🔍 The Mountaintop Fallacy – Part 2
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. A follow-up to part 1 – The Mountaintop Fallacy – this is part 2. What Each Layer Really Does Overlays, Operating Models, and Practices—Stop Mixing Your Metaphors You’ve seen the slide. One of those strateg
🏔️ The Mountaintop Fallacy
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. Let’s get something out of the way right up front. While many of the examples in this series draw from IT—because that’s where service management frameworks have historically taken root—USM is not an IT fra
The Supply Chain is Dead. Long Live the Service Chain
Another great post by our guest editor, John Worthington. “Supply chains are evolving into multi-agent systems, more like autonomous ecosystems than linear processes.” — Alberto Chierici Let’s sit with that for a moment. In his excellent post on Gradie
Stop Swinging for the Fences
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. Simplify Service Management and Accelerate Transformation In today’s service landscape, complexity is everywhere. Volatility, tool sprawl, and disconnected practices are undermining enterprise resilience. A
🔥 Time to Walk the Talk
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. We’ve tried to balance efficiency and effectiveness for decades, but how we’ve approached that balance has been deeply flawed….makes me wonder if the only thing that’s changed are the buzzwords. Why the ITS
Summer School: Old Lessons for New Dogs
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. ☀️ It’s summer. You should be at the beach. But instead, you’re taking “Strategic Service Management” on Zoom with a professor who still thinks the cloud is a weather phenomenon. And you’re wondering: Why a
Why a capability model needs an operating model
“Capabilities represent what the business does, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭.”. Or rather “Capabilities represent what the business wants to do”. This is typically a modeling act, creating an abstract image of what the company does. As such – it’s crucial for ar
Routines as Social Circuitry
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. This post was triggered by another post which you can find here, and it reminded me of an old rant from 2007. The infamous CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base) — or as USM would call it, the Managed
Service Management is EVERYONE’s Business
A post by our guest editor, John Worthington. Understanding the history of service management can help us understand why misunderstandings persist. A unified approach is critically needed, since in today’s world service management is everyone’s busines