What is IT Service Management?

I want to begin by briefly examining human history regarding professions. I expect you’ll join me in recognising that Information Technology has existed for approximately 100 years. Information Technology is a young industry with several even younger career paths, one of which is Information Technology Service Management (ITSM).

It helps to cover a quick understanding of the evolution of humans and professions. A quick search via a popular search engine informs us of the following:

• Toolmaking is considered one of the world’s oldest professions at approximately 2.8 million years. Early civilisations needed to hunt and build a shelter – and hands alone were not up to the job.
• Tailors and seamstresses were recognised as professionals approximately 500,000 years ago. Looking good is the key to feeling good, something the ancient Egyptians cottoned on too early (pun intended).
• Ceramicists were recognised as professionals approximately 26,000 years ago. Cooking, eating, and drinking from solid vessels made you less likely to spill something on your finely tailored clothing.

You may argue that IT was around before the mid-1900s, but I expect you’d agree that it only existed as a profession per se in the 1940s as part of Allied war efforts during the 2nd World War. These were the first times people were working on operating technology that delivered information quickly into the hands of humans, information that could be acted upon to deliver outcomes.

As IT became mainstream in the latter half of the 20^th century, so did several job roles within the industry. Most of these roles were based on aspects of IT operation, such as mainframe operation and maintenance, which later evolved into software development and commercialisation.

As governments and organisations began to utilise IT to run their organisations, the concepts of ‘services’ began to evolve. ITSM was ‘born’ with ITIL as a methodology, which was an answer to several pressing questions around the delivery of IT as a service.

Since then, IT has become a tool that has weaved its way into our everyday lives; we interact with IT daily. It’s in our homes built with tools; we catalogue, order, and deliver clothing using IT. Those vessels that were first made approximately 26,000 years ago are fired using electronic kiln controllers, or in some cases, we circumvent the need for clay through IT-driven 3D printing.

Incredibly, this ‘thing’ called IT has been weaved into our everyday lives, and yet it has only existed for 100 years, and we’ve squeezed so much out of it, but there is so much more to come.

As I’m a big fan of a picture, I enclose below a ‘not to scale’ timeline that I hope illustrates the relative ‘age’ of our IT industry and ITSM as a profession.

For over 2.8 million years, toolmaking will have evolved to the point where we all understand its value, core accountabilities and possible career path; the same applies to tailoring/seam stressing and ceramics.

By comparison, not only is IT as a profession a relative infant, but ITSM as a profession is half its age again. Yet, we have weaved our way into everyday life. No wonder we have much growing up to do, and relatively little is known about our profession.