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“Why do you talk about #BoringboringITSM when it’s what you sell?” Asked my better half the other day when I asked her to review my last blog. A very good question given that I spend my time talking to customers who work in IT, and whose job titles are things like ‘Head of Service Management’, or ‘IT Director’ or ‘Head of Production Systems’.

Perhaps the starting point is to clearly state that I am passionate about this only because it is what I sell, and our focus at Fusion is absolutely about delivering value to our customers. As I have previously stated, when the Board in most organisations (i.e. business leaders who do not have a background in IT) hear about IT Service Management, they hear ‘Service Desk’. What they do not see is that Service Management (as opposed to IT Service Management) is a fundamental business function that supports all of the digital services that underpin almost every company on the planet. So #BoringboringITSM is my way of shouting this out to the IT industry and business leaders.

Let me explain more about why service management is so important.  In any business there are customer facing services that directly or indirectly generate revenue, and increasingly these services are digital. Things like an e-commerce website for a retailer, or a mobile banking application for a bank – critical because without them there’s no business.

The teams that run those digital services are critical to the success or failure of the business and they in turn rely on a web of technology services and capabilities including the service desk, but also monitoring, database, cloud services – the list is a long one. Underneath this are things like processes, automation, operations and making this chain of technology, people and process work is the Service Management function.

So, when I talk about Service Management I am trying to paint the picture that shows how critical it is to those revenue generating, business critical applications. And not just running them, but as a vehicle to bringing new services to market. We currently have a very well-known customer in the Media world whose ability to release new services in consistently slowed down by the ability of their infrastructure team to keep up. We are working hard to bring these two business functions together and improve not just the operational efficiency of the business but allow them to reduce their time to market and improve their customer experience.

Unfortunately, IT seems to have become caught up in a ‘cost reduction’ cycle because it has consistently undersold its own importance. The CIO knows this and needs some help from the Service Management vendors and their ecosystems to address it. DevOps, Cloud Migration, AI – these are all initiatives that have caught the imagination. Come on Service Management – let’s get on the bandwagon.