How quickly time has passed.  It seems like it was only a few months ago in which I was a youthful and naive ITSM practitioner, recently hired on to work as a ServiceNow (I’ll miss you hyphen) administrator and ready to go out and make a name for myself in the ITSM space.  Oh wait, that was only a few months ago…

So now here I am, nine months later and getting ready to start a new ITSM career with a consulting company.  As always, I won’t specifically name any people or companies I work for, or previously have worked for, but I’m sure with a little detective work you can probably find out anyway.  Since I’m moving on to the IT dream job in the sky, I couldn’t help but give a recap of some of my time here.

1.  First thing’s first; building gamification into ServiceNow has been one of the most fun and rewarding development experiences so far.  I’ll miss the sleepless nights, hair pulling tantrums, and thrills of excitement that comes with working on a cutting edge project, but alas, all good things must come to an end.  I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; there’s no better way to learn something than to achieve what has never been accomplished.  As Chris Dancy would state, that’s the “first mover advantage.”

2.  As always, ITSM is one of the most difficult areas of IT.  Ironically, it’s also one of the least known.  With that in mind, I’ve gained invaluable experience from working in a place with very immature processes, while navigating a chaotic environment, and all the while trying to be the loud voice of ITIL and ITSM.  Was I successful?  Maybe a little.  Will I ever shut-up?  Probably not.  The most important thing is simply to “keep the faith,” which is great advice from Rob England.

3.  Blocking social media access only hurts productivity.  If you ask my (soon to be former) coworkers about me, they’ll probably say “he never shut-up about being blocked from Twitter,” and I would whole-heartily agree.  In fact, I often wonder how much time would have been saved by not blocking Twitter and forcing me to use my mobile device.  Not only would the data stream have been faster, but I’m sure the time to take the phone out of my pocket, type on the touchscreen, correct the typos on the touchscreen, and having to resend Tweets from a shoddy data connection would have added up to weeks worth of productivity.  Interestingly enough, I only use social media for work related purposes, so I’m actually trying to be a more valuable and productive employee.  I’ll never understand that one…

4.  Technology is fun, but ITSM really is my passion.  I learned this from working on ServiceNow as an administrator and developer.  As fun as it is to build custom applications in ServiceNow, it’s not something I could do nine hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life.  Believe it or not, I’m an ITIL V3 Expert and my passion is with ITSM.  Will I ever get away from tools and technology?  Absolutely not!  As I mentioned, it’s fun, but it’s only one minor piece in the grand ITSM puzzle of life.

5.  What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.  No additional comments to add to this one.

That’s really a very (very) short recap of the past few months of my life.  While I’m excited to take on new challenges, and consequently new successes, I’m also happy to stay connected with my former colleagues and can’t wait to see how things develop at my (soon to be) former place of work.  So long, and thanks for all the…

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.