The presence of distinguished speakers coupled up with a series of quality dialogues and workshops have ensured that the first leg of MSC Malaysia Capability Development Programme (COP) Roadshow 2010 in Cyberjaya was a rousing success.

The CDP Roadshow 2010, themed "Your Knowledge Hub to Maximise Your Potential", was held recently at the Cyberview Lodge Resort & Spa and attracted over 200 companies and lCT professionals. Organised by Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the two-day event was the first of three legs planned by its Capability Development Department across the country. The next two legs will be held in Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

While previous CDP events were conducted as small and stand-alone occasions – this year the department has decided to take a giant step to consolidate the workshops and conduct three main events targeting both lCT professionals and MSC Malaysia Status Organisations.

Dr Karl Ng, the Head of Capability Development Department, said the event proved to be a better approach in providing choices to participants as compared to previously adopted approach of separate sessions at different times ofthe year.

Ng said: "Weare in the midst of introducing many more exciting programmes and initiatives this year and this is the best platform to share and receive feedback from our MSCMalaysia Status organisations and the lCT industry in general."

He added the event provided a good opportunity for the department to share with the participants on latest COP announcements and assistance provided to them through its incentive schemes, online knowledge centre, besides workshops and awareness dialogues.

The keynote speaker for the occasion was Howard Kendall, Founder and Chairman of Service Desk Institute of UK; who delved into the subject of IT Service Management (ITSM).

Kendall said managing the customer experience, from the business point of view using IT facilities is the way forward. He stressed that having a strong Service Management framework is not enough, as the "challenging socio-economic background of new generation socio-media tools", such as Twitter and Facebook, are making evaluation ever harder.

He said such rich media gives instantaneous feedback and evaluation to the service provider - meaning they have to improve their services as soon as possible - and this may prove to be the hardest part.

"The main reason I am here is to help grow the skills together with the MSC Malaysia Capability Development Programme. It's very much about developing quality standards for ServiceDesk. That's something we will do together with Malaysian companies," Kendall promised.

The keynote speech was followed by I Awareness Dialogues focusing on selected areas such as Leadership, Project Management, Software Development and Strategy. Four workshops were also held in the area of Information Security Management Service (ISMS), IT Service Management (ITSM), Service Desk and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

ITSM Experts Managing Director Tony Albert - who conducted a workshop on Service Desk Certification at the event – was delighted with the response at the event. Albert said: "We got more participants than what we earlier expected - so that's something very encouraging and we would like to see more companies participating in similar programmes in the future."

He added: "Wewant to take this opportunity to help organisations to raise the quality standards of their service delivery to their clients which will eventually make all MSC Malaysia Status Companies in Malaysia very competitive to become a global player. So we do look forward for more workshops in the future."

The event in Cyberjaya also saw COP's announcement of the Software Testing Guidebook. The handbook is intended to assist professionals involved in Software Testing to adopt more structured processes in order to improve their software testing capabilities and product quality.