Jan Brouwers & Kristof Stroobants

Integrating operational management and process automation 
By Jan Brouwers & Kristof Stroobants 

Summary of the session
IT has evolved from focusing on technological issues to managing IT as a business with IT Services as the primary product. 
The technology to see, to control and to automate the infrastructure needs to be integrated with the IT business processes to enable IT professionals to work together to deliver high value services. 
This session will show how to create the ability to detect and visualize business process degradation; correlate business process problems with IT event cause and how to identify IT and network issues before they become an impact to the business.

Short Bio of the speakers

Jan Brouwers:
During the last years, Mr. Brouwers guided organizations and companies through several IT Service Management change processes in order to optimize their IT service and to increase the stability and availibility of the IT services. Main focus is on people change management in large organizations and implementing IT Governance.
In June 2009, Mr. Brouwers became IBM Certified Professional in the Consultant profession.
Previous jobs included working in the IT department of a large petrochemicals company in several functions, from IT strategy to improving the processes in IT services.
At the start of his career, Mr. Brouwers has been in a number of pre-sales and technical jobs integrating heterogeneous networks.

Kristof Stroobants:
Kristof Stroobants joined IBM in 2002 as an IT Specialist within IBM's Unix business. During the first years, Mr. Stroobants was in charge of disaster recovery activities for major IBM customers, both on Unix (AIX) and Intel (Windows, Linux and VMWare) environment. He provided both hardware infrastructure and software support which resulted in high client satisfaction. Experience in configuring network components (Cisco switches and routers) and storage components (DS4000, DS8000) were added to the skillmap. During different consultancy projects, Mr. Stroobants acted as a Subject Matter Expert to assist in Business Impact Analysis, Risk Assessment and Recoverability Assessment exercises, including creation of Disaster Recovery Plans for small, medium and large enterprises. Hands-on learning and international teaming to create state-of-the-art solutions (for example disk replication techniques) are keywords for this period.
From 2006, Mr. Stroobants has taken the job profession as IT Architect, in the domain of Infrastructure Architecture. As key member of BeLux Solution Design Center of Excellence, he was in charge for designing solutions around infrastructure, such as IT moves, datacenter optimisation, virtualisation and consolidation projects. He supported the complete chain from opportunity development until project go-live. Mr. Stroobants became a level 1 certified IT Architect, therefore the keywords for this period are: translate customer technical requirements into creative but technical sound solutions.
From 2010, Mr. Stroobants left IBM's services department and became an ITIL certified Service Management Solution Architect for the Tivoli brand. His portfolio contained Tivoli's service management products (from incident, problem towards release management), but also monitoring and Business Service Management products. Keywords for this period are: talk business and position solutions - not products.