Posted February 3rd, 2010 by Pierre Bernard

I believe that it is high time that the IT community (consultants, educators, trainers, hardware, and software vendors) start cooperating towards building a sensible body of knowledge for service management.

I say service management on purpose. It is neither IT nor business service management. Even ITSM, IT service management, does not help. It should simply be service management, because this is what we all do. In my opinion, the tangible product purchased or the activities performed by someone are the representation of the unit of service that a customer can recognize.

Purchasing a server and everything included with it such as installation, operating system, and maintenance is actually purchasing a service. A technician showing up to repair a desktop, whether internal or from an external company, is purchasing a service.

Why are we having such a difficult time agreeing what a service is? Even more important; why are we having such a difficulties in IT in general?

To identify the answer, we must first focus our attention on the business. By business, I mean private organizations, public agencies and government organizations at all levels, all education institutions, and non-profit organizations.

In any organization, there are many activities happening behind the scene, such as management, accounting, advertising sales, production, marketing, manufacturing, delivery, purchasing, security, maintenance, IT and so on.

Where am I going with this? We, the IT community, are doing ourselves a major disservice by insisting on calling everything IT-this and IT-that, business-this and business-that and it does not matter if IT or parts of IT are outsourced or not.

In the eyes of the customer, it does not matter who dropped the proverbial ball: the business did. To paraphrase a former colleague of mine, FIMO – fix it and move on.

I have seen many discussions in the social media about fixing IT and so far and it seems to me most agree that the general IT literature does not cover everything.

I also think it is high time that we start building and promoting a business-related body of knowledge for service Management in general. In my humble opinion, there is no official or officially sanctioned body of knowledge for service management.

Presently there are various frameworks, methodologies, and infrastructures available to the business. However, which one should we select? If we use one, do we need another? Is a tool sufficient? If so, which one?

I will not be using the canned consulting answer of “it depends”. That would be taking the easy way out.

Of course, no one will be able to be an all-knowing expert for all frameworks, methodologies, and infrastructures. The difficulty is that there are few (maybe none) industry recognized central repositories of knowledge and accepted best practices that cover IT. There are, of course, pockets of exceptions such as PMBOK® or COBIT®.

Sure, there is ITIL® and ISO/IEC®, and many others; but this is not sufficient. Many will argue that universities and colleges offer the best all-around approaches. This is true to a degree (no pun intended). However, education and training does not stop with the completion of a degree. There is always something new to learn or coming up on the horizon. We also need to be able to easily find and reference information more easily than we presently do.

Sure, there is ITIL® and ISO/IEC®, and many others; but this is not sufficient. Many will argue that universities and colleges offer the best all-around approaches. This is true to a degree (no pun intended). However, education and training does not stop with the completion of a degree. There is always something new to learn or coming up on the horizon. We also need to be able to easily find and reference information more easily than we presently do.

First, we need to identify the topics for which we need worthwhile literature we can sanction as part of our body of knowledge for service management. Here is what I propose as a starting list. I started my list with a visit to the Harvard Business School’s website. I looked at other various major universities from around the world as well, and found very similar lists.

Their executive education program lists the following topic of interest:

• comprehensive leadership
• owner-managed
• business strategy
• corporate governance
• entrepreneurial
• financial management
• healthcare & science
• industry specific
• innovation
• leadership & change
• marketing
• negotiation & managerial decision making
• personal development
• social enterprise
• technology & operations management

To this list, we can add additional topics of interest specific for service. This is a first draft for the list; other topics will be added as they are identified.

• CMMI®
• cultural change & understanding
• infrastructures
• ISACA – COBIT®, VALIT®, and RISKIT®
• ITIL®
• ISO/IEC® standards (just a few examples)
 - ISO/IEC 20000:2005 information technology – service management 
 - ISO 31000:2009 risk management – principles and guidelines,
 - ISO/IEC 27000:2009 information technology – security techniques – information security management systems
 - ISO 28000 series of standards on supply chain security management systems

• managing successful programs – MSP®
• management of risk – M_o_R®
• PMI® - PMBOK®
• PRINCE2®
• The Portfolio Program and Project Management Maturity Model – P3M3®
• The Portfolio Program and Project Offices – P3O®

DESKTOP SOFTWARE – software proficiency
• email
• graphics
• internet
• presentation
• project management
• reporting
• spreadsheet
• word processing

SOFT SKILLS – alphabetical listing
• analytical
• behavior
• coaching
• communication
• consulting
• facilitating
• keyboarding
• learners and learning
• listening
• mentoring
• motivating
• networking
• presentation
• public speaking
• reporting
• training
• train-the-trainer
• writing

In upcoming columns, I will explore each of the above in more detail. I will also start building a more comprehensive list of topics and will suggest books, articles, whitepapers, and user organizations that can be useful in building the body of knowledge.

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