The robots aren’t coming, they’re already here!

In a world where AI is the hottest topic of conversation, where most people carry their online life in their pocket and picking up the phone feels like a step back in time - should we really be using frameworks and technologies from the 70s and 80s to manage our IT service?

Or is the problem a case of human nature and our ITSM leaders lacking vision and being fearful of change?

ITIL was established in the 80s. The first spreadsheet and email are children of the 70s.  Yet in the last few weeks I’ve seen and spoken to many where these remain the key tools in how we engage and manage our services.

Still in many cases today, the service desk is the first point of interaction for IT.  I would argue that statement alone should feel like a failure, how many start-ups build service desks these days?  The time of receiving a phone book sized manual with every new version of Excel are long gone, if technology isn’t intuitive its already obsolete and you need to consider your user journey, not accommodate failure.

So why do we build services desks and expect the staff to read operating instructions or follow flow diagrams?  I’ve never met a member of a service desk who has ever read an Operations Manual yet I’ve sat in endless ITSM meetings hearing how they are crucial to the success of the service.

When your customers call into your service desk, first recognise that your ITIL efforts are failing, then wonder if your customers are thinking about how to facilitate your call flows or whether they are driven by emotion?  Following this train of thought - what should be the primary skills you train your staff?

Let me push this thinking further and advocate that you should never train any of your service desk in ITIL.  That’s right, training your service desk in ITIL has a negative impact on your customer experience, on your service quality, on all the metrics that truly matter.

Having been at the recent SITS - The Service Desk & IT Support Show I don’t want to diminish the enthusiasm and talent in that community so let me quantify this statement.

ITIL is still relevant (however, spreadsheet and e-mail users I’d afraid I cannot offer an olive branch to you!)

When has a business ever attributed their success to a comprehensive implementation of ITIL?  I can’t think of a case I’ve seen that happen.  However, I have seen successful ITIL implementations bring real value and every single one had a common trait - nobody really knew it had happened.

The most innovative ITSM leaders I have met have been the ones who knew not to bang the ITIL drum.  They were able to translate processes into human behaviour traits, able to shape tooling into innovative paths, to a point where nobody even realised they were applying ITIL principles.  They didn’t talk about SLAs, they didn’t utter the immortal phrase ‘according to ITIL’.

If you truly want to innovate and deliver world-class services, start by choosing the right ‘experts’, they’re often not the ones that tell you they are!

Maybe the robots who are the biggest risk to the IT world aren’t AI, just maybe it’s the robotic ITSM leaders we’ve allowed to flourish that are constraining our talented teams?