Yesterday, SECC organized a session about ITIL in ITIDA building in Smart Village, Cairo, Egypt.

Here are some of my personal notes, I just wrote it as it may be useful to someone else.

1. ITIL have certified training for individuals, no certification per the organization. However, you can be certified by ISO20000. ITIL will help you in your certification. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_20000
2. HP helped Microsoft to has its own framework, called: Microsoft ITIL based framework (MOF), see: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/mof/default.mspx
3. HP has their own efforts based on ITIL, “HP ITSM Reference Model v3.0”.
4. HP provides ITIL help and automation tools: Service View tool that let you understand your infrastructure dependencies. They have also Service Level Agreement monitoring software. I expect them to have many other tools.
5. HP has their own way to assess ITIL implementation level.
6. The importance of proper training. The presenter presented a very nice graph representing the transformation of data, to information, to knowledge to wisdom through professional training. He assumed written words in books like data and the experienced talented trainer help move the audience very fast to wisdom.
7. Start (ITIL implementation) with the part in your organization that has the most pain. I generally like pragmatic approach!
8. Let process drive the tools not the reverse. The tool buyer can push you in the wrong direction, be careful, I warned you.
9. Deployment planning is so important to avoid service interruption.
10. For me, the real experience of Mansour Auto and Orascom was exciting, more than the theoretical description of ITIL.
11. In a big organization, agreeing on service level between internal dept is important in your excellence journey.

I recorded many notes about presentation hints, but I will post it in a separate post.