It has been over nine years since I have attended a Gartner Group symposium. I always used to go as an attendee (paying of course).  This time, I attended as a VIP in the Gartner VIP Program.  Not much has changed, such as the locale (Disney), the scope (entire Gartner pool of research), but the crowds were smaller than in the 90’s.  Probably due to the economic gloom and doom of 2008/2009.  There was only one, maybe two, sessions on IT Service Management.  What was exciting is that there were many more sessions on BPM.  And BPM had its own area of the ITExpo. Some of the highlights of the conference;

• 95% of the customers say that their BPM projects have escaped the axe. In fact, most have reported that there is even more management support for BPM than ever (thanks to this economy)
• Some of Gartner’s research also points to the fact that organizations are leveraging BPM more often and its trending towards the IT organization rather than just in the business.  Obviously, this bodes well for an organization like ICCM who has created IT best practice processes based on ITIL v3.
• Metastorm leads the pack for Microsoft-centric BPM. “Because of its round-tripping capabilities, ease of use, enterprise architecture support in its Provision product and strong support for business role collaboration, it is well-suited to business transformation and continuous process improvement usage scenarios.”
• BPM is most often leveraged successfully where Continual Process (service) improvement is sought
• Quite often Cost Savings are the primary goal of BPM projects, but after Customer Satisfaction and Quality improvements are realized, cost pressures improved.

Monday morning kicked off with a welcome address from Gartner CEO, Gene Hall followed by Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s Global Head of Research. Peter provided insight into what’s ahead for the industry and discussed findings of recent Gartner research. He predicted a 2.3% increase in IT spending in 2010 and advised careful planning with three key areas in mind:

• IT operational spending
• Increasing age of hardware as organizations delay updates
• Demonstrating hard evidence of business performance improvement.

The CIO Program kicked off on Sunday with a special keynote delivered by Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO of the US Government. Kundra discussed his work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations.  There were also three Mastermind Interviews with:

• Mark Hurd, Chairman & CEO, HP – Hurd discussed his vision for HP, the role of the CEO and the company’s transformation during his tenure.
• Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO, Google – As CEO since 2001, Schmidt detailed his focus on building Google’s corporate infrastructure to support rapid growth, while ensuring quality stays high and minimizing product development cycles.
• Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division – discussed changing the culture at Microsoft and his support of the consumerization of IT

Basically, the good message I got from the conference (and was actually quoted in Jim Sinur’s blog http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/22/whats-hot-in-bpm/ was that BPM is “the next thing” and it is not a matter of if, but when…

In sharing our solution with some of the attendees, there was definite interest in learning more about an IT Service Management solution such as e-Service Desk, that leverages and industry leading BPM Engine from Metastorm, but comes with “ready to go” processes that can be immediately leveraged to demonstrate value.

Worth noting is the phenomon of social media (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) and the impact it is having on ITSMf, our booth, and the industry.  A fair amount of traffic stopped by the booth because they heard of ICCM on Twitter..  I was interviewed during the show by Christopher Dancy of ServiceSphere.  The event also gave me a chance to attend my first “Tweetup” at the resort bar.  I was able to meet a good number of people who I have only “tweeted” to 140 characters at a time.   What a social media revolution.  You can follow ICCM Solutions at twitter.com/ICCMSolutions or myself at twitter.com/CyberJMC66.

We also had the chance to have one on one sessions with David Coyle of Gartner Group and Glenn O’Donnell and Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester Research.  Great meetings with David, Glenn and Evelyn.

Most important observation… I believe the economic gloom and doom has presented ICCM with a very unique value proposition that resonated with every person we demonstrated the solution to.  It only took minutes for them to see what could be done with our solution, but also what comes out of the box without modification.  It’s great to hear “That’s amazing” and “Wow” so often throughout the day.  More importantly, I think our implementation approach which is as difference from our industry as the solution, really appealed to the people I spoke to.  Many had been through the long drawn out technology implementations where technology becomes the “critical path” of the implementation, and value a solution that finally takes technology off the critical path of Service Management implementation.

Thought I would post my first “On the road” update to our NEW ICCM Blog.  Happy and Safe Travels everyone heading home from the conference!

The conference runs from 20^th – 23^rd September, 2009.  It will be held in Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, Dallas, TX, USA.  ICCM will be exhibiting at booth 1921.

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