Service management now and in 2022: switching on the lightbulb

A mantra from the past year is that ITIL 4 contains tools and approaches that bring us closer to customer needs.

By that I mean building a customer relationship, meeting customers where they are, understanding needs and co-creating value. The challenge is getting this message across to companies and colleagues.

A company can experience a lightbulb moment with this: if they have been trying to handle operations management in a fast-moving environment while meeting governance regulations. There are probably pockets of it happening already in a company, but not enough to make it a cost-effective IT model.

However, a conversation around ITIL 4 will demonstrate the possibility of having an Agile/DevOps environment alongside governance to reduce risk. Once that lightbulb goes on with a company they understand it, like it and progress it to co-create value.

We can show companies how ITIL 4 interweaves each of the pieces in a service value system and how they can trace value streams in that system. And this is something they can do themselves, developing an approach that is fit for the future.

When it comes to embedding ITIL 4 principles, a lesson learned this year was to get senior leadership buy-in and cultivate a “champion” in your corner to support it.

But to be able to translate its worth to CEOs and COOs requires an “elevator pitch” in executive terms that answers the questions: What is it, what will I get and why?

The ITIL 4 Leader: Digital and IT Strategy module has particularly useful guidance in its customer and market relevance section. This insists that everyone, including the C-suite, is thinking about the customer and whether everything the organization does is relevant to that customer.

If you look at Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, we all need to prioritize the essential things that will help us fulfil our purpose. That’s why the customer and market relevance advice in ITIL 4 is so key: your customers are the reason you exist, so make sure what you do is relevant.

Today, many companies maintain on-premise IT versus cloud-based services.

If – thinking ahead to 2022 – you need a DevOps environment that is cost effective and want to work in an Agile way, on-premise IT creates bottlenecks. Similarly, if you need a quicker turnaround with new applications, it’s better to feed into a continuous integration/continuous delivery approach.

While many in service management are still figuring out how to work with that, ITIL 4 provides the methods to be both flexible, adaptable and help customers get what they want.

And service management based on ITIL 4 – suitable to high velocity IT and resilient operations – means that individual practitioners also need cloud certifications and knowledge to support where companies are heading. In addition, becoming a Scrum Master is a good way of learning how to facilitate communication among a team and keep them on pace.

The changing demands and requests for new skills are now a weekly occurrence and practitioners need to ensure they have those skills in place to remain relevant in 2022.