At ITSM22, our annual conference, I was listening to Paul Wilkinson talk about The Shiny New Thing. As ever, Paul provokes thought and challenges his audience. At one point he asked everyone who has done ITIL certifications to raise their hand, and then similarly asked who could give the definition of a service. When only training providers kept their hands up, the rest of us were duly castigated. The next day I was in another presentation where Chris Good asked the audience the same question with the same result, though without the same level of castigation.
Musing on this, something didn’t feel quite right. I think there is a confidence factor – will he point at me and ask me to give the definition? But it felt more than that. To me the reason why people didn’t put their hand up is not so much because they don’t know what a service is, more because the definition is too complicated. There is a certain irony here. We talk about wanting to sell service management and to speak the language of others, but have we constructed an environment where our core concept doesn’t make immediate sense to other people?
Imagine one of those elevator pitch moments. Your CEO bumps into you and asks, “What do you do in service management?” Do you say, “A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks”, or do you give an answer better suited to the questioner?
Later on I was listening to Ken Goff present. Now Ken is someone who is good at talking about things in plain language, so I asked how he would describe a service. He rattled off the textbook definition at high speed. Impressive, but it didn’t carry his usual salesman-like conviction. So I asked him to use his own words. The result was shorter, simpler and delivered dynamically.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not averse to complexity. A friend and I read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to each other over a number of years and we delighted in it. If you follow the flow, those sentences take you on a journey of adventure. However, no one is expecting me to regurgitate them. Definitions serve a different purpose. Part of that purpose is precision. But as Paul was highlighting, it is also about absorbing it – making it part of you, so you can state it or apply it without having to look up what it is.
I find myself wondering whether the ITIL definition of a service is (dare I say it) fit for purpose in this. Let me contrast it with the definition of a risk in ISO27001. Risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives. I really like this definition: short and to the point; easy to lodge in your head and apply in the moment.
So, what did Ken say? It was a fleeting moment and we both needed to move on. I knew as we did that I wouldn’t be able to replicate his words. However, I can’t say what I’ve said without making some form of attempt at my own definition. What might my words be? I started with, “A service uses things that you can’t see to do things that you want to happen” and ended up with “A service takes things you can’t see and combines them. You use them to get things done that you want to happen.” While these may lack the precision of the ITIL definition they are both much more readable than it. The Gunning Fog Index score drops from 18 (suitable for people at university) to about 5. As a comparison the Bible and Shakespeare are both around 6. I’m not saying my definition is better – the official definition manages to cram in a number of key concepts and show how they relate to each other. And such precision does matter. But it isn’t everything.
So, Paul asked us a question. I would like to turn that around and ask a question in return. Has ITIL made the definition of a service too complicated? And does that make it more difficult for service managers around the world to articulate clearly what it is they do?
Finally, if you find that you struggle to hold onto the ITIL definition of a service, maybe you could try doing what I’ve done here, and work out how you would say it in your own words. Or you may wish to pick up Paul’s exhortation to talk with your business stakeholders and work it out together.
PS In case you are wondering, the Gunning Fog index score of this article is around 10, which is comparable to national newspapers.
Richard Horton
Richard Horton is Head of IT Service Management at NIHR RDNCC. He is a former itSMF UK Director with a history of running itSMF groups and events, and is the current vice chair of itSMF International.
