IT Management Forum
is the year's primary industry event aimed at IT management professionals and their business partners

Kill DevOps
This fast-moving, non-technical, outside-in talk aligns DevOps with Agile, 'sells' the value of DevOps to business executives, finds the weakest link in the value stream (Theory of Constraints), and proposes a zen-like way of working. It includes a section about effective DevOps behaviour.

Effective business-IT behaviour
This interactive session will help you improve business-IT collaboration. After specifying the kind of business value that you want to achieve, you will identify desired behaviour that enables business and IT to co-create more business value from IT investments. Your findings will be captured and compared to findings from previous sessions conducted in more than 10 countries.

When becoming managers, many former engineers realize that mathematics and system analysis are applicable for designing both technological and organizational systems alike. Furthermore, process models used in telecommunications industry, such as eTOM, are very good for structuring operations of any service organization, e.g. of an IT company. And the most surprising, ITSM and DevOps turn out to be not only engineering practices, but also efficient approaches to managing non-IT business processes as well.

We will talk about business careers of yesterday's IT pros, and extending the use of process-based IT practices to business in general.

An ITIL update initiative announced by Axelos on November 1, 2017 is going full steam ahead. ITMF 2018 attendees will have a unique opportunity to learn firsthand what has already been done, and what is planned for the future.

The fact experts from itSMF Russia have stated for years, is obvious reality today: the role of IT in every vertical is growing progressively. IT services have already become a major business asset. Almost every significant activity type, including supply processes, chains, and networks, as well as models of interoperation between product/service suppliers and consumers are being implemented in new ways as a radical transformation of entire industries is going on. A new complex ecosystem emerges, where interoperation and collaboration between nation states and global businesses are widening and growing more complicated. That ecosystem has been named the "digital economy".
Comprehensive IT services rather than products offered as part of them form the basis of the emerging innovation economy, becoming a major factor driving successful global economic, innovation, technology, and humanitarian cooperation. In this environment, it is especially important to push for maximum IT value through end-to-end coordination of IT operations using service approach (ITSM) principles. There is a need to create a service ecosystem with mandatory IT service quality management elements, facilitating cooperation of all stakeholders.

You are professionals in IT. You carry out hardware and software maintenance in a timely and efficient fashion. You understand strategic goals and objectives of your business and contribute to achieving them. That, however, is not enough anymore!
Feasting our eyes on beautiful mountain tops, we lose sight of the beginning of the path the leads up there. We overlook small but essential routine preparatory work preceding the ascent. That way, we lose our chance to reach the top.
In fact, we lose our chance to help business to achieve its objectives. With the modern stringent completeness and urgency requirements for information delivery, there is a need to efficiently perform routine operations to serve your business.
Just try to recall:
- when a lightbulb overhead flickers, what do we do?
- when we need a certificate from HR department, what do we do?
- when we need a reconciliation report from finance, what do we do?
The answer is always the same: we take time to make a decision. It is the routine that steals our resources.
During the master class, we will discuss why and how to optimize typical routine operations. We will consider practices for use in day-to-day operations as well as specific implementations.

In the era of digital transformation, when businesses' operations are based on information technology, the requirements for IT service management undergo drastic changes. With the very existence of organizations being now dependent on services, companies are actively looking for new mutually beneficial cooperation models. The basis of those models should be an architectural approach, along with creation and analysis of an efficiency model, as well as new legal frameworks and standards.
Will service approach continue to be at the center of operations and customer experience?
Or will it be replaced by something brand new?

Our company has come a long way to build a self-service system, and at some point instead of offering users a convenient self-service tool, we began to require to use it exclusively. After taking a second look at the solution and re-assessing its value for the employees, we began to cut down on our self-service related requirements, thus entailing significant changes in processes, culture, and IT architecture. This is what we plan to talk about.

With agile development methodologies being a major trend over the last few years in IT and project management, only the lazy would not care to mention them.
Scrum, Kanban, and XP: what are the differences between the major frameworks, and how to select the one that fits your specific company?
We will discuss the adoption of agile by major businesses using specific cases where a part of a company is already living by the new agile paradigm, while the rest is still using old ways. I will share my own experience of solving the cases.

In organizations implementing projects using agile approaches, conflicts of interest sometimes arise between line managers, traditional management methods, and objectives of cross-functional teams. Could such conflicts be avoided? In my keynote, I'll try to expand on the answer to that question.

The digital revolution storming the world is changing business strategies and management approaches. About 60% of major global firms are already working on their digital transformation strategies.
The wave is also being caught by Russian businesses focused on cutting edge technologies. In the meantime, the rate of changes in business environment and penetration of IT into all areas of life and business are far outstripping forecasts, requiring new management methodologies.
Previously, we had to choose between Agile and Waterfall, while now the convergence of a number of management approaches under any single project becomes vital for an efficient strategy of performing a digital transformation.
Many organizations are faced with the following questions:

• What is the way of efficiently implementing hybrid management models by taking advantages offered by each of the approaches to achieve best outcomes and project manageability?
• How to implement a system for quality control of a transformation project with varying maturity levels of project management?
• How to integrate project management with company operational activities, making it agile and flexible enough to handle projects of any complexity?

By all accounts, enterprise knowledge is a key asset in the present-day economy. Still, surveys of actual management tools use (Bain&Company, 2001-2015, more than 1,000 companies from all over the world annually) show that the outcomes brought by knowledge management are far lesser than those from other technologies. From 2011, the number of companies implementing knowledge management has been on a decrease. It is fair to assume that as long as the impact of knowledge is effected through change, the best outcomes could be achieved only by concurrent and coordinated implementation of two practices: change management and knowledge management. To test the hypothesis, a research study was undertaken that included 103 Russian organizations. As a result, the hypothesis proved to be fully correct for privately-owned organizations. At the same time, in organizations owned by the state knowledge does not serve as an efficiency catalyst, and those organizations are less efficient than private ones in all areas.

It is well known that systems either evolve or die.
Today, we'll talk about the evolution:

• How does it happen?
• What is needed for it to happen?
• Do you need to hire consultants for that?
• Does it happen in an organic way, or you need to commit a "revolution", and spend tens or hundreds of millions?
• Is it really that complicated?

Let's try to answer the questions together, dispel myths, and find simple solutions to complex problems.

Naumen is a Russian technology company, a software developer. One of our most important tasks is to track modern trends in the development of technologies and their practical application to reduce costs and increase the productivity of enterprises and companies - our customers. We spend a lot on R&D in order to provide our customers with modern demanded solutions. The presentation discusses use cases for solutions based on machine learning technologies, data analysis and total digitalization in IT management.

The effectiveness of any practice depends heavily on the ability of the team and the business to apply it. How do you understand if a team is ready to use it? Does it make sense to adopt practices from teams with a more developed cultural code? What is the specificity of the culture of large organizations? Let's talk about this and many other things during my presentation.

Over the last 5 years, our company has come a complex way from multi-billion losses to a steady revenue growth. To transition from the one state to another, the organization had to implement hundreds of change initiatives, most of them related to IT systems and services. The rate of business environment transformation dictates IT a need to adapt quickly to new situations while adjusting management methods to the current context. In the keynote, I'll outline the evolution history of the IT management system in our company, the use of various Agile methodologies (including Scrum, SAFe, and Kanban), the search of a balance between the speed of development and service quality, as well as some of the encountered issues and ways to address them.