Finnish itSMF Conference - IT Service Management & Power of Change

ITIL version 3 sets more focus on the people, their changing roles and on how to professionally manage the change in the organization. Therefore itSMF Finland had chosen the leading theme of this year to be the Change and also the importance of cooperation between business and IT. The event was held in Helsinki October 9-10 and attended by 180 delegates who enjoyed both the two streams of presentations as well as the accompanying exhibition with 14 vendors.

The Keynote speakers of this year's conference were three well-knows names from abroad and two interesting Finnish guest speakers. International guests included Colin Rudd, Ken Wendle and Malcolm Fry (shown in action). All three international Key Notes gave enormously interesting presentations; Ken Wendle, as always, with a little bit of magic touch, told the audience about change in a very refreshing way. Many of us are still wondering how he does it! Colin Rudd's input was a real-life case with very interesting figures - well appreciated by the audience, and finally, Malcolm Fry telling us why the conventional structure and application of IT metrics should be questioned and instead look closer at service-orientation and value-based measurements.

The Finnish guest speakers included both ITSM connoisseurs from end-user organizations, and also two guests outside IT. PhD Mikko Kosonen, Executive Vice President and member of the strategic management of Sitra, and a former CIO of Nokia, spoke about ‘Strategic agility as a challenge for companies and for public sector organizations'. He is the co-author (with Professor Yves Doz) of the June 2007 HBR article ‘The New Deal at the Top' and the book ‘Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Helps You Stay Ahead of the Game'. He drew interesting parallels from these themes into IT. Another famous Finnish speaker was professor Christian Grönroos from Hanken School of Economics of Helsinki. He covered the topic of what are the prerequisites and the change requirements for the Service Management success. His perspective was outside of IT which made the presentation eye-opening and very fascinating. He is an author of several books related to Service Management, e.g. ‘Service Management and Marketing. Customer Management in Service Competition'.

The evening entertainment included dinner with some Latin-American dancing and music. Later on the brave ones headed to Helsinki night for a famous Finnish Karaoke. We all were amazed by how beautiful voice Ken Wendle does have - his Mack the Knife was perfect! We also heard many more excellent performances from Russian folk songs, Pink Floyd's Money to Power of Love. What a great bunch of itSMF performances we had!

The new chairman of the Finnish chapter, Jukka Rautakallio, estimated in his closing remarks that this years event was the best by far - and we target for a better one next year! Welcome to Helsinki!

On behalf of the Finnish Events Team a Warm Thank You for all speakers, our delegates, and our guest photographer Chris Roberts from itSMF UK!
--Riitta Raesmaa