itSMFI 2016 Forum Focus - December Forum Focus ITSMFIV3 | Page 6

The Integral Service
Management Model
by Dolf J.H. van der Haven
NOTE: this article is part of the book “Service Management in Human Perspective”, to be published by IT Governance Publishing
in 2017
Introduction
ISO/IEC 20000, ITIL and IT Service Management in general are in
the letter mostly process and organisation-oriented. What misses
in these approaches, but are important factors in the
implementation of any ITSM framework, are perspectives on the
influence of organisational culture and communication as well as
the individual’s attitude, motivation, emotional state and
behaviour on a successful ITSM implementation.
These aspects can be added to ITSM by integrating them into the
model used in Integral Psychology. Integral Psychology bases itself
on a model that states there are four basic perspectives on any
phenomenon in the world that should all be taken to get a
complete view of it. After explaining this model, the application
thereof to ITSM will be developed.
Ken Wilber’s Integral Model comes down to splitting up
phenomena in the world into four aspects, based on whether you
talk about an individual person (the upper half of Figure 1), the
group that person belongs to (the lower half) or whether you look
at things from an internal perspective (the left hand side of Figure
1) or from an external one (the right hand side). This results in four
so-called Quadrants, depicted as follows:
Figure 1. The Integral Model and the place of ITSM in it (after Ken
Wilber).
1.
The first quadrant on the upper left contains internal
individual aspects such as knowledge, emotions,
morality, etc.
6 itSMFI Forum Focus—December 2016
2.
The second quadrant on the upper right contains
external individual aspects such as the physical body, health
and behaviour.
3.
The third quadrant on the lower left contains internal
aspects of the group (a company, society, etc.), such as
communication and culture.
4.
The fourth quadrant looks at the group from the
outside, involving things like organisation, politics and pro-
cesses.
In each of the quadrants, there are possibilities for growth or
development in various aspects, indicated by the concentric circles in
the picture. The further away from the centre, the further developed
an aspect is. The arrows in Figure 1 show various aspects in their
quadrants: longer arrows indicate a higher level of development for
that aspect.