What’s service management? Ben was a very tall Texan, Daniel Breston’s first CEO at a bank in Houston in the late 1970s, and his way of running the place was to walk the branches, asking everyone he met one question.
Tomorrow, will you be able to help your team or one of our customers? If not, what’s stopping you?
If someone said yes, Ben moved on. If someone said no, he wrote what they told him on a Post-it, took it upstairs to head office, and stuck it under a managing director’s name. Every day, the managing directors had to clear the board. The rules were clear: you didn’t know which employee had flagged the issue, and even if you guessed, you couldn’t go back and lean on them. The CEO had asked. Someone had answered. The issue got fixed.
“That’s what service management is about,” Daniel says. “How are we going to manage the services for our internal staff and our customers when we use technology?”
He’s been carrying that working definition for fifty years.
Frameworks are tools. They’re not the point of service management.
Daniel has been around long enough to watch every IT service management (ITSM) framework come and go and come back again. ITIL versions one through five. Agile. Scrum. DevOps. Lean. He’s an avowed Lean person specifically, and he’s credited in one of Michael Ballé’s Lean business novels. None of these, on its own, is service management. They’re tools that help you build it.
His issue isn’t with the frameworks. It’s with practitioners who pick them up without knowing where they came from, why they were written, or what they were trying to fix. The agile movement emerged from a small group of software developers at a ski lodge in 2001, seeking to address specific issues with how software was being built. ITIL emerged from the UK government’s effort to fix its own IT in the 1980s. Scrum has its own history tied to product development teams. If you don’t know any of that, you’re going to misuse what you pick up.
Daniel’s example is Scrum being treated as a problem management tool, which he sees often, and which it isn’t. You can’t lift a framework off the shelf and use it well without the attitudes and behaviors that came with it. Paul Wilkinson gave the industry that phrase, and Daniel uses it constantly.
Go to where the work happens
The advice Daniel gives anyone joining IT, at any level, is the same advice he gives himself: go to where the work is happening, watch it being done, and listen to the people doing it. He likes a line from a CTO he heard speak at an itSMF event years ago.
I spend 70% of my day outside my office. I’m not in meetings. I’m where IT is being used, or where it’s being developed, or where the vendor helping us is.
In Lean terms, that’s the gemba: the place where the work gets done. If you stay in your office reading tickets and dashboards and trying to manage from a chair, what you produce won’t make sense to anyone who has to use it.
For newcomers, his advice is blunter still: if your employer won’t let you go where the work is, leave and find one that will. He’s not joking.
The piece the service management industry is still working on
Daniel’s other long campaign is on mental health and stigma in IT. For decades, the response to anyone struggling with work pressure was “hack it or leave it,” and in plenty of organizations, that’s still the response. Daniel thinks it’s a culture problem, not a personal one. If your organization is producing stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout in the people running its systems, the organization is what needs fixing.
There’s been progress in the last five years. itSMF UK runs quiet rooms at its conferences and books wellbeing speakers onto every program. SDI ran a stress-management session at its last event. BT discusses it openly inside its own IT organization. Service management vendors and consultancies have been slower, but they’re moving. Stephen Mann wrote about his own experience with anxiety and depression in IT back in 2018, when that was still unusual for someone in ITSM to publish. It’s much more common now, and Daniel takes that as progress.
Back to the question
Across fifty years, three industries, and every framework anyone has put on the table, Daniel’s working definition of service management hasn’t changed. It isn’t a methodology, and it isn’t a process. It’s a question: can the person trying to do this work do it tomorrow? If not, what’s in their way?
The frameworks help you build the system that makes the answer “yes” more often than “no.” Going to where the work happens tells you whether the system you built is working. Mental health issues are what you see when it isn’t.
Ben at the bank in Houston had the Post-it pad and the question. Daniel has been carrying the question with him ever since.
The Conversations with Giants series is created by Roman Jouravlev. ITSM.tools publishes accompanying articles and embeds each episode. Watch this episode with Daniel Breston 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.
