The speed and ease of which ‘improvements’ to proven practices can be duplicated (and monetized) by the community continues to accelerate, but is this a good thing?
I was originally attracted to BPM and eventually service management because of the perception that it was truly a collaborative effort, not a proprietary food fight. But Pink Elephant’s termination of a 40-year history with ITIL really illustrates today’s truth about the continuous improvement space…
…and it makes me want to join a ROMEO group for service management professionals.
Perhaps the most objective opinions about continuous improvement come from those who not only have been there and done that, but no longer have any vested interests. There’s just something odd about being able to collect best practices from others over decades and turn that into a proprietary, billion-dollar business.
Maybe that’s partly why I was attracted to the Unified Service Management method, which is supported by the non-profit SURVUZ Foundation. But I’ve certainly not given up on decades of lessons learned, much of which is reflected in USM anyway.
The truth is, almost all the ‘best practices’ out there have evolved from what came before:
“...even Deming spent a great deal of time copying Shewhart’s ideas and devising ways to present them in his own way. Students of continuous improvement are therefore students of history to some degree.
There have been multiple instances where one ‘expert’ or another took something, ‘improved it’, and re-published it as new thinking. This sometimes creates friction between authors and confusion around who exactly is an ‘authoritative source’.
This is the nature of the beast.”
John Worthington, Rolling Uphill
For now, I’ll continue to help the itSMF USA reconstitute its membership and evangelize the USM method.
But if anyone wants to think about a ROMEO group for grey-haired (or no-haired) service management professionals let me know… John@MyServiceMonitor.com