Mark Smalley

  • Writer & coach
  • Smalley.IT

Mark Smalley helps IT people understand service. He helps people discover where they are and to visualize where they want to be. Mark is a writer and coach at Smalley.IT and self-identifies as The Ancient IT Philosopher. His main area of interest is the management of IT systems and services. Mark is a contributor to many bodies of knowledge and has spoken at hundreds of events in more than thirty countries. He was lead editor of ITIL 4’s High-velocity IT module and is involved in ITIL’s development. Mark also has contributed to the XLA movement.

Sessions

  • Let your curiosity and compassion inspire you (EN)

    Curiosity triggers inspiration – what do you look at and what do your individual biases see? Seeing the bigger picture helps you understand and explain your environment, and I’ll share my best “digital value stream” framework so far. How do your IT efforts translate into business value? I’ll quote from my books Reflections on Product to Value and Are you digitally “done”? and show you where you can create value potential, and where you can only minimize value leakage. What can you learn from other disciplines? I’ll highlight what we adopted from Agile, DevOps and Lean in ITIL 4 High-velocity IT.

    Compassion triggers action – empathy gets you halfway there. Inspired by the Richard Cook, I’ll encourage you to leave the “system as imagined” from time to time and visit the “system as found”. This is where you can beat ChatGPT. You should also step out of old SLAs and into scary XLAs where it’s about human experience and business impact – I wrote about it in the XLA Handbook and Reflections on XLA. Inspired by Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, I’ll suggest that you assess the nature of the “system” so that you know how to act. Inspired by Taichi Ohno, I’ll remind you that you have to face your own difficulties and think for yourself. In the end, inspired innovation and improvement is about your collective desire and ability to care.

  • Panel discussion (EN)