Whither ITSM?

No, not "wither ITSM", though perhaps that too. You be the judge.

Right now the ITSM industry is involved in a messy spat amongst ourselves, that the rest of the IT sector will ignore. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the other 98% of the IT population even care what happens here. They don’t much mind how they learn their ITSM basics along with all the other knowledge commodities they need to consume for their daily work.

For those not up with the play, start here. It's just business for the bottom feeders in any industry. They consume the dying products sinking to the bottom. ITIL is end of life, this is part of its natural life cycle. Unfortunately the process of consuming it hurts people.?

Capita overpaid for it, ran it down, but give them credit for one thing. A bunch of great thinkers under their sponsorship made ITIL 4 happen because they cared, to drag ITIL into the 21st Century. PeopleCert doubled down on overpaying for it. I would guess in a belief that the customer base was captive and the asset could be sweated. Now they need their money back (fast, it was a leveraged deal). It's no wonder that ATOs are being pushed beyond what they will accept. I imagine this is part of the PeopleCert strategy. Classroom ATOs are high maintenance, I suspect they're happy to shed those. Again, give them credit. PeopleCert have the vision to see what customers need (across the whole global market including millions more practitioners in upcoming nations) and they have grabbed the opportunity to give it to them. The future is a commodity product that scales: online cert mills.

Several people have asked me if my alter-ego, The IT Skeptic, is coming out of retirement.? No, he’s spinning in his grave, but he’s definitely dead. However, I do want to contribute to the discussion.

We must not focus on the past and regret, or the future and worry, but look to the present and respond situationally. It is what it is.

The purpose of the current discussions I have seen seem to fall into three types:

a) to find substitutes /alternatives to ITIL.?

b) to find a simple common introductory course.

C) find the way forward for ITSM.

Both the first two have a place, both have value in limited markets, in niches. Personally I'm interested in the third but here are some thoughts on the first two:

a) Not ITIL

There is zero value in getting emotional and trying to take down ITIL. There have been several solid attempts to compete over the years that all went nowhere.? I’ll leave the outrage to others.

There is a need for better knowledge for service management professionals specifically, not for the whole ITSM user community. The latter just?want the ticket and PeopleCert understand that, they provide the commodity digital solution for the IT person who wants to know about the 5 books. Taking them on directly seems to me to be pointless. The market doesn't want 2 solutions. Trying to get the same mindshare as ITIL is an enormous task across several million practitioners, especially in Asia and Africa. What PeopleCert’s business model doesn't cover - I think - is the specialist classroom training for people who want career expertise. It's a small market that will sustain high prices and classroom training.

There are also a number of customer organisations whose ITSM heads know and care enough about what’s happening to throw ITIL out and look for an alternative.? I have no data on how many there are, but I suspect not that many outside of our close circles. Changing horses is expensive.

b) Intro to ITSM

There is also a demand for an introductory course amongst those who make a living teaching ITSM, that they could use without paying the ITIL tithe. This would be a useful public service to put it out there.

Awareness of it will be limited, there will be little pull without massive marketing resources beyond the capability of the community creating it. but then, it's not out to make money. For those who know, it will be nice to have. I fear it will get bogged down in the usual ITSM definitional debates.

c) ITSM Wayfinding?

So let's talk about (c).

I feel like most of the discussion is fixating on the thing needed, not the people or activity to make it happen. Oh the irony.? ITSM people love to conceptualise, to abstract, to doodle, to create. Unfortunately, we usually do it as an exercise in personal expression, not as a collaborative activity.? Every ITSM framework out there except ITIL, VeriSM, and a couple of others seems to me to be at its heart the work of one person. How many frameworks would you like? I’ve created Tipu,?

…CoPr,?

…Basic Service Management,

…the Unicorn Management Model,?

…and these no-name bubbles

For what it's worth, I am creating a framework of the bigger context we in IT ought to be thinking about now, which I offer up as a contribution. I call it Open IT.? It doesn’t have a pretty wheel yet (our industry demands an iconic picture). If you are curious, sign up for the series of weekly emails explaining and developing it. In a nutshell, it is about the better ways of managing and working based on humanity, systems, and adaptability. The three focus areas of IT are liberation, adaptability, and flow.

20th Century management is obsolete, and with it the perfectionism and structure of traditional service management thinking. We must embrace the messiness. Optimisation is a failing strategy in a VUCA world. Adaptability ensures survivability in the 21st Century. What got you here won’t get you there. I'm not saying Open IT is the answer: I'm saying it describes the answer, it defines the scope. If it seems too big in scope, look at ITIL. ITSM has always tried to describe all of IT reality.? In this millennium, IT reality just got bigger. What I'm talking about here isn’t an alternative to ITIL. It needs to rise above, to be on a new level, to see further; in which ITIL is just hygiene, a BAU consideration. Enterprise service management isn't big enough, though you can go there as an interim step to escape the sinking ITSM ship. Then we move on to Business Agility, Humanocracy, complexity, and values-driven value.

Moving ITSM

As I said, it is pretty ironic that we focus on what the content is, more than who is going to develop and curate it, and how.?

We must move forward. ITIL 4 took a step. Many have gone further. I listened to Jan van Bon and others saying the right things in the online discussions about this. The DevOps thought leaders like John Allspaw are ahead. Systems thinkers like Dave Snowden, John Seddon, and Simon Wardley are trying to tell us. Cultural influencers point the way, like Frederic Laloux, Gary Hamel, Sidney Dekker, and Amy Edmondson. And many more. Most folk in the traditional ITSM community (and IT management!) have fallen behind - I hear it every day.

This discussion is no place for old men. I'll leave it to the younger generations to find the path forward - I’m chipping in my bit here. I hope they will be a hell of a lot more diverse in culture, gender, and ethnicity than the names I’ve already mentioned.

To make it happen, it will need a business leader to form the alliances, networks, collaborations, and products to define the future ITSM. Teal Unicorn isn't interested, but another coloured animal might be if they have the energy.

Meanwhile

So back to the immediate problem, how are people in the ITSM industry going to eat this year and next??

1. You can try to compete directly with a standardised digital product that has the ITIL brand. Good luck with that. You might scratch out a living on the periphery with disaffected customers
2. You can go after the elite classroom training market that I don't think PeopleCert want (?), delivering stuff like VeriSM, ITSM Essentials, or USM.?
3. You can reinvent yourself as delivering something higher. Pivot to work in "ways of working". I did this six years ago when I created Teal Unicorn with Dr Vu. I started ten years ago by embracing DevOps and Agile.
4. You can retire. Many of us are near.
5. If you aren't quite at retirement yet, you can dance for the piper.

[After a comment by Phyllis Drucker , I'd add ...

6. Diversify. ITSM isn't the be-all and end-all. e.g. Some folk I know have moved into security. It is kind of (3) but less challenging.]

Thanks for reading this far.? Good luck out there.

#itil #itsm