Groovy IT service management

The idea for the Groovy IT Service Management Framework emerged as a result of my exposure to standards and frameworks such as ISO 20000, ITIL, IT4IT, VeriSM, and ISM. It seemed that they could be loosely unified in terms of four areas: engagement, preparation, cocreation and evolution. Evolution is in a different dimension than the other areas, being about the whole of engagement, preparation and cocreation. Each area is described in terms of two key activities and two key topics to understand. Whereas most ITSM frameworks have a strong focus on activities (e.g. processes), my thinking here is that there is value in understanding the nature of the 'objects' and the dynamics between the objects that play a role in these areas. This insight enables the practitioner to decide which activities to take. Non-ITSM frameworks (such as BABOK and PMBOK) often describe their field in terms of "knowledge areas", and this term might apply here.

Engagement is where service provider and consumer discover each other’s existence and assess both each other’s potential contribution and potential relationship. The key activities are trust and promise.

• Trust manifests itself in the relationship and can be explored in terms of the other party’s ‘technical’ ability, benevolence and integrity, and the alignment of their perceived values with the party’s own values.
• Promise is about the interplay between intentions, promises, impositions, obligations, and assessments, resulting in an agreement (refer to Promise Theory for further exploration). The agreement captures the agreed value of the service, which may differ from the value that each party expects.

The key topics are relationships and agreements.

Preparation is where the agreement is translated into the people and resources (“service components”) required for the actual service interactions. The key activities are allocate and arrange.

• Allocate is about identifying and assigning the people and resources to the service.
• Arrange is about organizing them so that they are ready to act or be acted upon during the service interactions.

The key topics are service components and context (because what works in one organizational context may not work in another). Starting with the expected and agreed value, this is transformed into potential value that can be utilized in the next area, cocreation.

Cocreation is where service provider and consumer apply their knowledge, skills and other resources for mutual benefit (this is the service-dominant logic definition of service). The key activities are empathize and apply.

• Empathize is about understanding where the other party is in the service journey, and how they are feeling about it. Understanding is not enough, however: it has to be accompanied by compassion that drives people to act.
• Apply is about each party using their resources. This is in the form of affordance and performance. Affordance is when you give the other party access to your resources, for example the use of an application. Performance is the application of your resources, for example using your knowledge to skills to explain how a user should use the application.

The key topics are business impact and human experience (of the interaction and the business impact). The potential value present in the arranged service components is transformed into ‘kinetic’ value when people use (the output of) the service to achieve business results. For example, the business impact when someone acts on a decision that was improved by information that a user derived from an application.

Finally, evolution is where the whole of engagement, preparation and cocreation is elevated to a higher level. The key activities are sense and experiment.

• Sense is about understanding the nature and the status of the organizational system in which service happens. One of the key characteristics is the predictability of the system, in other words the degree of linear causality.
• Plans work in predictable systems, but often the system – particularly when people are involved – is unpredictable. In these cases, it is more effective to experiment and assess how successful the experiments are. The Cynefin sense-making framework offers much guidance in this area.

The key topics are status (of the system) and improvements.

Note that these areas apply to both service provider and consumer. This emphasizes the cocreational nature of service in which the consumer plays an active and crucial role.