The problem of Change has every company's full attention. This study translates the 2016 content agenda for the annual Pink Elephant conference on ITSM into a reference knowledge catalog of key ideas about IT-enablement of adaptability.

1. Adaptive Business
Capability
Business Management of IT
as seen at Pink16

2. ADAPTIVE BUSINESS CAPABILITY
EVOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION ALIGNMENT
INVESTMENT
PRODUCTION
FACILITY
©2016MalcolmRyder/ArchestraResearch
The following is a research note based on a review of public
information provided by Pink Elephant, Inc. The note’s
comments are based on a “face-value” survey of the
conference content agenda for “Pink16”. All associated claims
or interpretations described in this note have originated from
Archestra Research and do not represent the intent nor
property of Pink Elephant.
Pink Elephant, Pink15 and Pink16 are either trademarks or
registered trademarks of Pink Elephant Inc.

3. What the conference content is about
The major annual IT management conference from industry advisory leader Pink Elephant has
published its conference agenda for 2016, with the focus “IT at the Speed of Change”.
We see the content of Pink Elephant’s Pink16 conference in a Business Capability narrative:
• Leadership is responsible for defining and deciding the organizational change that enables the
company to shape itself to its purpose and strategy.
• An enabling strategy for IT usage allows the organization's change to progress and to reach a
sustainable desired future state for ongoing business execution.
• The execution focuses on identifying and meeting demand with defensible offerings of goods,
services, and associations that provide value through their use by parties looking for information,
actions, events, and materials.
• The business works through the birth-to-death lifecycle of these offerings under pressure – the
pressure of having and maximizing their relevance, availability and effectiveness under
circumstances of continually changing preferences and needs of the parties with demand.
• To achieve and sustain viability and feasibility as a principal enabler of provision against that
demand, an identified organization working in or for the business has a role and the practice of
optimizing the incorporation of IT with timeliness, flexibility and resilience.

4. The available knowledge domain
The overall themes in the narrative are about successfully adaptive business capability:
• Evolution (leadership and organizational change)
• Implementation (IT strategy; Service and support operations)
• Alignment (DevOps; LeanIT/Agile)
Our research curatorially challenges the content in those themes to address certain topics. Our
main topics fall into three groups, also aligning somewhat narratively:
• what is formed to enable things to be done (facility),
• what is being done (production),
• and how does that matter (investment).
The topical cross-referencing against themes produces an overall knowledge framework (shown
following) for the conference’s ideas.
• Note that the framework’s thematic columns reiterate Pink16’s conference “tracks”.
• The topical views of our research are represented by the rows of the framework.

5. A knowledge bias
Any business can change. We are concerned with the ideas found in the conference content that are
supporting coverage of business adaptability. And our framework has made us more selective.
Our content preferences are based on the assumptions that:
• the normal business management of IT is necessarily prioritizing and absorbing continual change
• More sophistication about that prioritization, per all areas of the business, should first be applied
to the question of What To Change To.
The relevant content collected for any given topic of our framework offers a virtual conversation,
containing multiple ideas deserving of more awareness and critical thinking.
But within each topic’s group of ideas, there is a key idea (or two) that, compared to the others, will
be most influential on the near-future expectations of opportunities that could develop.
Expectations drive efforts.
As research into Pink16’s content, our preference is for those topical ideas that introduce new
perspectives, or that extend or contradict currently held perspectives, more than for those that are
occupied with teaching or reinforcing emerged standard procedure.
In the framework, we tagged those “stretch knowledge” items in heatmap fashion, with red text.

6. ADAPTIVE BUSINESS CAPABILITY
EVOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION ALIGNMENT
Leadership Org Chg IT Strat Mgmt SvcSupp Ops DevOps LeanIT/Agile
INVESTMENT
concept • Situational • Bi-modal IT • Ideology
• Axioms
• Tenets
culture • Multi-
generational
• Public sector
• Habits
value • Enterprise
service mgmt.
• Stakeholder
engagement
• IT value chain • Design • Business case
finance • Models • Costing
PRODUCTION
performance • Culture • Talent
management
innovation • Collective
leadership
• Digital Service
Mgmt
• Continuous
Innovation
• Acceleration
implementation • Cloud migration • Service
automation
• Requirements
• Frameworks
transformation • Grass-roots
• Roadmap
• Risk • Strategies
• Success factors
• Evolution
• Futures
• Adoption
• Requirements
FACILITY
training • Cross-training • Models • Knowledge
• Gamification
communications • Transparency • Process • Terminologies
process • Owners • Alignment
• Speed
• Accountability • Integration • Improvement
• Best practices
architecture • Org model • IT value chain • Optimization
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

7. What’s missing from our view
Given any content collection, we can take superficial omission of subjects as an indication that the
overall content collection has been curated for a different direction or problem.
Compared to a year ago at Pink15, one of the most significant things about this year’s conference
coverage is its apparent lack of emphasis on Governance. Another issue that seems largely subdued
is Knowledge Management.
That observation can be taken in several ways. One interpretation is that findings in those areas
have not significantly changed since their prior recent prominence in management advice. Another
interpretation is that adoption of them is now more ordinary compared to the urgency of freshly or
initially addressing other issues.
Meanwhile we have taken both Security and Tools (areas that are offered as Pink16 conference
tracks) to be issues that, like Governance and Knowledge, are pervasive and are therefore best
mapped throughout the framework’s full range. However, while that has not been done here so far,
an initial mapping would probably include them as topical rows in the Facility group, not as
columns.
Finally, as a related cataloging matter, any given item of content may contain several ideas and
therefore may correspond to multiple locations in the framework. Content providers can self-
identify where their contributions offer the most emphasis. Within our framework, ideas can still
emerge in locations not currently shown populated.

8. How the knowledge is useful
It is tempting to trace and link the highlighted items or “hotpoints” from concept to architecture, to
expose some pipeline of value or a blueprint for adaptability that current organizations can use to
navigate required and impending change.
But despite our topical narrative, we claim no significant evidence that the highlights operationally
connect with each other in that way.
Instead, we find from experience comparing different organizations that the hotpoints can at least
predispose, and at most dominate, the way that other ideas in their same topical areas are pursued
or used.
Awareness and progress at those same hotpoints can set an organization’s “footing” or its
management’s “direction” in an irreversible orientation.
In that sense, we see them as systemic factors, in the overall environment of adaptability of the
business. In IT management practice, these factors are part of continuous alignment of IT to the
business.
Being systemic and imperative, they deserve and encourage ongoing research of related content
from multiple providers and collections.
More immediately, they stand together as an example of targeted agenda points for engaging any
similar conference or knowledge collection.

9. ©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
www.archestra.com
mryder@archestra.com