The central assumption of IT service management is that IT matters, that if it's worth running your business on computers it's worth doing it properly.
Computers become really useless, really fast without maintenance, support, life cycle management and many other processes indispensable to a modern business.
All too often, the IT department is part of the facilities department, or seen as a necessary evil, a cost center populated by informally dressed nerds.
As information and communication have become indispensable to a modern organization, proper IT service management has become a must have and a significant competitive advantage. An IT department, ideally, is a true enabler. An enabler of productivity, of change, of control and optimalisation. An equal to and partner of every other part of the organization.
Proper IT service management enables companies to run their IT department as tightly and effectively as they run their central process and their HR and finance departments.
The field is not fully developed, academically speaking, and continues to balance precariously between demand and neglect by large enterprises. Compared to the volume of academic work on HR management and finance management it is barely developed at all. There are great developments, however.
The most thorough approach to IT service management is the ITIL framework, which is has as many detractors as fans. The ITIL framework is commonly used as a set of best practices and followed loosely by many IT organizations. True ITIL experts or masters are few and far in between, customers usually demand practitioner (mid-level) certification and working experience.
IT governance is the top of the ITSM pyramid and the hardest part for organizations to master. Great CIO's are even harder to find than other great executives, and it will be a while before seasoned IT executives are common. Because ICT is such a rapidly changing sector, it's hard to acquire the seniority necessary for an executive position while staying on top of the field. Fresh graduates lack the experience and power, and veterans can easily get out of touch with the latest developments such as cloud services and social media.
It is a great time to be an interdisciplinary IT and business expert, however, as companies make do with the expertise offered by the market. Universities like the TU Delft are turning out experts in business informatics, and large IT service companies like Cognizant are rapidly expanding their ability to be a partner in IT service management.
In a few short years business science and business practice will have caught up completely with computer science and IT practice, and companies will look back and wonder how they ever got by with improvised IT service management and most of all IT governance.
IT matters too much for any other development.
