For decades, organizations have been driven by practice-based frameworks for setting up and improving their service organizations, their routines, and their services. This has indeed provided progress and improvement, but only to a limit.
The limited success of this traditional approach was heavily influenced by a lack of management architecture, causing inefficient service organizations that mostly focused on technology, tools and techniques. The USM method was developed to complement these traditional approaches. USM offers the insight that has been missing for decades, and offers a free set of instruments for all service organizations, enabling a simple and structured approach to Enterprise Service Management.
First of all, USM defines a service management architecture. Applying this architecture – not for the technology or the services but for the management system of the service organization – USM defines a standard for a generic management system that can be used by any service organization, whether this is a company, a department or a team.
With that service management architecture and the associated service management system, you lay the fundament for the structure of a successful service organization. Local choices then determine how you organize your own ‘floors’ on that fundament.
USM can be deployed in all service organizations of any nature. It can be applied for any technology-focused reference architecture (such as TOGAF or eTOM), for any standard (such as ISO27001 or ISO20000), for any combination of practices taken from popular frameworks (such as ITIL or BiSL), or for any popular technique (such as DevOps or Lean).
