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All the rage among IT departments, the service management approach is catching on in other divisions of the business

IT departments the world over have caught the service management bug. Some indication of the popularity of the management approach, which in essence advocates operating the IT department as though it was a service provider, comes from a study of business adoption of ITIL, the IT management framework most closely associated with service management.

The survey, conducted in late 2008, found that over half of businesses with over 1,000 employees had adopted ITIL or were planning to do so in the following 12 months. And even without explicit ITIL adoption, elements of the ethos can be glimpsed in today’s IT management; internal IT managers can often be heard referring to the people whose systems and devices they build and support as ‘customers’, not users.

Now, though, there are signs that the bug is spreading beyond even the IT department. Presented on the following pages are five examples of that phenomenon in action.

There is good reason for this expansion: many of the tenets of service management, such as establishing standardised and repeatable processes for problem resolution and change management, make good management sense in all walks of business life.

The following five case studies demonstrate the value of service management outside IT. In the case of hydraulic and electrical systems manufacturer Sauer-Danfoss, for example, it is the company’s finance operation that received a service management makeover, with the introduction of a service desk application to process invoices, payments and the like.

At Greggs the Bakers, meanwhile, the adoption of support desk software by many departments outside IT has brought about the standardisation and improvement of internal processes.

Other examples demonstrate more tactical benefits: at the National Gallery, expanding the IT support desk software to cover facilities management saved the organisation money.

What does this all mean for the IT department? The argument that it will improve the standing and influence of IT is appealing but can perhaps be overstated. While IT might be recognised as experts in service management, other departments will still demand ownership of the service support processes they operate.

Nevertheless, if service management and ITIL are to become management disciplines that are valued by all departments of the business, that must surely present an opportunity to those employees, managers and directors that understand them best, namely the IT department.

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