10 most essential jobs for delivering IT as a business

IT Service Management, we hardly knew ye.

There has been plenty of momentum toward ITSM principles and practices, in which IT  focuses on running more like a business, delivering services to internal and external customers. It is a more lightweight component of the ITILmethodology. Now, it seems, ITSM is dated -- just as it's starting to appear on corporate radar screens.

For starters, drop the "IT" from ITSM, says Forrester's Glenn O'Donnell. (Seconded by his colleague Stephan Mann, who surfaced O'Donnell's original report.)

Successful ITSM, O'Donnell and Mann state, "requires customer obsession, relentless focus on just the right portfolio of services, automation, and an expansion far beyond ITIL and the walls of the infrastructiure and operations organization." In other words, a lot of business and customer-service skills.

So, drop the IT from ITSM, and add "automation," the analysts urge. The result, "service management and automation" (or SMA for short), better addresses the need to "deliver customer outcomes faster, cheaper, and at higher quality."

Within their newly minted service management and automation realm, O'Donnell and Mann describe the 10 job roles that are and will be essential for making SMA stick and deliver:

1. Automation architect. Designs, implements, and maintains the automation system
2. Service manager. Has ultimate responsibility for the services -- "will own that service (and service delivery) from cradle to grave."
3. Process manager.  "Like the service manager, the process manager has ultimate responsibility for the processes under his or her jurisdiction."
4. Service designer. Oversees services assembly using the principles of systems engineering.
5. Financial manager. Brings business sensibilities and discipline to service development.
6. IT marketing manager.  Sells IT services to the rest of the organization -- highly needed, O'Donnell says.
7. Sourcing and vendor manager. Works with available suppliers and vendors for tools and systems.
8. Capacity manager. Controls IT infrastructure "in such a way that resource shortages are anticipated and corrected before they occur no matter if on-premises or off-premises solutions and infrastructure are used."
9. Problem manager. Able to "comprehend dependencies and has the ability to see through the mess to identify and resolve problems that cause recurring incidents."
10. Knowledge engineer. "Responsible for encouraging, enforcing, and creating a knowledge management process and disseminating knowledge across the organization."

(Photo: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)