You won’t be surprised to hear that the BCS SM-ITAM conference was a virtual event this year! Claire Agutter did a fantastic keynote, discussing some of the lessons learned during the Covid-19 crisis and how digital services and effective service management help organisations weather the storm.

Given that we were forced to go digital, we decided to try out a different format, holding 3 sessions a day over 3 days, and we also pre-recorded the keynote and released it the week prior.

There were some real advantages to the changed format – it meant that we had a truly international conference for the first time, including Mark Harrison, presenting on Enterprise Service Management from New Zealand at 6.30am local time, which worked out to be 6.30pm UK time! We also had presenters from India, the US, and Spain.

The big takeaway for me is the importance of engagement between the audience and the speaker. Most of our speakers opted to schedule a couple of questions/comments sessions throughout the presentation, and it was really obvious how the opportunity to veer off the slides perked up everyone, speaker, audience and facilitator alike!

Another innovation is that we recorded all the sessions, and the BCS have uploaded them to our very own YouTube Channel, so you can catch up on all our presentations here.