I recently spent a couple weeks in San Francisco for two separate conferences. I’m thrilled to be home but the time was very productive.

itSMF Conference:  My first week was spent covering ITIL - the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. This is a globally recognized collection of Best Practices for IT Management.  With me was our ITIL Team – ITSM / IT Operations Senior Manager, Service Desk Manager, Change Manager, and Problem Manager. We participated in three days of courses and sharing experiences with other companies classes and sharing from other companies at varying stages of ITIL adoption. Notables included Toyota on Lean and Continuous Improvement processes applied to ITIL,  Barclays Global Investors on IT Budgeting and Costing, InfoGraphics for complex training illustrations, and many others. On Thursday we took a cram course and subsequently passed our fundamentals certification tests for the next major revision, ITIL V3. This is said to be the last “major” change – incremental refinements are expected going forth.

Oracle OpenWorld: My second week again in San Francisco was with our Oracle Apps Senior Managerfor this annual conference. With Oracle’s acquisitions of the last few years, they are now the world’s largest Enterprise Software company – and this meeting is insanely huge – fifty THOUSAND people. One of the great advantages however is the opportunity to rub shoulders and have conversations with many other customers, key consultants, as especially Oracle management. A great time to voice concerns, discover direction, and find solutions. Our plans for 2009 at Ultradent have changed based on some of these conversations, including chats with two separate Oracle vice-presidents and a key Oracle Product Manager. Interactions like this help us avoid jumping into an upgrade too soon, and are a good reality-check on the efforts we are putting into Business Intelligence and other key projects.

A very busy but productive two weeks!