I think this is partially because we view service management as operations only (i.e. day-to-day, business-as-usual), rather than seeing the full scope of it, of the complete service lifecycle including strategy, design and transition.
And, regardless of whether this is true or not (and: it’s not!), service management is here, it’s not going away and all those agile projects, all those smart, connected technologies still need to be part of a service that delivers value to the consumer and need to be operated (and improved, and … well: managed).
Thus, we need Champion Thought Leaders to not only keep service management in the forefront of people’s thinking, but also to look for improvements & new practices (and that way linking service management to the more sexy agile, lean and innovation\transformation activities organisations are paying attention to).
2. Complexity
The days of the de-facto standard in service management are gone (the one Thing to rule us all, to repeat another theme discussed during the itSMF conference) and instead we are bombarded with a myriad of practices, each promising to do things better or rather to focus on a particular area of service management (where pain is felt, improvements can be achieved or transitions made).
So, we need global experts to create and introduce these new practices, and then organisational ‘coaches’ to find the best ways to introduce and apply them, but it all starts with ‘local’, operational Champion Thought Leaders who see existing practices that need improving and are willing to expand their scope beyond the known\available\common theory.
3.
Yes, I know that service management relevance (or rather the lack thereof) was my initial development necessitating Champion Thought Leaders but this one is more or less the opposite of that first one, as there is an increasing relevance of service management in the enterprise, i.e. outside of the IT department.
Enterprise Service Management is needed for those organisations tackling digital transformations (and let’s be honest: which organisation isn’t … or doesn’t want to?) as now we no longer have IT-services, but rather technology-enabled business services. The end-to-end service covers the technology, but also the other enterprise aspects and thus service management capabilities need to be extended into the enterprise as well.
Now, back at the same conference where
we were awarded the ITSM Champion and Thought Leader awards, we delivered a presentation on VeriSM™, as one of the new ITSM kids in town, especially focussed on service management in a digital age and in an enterprise setting.
Afterwards we got the question of who would talk to the business about this (i.e. enterprise service management practices), and the answer is: ‘well … you of course!’
Become a Champion Thought Leader!
Service management is on the precipice of a renaissance. Emerging technologies (cloud, IoT, AI …) make IT service management less relevant, but technology enabled business services much more so. Digital transformation is on everyone’s lips, including of the organisational decision makers (i.e. outside of, as well as over-and-above the IT department).
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