Chance are they haven't had training in customers, people management and process improvement, and all too often they won't get offered that training either as the IT Department looks after the machinery after all. So along comes the business who don't aren't really much interested in servers and code, but want to get a job done more efficiently or ore effectively using technology. To the business the IT department should work just like that home network, you shouldn't have to worry about how it works, you just say jump when something goes wrong with it. Oh if you could get a dollar for every time you find out it is your home network if it fails, but you get no acknowledgement whatsoever when it runs flawlessly for months on end.

So the new IT Manager all too often thinks that good customer service is say yes to the customer and either create the new thing they want or repair the old thing when they say jump. The key to good customer service become saying yes, saying it enthusiastically and then trying to find a way to make it happen. As it become more complex in delivering, there may be some thought given to process, planning and service management, but all too often it is actually putting more work down a pipeline, throwing more resources to get to the deadlines that were promised. Good customer service becomes promising a lot and then trying heroically to deliver the promise by throwing more resources at it to deliver on the promise.. But the more promises you deliver on, the more requests the business throw at you, you try to fend them off with some shiny toys to play with, but eventually the weight of promise mean you can't deliver on the promises, so you are left with fudging it, non-delivery or huge expense to deliver the programme. It all seemed so easy, you only got into it because you loved technology.

Then one day you hear about service management, and chances are you go on a foundation course and learn the names of some processes. You rally the team back at the office, we can change all this if we use the names of some processes I heard on my training course. So we get an incident manager, a problem manager and a change manager and announce we are "doing ITIL", we then tell the business that we're up with the modern thinking and go back to looking at what shiny toys we can find to placate the business for a little longer. But the business is no longer wowed by the shiny toys, in fact they expect them by now. They want their business transformed by the delivery of technology solutions, everyone is so hard to please Ok so it might not exactly go like that for everyone, but the IT department that adopts service management as a few jingo words to throw around but make no real change is all too common.

Service Management is a way to build a partnership with the business, it involves