To all of the fans of Darwin who somehow became a member of the IT Service Management world: A series of observation s and perhaps a prediction or two…..
Communication and the Collective Mind
In IT service Management practices, for example, we see communication as the corner stone for all employed and hoped-for best practices. It has become the Alpha and Omega of everything we do with regards to the management practices of Incidents, Problems, Assets, Configurations, Changes, Releases, Requests, Financial Planning, Supplier and Vendor Activities, Auditing and Reporting…to name but a slight few.
In today’s technological realm we see an overwhelming utilization of communication forums and formats between the user community (yes, genus-user has established themselves as a community with equal rights and everything that goes with a sense of community) and the IT world. Incidents and problems and requests are now funneled through e-mails, tweeted from varied ports of origin, submitted from self-service facilities, perhaps generated from mobile hand-held devices – and then collectively resolved via social media mediums that utilize collective reasoning and vetting processes….
And the trend towards the utilization of the collective mind – group via the exploitation of the personal mobile device (a wee bit ironic) is just in its infancy. One could almost reason that if an evolutionary “itch” were to surface that compelled us to return — temporarily — to a nice high branch of a sturdy tree, you could still communicate with your new technological social tribe via your mobile “pad.” Yes, one could actually tweet as nature originally intended the activity….
With respect to the use of communication tools in the practice of managing the IT services we provide, we wield a triple-edged sword of timeliness, accuracy, and personalization. The data once we provided when the Brazilian Rain Forrest was thought to be the unending source of green-bar paper, is now an unusable medium with arcane restrictions of portability. Each user requires a specific slice of data that is exactly oriented to their task-at-hand. Anything delivered beyond that specific request is thought to be wasteful and woefully not aligned with expectations perhaps defined in the service definition. The accuracy required is often thought to be a combination of pinpoint data elements in an easily consumed combination of intuitive graphics and simplistic text format – which of course must be made available in any manner of display device…at any time…in any language.
Now What?
So let’s agree that we now have a primal indisputable reliance on communication within the IT Service Management world. And let us also agree that this reliance has created new genres of commerce and unprecedented levels of competition in the business world. And then let us further agree that the ability of IT to provide and manage all means of services depends greatly upon its support and integration with multiple means of communication. Then certainly we can see that the next age of technologist are crossing our door-steps and are currently developing the next user oriented service management paradigms that are completely based on mobility and immediate dynamic interactions (I dare say some of them are here already and can be readily detected by their ultra cool new devices that cannot be operated by our IT management predecessors due to the lack of the opposable thumb).
Yes – the next age (say two years out perhaps) could very well be based upon the power and need of the collective communication tribes. No, this is not socialism, in which we are all forced into individual obscurity because of homogenization and lowered standards oriented towards satisfying the needs of the lowest common denominator.
The outcome of the interactive social community is quite the opposite, actually. It is an IT-based service environment that utilizes multi-domain service provisioning (that does use the tenants of today’s Cloud Dynamic/Elastic computing model). However, the prime goal is not about satisfying transactional and performance fluctuations with the most attractive financial attributes. Rather, the multi-domain communication service is about access to (and the utilization of) collective decision oriented information.
We can see how risks are greatly mitigated when we consult with a large number of experienced individuals (in any practice) opposed to a decision made in a vacuum by one person with a singular set of experiences.
It becomes obvious that we will be able to better determine the root cause of incidents – and eliminate reoccurring problems – if we turned to the experiences of thousands of people who have ready eliminated time consuming variables.
We can all see the obvious advantage of preventative information that s shared by those unlucky few who have gained their Good Sound Judgment by their Experiences which were unfortunately based on lessons they garnered from Extremely Bad Judgment…..
I think you get the point here about the power of the collective.
So where does this then set us with respect to the evolutionary tales?
I would hope to think that we are about to “relocate” once again…maybe this time to “cloud”. Maybe we go up a little higher than the cloud level. The neat thing about this next relocation is that it will not be a physical move. It will be a movement of thought. Thought shared. Thought vetted. Thought recommended. And hopefully, thought liberated……
By: Christopher Williams