So, I left service management in August of 2014 so that I could get some education on out-sourced IT, which is what I was a managing as a service delivery manager. I kept coming up against problems that I could not break in the organization, and the time I spent in in-sourced IT and service management did not equip me to fully comprehend the problems, or the reports of what my functional subordinates had been telling me.
Let me tell you, it's pretty ugly on the underside of service management. Not everything is bad and there are some people who do it well so I can see how it was all supposed to work from all sides except the customer's (I'll get there eventually), but what has been going on in the industry has gutted the structure that enabled service delivery to function. Service Delivery is no longer allowed by higher level management to do what it was intended to do: provide better service to customers.
One of the shortcomings that I have discovered is that executive management has lost sight of its services. It has been infected with a common Wall-Street disease, which is flopping financial gains with quality: instead of producing a high quality service from which money flows naturally, the goal has been to make money from from the service at the cost of quality. And this seems to be endemic - every group with whom I has spoken in the last 18 months from every company is dealing with this.
The problem is simple, and something I learned very early on in my MBA. Financial indicators are lagging indicators: they tell you about performance between 1 and 6 months ago, but they are not indicators of today's performance. You find that out next month or next quarter from accounting.
What can tell you how you're doing today is your services and marketing teams and metrics: are your services hitting their targets, and are the customers pleased with the service they are receiving compared to what they signed up for. These directly correlate to financial numbers, but this is not what modern public company executives want: they want the quarter-end shareholder report to be good so they get their bonuses.
Symptoms range from not having enough people to deliver service, to sales teams selling something that the company cannot do, to massive attrition rates (regardless of gepgraphy), to loss of company knowledge required to turn the massive handles of internal process and bureaucracy.
These are not the root problem. They are symptoms. They root problem is much simpler: the ability to make decisions for long term gain has been sacrificed to short term earnings reports. This has only happened in the past few decades, from what I can tell. In the '80s companies were still on the service path, but the shift to short-term thinking was just beginning to make cracks in the quality service that is the core of successful services businesses. It's taken 2-3 decades to bring us here.
These problems have caused the underside of service management to become the ugly, top-heavy thing that it is in most organizations today. It's not beyond repair, but significant changes will have to be made to many areas in order for it to recover. It is possible for a single, charismatic leader with lots of support to change it for one organization even now, but the inherent system weaknesses we have created make that very difficult for everyone else.
