In the age of Services-as-Software, Agentic AI, and BS AI Employees, service management has officially become a lost art!
By definition, a service is an act or work performed by a person or group that benefits another. The key word is “person“. Not software. Not machines. Not fake AI. People with Human Intelligence (HI!).
Since service management is the systematic practice of creating, designing, delivering, supporting, and managing the lifecycle of services an organization provides to its customers, that means that the art of service management is using Human Intelligence (HI!) to appropriately design, create, deliver/perform, and support the outcome of the services the organization offers to its customers. Human Intelligence (HI!), NOT AI.
More importantly, it’s the art of:
- creating services that will provide value
- designing delivery methods that will be efficient and effective for the provider and the customer in the delivery of the value
- delivering the services with a human touch
- supporting the customer through the delivery when they need help fulfilling their end of the service (such as providing data, organizing meetings, making decisions, opening up systems, etc.)
And, generally, delighting the customer with the service by actually providing value. Something that can only be done by an intelligent human that understands what the customer actually values. And that’s a return on their money. It’s not just a strategy in a powerpoint deck (and certainly not one created by hallucinatory Gen-AI), a GPO that takes 10% off of insignificant tail spend, or a flip the switch system integration with no training, ongoing monitoring, or project assurance.
It’s a step-by-step strategy with implementation support at each step; a self-serve Procurement process setup and managed by the GPO in a manner that doesn’t require Procurement to need them on a day-to-day basis; and on-going onboarding training, adoption monitoring, and support process to ensure the system is used, tested, and improved by the daily users as soon as key functions come online.
Service management is becoming a lost art just as art itself is becoming lost in the age of unintelligent Gen-AI. Like art, service management requires humanity to get it right. By definition, humanity is something systems do not have!