Activities

Two Hills spent 2011 moving to a Cloud-based IT environment. We don't advocate it for everyone, and we aren't all the way there yet ourselves, but we expect it to work for us (and several clients) eventually.

Rob presented

• at itSMF Ottawa in May 2011
• itSMF Denmark Spring conference keynote in May 2011
• Wellington in June 2011 for the itSMFnz National Conference
• a keynote on Tipu in Perth in August for the itSMF LeadIT National Conference
• Pink Elephant's 16th Annual IT Service Management Conference in Las Vegas in February 2012

He will be at

• CCLearning PM conference in Wellington in May
• itSMFnz 2012 conference in Wellington in June
• ISACA World Congress in June in San Francisco (not speaking)
• the itSMF LeadIT National Conference in Australia in August
• ISACA's regional Oceania CACS in Wellington in September
• Pink Elephant's 17th Annual IT Service Management Conference in Las Vegas in February 2013
• itSMF South Africa SMEXA conference in March 2012 postponed

and we are in discussions with several other conferences.

Our Tipu methodology is receiving much interest and positive feedback, and we are hopefully about to embark on a large-scale rollout of it for a client.

Recognition

Rob is credited in the acknowledgments as a contributor to the 2011 edition of the ITIL core book Service Strategy.

Rob was awarded the inaugural New Zealand IT Service Management Champion award in 2011 by itSMFnz, and was voted best speaker at the 2011 itSMF NZ national conference.

Rob's blog, The IT Skeptic, won the popular vote for best "IT consultant and analyst" blog in the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2010.

Rob is one of New Zealand's first IT Certified Professionals, a New Zealand Computer Society accreditation. He was recently certified as a Prince2 Practitioner (scored 92/108).

Books

Two Hills now has six books published. The Real ITSM book has an integrated website as does Basic Service Management. The book Owning ITIL received a rating of 5 out of 5 stars when reviewed by the British Computer Society.

Our book Introduction to Real ITSM has been developed into a workshop, using humour to communicate the importance of cultural change when doing service improvement. The workshop has been delivered twice in Wellington and twice at the IT Service Management Conference in Las Vegas USA in February 2010 and again in 2011, where Rob was a presenter and "celebrity" host. Rob is invited back to deliver it again in February 2012.

The same book Introduction to Real ITSM has been translated and published in Russian by a Moscow business partner, Cleverics. So has Owning ITIL.

Most of the books are now available on Kindle, which is a non-trivial conversion exercise. Not as bad as converting to EPUB and iBook, which we have also managed for most books.
Another book, He Tangata, is on hold awaiting the publication of a book by Karen Ferris.

More books are under consideration, such as Basic Service Improvement (a sequel to Basic Service Management), the OPS4LESS Almanac, CoPr, Authenticity: the 21st Century's Lost Cause, and Real IT - another funny one.