Service management stopped being the IT department’s job a while ago, and plenty of practitioners haven’t caught up. Technology or tools are now chosen, run, and managed across the organization, often by people who have never held an IT title. The ones who still treat service management as the property of a central IT team are watching their remit shrink to the IT support desk, while the work that carries real value moves somewhere they aren’t looking.
That’s the argument David Cannon makes in the twelfth episode of Conversations with Giants, Roman Jouravlev’s interview series. David wrote the ITIL Service Operation book and has worked on the framework from version three to its latest edition.
The Tools Fragmented and Integration Got Left Behind
As the work spread out across the organization, it broke into specialized pieces, and that’s clearest in the tools. The IT service management (ITSM) suites of 20 years ago were broad. One product could reach from device and event monitoring through to capacity planning. The popular tools now are specialized, each built for a team that has itself specialized, and they were never designed to share a view of the work. The result is a set of tools that should exchange information and don’t, and a service picture that no single system holds. David has no problem with specialization. What worries him is ownership: someone has to be responsible for the integration between the pieces, and in most organizations, no one is.
The Service Manager’s Job Is Now Orchestration
The tools split because the work split first. ITIL began as a way for technical teams to align with the business, grew into a model for running IT as a service provider, and, in its current form, treats digital technology as something used and managed across the entire organization, often outside IT. Service management is now an organization-wide concern that most organizations still run it as an IT-only function.
David’s practical answer is to stop guarding the central desk and start mapping the whole estate. Find every place technology is chosen, provided, and managed, including the parts owned by marketing, finance, or an outside supplier, and work out how they connect. Then make one role responsible for orchestrating and governing that whole picture, so the risk spread across it is being managed rather than assumed away. David thinks that work, not the IT service desk, is where the value in the job now sits.
What Cloud Should Teach You About AI
That organization-wide view is exactly what you need for whatever comes next, and right now that’s artificial intelligence (AI). David’s warning comes from cloud. When his team wrote about cloud in ITIL version three, they managed the obvious part well: how to procure and run cloud infrastructure. What they missed was the bigger change, that ordinary people would use the cloud from their phones to book a taxi or a date, and that it would reshape how businesses operated, not just how IT bought servers. Manage AI only as infrastructure, and you’ll make the same mistake.
He’s also more confident about AI than the industry ever was about cloud. AI tools extends a shift that service management has already lived through, with technology spreading from the central IT department into every corner of the business. Because it continues a pattern you already understand, the current ITIL is willing to describe it without pretending to have it fully mapped, and you can plan for it from where you are rather than from a blank slate. Look ahead, but build on what’s already there.
Quality Means Different Things in Different Places
How you put any of this into practice depends on where you’re doing it, because service management has never meant the same thing everywhere. In much of Europe, David finds, quality is valued enough to pay for, even when the return takes years. In the US, it’s judged in the short term by how quickly you can ship what people need. The early ITIL adopters were the patient, quality-first organizations, so getting it into a typical US company now means breaking the work into three- and six-month pieces while holding the long-term vision. Quick wins are essential there, as long as they aren’t the only wins.
Scale decides how specialized your people can be. A medium-sized US company can run to tens of thousands of employees, while a medium-sized South African one might stop at a few hundred, and that difference sets everything else. Large organizations can afford people who join the IT service desk and retire from it. Smaller ones need generalists who have worked ten different IT jobs, and David thinks the generalist is now the more valuable hire almost everywhere, because holding several of those fragmented pieces at once is exactly the skill the work now demands.
The Service Management Role Worth Moving Into
For all this change, none of it needs a new framework or another tool. The pieces already exist in most organizations. What’s usually missing is a role whose job is to see how they fit and take responsibility for the whole. David’s case is that owning that role is the most useful move a service manager can make now.
Service Management Key Takeaways
- Treat service management as an organization-wide concern, not the property of the central IT desk. The value is moving to whoever can see and govern technology wherever it’s used.
- Map where technology is chosen, provided, and managed across your whole organization, including outside IT, and make one role responsible for orchestrating and governing it.
- Make integration an explicit responsibility. Specialized tools and teams won’t join up on their own, so someone has to own the connections between them.
- Don’t manage AI only as infrastructure. Plan how it will change the way the business and its customers work, and build on the decentralization you already understand rather than starting from a blank slate.
- Fit the rollout to the context. In quick-win cultures, deliver in three-to-six-month increments while protecting the long-term vision; in smaller organizations, grow generalists who can hold several pieces at once.
The full conversation with David Cannon is available as episode 12 of Conversations with Giants, hosted by Roman Jouravlev.
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.
