When I saw the program (in Dutch) of Srvision & Trends in Tooling 2019, I had more than one reason to be enthusiastic. Resilience organizations is a topic that interests me, so the theme “Service Resilience” was one reason to attend. The other is that one of the presenters talks about swarming in combination with the Cynefin framework. Since I refer to his work in the upcoming Intelligent Swarming framework, I thought it would be nice to hear (and meet, if possible) Jon Hall talk. Here is my summary of the day. All presentations can be found in a Dropbox folder, as well as pictures drawn during the presentation. Also, read the blog post of the organization (“Bouncing back with ITIL4).
During the Srvision & Trends in Tooling conference, March 28 in Kinepolis (Utrecht), also known as Service Manager Day, the theme "Service Resilience" was central. A varied program with many parallel sessions divided into: Service Resilience, Resilient Value, Resilient Strategy, Resilient Process and Resilient People. As the titles suggest, there were many English speakers (in addition to Dutch speakers).
The day was kicked off by Will Evans, who talked about "Design of resilience". Evans combines Design Thinking, Lean and Theory of Constraints (TOC) on the transformation of organizations. He uses a definition of resilience based on the capacity of a system to absorb unforeseen changes in such a way that the system itself does not change in quality.
According to Evans, one of the most important questions, and we don't ask them often enough, is: what problem are you trying to solve (with digital transformation, for example)? Many organizations do not know where they stand now and do not have a clear picture of what can stand in the way of change. An interesting idea is that according to Evans, resilient organizations are not necessarily in balance but in limited, refrained stability.
After this inspiring presentation, each participant opted for one of the parallel sessions. I heard some interesting things related to knowledge management and intelligent swarming. For example, thanks to ITIL 4, there is more attention for value creation. With KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) we tell companies that the old way of measuring (number of incidents solved, for example) is no longer sufficient. How does the IT organization contribute to the operating result? With the developments in the field of AI and machine learning, for example through chatbots, it is important to have knowledge management in order, one speaker warned. The room remained silent when this speaker asked who indeed has knowledge management in order. Swarming was also mentioned a few times, in some cases in the context of DevOps, where there is a lot of overlap in the two methods. According to Jon Hall (BMC), both DevOps and Swarms support the self-organizing character of teams, knowledge transfer, prevent queued work to pile up and protect the star individual from burning out.
The day was closed by Ruben Terlou, photographer and movie maker. He showed us how fast China is changing, using beautiful photos and film clips. Resilience is an interesting topic for companies and IT organizations. The congress shows how it can be applied to many layers, even on the personal level. I think that many organizations still adhere to old management principles and are less resilient because of efficiency thinking than they may think. There's work to be done!
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