List of speakers for the ITx 2016 conference
This page contains the speaker list for ITx 2016, ordered by name. Check out the Programme as well.
Ambassador, ASL BiSL Foundation (The Netherlands)
Mark Smalley, based in the Netherlands, is an IT Management Consultant at Smalley.IT and Ambassador at the non-profit ASL BiSL Foundation.
He is also affiliated with AllThingsITSM, APMG International, BrightTALK, BRM Institute, GamingWorks, IT4IT Forum, ITPreneurs, Pink Elephant, Taking Service Forward, Topconf, and Van Haren Publishing.
Mark is specialised in Application Management and Business Information Management and has reached out to thousands of IT professionals at more than 100 events in more than 20 countries.
Connect with him @marksmalley & www.linkedin.com/in/marksmalley
Looking back at the industrial revolution, the dominant ‘management paradigm’ was Scientific Management. This was pretty straightforward, focussing on control of function and tailored to mass production.
But this ran out of steam when the world got more complicated. People realized that things depended on so many other things.
A better paradigm emerged when Hammer, Senge, Kaplan and Nonaka shifted the focus to control of information. This new way of thinking, Systems Thinking, was better suited to mass customisation and knowledge work.
Now we have moved on to mass collaboration between multiple parties and we are in the domain of complex adaptive systems. Complex systems’ behaviour can’t be predicted – it just emerges. Systems Thinking assumes that the interactions between system components are complicated but knowable. For complex systems, this gives a false sense of control and is a recipe for disaster. Seasoned practitioners recognize the futility of grand plans for mega-projects. If the project is successful, it’s usually not due to, but despite the project plan.
Dealing with complex systems is different and requires a more experimental ‘systems tinkering’ approach. David Snowden’s sense-making Cynefin framework offers different strategies for dealing with systems that are obvious, complicated, complex or chaotic. Or simply unknown. Described in detail in the highly-cited and Academy of Management award-winning Harvard Business Review article A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, the Cynefin framework often ‘liberates’ project managers and other roles from the shackles of traditional command and control-based thinking.
This talk also references Agile and DevOps.
"If you think that you’ve found it, think again, because you never will."
This ancient Zen saying about a monk's journey towards enlightenment and awakening is the inspiration behind the presentation title ‘Kill DevOps’.
DevOps is about continuous experimentation and learning.
DevOps brought Agile’s value proposition closer to the users by speeding up deployment (and more!).
However no value is realised until the users actually use well-conceived systems.
This is often the weakest link, so we need to extend our reach, and the presentation will show you how to do this.
Hosted by Matt Hooper, this panel of Karen Ferris, Rob England, Lou Hunnebeck & Mark Smalley will discuss how to integrate "traditional" frameworks (e.g. ITIL) with other approaches (e.g. DevOps & Agile).
IT people always seem to have regarded themselves as ‘special’, feeling entitled to exclusion from regular business practices, norms and maybe even ethics. Slowly but surely, the laws of corporate gravity are bringing IT people down to earth and assimilating them into the enterprise. On the one hand, IT people are realizing the inevitable need to codify and standardize. And on the other hand, now IT has clearly become a significant business asset, increasingly IT-savvy business people simply won’t tolerate it.
This presentation takes a look at the IT function as if it were a regular business department, using well-accepted concepts such as business models and operating models to get a better grasp of the components that need to addressed.
The new Open Group IT4IT standard – as supported by enterprises such as Royal Dutch Shell, Accenture, Achmea, HP, Munich RE and PwC – is a step in the right direction, providing an overarching value chain and a reference architecture for “the business of IT”.
But not only does the IT function need to get its act together: if IT’s business partners aren’t able to articulate their needs and ensure that the IT systems are used effectively, there won’t be much return on their investments.
So, for IT project managers, this is relevant for value realization. IT project scoping must consider the organization (both business and IT) that uses, supports and manages information systems. It’s no good building great cars for incompetent drivers. They’ll end up driving the cars badly, and in the wrong direction. And, as always, it’ll be the project manager’s fault…
But not only does the IT function need to get its act together: if IT’s business partners aren’t able to articulate their needs and ensure that the IT systems are used effectively, there won’t be much return on their investments.
So, for IT project managers, this is relevant for value realization. IT project scoping must consider the organization (both business and IT) that uses, supports and manages information systems. It’s no good building great cars for incompetent drivers. They’ll end up driving the cars badly, and in the wrong direction. And, as always, it’ll be the project manager’s fault…
Ever since the demigod called IT fell from its pedestal in the eighties, the relationship between IT and the business has been dysfunctional.
Disgruntled that, despite having done its best, it was blamed for losing the plot, IT adopted a defensive “just tell us what to do and then it’s your fault when it goes wrong” attitude. “And by the way, you have to sign these incomprehensible service level agreements, follow our Kafkaesque procedures and pretend to understand our techno-drivel, otherwise something might happen to your servers. You don’t want something to happen to your servers now, do you?”
In fifty years’ time, will we look back at this period as the end of the dark ages of IT? The good news is that, slowly but surely, people seem to be realising that it’s time for a change. A radical change. A new way of looking at things, instead of obsessively looking at new things in old ways, and being disappointed that it doesn’t get them anywhere.
Mark Smalley calls this the IT Enlightenment Movement and presents the fundamentals in this international keynote.