What Happens in Vegas isn’t Staying in Vegas!

With over 2,000 attendees from across the globe, Pink Elephant’s annual conference strengthened its reputation as “the world’s best IT Service Management conference”. The conference theme, IT @ The Speed of Change, showed attendees that you need to be quick, lean, innovative, proactive, timely and effective.

The Pink Elephant EMEA team were joined by over 20 of our customers to gain knowledge, new insights and to network with fellow attendees.

The conference was opened by Emmy & Tony Award Winning Actor, Martin Short. Martin’s session was a funny, inspiring and insightful story of loss and empowerment. He shared his life story of loss and how he came out the other side stronger, refusing to be a victim.

Over the next 3 days there were 12 tracks and over 160 sessions covering a vast array of subjects including: IT leadership and people management, leading change, ITIL, COBIT, Lean IT, DevOps, Cyber Risk, Security and Resilience and more!

One of the practitioner sessions was delivered Andrew Humphrey, Head of Service Management at Auto Trader UK. Andrew discussed Auto Trader’s service management journey, which started with ITIL and incorporates Lean principles, Agile development methods and DevOps automation. The result? A total shift in working culture; instead of rigid project cycles or contractor armies, both operational and technical issues were highly valued and operational responsibility within each squad was greatly improved. The room was packed and the session feedback excellent – well done and thank you Andrew!

On the final day of the conference Peter Hubbard, Principal Consultant Pink Elephant EMEA, delivered an inspiring session: ‘IT Governance vs. Compliance: Taking Back The Strategy High Ground’. Peter explained how COBIT can be used to support strategy by providing enhanced levels of governance and control. He also showed how to use COBIT to ensure your ITSM processes map directly back to senior management objectives. His final piece of advice on governance? “I don’t care if you use ITIL, COBIT, DevOps or an Ouija board as long as your processes are effective, efficient and transparent.”

Feel like you missed something? No worries, please get in touch to discuss the special EMEA rates we have in place for the Pink17 Conference which is scheduled for 19 – 22 February 2017 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. See you there!

Written by: Gijs-Jan Huisman