Every framework, every bit of jargon, every habit of working you’ve picked up in a service management role started as a decision someone else made before you arrived. Inheriting all of it doesn’t commit you to keeping any of it. We get to decide what endures and what we change. That’s the case Simone Jo Moore makes about humanising IT throughout her conversation with Roman Jouravlev in his Conversations with Giants series. Whatever the tools and techniques do next, the human stays at the center of all three of what she calls her core interactions: people-to-process, people-to-technology, and people-to-people.
Humanising IT: putting people at the center
For Simone, humanising IT didn’t begin in IT. Before service management, she designed services in what she calls the marble-and-brass world, the secretarial and reception work sold to small operators who wanted a corporate look and feel. Service design goes back that far for her. She points out that the word humanising dates to the 1600s, which makes the idea of putting people at the center of work a few centuries older than the current conversation about it.
When she moved into call centers and service desks in the late 1990s, she carried that thinking with her. The line she used whenever a team had to redesign a process was that a process is still a conversation. The question she’d ask next was how that conversation was happening. Her own contribution has come from the behavioral side, through empathy, emotional agility, and wellbeing and mental health programs, with the work designed with the person at the center.
She gives credit to the human-centered design work coming out of HIT Global (offering humanising IT training and certification), while making the point that human-centered design is no more a single discipline than HR is. Plenty of methods sit inside each. The same focus on people runs through the Conversations with Giants series, from Mark Smalley on value and silos to Barclay Rae on why service management keeps being declared dead.
AI clears the drudgery (in humanising IT)
Simone is openly excited about artificial intelligence (AI), for practical reasons. She talks about the dull, draining parts of a job as cognitive parasites. These things occupy your brain without giving anything back. Take those away, and people get time back for the harder, better work, like solving problems and having the conversations with customers and colleagues that routine work crowds out. A well-designed way of working, she says, follows how a person needs to move through something.
She reaches for an old analogy for AI and humanising IT. Think of the washing machine adverts from the 1950s and 1960s, the shift from hand-wringing to push-button automation with a cycle for every fabric. The question with AI is the same one those machines raised: what it frees us to do now that we couldn’t do before, in how we work and how we live.
She even brings AI into her own artwork, and she’s particular about how she uses it. Typing a prompt and taking whatever comes back is fine for a birthday card. When she’s making her own work, the idea, the feeling, and the concept stay hers, and AI becomes a muse. She’ll sketch something, upload it, and ask what it might look like in a different color scheme or a different medium, oils to watercolor to clay, as a way of playing with an idea before she commits to it. She’s read enough of the copyright cases moving through the courts to know the risks are real, particularly for vocalists and other artists whose work can be lifted, and she holds those alongside the upside.
The newer question, and the subject of a paper she and Roman worked on, is governance. Her three interactions used to be people-to-people, people-to-technology, and people-to-process. AI adds a fourth, a human in conversation with a technology that now has agency of its own. It’s still a conversation, the way she sees it, which is why it still needs to be designed around the human. Kaimar Karu put a version of the same argument in his episode, treating AI as an instrument that might serve a strategy rather than a strategy in its own right.
SIAM is a relationship problem first
Ask Simone why an organization needs service integration and management (SIAM), and she keeps it simple: it makes life easier by making the whole thing smarter. SIAM coordinates multiple suppliers through a single integrating function. Supplier and contract management have always existed in IT, but she describes how they often run as a hodgepodge, with too many people working the same issue from different directions and a lot of duplicated effort. SIAM takes the guesswork out of who owns what and aligns value systems and outcomes across organizations that each keep their own objectives.
The single integration layer interests her as a way of seeing relationships rather than contracts. She talks about a nexus, the web of connections between providers, internal teams, and customers, with SIAM as the thing that recognizes that web and pulls it together. It’s work she’s done with Claire Agutter, who’s a future guest in this series. Take the acronyms out, and SIAM is a way of managing relationships, with the coordination layer built on top.
No framework rules them all
Asked whether the industry already has the tools it needs or is just using them badly, Simone’s answer is that we don’t have all the ingredients, and the ones we’re missing may be sitting at the back of the pantry waiting for someone to clear it out. She isn’t asking for another framework. The work is in blending the ones we already have (as part of humanising IT).
Karen Ferris’s portfolio approach appeals to her for that reason: it lets you mix and match methods, techniques, and frameworks according to the context you find yourself in, rather than committing to one and pushing everything through it. Her own relationship nexus is a pathway, she’s careful to say, closer to a guide than a framework. She leans on guiding principles for that reason, since a principle keeps its shape even as the specific methods around it change.
The hard part, she says, is adapting through that complexity. Some of it she’d deliberately tangle together, where the connections are worth having, and the rest she’d prune back, the way you clear out synapses you’ve stopped using. Organizations are built from people, each of them different, so a good deal of the complexity is natural and won’t be designed away. The job is to make space for people to work through it, starting with how they behave.
Leading people without controlling them
On leadership, Simone draws a distinction between motivating and inspiring people. Motivation, she says, has to come from inside the person, so the most you can do is create the conditions for it, where people do something because they’ve decided they want to. She’s comfortable with the word “manipulation” for this, stripped of its baggage, since, at root, it means to maneuver or influence. The same influence turns dark in the wrong hands, whether that’s a manager or a colleague acting in bad faith, which is why she ties it back to staying human yourself and holding on to your own ethics.
Given one thing to change about the industry, she’d make it more compassionate and more human (bring us back to humanising IT), readier to let go of dogma and to express itself with more empathy. She separates kindness from compassion, with compassion being the part where you act on it, and she’s firm that emotional agility is a skill, meaning people can learn it rather than wait for it to arrive.
The pull of community
That outlook carries into her community work. She sits on the board of the Open Service Community. She co-hosted the Keeping the Learning On broadcasts, which ran for three seasons, alongside earlier podcasts that brought industry colleagues together to pick apart what was bugging them. She describes the Open Service Community as a kind of safe space, where people share what they’ve tried and what went wrong, and come away with practical ideas and a bit of support. None of it was particularly formal at the start, just people talking.
Beyond humanising IT: The journey is the goal
Her advice to anyone entering the field runs along similar lines. Find the people whose work pulls you in and ask them how they think, then let yourself be illuminated by them instead of copying them outright. Stay curious, and keep asking why a particular path is happening for you. And hold on to the difference between being able to do something and being obliged to do it.
When Simone turns the tables and asks Roman what’s fascinated him most across the series, his answer is serendipity, how many turning points in the industry came from low-probability combinations of people and events. Simone takes the same view of a career. She’s never been comfortable with the question of where you want to be in five years, because committing to a fixed target can shut down the unexpected turns she’s found most valuable. The journey is the goal, in her words, and the adaptability she builds along the way is what she values most. For all the frameworks, tools, and AI in the conversation, her conclusion stays simple: the work is humans connecting.
Watch Simone’s full Conversations with Giants episode, including more on humanising IT, here:
Sophie Danby
Sophie is a freelance ITSM marketing consultant, helping ITSM solution vendors to develop and implement effective marketing strategies.
She covers both traditional areas of marketing (such as advertising, trade shows, and events) and digital marketing (such as video, social media, and email marketing). She is also a trained editor.
