Earlier this month I had the great honour to be awarded the
itSMF Australia ITSM Champion of the
Year and the Thought Leader of the
Year Awards (the latter together with my indomitable colleague @mmg9898). Now, as thrilled as I am with this
recognition and as much as I think it is a reward for my activities and
commitment, it also got me thinking how we need more champions and thought leaders, in all organisations, at all
levels!
Champions
I need to clarify that the word ‘champion’ in this context is not about being a winner (although on
the Industry Awards night I certainly felt like one), but rather about being an
advocate (i.e. ‘to speak or write in favor of; support or urge by argument; recommend
publicly’- source: dictionary.com)!
In order to be a champion\advocate, firstly there needs to
be an audience otherwise you are just ‘shouting in the desert’. But, a champion provides a reminder to that
audience about what (in this case) service management is, its correct application,
new developments and other noteworthy aspects.
During the conference it was frequently mentioned that
organisations need a kind of ‘Service Management coach’ (similar to an Agile coach etc.) to guide an organisation in
its use of the many different service management practices available these days
(as well as the staff applying them).
But … it goes further.
A champion is not necessarily a person with expert knowledge and capabilities
or seniority, but can be ‘merely’ that one person in a team who is motivated
about the practices in use, and advocates, encourages, guides, supports and
influences the team members around them (regardless of hierarchic position).
We need those champions: from a global expert perspective,
but also as an organisational coach or an operational enthusiast … BE A CHAMPION!
Thought Leaders
Apart from Champions, we also need more Thought Leaders. I think sometimes people expect our ‘thought
leaders’ to be exceptionally brilliant people who amaze the world\industry with
creative and original ideas …
Far be it for me to say that this isn’t true for some
luminary colleagues, however, I reckon that most thought leaders do not
necessarily have all their original thoughts themselves. Instead they observe their environment, the
community they operate in and collect individual challenges, opportunities,
thoughts and solutions. They engage and
interact with the community to gather and this information and proliferate,
expand, share it in a novel & structured way that is recognised as ‘leading
the way’.
It reminds me of the ‘Dancing Guy’ video from Derek Shivers,
whereby the ‘lone nut’ is the person with the original idea but indeed is only
a lone nut, until the ‘first followers’ validate the idea and start the
movement. Thought Leaders are these
first followers who recognise and validate the potential of new ideas.
And with this comes the concept that ‘Continual Service
Improvement’ is at the heart of any (service management) operating model and
culture. We need to question the status
quo, we need to judiciously apply new practices and methods and constantly
measure the value of our outcomes.
Thus, if thought leaders do not need to be exceptional
thinkers, and we all need to be thinking about bigger and better ways of
operating … BE A THOUGHT LEADER!
Why do we need
Champion Thought Leaders?
Now, all of the above has been true for some time, but I
think that in this current day and age it is even more important to have Champion Thought Leaders. First and foremost, as Service Management is
a community that is fed by individuals contributing to the collective wisdom
(as well as organisations, commercial or otherwise). The more people that contribute, the larger
the collective wisdom available to the community is.
I can see three current developments that increase the need
for Champion Thought Leaders today:
Unfortunately, a reality is that the field of traditional
service management is losing its relevance.
Not so much in real terms (as in contributing to business outcomes and
value) but in terms of the attention it gets (from the business, management but
also prospective staff). It is just not
‘sexy’, and definitely not when compared to agile practices or artificially
intelligent technology!
I think this is partially because we view
service management as operations only (i.e.
day-to-day, business-as-usual), rather than seeing the full scope of it,
of the complete service lifecycle including strategy, design and transition.
And, regardless of whether this is true or
not (and: it’s not!), service management is here, it’s not going away and all
those agile projects, all those smart, connected technologies still need to be
part of a service that delivers value to the consumer and need to be operated
(and improved, and … well: managed).
Thus, we need Champion Thought Leaders to
not only keep service management in the forefront of people’s thinking, but
also to look for improvements & new practices (and that way linking service
management to the more sexy agile, lean and innovation\transformation activities
organisations are paying attention to).
The days of the de-facto standard in
service management are gone (the one ring
to rule us all, to repeat another theme discussed during the itSMF
conference) and instead we are bombarded with a myriad of practices, each
promising to do things better or rather to focus on a particular area of
service management (where pain is felt, improvements can be achieved or
transitions made).
So, we need global experts to create and
introduce these new practices, and then organisational ‘coaches’ to find the
best ways to introduce and apply them, but it all starts with ‘local’,
operational Champion Thought Leaders who see existing practices that need
improving and are willing to expand their scope beyond the
known\available\common theory.
3. Relevance
(again)
Yes, I know that service management
relevance (or rather the lack thereof) was my initial development necessitating
Champion Thought Leaders but this one is more or less the opposite of that
first one, as there is an increasing relevance of service management in the
enterprise, i.e. outside of the IT department.
Enterprise Service Management is needed for
those organisations tackling digital transformations (and let’s be honest: which
organisation isn’t … or doesn’t want to?) as now we no longer have IT-services,
but rather technology-enabled business services. The end-to-end service covers the technology,
but also the other enterprise aspects and thus service management capabilities
need to be extended into the enterprise as well.
Now, back at the same conference where we
were awarded the ITSM Champion and Thought Leader awards, we delivered a
presentation on VeriSM™, as one of the new ITSM kids in town, especially
focused on service management in a digital age and in an enterprise setting.
Afterwards we got the question of who would talk to the business about
this (i.e. enterprise service management
practices), and the answer is: ‘well …
you of course!’
Become a Champion
Thought Leader!
Service management is on the praecipe of a renaissance. Emerging technologies (cloud, IoT, AI …) make
IT service management less relevant, but technology enabled business services
much more so. Digital transformation is
on everyone’s lips, including of the organisational decision makers (i.e. outside
of, as well as over-and-above the IT department).
And because we’re entering unchartered territory, it is not
the usual channels that will bring the message.
Not the globally recognised service management guru’s (or skeptics), not
the spruikers of new practices and methodologies, not even the consulting
organisations and researchers, like Forrester, Gartner and the like, that are
usually keen to provide an insight of ‘where it’s at’. Rather the message needs to come from
‘within’, from those that understand the business and preferably have some real
life experience in this (warts and all, good and bad, lessons learned, pitfalls
and all that).
This is where you come in. Service management is one of the things that we have actually done quite well within the IT environment, and it is our duty -and I mean: all of our duties … including you as the reader here- to share this with the business, advocate service management practices and lead the corporate thoughts on practices and structures … BE A CHAMPION THOUGHT LEADER !
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