Something's wrong, I want something
At a Service Management trade show a few years ago, one of the service management tool vendors explained how they'd worked with a customer to simplify the entry point to their self service system. They'd presented the users with just two choices:
- Something's wrong
- I want something
Pretty effective. Any customer's needs can be easily distilled down to just these two statements.
They either want you to fix something to restore it back to how it was before it broke.
Or they want to change something to make things better.
Whether it's a request for software, or an improvement to a user experience on a website requested by a product manager on behalf of their users, it's still a request for change. They want something.
If the whole business could use a service management system to record every scenario under these two basic headings - whether it's to do with the operation of the business, technology or anything else - we'd have a record of how a business truly operates.
We could then use that model to improve the operation of the business: automating common change requests, RCAing common issues. Service management for the whole enterprise. Enterprise Service Management.
