Do we still need IT Service Managers?

Introduction of DevOps culture resulted in major paradigm shift in most IT fields, IT Service Management (ITSM) is one of them. Although I do not see substantive content changes in job posting and their number yet, I feel that it is going to change soon. But first, lets look at the responsibilities of a IT service manager.

When you try to search for the role definition of IT service manager, you will get diverse results due to various reasons:

• There are multiple ITSM frameworks out there — ITIL is the most popular one across industries, but also ISO/IEC 20000 is well established in large companies — all of them are having different views for that role
• Small and large companies have different complexity of requirements, processes and services and therefore implements different set or processes, which finally defines the role
• This role is mainly prevalent in European countries, in others you will more often see role specification — Incident Manager, Change Manager, Problem Manager — which narrows the scope of responsibilities

Still, there are some resources I would recommend, as they provide a good summary of skills an IT service manager should master:

• Do you need an IT Service Manager for ITIL/ISO 20000?
• Find out what an IT service manager does and the skills you need to do the job

All European companies I have worked for in past years, have implemented ITIL framework to some extent, so I will stick to it from now on.

ITIL has a long history and at the moment widely implemented version is ITIL v3, which is all about 4 Ps — People, Products, Partners and Processes — and designing and provision of services fit for purpose and fit for use. Many organizations have put most emphasis on processes implementation, IT services and therefore IT service managers as service owners have to adhere to these processes. Someone would argue here that sometimes IT departments ignored the main idea behind ITIL v3 — improve the way how IT can deliver and support valued business services — and defined processes just for the sake of having something in place (“We are doing ITIL now!”). Nevertheless, even bad processes have to be considered, as they have to be followed, audited, and monitored by someone (guess by whom).

So what are the responsibilities of an IT service manager? From my experience, they can be summarized as follows:

• ITIL processes implementation and ownership
• Management of services using above ITIL processes
• Relationship management with service stakeholders

It is a pretty general and broad definition, which does not demonstrate the role’s complexity level, which is primarily derived from the complexity and number of related ITIL processes, and is dependent on organizational strategy. Consequently, if any different way of doing things or technology would allow us to automate most processes or get rid of them, the role will be not the same anymore. This is an extremely simplified assumption, as other factors like business needs have to be considered too. But it should give us some insights on what changes to the role do we have to expect. So let us review all 26 ITIL v3 processes one by one and see if they are somehow affected.

Strategy Management for IT Services

It is very unusual to see an IT service manager to be involved in this process, especially in a large organisations. Organisational service strategy is defined either by CIO or a dedicated strategy team, while being derived from overall organizational strategy.

Service Portfolio Management

Another strategic process, tightly connected to service strategy management. Although some senior level IT service manager could be involved in this process, it is primarily in scope of strategic teams.

Financial Management for IT Services

One of the strategic process which affects operational IT service managers, especially if an organization’s IT asset management (ITAM) system does not provide required financial information. Nevertheless, this process can be fully automated by a sophisticated ITAM service like one from ServiceNow.

Demand Management

Demand management is a broad topic with many dimensions and I would recommend everyone to do a deep dive into it by reading this article. In terms of ITIL v3 I would consider this process as a proactive one, as it analyzes (customer) usage patterns and tries to anticipate changed or future business service demand. ITIL 4 does not explicitly consider demand management as a critical and strategic practice and treat demand as an input to service value system. That leads me to the conclusion that beside explicit service request, where a customer describes a need for a new service (via service desk), fluctuations in service demand can be absorbed by elasticity of cloud offerings.

Business Relationship Management

This is a highly important and non-replaceable process which implies interactions with various service stakeholder.

Design Coordination

As the name says, this is a coordination activity, which includes coordination of various suppliers (XaaS providers), customers, business units, and tech staff. This is more or less a project management activity which cannot be substituted.

Service Catalogue Management

Service catalogue consists of service offering for internal teams (“New notebook”) and/or external customers (“SaaS portal instance”). Maintenance and improvement of this catalogue cannot be automated, additionally in large organisations, is it a full time job role.

Service Level Management

Do we still need SLAs? Yes. Especially when you provide service to external customer, you need to have a contract which guarantees a certain quality level for a defined set of features. The process of calculation of relevant service KPI’s can be automated using Istana and application of SRE principles.

Capacity Management

This process is tightly connected to demand, service level, and availability management. By applying appropriate technology — Cloud (elasticity), ITAM (financial data, asset information), monitoring system — you can fully automate that process.

Availability Management

As long as the business requirements are understood and can be fulfilled, availability management can be fully automated by

• active monitoring of service functions and underlying components, and taking actions
• applying DevOps principles
• fault tolerance and resilience of cloud infrastructure

Service Continuity Management

You can’t prepare for every possible disaster. But you can design resilient infrastructure, apply automation principles (Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD), and testing practices (continuous testing, chaos testing). Still, people need to know what to do in case of (unexpected) disasters. Therefore IT service manager would play an important role here by making sure that all principles and practices are implemented, understood, and followed.

Information Security Management

Security is a important topic for every organisation today. Medium and large companies typically establish a security department which is accountable for definition of security processes and policies. Those policies need to be implemented and audited on regular basis, among others by IT service managers. This task could be supported by various information security management (ISM) systems, but not completely automated.

Supplier Management

Increased acceptance of cloud services in organizations raised the importance of that process. This is and will continue to be one of the key tasks of service management.

Change Management and Change Evaluation

This process is most criticized one when it comes to comparison of ITIL with DevOps approach. Change advisory board (CAB) becomes a bottleneck as the number of changes goes up. So Axelos completely revamped the process and renamed the practice to “Change Enablement”. Change still needs to be authorized, but role is delegated to “… development teams, technical experts, or service and product owners”. This aligns with DevOps principles and enables fully automated changes.

Transition planning and support

The scope of this process got broader by introducing Project Management practice in ITIL 4. As new IT services are introduced, IT service manager will continue to be involved in projects, so I do not expect any changes here.

Release and Deployment Management

This process can be automated by implementing DevOps and SRE principles (e.g. CI/CD).

Service Validation and Testing

Test automation can be implemented on various levels and enables automated testing of software against business and service requirements. If done right, full automation of this process can be achieved.

Service Asset and Configuration Management

Automation of IT asset management capturing, registration, and update greatly improves the ITAM practice. IT service managers use the automatically collected and manually entered data to create valuable information for financial, procurement, and other department which rely on that information.

Knowledge Management

Information is vital in today’s world, making this information valuable for an organization by managing it is one of key responsibilities of IT service manager. Knowledge management systems are one of oldest ICT systems out there and knowledge asset management plays an important role in every organization. This discipline and related systems keeps evolving and need well elaborated processes, what could be a challenging task for an IT service manager.

Event Management

Full automation is possible using appropriate monitoring tools and from my point a view a must.

Incident Management

Incident creation and routing to particular team can be largely automated. As new product features are introduced (or bugs are fixed), new incident will arise. By adopting SRE practices you can shift most operational tasks from service management to SRE teams. Still, you will need someone for coordination activities, e.g. production meetings, and who takes care about automation processes.

Request Fulfilment

ITIL 4 renamed this process to “Service request management” and moved service desk activities to “Service desk” practice. Self-service portal functionality is offered by most ITSM software providers but also cloud providers, allowing service customers to submit the requests on their own and get them fulfilled by automation. Other requests can be automatically routed to the team, that is responsible for fulfilment.

Access Management

Service access authorization will continue to be a key responsibility of IT service manager as service owner. This process can be supported by connecting services to user directories and granting access on group level, whenever possible. Monitoring and reporting automation of unauthorized access can be achieved using ISM systems.

Problem Management

By applying DevOps post-mortems, error budget, and Scrum product backlog (yes, I prefer to see production bugs in product backlog), can we get rid of centralized problem management governed by an IT service manager? I would say “yes”, that should be feasible.

Continual Service Improvement

Continuous learning from past failures, reviewing of ITIL processes, and improving of services are responsibilities of service manager that cannot be omitted nor automated.

Let‘s sum it up.

Can be fully automated

• Financial Management for IT Services
• Demand Management
• Service Level Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Service Validation and Testing
• Event Management
• Request Fulfilment
• Problem Management
• Change Management and Change Evaluation
• Release and Deployment Management

Can be partially automated

• Service Continuity Management
• Information Security Management
• Service Asset and Configuration Management
• Knowledge Management
• Incident Management
• Access Management

Usually not the responsibility of IT service manager

• Strategy Management for IT Services
• Service Portfolio Management

No automation possible, responsibility of IT service manager

• Business Relationship Management
• Design Coordination
• Service Catalogue Management
• Supplier Management
• Transition planning and support
• Continual Service Improvement

Is it too far-fetcher? Cloud native organization do not hire service managers. Now we could argue they don’t need them because they are small and the responsibilities of an IT service manager are distributed among existing team. Could be. But I tend to believe they optimize and automate their IT by applying DevOps and SRE principles and avoid process thinking as far as possible.

This does not mean we do not need IT service managers anymore, on the contrary I believe their role is more important than ever now, for following reasons:

• Large companies — bank, insurance companies — operate a non-negligible quantity of legacy systems that are used by internal and external stakeholders, rely on established ITIL processes, and need to be adopted first
• Cloud migration is a lengthy process in complex environments that requires enormous amount of coordination activities and also ITSM process adoption
• DevOps culture change needs advocates and service managers can take on that role and support the process

Thus, it is time for IT service managers to get a deeper dive into DevOps and SRE practices, make themselves familiar with adoption of service management practices, and try to figure out how all that will change their process-oriented ITIL world.