Rather than focusing on one prescriptive way of working, it aims to helps organisations to respond to their consumers and deliver value with an integrated service management approach.
Given the huge range of ‘best’ practices out there, this does sound appealing.
Everyone is a service provider
Never a truer word spoken! Public or private sector, small or large – everyone is now in the service market. Even organisations that focus on selling products (for example: retailers) need to provide services attached to those products to be successful (for example: customer service, shipping, returns). And it’s not only private sector or profit-seeking organisations that need to focus on services either. Services are just as important in public sector environments,
where good service can deliver a better experience for consumers or citizens.
Value still needs to be delivered, whether financial or non-financial.
Services are not restricted to the IT domain either. For years, practitioners have been calling for the ‘IT’ to be dropped from IT service management. In VeriSM that is exactly what has happened. VeriSM is built on the premise that to be an effective service provider organisation, service management can no longer be confined to a
single department like IT or customer services; it touches every element of the organisation. To create digital services all the capabilities within the organisation need to work together.
This integration is different from the more commonly used term of ‘alignment’. There is a constant call to align Business and IT. However, even the word alignment infers a disconnect, a void to be filled (after all when two ‘streams’ are perfectly aligned, they are in parallel and not touching each other). It suggests dragging two forces together kicking and screaming, which is the reality of how many businesses see their IT services provider. The ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude prevalent in so many organisations, where IT and the business are disconnected, needs to be changed. Service alignment is out and service integration is in – all areas of an organisation’s capability working together to deliver value to the consumer!
The VeriSM approach is specifically tailored to support the organisation - the entire organisation - to help them succeed in the world of digital services. When the focus changes to look at service management from the organisational perspective, service providers can start to use all of their capabilities, whether they are IT, marketing, finance or customer service, to deliver value.
Back to Basics – VeriSM explained in simple terms
VeriSM describes a service management approach from the organisational level, looking at the end-to-end view rather than focusing on a single department, like the IT department only.
Based on a model (see below), it shows organisations how they can adopt a range of management practices in a flexible way to deliver the right product or service at the right time to their consumers. VeriSM allows for a tailored approach depending upon the type of business, the size of the organisation, it’s business priorities and culture.
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