Lisa Simpson Killed ITIL

Yesterday Lisa Simpson from the show, The Simpsons, had her wedding.   Back in 1995 when the episode originally aired it seemed safe having a date that far in the future. 

This led me to realize that it might now be safe to predict the end of support.  I base this gloom and doom prediction on a few factors in no particular order.

Let’s start with some current topics.  As I write this blog, there is a conference going on where Michael Krigsman from ZDNet is attending.  At this conference they are covering the exciting world of social CRM and the flurry of tweets are blinding.

Three weeks ago Zendesk announced integration with HootSuite.  I have since spent time speaking to the CEO of HootSuite about the future of IT Service Management Support and what an important role I felt Social and New Media played in it.

Microsoft has finally released the Outlook social connector which now lets me see my Facebook contacts in line with their email messages.

The final stage of hospice care for IT Service Management came with the announcement that Gillette has released a new razor with not only 6 blades, but now those blades are THINNER!

How in the world does that razor announcement fit into our ITSM world?  Well each week I see a new piece of support software released with a number of new “official” ITIL processes.  Some software is now support up to 14 processes!

Yup you heard that right, 14 processes and not one of them will do anything for the infrastructure that is slipping into the cloud, the services offered by SaaS or the customers who would rather wait for an ATM than talk to a live person at the bank.

The slow death and move to hospice has not been easy for the family.  We started supporting our loved one back in 1997 by making sure we measure things like FCR, Time to resolve, and Failure Rates.  These metrics did nothing but justify that we indeed did love our patient; they didn’t do anything to support the patient.

We then moved into software that would be self-healing and portals where our patient could get all the help they wanted without even lifting a finger to call us.  It was getting hard to see that we actually cared, but trust me, we did.

Finally we are on the dawn of our storage being in the cloud, our support coming from Google and our services being dished out to us in easy to consume SaaS syringes.

After spending over a year screaming out to our industry about the use of social and new media to not only save our jobs and revive our patient, I am at the point where I have to just accept the death and wipe the tears from my eyes.

If you are in the industry, do not fear, even though our loved one is in a coma we have time.  Technology can prolong the life of the comatose IT Service Management profession for years to come. 

I am just coming to terms with talking to the lifeless and have to keep saying, maybe, just maybe under that drug induced coma, my loved one can hear me.

Comments

[Jamie Cantrell]

Why does the death of traditional IT support necessitate the death of IT jobs? Why should not the traditional IT support environment convert to a bigger focus on self-help and the IT industry focus more on a back-end support environment (i.e. supporting the development and management of comprehensive knowledge databases)? The development of social media and immediate-capture knowledge tools, such as wikis and blogs, create an opportunity for the IT world. Why not capture the opportunity to ensure that quality information is being distributed to your end-user, rather than throwing your hands in the air and waving the white flag? Surely there is information on processes and specific IT builds that is not readily available to the user via the Google search. Not to mention the fact that most users do not necessarily understand what they are reading on Google any way. Communicating the importance of utilizing confirmed information sources to the user and limiting the user's ability to perform certain critical IT operations pretty much assures the continued survival of the IT support and knowledge management industries. There will always be a need for personal help at some level. Maybe not for resetting a forgotten password, but at least to fix that blue screen of death...