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:
(Photo: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)