Speaking topics

Thank-you for your interest in using Two Hills' content services. You are buying:
- original thought leadership in IT, especially ITSM and governance
- thought-provoking, sometimes controversial ideas
- broad knowledge of IT and ITSM, assembled from a wide international network of thinkers and leaders
- robust debate and challenging delivery
- access to the IT Skeptic brand and its tribe of followers

Rob has been invited as keynote speaker at a number of conferences, and invited multiple times by itSMFnz, itSMF Australia, CCLearning PRINCE2 and Pink Elephant USA. He was voted best speaker at itSMFnz 2011 national conference and was voted second-best speaker at itSMF Best Practice Netherlands 2008.

Rob can speak to a wide range of topics.

Just as examples (follow the links for more explanation of the topics):

  1. Owning ITIL: what decision-makers don't get told. An antidote to the KoolAid for ITIL decision-makers and those who work for them
  2. The 5% Club: Why CMDB is only for a select few.
  3. What Governance Isn't (and thereby better understanding what it is, including ISO/IEC 38500)
  4. Dead Cat Syndrome: operational readiness of new services
  5. He Tangata, People in IT: the importance of cultural change. Without it all IT initiatives will fail.
  6. Plug and Socket: practical application of governance to ITSM. What do I need to have ready when the governors come knocking?
  7. Direct: An IT policy framework. As far as I can tell, there is no best practice IT Policy framework in existence so I am having to build one.
  8. Tipu: a pragmatic approach to Continual Service Improvement, especially for smaller organisations
  9. BSM: Basic Service Management. A summary of SM in forty minutes flat. NB. there is zero IT content in this presentation - it is pure service management as it applies in any context.
  10. Cowboys Acrobats and Rainmakers: the balance between control and agility. The increasing pace of change in general - and social media, Cloud, Agile and DevOps in particular - have major implications for traditional IT Management. Decades of hard-won controls over our IT production environments are under assault from radical new forces, including Agile, DevOps, SaaS, Cloud and social media. A new world is arriving at a remarkable pace. In that new world we will no longer control what happens in IT. We can't control what developers do, what the business units do, what our suppliers do, what our users do. We can't even control where our servers are. We don't know where our data is, where our servers are, where our users are, what platform the users are on, where the apps are. What does the IT function within our organisation look like in that new world? What are we for? Do we even need IT any more?
  11. Emerging themes in IT Management in the Twenty-Teens. As the centre of IT spirals out of control, we will see the rise of governance and assurance to complement service management.
  12. Framework Fiesta: There is more to ITSM than just ITIL
  13. The Social Media Hype Cycle: is social media causing an IT revolution or a mildly interesting extra channel?
  14. Every Cloud Has a Silver Bullet: cutting through the hype to find if anything has changed
  15. Seven Visions of the Future of ITIL
  16. Culling: Why IT projects fail, and how to change that through service portfolio management
  17. Big Uncle: Benevolent Security and The End of Privacy. Privacy was a momentary aberration in human history - get over it.
  18. The ITIL Wizard: the best advice on the web (a satire with some pointed messages)
  19. Achieving a Harmonious IT Environment (based on the satirical Real ITSM)
  20. Crap Factoids: cutting through the excrement in what you read online (with some examples the vendors and analysts won't like)
  21. ITIL Through the Looking Glass: What we can all learn from scaling down ITIL
  22. Never mind the auditors: a layman's view of COBIT as an everyday IT operations framework tool. How someone with no expertise in COBIT still finds it useful guidance.
  23. The Geeks are not Inheriting Anything: caring for your career and your staff by moving beyond geekdom
  24. IT Teachers Suck: what we need to know to train adults properly
  25. A History of the IT Skeptic: controversy, dirty deeds and crap factoids
  26. The Digital Family Trunk: keeping what is digital and precious, and leaving a digital legacy behind
  27. Ttjasi: take this job and shove it. Should you quit?
  28. Make the Most: a methodology to improve your sales performance

If you would like something on another topic then we are happy to discuss it. Contact us.