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The beginnings and the history path
To better describe itSMF and its territorial commitment to advocate, discuss, collate, advise and shape professionals in the IT sector, transmitting them the right mix of culture and knowledge to face the future challenges, it is useful to start to tell the story and evolution over time since the beginnings.
itSMF Switzerland is non-profit association grounded in 1998 as national chapter of itSMF, the only association worldwide recognized since 1991 by the OGC (Office of Government Commerce in the UK) and after by Axelos, committed to improving the quality management of IT services through the diffusion of a worldwide virtual community of professionals, widely distributed in the various countries.
The past needs and trends put the emphasis on the life cycle of IT services itselves; the events and activities focused mainly on the importance to rule the processes, consolidate the informations, to define a clear and outlined structure of IT roles and competences at organizational level to increase the level of maturity to bring IT function to be aligned with the business.
To better describe itSMF and its territorial commitment to advocate, discuss, collate, advise and shape professionals in the IT sector, transmitting them the right mix of culture and knowledge to face the future challenges, it is useful to start to tell the story and evolution over time since the beginnings.
itSMF Switzerland is non-profit association grounded in 1998 as national chapter of itSMF, the only association worldwide recognized since 1991 by the OGC (Office of Government Commerce in the UK) and after by Axelos, committed to improving the quality management of IT services through the diffusion of a worldwide virtual community of professionals, widely distributed in the various countries.
The past needs and trends put the emphasis on the life cycle of IT services itselves; the events and activities focused mainly on the importance to rule the processes, consolidate the informations, to define a clear and outlined structure of IT roles and competences at organizational level to increase the level of maturity to bring IT function to be aligned with the business.
The present and the future path
Nowadays the paradigm is almost changed: the IT function, thus the governance of IT, has to respond to a greater and more pressing demand for speed of execution and realization of artefacts (a usable portion of software and infrastructure), resilience to changes in requirements and adoption of a hyper-collaborative working approach.
For these reasons, events and activities now are focused in the IT value chain, practical implementations guide and culture proposition to provide quality products and services able to reach the most valuable business competitiveness.
This disrupting change of demands is leaded by digital revolution and time to market, for these reasons IT Service Management and IT governance are no more related to IT function and board of directors only, but deal with any decision making corporate figure of every role and department which shall interact with processes being digitizing.
The need of automation, usage of artificial intelligence of machines, simplifying the decisional steps and orchestrate the working and processes flows are hard to absorb but essential to metabolise first of all by human resources. The most important processes actors, who are asked to adopt this disruptive and hyper-collaborative working approach.
itSMF evolution brought to refine over time the adoption of methodologies in project management field, service lifecycle, processes, resiliency to security threats and proactivity to manage risks to guide the enterprises to better use the information and digital technologies as strategic lever of growth.
itSMF philosophy and vision
The philosophy spins around these key concepts:
✔️ dialog and discussion
✔️ continuous improvement
✔️ expertise and training
The local communities propagation allows us to adopt a common and all-encompassing language that facilitates and inspires strategic decisions in one coherent and widely shared direction
itSMF vision spins around the practical and productive approach according to axiom
Enterprise ⇒ issue ⇒ comparison ⇒ solution ⇒ operation
obtained with simple and direct language in order to explain complex concepts in a responsive way. This is the future of IT Governance: the main glue role between corporate goals and the digital world with its technologies, which are the means to achieve them.
Because being affiliate and sponsor
In the future meetings itSMF will show its engagement, the topics path to face with, its value chain, the modern framework, tools and best practices, a new way to communicate able to reach out all the different stakeholders.
The upcoming scheduled topics are:
✔️Cyber Security & Compliance, GDPR e la nuova LDP
✔️Round table over topics voted and proposed by community
✔️A course to obtain PDU and CPE to preserve the PMI and ISACA certifications
✔️IT governance in the Cloud era
✔️DevOps and ITIL for Agile PM and team collaboration
Axelos, to whom we are inspired, provide ITIL as a framework for Service Management, Prince2 for Project Management and adoption to Agile Project Management, Resilia to be resilient to the Cyber threats.
Our competence and knowledge is able to map and integrate the Axelos different methodologies in a functional way with each others like ISO/IEC 27000, 20000, ISACA Cobit, PMI PMBoK, ScrumAlliance, DevOps, VeriSM, IT4IT, Lean, Kanban.
Join to itSMF, which worldwide collates more than 6’000 companies and 40’000 members, enable you to free attend events and seminars, workshop and round tables at discounted price, unlimited access to publications and documentation, case studies, subscription facilities to training courses and certification paths.
ItSMF won’t be a simple disseminator but rather an aggregator in order to link professionals to enterprises, solutions to ordinary problems to obtain a real benefit after using IT governance and Service Management best practices.
The correct aggregator role creates the ideal market conditions for a natural and targeted marketing through the comparison and sharing of topics, opinions and experiences, different approaches to methodologies application.
Supporting this territorial working group consolidation leads companies to propose themselves in an innovative way, to choose and to be chosen as ideal partners.
itSMF proper value chain
Our value chain identifying services:- Acknowledgment
Transfer all the best practices knowledge and doctrines in the IT services management life cycle and IT governance area with more perspectives, both internally oriented to IT staff and especially to managers and business managers who have a decision-making role.
We use seminars, workshops and our social channels up to careful market research and authoritative proposals from partners and sponsors that help us identify the solutions that companies are asking for
- Comparison
Our blog acts as first level comparison, always on and the natural source of interesting point of views to extend the topics perspective. It created the good conditions to propose new trendy and interesting future look.
Comparison begins from the bottom of our community, made up by professionals, partners and affiliated we use to give voice. Everyone could propose an ordinary topic or issue to face off, e.g. quality standard, fulfill a new compliance or simply the needs to improve a service performance due to updated enterprise requirements.
Round tables are the best situation to propose ordinary problems, exchange opinions and assumptions, give a chance to all the participants and moderators to be prepared to provide an active contribution to the problems the proposers expect.
To the meetings take part the companies leaders and challengers of the majors territorial economic sectors.
- Consulting
Our sponsor and partners help us to support on the territory the companies they ask for a practical solution to their needs.
We always try to capture carefully the environmental factors to better understand how to adapt the practical approaches, methodologies and frameworks / tools according to specific objectives.
We propose and recommend the right tools to better integrate, orchestrate and simplify the adoption of IT processes previously discussed.
Our advisory concept ranges from the strategic support to the management to align the IT area, to drive the business change to innovations and suggest professional profiles and competences in the ITSM field for specific IT needs.
Our expert judgment is competent and impartial to approve and validate your innovation processes through IT services.
- Training
Usually shown at the beginning of the value chain, we put the training just at the end because of everyone should understand before the issues, realize the challenges they involves, the objectives, the companies need to adopt the IT Service Management and IT Governance practices.
Facing day by day with the real problems and being involved by expert consultants to find out byself that their level of training have to be improved and certified to be better aligned and spent.
itSMF involves the professional network of partner and sponsortraining experts to instill the culture of "knowledge by how to do" with training and certification courses able to cover all the specific needs.
Beside the training courses accredited to certifications, we also organize advanced courses and seminars to transfer specific knowledge on required topics.
We identify on this an present and future important step able to push their professionals growth and companies together with them.
Autore: Andrea Cherubini, itSMF president.
