Everything changes, but remains the same in Service Management.

[SimonMorris]

In Service Management - a reactive world of constant change - what has remained the same forever?

Yesterday I went to the NetworkingNOW session at #Know14 to meet ServiceNow customers and talk about custom application development.

As always I was surprised and grateful for some interesting, thought provoking conversations.

We often talk about customers "taking the platform and extending it". I think that phrase has multiple meanings. Last night I spoke to customers that see ServiceNow as a platform of technical capabilities - database abstraction, persistence, APIs. I spoke to a customer that wrote a migration from a legacy documentation platform into ServiceNow Knowledge Management in a week. Definitely a user of the platform.

But there is a second meaning that I discovered. Customers are using our Service Management tools as a level of base competency for IT - defining, measuring, stabilising and improving IT services. And they are using that base of skill and competence in Service Management as a platform for extending the service model into other parts of the business.

ServiceNow is giving organisations a reference point for what good Service Management looks like, regardless of the Service Domain.

I found that customers are still excited about the IT Service Domain - I talked a lot about Release Management last night - but they are just as excited about extending the model across the enterprise.

Human Resources was a popular example, and personally relevant as my ServiceNow application development team have spent the last 6 months or so building that as a addition to the ServiceNow Automation Suite.

So - back to the original question. What has remained the same in Service Management?

The desire of the end user for a seamless service experience. The tooling and competency of organisations has changed at a frantic pace. But customers always have and will continue to expect a great experience.

Its the job of the Service Management teams in our customer organisations (note: I didn't say IT Service Management - our customers are already removing that distinction)… it's their job to remove the friction for the user in requesting and receiving service across the enterprise.

Having a common toolset and a common Service Catalog is making that possible today.