South Africa Trip

This week I’ve been in South Africa at various Client meetings and was a keynote speaker for the ITSMf in Johannesburg. This was a well attended event for the region where I gave a presentation on Integrating IT with the Business focussing on ITIL v3 and BSM. It obviously went down well as many positive comments and questions afterwards.

Obviously when you travel a fair amount you come across many good and annoying things, well this morning has one of the annoying ones. The hotel I was staying in next to the office can only give me a late check-out of 12 noon, but my flight out is not until 10pm! So I even asked how much to buy some extra hours to keep the room the room for longer, to be informed that it would be a full daily rate. (health warning: a rant is about to start). This got he annoyed. Surely a daily rate would infer by definition of the word “day” to last from at least dawn to dust – a day. In which case I had already paid for that. But no, it appears (and I’m sure you all know anyway), that a daily rate is actually from about check-in (normally 2pm) until check-out (normally noon), so in fact you’ve paid for only 22 of the 24hours, and of course we also know that Business travellers tend not to check-in until evening anyway and checkout generally after breakfast heading to meetings or office, so the same rate for probably only 12hours. So now I’m homeless from noon until my taxi to the airport comes at 8pm. Oh the joys of travel!

Now that the rant is over (you can tell I was annoyed this morning), it is great to report that many of the clients in this region are moving forward well with BSM taking a step by step approach through an improvement plan focussing on the major business benefit areas, like Change Management and CMDB. It’s good from my perspective to keep in touch with these clients I’ve spent many days with over the years to see their progress and see how they put in action best practices with ITIL v3’s 4 “P”’s People, Process, Product and Partners. The extra “P” I would like to add is Performance. When you get all the other 4 “P”s in place my 5th “P” is the automatic return, improved performace of both the business and IT services. These organisations are all top performers in not only their sector but also in country. Proof indeed of the benefits that can be realised.

So, off tonight on the homeward journey. Next week I’ll be in Paris speaking to an audience on ITIL v3 and BSM.