The Dutch Experience - part 2 in the series on SMMs – read part 1 here.
In the 1990s, in the Netherlands (as well as in other countries), many projects for improving IT service organizations, using ITIL best practices, had not delivered the expected results, time upon time. Too late, too expensive, out of scope, and falling back to the old situation within two years. Sounds familiar? Even now, in 2016, the situation hasn't changed in most countries.
This resulted in a study into service management knowledge in other disciplines than IT, in the early 2000’s. The study revealed many useful approaches that somehow had been overseen or had not been fully fledged within IT, due to the popular best practice approach of the 1990s. As I’ve discussed before in another blog, a best practice approach for improvement a service organization ‘starts at the wrong end of the stick’.
The basic elements of all these findings were used to develop a systematic approach that would have to guarantee successful outcomes of organizational improvement projects in service organizations: a Service Management Method, in short: an SMM.
The first result of this study was the ISM Method, an IT specific application of a generic SMM. ISM was first used in 2005, and developed into the Dutch national standard for IT service organizations within a decade. Although it wasn't perfect yet, dozens of Dutch organizations have applied it in their IT practices. A new market developed around it, providing books in Dutch and English, training programs, exams, standardized tools, management games, etc. Incidently, organizations in other countries adopted it to some level, but without the local support that was only available in the Netherlands.
Soon after the start of the ISM Method in Dutch IT delivery organizations, the approach was also applied to organizations in the Dutch IT demand management domain, aka Business Information Management – a field of practice that was highly developed in the Netherlands (unlike most other countries). This generated an additional market for Functional Service Management (FSM), with a dedicated book, training programs, exams, management games, and re-using the same standardized tools.
Starting in 2015, the idea of a methodical approach to service management (beyond IT) was completely rebuilt from the ground, getting rid of all the practical inconsistencies that always arise in commercial products. This was based on a simple and straightforward service management architecture that found its origin in Systems Thinking - and it was largely enabled by moving away from a commercial privately-owned product to an open-source knowledge-sharing community. The resulting method was then tested in other domains than IT or information management, and it soon became clear that it would also perfectly fit these other domains. Of course the terminology had to be adapted, and examples would have to fit the targeted domains, but the methodical approach was proven to be valid in any service domain of any size in any line of business. This resulted in the Unified Service Management method (USM), the latest step in the evolution of Service Management Methods.
In my next blog, I'll discuss the context and mission of a method
The USM method was launched early 2016.