritius, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, North America & Canada.

And to those of you who have travelled from all parts of the UK to be here today, welcome to you all.

Be assured though that wherever we are, the same warm welcome awaits you with our usual mix of thought provoking topics presented by speakers drawn from right across our industry. 

Our exhibitors are again here in force with solutions at the leading edge of ITSM and of course no matter where we meet the one thing we all bring is our desire to further our knowledge and understanding of IT Service Management.

Axelos are again with us as our Platinum sponsor and I encourage you to join them in the Arora theatre on Tuesday morning. With the impending launch of ITIL Practitioner they will share their vision of the future of IT service management and best practice.

Gold sponsors this year are EXIN, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Sumerian and we thank them all for their continued support.

I would also like to thank the team from All Things ITSM, who along with sponsors Cherwell and the Service Desk Institute will be filming a number of podcasts throughout today.

Please see inside your conference guide for timings of other special events such as the SIAM book launch and the drinks reception in the expo later this evening.

The Industry Awards at our gala dinner this evening will be hosted by John Parrott MBE. I’m sure you’ll recognise John from his celebrated career as a professional snooker player and TV personality. He won the World Snooker Championship in 1991, defeating Jimmy White in the final. He is one of only nine players to have compiled more than 200 competitive century breaks during his career and I’m sure will have a highly entertaining story or two for us tonight.

Tonight’s raffle is in aid of the Make a wish Foundation and we have a number of fabulous prizes including a Play Station 4 and game, 3 IPads, John Lewis vouchers and various bottles of wine and champagne. If you are not able to join us at the gala dinner but would like to participate in the raffle, please see the team on our stand G1 for an envelope.

Tomorrow, there will be an interactive plenary session in the Arora suite, a panel of service management luminaries will answer questions on a number of topical issues.

Bob Brown, CIO at Manchester City Council, will close this year’s Conference. Manchester has the eyes of the UK upon it as the first Council outside London to have been granted devolved powers. With these powers comes great responsibility at a time when budgets are tight and getting ever tighter. ICT in Manchester is focused on enabling many of the city’s needs and joining their disparate systems together with a common data sharing agenda. Bob will share his insights into this hugely important endeavour and the challenges that need to be overcome.

Which neatly brings me to the theme of our conference this year, NEW CHALLENGES, NEW SOLUTIONS.

This has been a year of immense change, with the organisation now sporting a new Chair and CEO.  I cannot let the opportunity pass without saying thank you for the work done by former CEO Mike Owen and we wish him luck in his new role.  I must also pay tribute to the tremendous work done by my predecessor.  I am sure John Windebank will be remembered as one of the hardest working and enthusiastic Chairs we have known, however John would like me to make it clear that he’s stepping down only because he has reached the end of his 2 year term, he’s not been fired or gone off in a huff. He does have a very demanding day job though and I think his employer would like him backJ  Also stepping down after a number of terms on the board are Claire Agutter, Vernon Lloyd, Ian Whyte and Rajiv Dua, although as ever with ITSMF UK they all remain active volunteers.  Thank you all for your time and commitment.  Stepping up to the plate as board members are David Backham, Richard Horton, Martin Neville, Dave Walker and Chris Williams.

Lorna Hinds-Sotomey remains in her position as Finance Director.

I feel immensely privileged to have been elected into the role of Chair following many years on the board and my 2 year term as vice chair.  It’s a move though that has required much thought and reflection with friends, family and colleagues.

It was during one of these conversations with a friend, who is also a chair of a charitable organisation, that I was asked what my vision for the future of the organisation was. What would be my challenges and what would define my term as Chair?

As we chatted, it became clear that there were common themes emerging for other membership organisations too, all with their challenges to success and I’d like to share them with you now as I firmly believe these underpin the principles on which the organisation was originally based and on which we continue to operate. 

Firstly, it’s vital that we continue to provide a network for organisations and people to share and develop their knowledge, experience, ideas and opinions. We are a forum, after all.

We already have a thriving regional network who support and collaborate with each other and an ever increasing number of Special Interest Groups. Here though, the challenge for our members is that they are increasingly time poor and need information served up in easily accessible, digestible chunks.

To meet this challenge, you’ll find that we will be embracing appropriate technologies now more than ever, we aim to be more visible and active on social media platforms and are looking at new ways to provide our members with more relevant, on-line content. Ultimately our purpose is to enable you, our member organisations to maximise your return on investment in ITSMF UK as an organisation and the wider service management industry.

As a board, we are clear that we need to work hard on your behalf to make your experience of the forum ever more efficient, more relevant, more agile and more productive and not just act as a talking shop.

This means though that it can’t all be one way, as members of the Forum, you should be able to ask questions, raise issues and concerns not only about the organisation but also the industry we work in and we look to you, our members, to guide us in that direction, to ensure we’re providing the right content in the right environment for you to succeed.

I also believe that maintaining the balance between supporting our corporate and enterprise members with that of servicing the smaller corporate and individual members is vital.  This is without doubt the most effective way to harness best practice and innovation for everybody.

This leads nicely into my second theme that is the need to represent the interests of the service management sector.  ITSMF UK needs to be an innovator, an opinion maker and most of all the independent voice of our industry.

There is a growing determination within the industry to make service management relevant and valuable to the whole business beyond the traditional boundaries of IT.  I believe our role is to position IT Service Management as a real business enabler with valuable skills the whole enterprise can leverage; in short to stand up and be counted as a professional business discipline.

Here, the challenge is to determine what messages should we be sending out and how do we make this happen practically within the membership and to a wider audience… to industry, to education and even to government.

When ITSMF UK started 24 years ago, we were a lone voice. For some, the only place to go for service management advice and guidance. Now, we have to acknowledge that we’re not the only game in town, there are many competing alternatives out there.

To help meet this challenge, ITSMF UK led by our CEO, Barclay Rae, will be establishing new industry relationships so that we can better collaborate to the advantage of all our members so if you represent such an organisation and would like a to have a positive chat, do get in touch with Barclay.

My last theme is about the people.  As a sector we should be working to raise the wider profile, reputation and attractiveness of service management as a career path people want to undertake.  In particular there is an absolute need to engage young people more and encourage them towards having a career in Service Management. 

It’s about getting  the  ITSM industry a profile and recognition that attracts high talent to want to be part of the industry and stay in the industry ... build sought after, high profile, destination career roles within ITSM that can actively compete for respect, recognition and reward with the top technical and leadership roles in the rest of the IT industry.

We’re making a start. This year, for the first time we have a Young Professional award for an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding level of achievement, business impact in the early years of their ITSM career and who also promises great potential for future success.

 ITSMF UK is also keen to determine ways of establishing ITSM best practices in undergraduate programmes.  Indeed, one of the finalists in tonight’s awards is a High school from Cheshire. The Millennial generation are especially vital for the future of Service Management because they come already armed with digital skills and they have been brought up as users of digitally-based services.

Currently too many ITSM roles are poorly defined and unrecognised. If you describe yourself as a project manager or even a programmer today, then most people would recognise the role.  However if you described yourself as a service architect or a service delivery manager, then I imagine that there would be as many interpretations as people asked.

To help understand this and other industry wide challenges ITSMF UK has established its first Leadership Council of senior leaders from member organisations.  This has since generated two work streams. The first looking at contemporary and future skills required within the industry and establishing a unified skills framework and role descriptions and the second, a group looking at ways to raise the profile and influence of the sector, to prevent Service Management from always being the hidden group within IT. Both those initiatives are moving at a pace with outputs expected in early 2016…watch this space, I’m sure we’ll be talking to you more about these initiatives in the months ahead.

As we move into the latest stage of our evolution, we do so in a very positive frame of mind. We fully remain true to our guiding principles of not-for-profit and independence, we are the truly independent, not-for-profit organisation representing the entire ITSM industry.  We have a sole focus on serving our members interests.

in that we will not be unduly influenced by any single member, supplier or stakeholder and retain our ethos of ‘for the members’. 

Our member organisations and the volunteers from them are key to everything the Forum does and are ultimately responsible for our direction and we continue to be grateful for all of the time, energy and expertise you expend on our behalf.

I’m looking forward to speaking to as many of you as possible over the next couple of days, if you want a chat but can’t immediately find me, please see one of the staff members on the stand however you can always contact me after the conference via the office or the new twitter account @itsmfuk_chair.

Inevitably there will be things you need to know over the next 2 days that are not covered by your Guide. If you have any questions at all, please ask one of the ITSMF UK team or call in to see us at stand G1 and the team will be more than happy to help you.

I really hope you enjoy this event and take every opportunity to ask questions and network with likeminded colleagues. Just a final tip for our overseas guests, don’t forget that if you find yourself in the queue for lunch or sitting in a session next to a stranger, a comment about the weather or the state of our transport systems are always great icebreakers and if you can combine the two, you’ll have made another friend for life.

So I’ve outlined the challenges, now I hope we can all work together to start to create the solutions.

ITSMF has agreed a new global partnership with AXELOS, owners of ITIL^®, the worlds most used IT service management best practice framework, and PRINCE2^®, the de facto standard for project management.

As part of the new partnership with AXELOS, all of these members will be eligible to take advantage of a lifetime discounted membership of AXELOS’ new Professional Development Programme which launched in September 2015.

The AXELOS Professional Development Programme is an online membership programme, aligned to the best practice frameworks of ITIL and PRINCE2, and is designed to support professional development.  Members of the programme will be able to complete continuing professional development (CPD) activities to enable them to earn a digital badge linked to their ITIL and PRINCE2 qualification.

Other key benefits of the new collaborative global agreement between itSMF and AXELOS include:  

·         The development of emerging practices, existing best practices and innovations amongst subject matter experts and IT Managers to enable business value through the power of IT Services, capabilities and resources

·         Co-hosting corporate forums for senior leaders to exchange views and ideas on industry direction, AXELOS strategy, product roadmaps and case studies

·         Helping to embed a culture of professionalism across the global community through awareness of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme

·         Conducting a joint annual global ITSM survey to identify industry trends

·         Co-develop and share white papers and other IP creation around the world

Shari Brunette, President of ITSMF International, said: “We are excited to work with AXELOS and provide our individual and corporate members greater visibility and value. Immediate benefits are available through participation in the Professional Development Program, a Program for which we have negotiated a great discount for our members! 

“In addition, there is the opportunity to participate in collaborative research with AXELOS who will provide a great partnership benefit by co-publishing these White Papers and Case Studies.  This is a fantastic way for ITSMF members to share their practical experiences.”

Peter Hepworth, Chief Executive of AXELOS, said: “This partnership between AXELOS and ITSMF is an important development in shaping the future of IT service management. We are delighted to offer the AXELOS Professional Development Program to itSMF members, the first of a range of initiatives that will help support individuals and demonstrate the value that IT Services brings to an organization.

The program will enable the millions of ITIL and PRINCE2 practitioners across the globe to achieve industry recognition and enhance their personal brand. In addition, employers who invest time and money in CPD can develop their teams and drive up standards while improving staff loyalty and morale.”

Those wishing to join the program must hold an ITIL or PRINCE2 qualification.  Anyone joining in 2015 can save £100 on annual membership costs, and just pay the £25 membership fee. Members of ITSMF will also benefit from a lifetime discount of 25% to join the program if they register by March 2016.

ITSMF UK members interested in finding our more about this initiative and joining the AXELOS Professional Development Program should contact the office.

For those who were unable to attend, the video recording (with sound and presentation) can be accessed here.

Following the departure of previous CEO Mike Owen, the ITSMF UK Board have appointed Barclay Rae on a part-time interim basis for six months. This will provide leadership, continuity and stability to manage and help move the organisation forward while longer-term options are considered.  

Barclay Rae has extensive experience as a consultant, analyst and subject matter expert in IT Service Management. He also has considerable business and management experience in the industry, both as a consultancy vendor and also working with industry bodies and vendors such as SDI, AXELOS, APMG, ITSMF and Axios. He will bring industry and subject knowledge to ITSMF strategic direction, as well as practical experience and commercial skills in running a small business organisation.

‘I am delighted to take on this challenge and help to support ITSMF UK in its development,’ says Rae. ‘ITSMF is at a critical phase where continuity is needed along with some strategic thinking to keep the organisation moving forward’. Rae will manage the office team as well as lead the group in the continuing development and implementation of additional member benefits and value. He also has the brief to develop partnerships with complementary industry organisations and will be making himself available to reach out to new partners for ITSMF UK.

‘Barclay has a great mix of relevant skills that we can utilise’ says Rosemary Gurney, ITSMF UK Chair. ‘We are delighted to be able to work with him over this period to help us to continue to move our services and operations to a new level’.  ITSMF UK also expect to call on Rae’s connections and wide industry following to help to drive interest and engagement with the organisation. Rae has featured on many ITSM podcasts and also fronted an ITSM TV initiative in recent years and is well known across the global ITSM industry. He also created the ‘ITSM Goodness’ programme which is a popular free-to-air set of practical guidance. He has also contributed as an architect on the new AXELOS ITIL Practitioner scheme.

As a temporary and part-time appointment, Rae will continue to deliver non-competitive consulting and media work through his company. This includes blogging, writing and independent consulting and auditing. The appointment is with immediate effect. Rae will report to the ITSMF Board and Rosemary Gurney directly. 

Following the recent ITSMF UK Board elections, which closed on Wednesday 30^th September, the Directors are delighted to announce the following results:

* Richard Horton - elected as board member representing SIGs and Regional groups

* David Backham – elected as board member representing Individual and Enterprise 10 member organisations

* Martin Neville - elected as board member representing Enterprise 25 & 50 and Corporate member organisations.

Dave Walker, Head of ITSM at LV, and Chris Williams, Head of ITSM at EE, have subsequently been appointed to the Board, bringing with them extensive corporate experience and knowledge.

Congratulations to the new directors and many thanks to all of the other members who put themselves forward for nomination.

At the subsequent board meeting, held on 2^nd October 2015, the successful candidates were duly appointed Directors of the company.

The outgoing Chair, John Windebank, having reached the end of his two year term, then recommended to the meeting that the board accepts the proposal made by the previous board that Rosemary Gurney, the current Vice Chair, succeeds him as Chair. This was accepted unanimously. 

Our first virtual Annual Meeting is to be held on Thursday, 22^ndOctober 2015 between 17.00 and 18.30.

As well as presenting our latest financial report and operational review for 2015, the Forum’s Directors will explain in more detail recent governance changes and present more information about our future vision and plans for the Forum and the way we are influencing the wider ITSM sector.

It will be the perfect opportunity for you to ask ITSMF UK's Directors any questions or to discuss any ideas or thoughts you may have. As a member-based body, your opinions and feedback are vital for the running of the organisation.

The event will be in the form of a live presentation and question & answer session, with the whole evening being recorded to allow later reference by all members via our website.

If you’d like to participate in the event, either by phone or in person, please contact sarah.nieto@itsmf.co.uk for details.

A full agenda for this event will be advised nearer the time - we hope you can join us!

Mike joined ITSMF UK in early 2014 and in that time has led a major turnaround in the organisation, including a substantial financial improvement, return to membership growth, and enhancements in all areas of governance and business management. He has also played a key role in boosting relationships with leading member organisations, including the recent successful launch of the ITSM Leadership Council.

ITSMF UK Chairman John Windebank commented, “As Mike moves on from ITSMF UK, our transformation into a modern, contemporary, not-for-profit organisation has been significantly progressed, with a fresh constitutional structure and relocation of the company to new offices in Bracknell, Berks.

“On behalf of everyone at the Forum, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Mike for all he has achieved and wish him very well for the future.”

The ITSMF UK Board is currently recruiting a successor for Mike Owen, the process being led by Vice Chairman Rosemary Gurney.

Thirty senior IT executives from major UK corporates and public sector organisations came together on Monday 6th July at the Sofitel St James in London to launch the ITSM Leadership Council.  They also agreed a framework of seven strategic actions needed to transform the sector, together with the setting up of two cross-sector strategic working groups.

The Council is a new leadership group for senior ITSM executives from amongst the largest organisational members of the UK’s IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF UK) to discuss common strategic issues and challenges in the ITSM sector and develop together joint actions to grow and advance the sector.   It will meet on a regular basis and be co-ordinated by ITSMF UK.

Opening the meeting, ITSMF UK CEO Mike Owen overviewed the fast-changing landscape of IT – with major challenges ranging from the huge growth of the cloud and mobile and 24/7 digital  delivery through the implications of Big Data and cyber-resilience to the rise of Shadow IT.  “In response to these very significant changes,” he said, “there is need for ITSM to up its game – both as a discipline and as an industry.”

ITSMF UK Chairman John Windebank argued that “IT solutions still tend to be architected and deployed from a technology, not a service, perspective and ITSM needs a clear business context and purpose.”  He proposed seven broad areas of action for transforming IT service management and helping it to meet today’s business demands.  Specifically, the ITSM sector:

• needs a stronger voice, profile and influence

• needs to do more to demonstrate how ITSM can help organisations to achieve significant strategic returns from their investment in IT and support continuous service improvement

• needs to develop better integration and joined-up thinking around technical standards, capabilities, innovation and performance

• needs to treat and develop ITSM as an holistic management discipline

• needs to review what roles, capabilities and skills it needs for the future and to transform current levels of ITSM education and training to deliver those skills

• should position and promote ITSM as a profession and a career of choice

• needs collective leadership to drive the industry forward

Guest speaker Mark Hall, Director of Global IT Operations at Aviva, said there had never been a greater need for ITSM, but that “the shape, role and boundaries of ITSM are no longer clear nor is its relationship to a changing world.”  He believed there is a need for IT to act more rapidly than ever before to satisfy customer demand, with less formal process and more interaction and collaboration with a broad range of partners and stakeholders.

The focal point of the evening was a 90-minute open debate, with the audience comprising a mix of CIOs, IT Directors and Heads of Service Management from large enterprises and public organisations (see the full list below).  Facilitated by the Forum’s Vice Chair, Rosemary Gurney, audience members readily echoed and endorsed the challenges and areas of action identified by the speakers.   Examples of particular views expressed included:  ITSM needs to get beyond the perception amongst many that it is still based on the process framework ‘ITIL’;  that ITSM needs to show how it can help business to generate value from investment in IT;  and that the ITSM sector needs to create a stronger pipeline of young service management professionals with appropriate business skills.

A comment from one of the audience members, Chris Williams, Director of Service Management at EE:  “The world is changing fast.  I believe that the skills needed to be successful in service management are changing too.  As well as traditional skills, we need ‘solutions integrators’ and great communicators.  We need people with a deep understanding of the commercial aspects of the businesses we support, who are highly adaptive and can predict the rapidly evolving environment we work in.  This means we need to radically change the way we identify talent, recruit and develop our people.”

At the conclusion of the event, the Council agreed to set up two cross-sector strategic working groups to work on the detail of bringing about focussed change:  one looking at how to define and present ITSM as a modern integrated business discipline (beyond just ‘ITIL’) and a second looking at elevating and transforming skills and competencies in the sector.  

The second meeting of the ITSM Leadership Council will take place in November 2015.

Members of the Council

ITSMF UK Member organisations represented at this first meeting of the ITSM Leadership Council included:  Asda, Aviva, BP, Clifford Chance, Computacenter, Co-operative Group, Domestic & General, EE, English Heritage, Fujitsu, GCHQ, Genesis Oil & Gas, Home Office, HP, Kings College London,         LV Insurance, Manchester City Council, Mars, Met Office, Nationwide Building Society, NTT Data, OVO Energy, PwC, RWE, Serco, SHL Group, Sopra Steria, and the University of Northampton.

The Leadership Council is open to all Corporate and Enterprise organisational Members of ITSMF UK.  Further details are available from the ITSMF UK office. 

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About the IT Service Management Forum

The IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF UK) is the country's leading membership association and independent professional community for organisations involved in IT service management.  Established 1991 and part of a wider, international federation across the world serving over 60,000 ITSM professionals, its mission is to support, represent, promote and advance ITSM as a professional sector and discipline.

ITSMF UK’s membership is drawn from a wide cross-section of organisations, including ITSM suppliers and service providers; user organisations; training companies and academia; consultancy, standards and practice bodies; as well as independent professionals.  Altogether, we have over 700 member organisations covering 7,000 individuals.  Our members range from large multinational companies to small firms working across the commercial, public and not-for-profit sectors.

For further information, email membership@itsmf.co.uk or phone 0118 918 6500.

Media contact information:

Please contact Natalie Pinner, ITSMF UK Marketing Executive, (natalie.pinner@itsmf.co.uk), on 0118 918 6500 for further information or comment regarding this release.

Media Issue Date:    15th July 2015

Mentors include noted ITSM industry experts from across the globe including Stuart Rance, Karen Ferris, Suresh GP and ITIL author Randy Steinberg.

Delegates who take advantage of the Virtual Mentor scheme will benefit from:

• Access to experienced industry experts
• Faster return on investment for their training budget
• Tailored support for their particular organisation or business issue
• Guidance on how to adapt and adopt service management best practice
• Corporate clients can choose an option that includes a set number of mentor hours to help facilitate their training and analyse training needs/identify next steps

Lead tutor Claire Agutter said, "One of the concerns people often have about online training is whether or not they will be able to learn from the experience of others.  Our Training+ Virtual Mentor service gives them access to some of the most experienced people in the industry, who can provide specific advice for real problems they are facing.  We're delighted to offer this service and very grateful to the ITSM community and the mentors who are providing their time.  Corporate customers can also benefit from access to mentors, adding workshops and training needs analysis to their training."

ITSM Zone offers online training and exams in many areas of best practice, including ITIL, PRINCE2, COBIT5, OBASHI and ISO 20000.  They are an AXELOS strategic partner and one of the chosen courseware providers for the new RESILIA cyber resilience training.

AXELOS introduces ITIL Practitioner qualification

AXELOS has announced a new ITIL Practitioner qualification, described as “the most significant evolution in the ITIL best practice framework” since the organisation became its owner. ITIL Practitioner is being developed to help organisations and individuals increase the value they obtain from using ITIL, says AXELOS, by offering additional practical guidance to adopt and adapt the framework to support the business. It will be the next step after ITIL Foundation for professionals who have already learned the basics of ITSM and the business value of well-designed and delivered services.

Addressing the demand from ITSM practitioners and organisations of all sizes worldwide, the first ITIL Practitioner exam will be available globally by the end of 2015 and will equip ITSM professionals with added practical guidance to help them leverage ITIL in line with their organisations’ business goals.

ITIL Practitioner will focus on:

·         Giving practical guidance on how individuals can leverage Continual Service Improvement (CSI) to maximise the benefits of its adoption and adaption

·         Aiming to improve the capability of individuals throughout the business, to adopt and adapt ITIL in their day to day roles for maximum business benefits

·         Making use of further evolved technological capabilities – such as automation, real-time reporting and Cloud computing – to increase the quality of service design and the efficiency of service delivery

·         Leveraging other philosophies, frameworks, good practices and methodologies – including Lean, DevOps, Agile and SIAM – to further enhance the value of ITSM.

Kaimar Karu, Head of ITSM at AXELOS, explained: “ITIL is the overarching framework that brings together all the good practice in ITSM, globally. Traditionally, ITIL has focused on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, leaving it to the practitioners to apply the guidance in their specific organisational context and find the best ways for the ‘how’ of adopt and adapt. As good practices appear, evolve and grow, the need for more practical guidance on the ‘how’ has increased significantly."

ITSMF UK wholeheartedly welcomes this announcement from AXELOS, as it encourages ITSM professionals and staff in related fields to broaden their service management skills and expertise, particularly in areas where ITIL interacts with other industry frameworks and embraces new industry developments. It also marks a clear move towards experience-based qualifications, based on the practical know-how that is essential to a culture of continual service improvement within our member organisations. As it stands this is an outline announcement and we will wait to see more detail before commenting further. We trust that AXELOS will involve many of our members, not least the ATOs, in helping to shape the detailed design and content of the ITIL Practitioner.

ITSMF UK have a number of exciting advertising options for vendor members who wish to share their message with the wider membership. Check out the details of our Winter Special package of eshots and ads here.

In the paper, according to James Finister in the Forward, Kevin Holland cogently argues that a successful implementation of SIAM rests upon the guidance provided by ITIL while also highlighting the need to adopt and adapt the guidance it contains to reflect the multi-tenant model. He also provides an overview of the drivers for developing a SIAM strategy and the specific challenges that it generates.

 Download the paper here

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Holland: "Adopt and adapt"

At the ITSMF UK AGM in November, Rajiv Dua and Richard Horton were elected to the roles of Commercial Lead and Service Delivery Lead respectively. 

We're also pleased to announce that, following a Board meeting earlier this month, Lorna Hinds-Sotomey has been appointed as our new Director for Finance and John McDermott has been co-opted for one year as Management Board member for Member Engagement.  The Board has also co-opted John Sowerby to lead on the Big 4 Agenda for 2015, and Vernon Lloyd, previously Director of Governance and Ethics, who will assist for a further six months on strategic development of the Forum.    

ITSMF UK Chairman John Windebank extended a warm welcome to all the new Board members, and said he very much looked forward to working with them in the months ahead.

Thanks to all those who helped us determine the Big4 Agenda for 2015. Watch out for further details and forthcoming Twitterchats or go to our Big4 page for more information.

COLLABORATION

- how do we work with others?

SERVICE MANAGEMENT OF THE FUTURE 

- what do we need to look like?

CAPABILITY FRAMEWORK

- how do we build it?

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

- how do we ensure it is relevan