A VeriSM Primer: a Perspective on IT Service Management Frameworks

By some counts, there are more than two dozen IT Service Management (ITSM) or ITSM-adjacent frameworks, including popular and time-tested ones such as: . In this article, we explore VeriSM^TM, one of the latest frameworks in this crowded agora. In fact, VeriSM^TM goes beyond “IT” Service Management. It purports to be a framework for all types of services. We discuss the history of VeriSM^TM – why it was created and by whom – and provide an overview of some of the key concepts. We also compare VeriSM^TM to one of the most venerable ITSM frameworks, ITIL 4 (for more information on ITIL, read our ITIL 4 Complete Guide).

What is VeriSM^TM and How Did It Get Started?

VeriSM^TM introduced in 2017, stands for Values-Driven, Evolving, Responsive, Integrated, Service Management and describes itself as:

VeriSM^TM was developed by the not-for-profit organization, International Foundation for Digital Competencies (IFDC), and a number of partners, including EXIN, BCS, APMG, and Van Haren Publishing. VeriSM^TM was launched, in part, because the founders considered existing service management frameworks to be too narrowly focused on IT, too prescriptive, and not evolving quickly enough to address the needs of businesses in the era of digital transformation.

It takes a holistic view of service management, recognizing that different organizations have unique requirements and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. VeriSM^TM emphasizes the need for organizations to focus on value, rather than rigid processes or frameworks, and to continually adapt and evolve their service management practices based on changing business needs and technological advancements.

Although many of the VeriSM^TM founders and authors come from an IT Service Management background (indeed, some have co-authored ITIL publications), VeriSM^TM does not focus on IT. Quite to the contrary, VeriSM^TM elevates the concept of Service Management, and IT services are only one type of service. Indeed, in VeriSM^TM, everything is a service. As a framework developed for the era of the digital business, digital technology plays a key role. At the same time, digital transformation goes well beyond technology – it has to do with significantly changing the business you do or the way you do business.

Along these lines, it is not fully the responsibility of IT to understand how technology can improve services; business leaders outside of IT need to be heavily invested in understanding the opportunities presented by digital technology.

What are the VeriSM^TM Core Principles?

There are no set of core principles that are exactly the same for any two organizations. Thus, there are no VeriSM^TM core principles per se. However, it is possible to describe some key characteristics of the VeriSM^TM framework:

• Value-driven and Customer Focused: VeriSM^TM focuses on delivering value to the business and customers and helps ensure that services contribute to the achievement of desired outcomes.
• Evolving: The service management landscape is constantly changing. Indeed, change is unavoidable, and successful organizations not only accept this; but embrace it. VeriSM^TM promotes an evolutionary approach to service management, enabling organizations to adapt to new technologies, business requirements, and customer needs.
• Responsive: VeriSM^TM encourages a responsive approach to service management. Organizations need to be agile and quick in meeting customer demands, market changes, and emerging trends. It is also important to anticipate and address potential issues before they become problems. One way digital organizations do this is by flattening their organizational structure to allow for quicker decision-making.
• Integrated: VeriSM^TM encourages integration and collaboration of different management practices, methodologies, and frameworks. Organizations may have multiple approaches and tools in place. Organizations must create a unified and coherent service management ecosystem.
• Service-centric: VeriSM^TM places a strong emphasis on the service perspective. Services are the key enabler of value creation and they should focus on understanding customer needs. Services and performance need to be continually improved. Service Management is part of everybody’s role.
• Future-Focused: Although all organizations should learn from past failures, an organization should not focus on how things have always been done. Instead, they should boldly focus on new and improved ways of working.

Likewise, although organizations operate within various industry ecosystems, have different operating models, and produce different products and services, digital organizations generally share a set of characteristics. First and foremost, digital organizations focus on external customers more than anything else. This includes solving customers’ current problems, understanding what is valuable from the customer perspective, knowing what is trending in the market, and predicting demand. The best digital organizations even find ways to shape customer experience and drive demand. Second, they care about operational excellence. This includes improving efficiency and automating any work that a computer or technology can do better and more quickly than a human agent. Having said this, digital organizations tend to invest more in so-called “systems of engagement” – those with whom external customer interact – over “systems of record” (back-office systems). Third, the strategy of digital organizations is defined in digital terms and digital technology is inextricably related to it (even though technology is not the only element of it).

What is the Importance of Value Streams to VeriSM^TM?

VeriSM^TM places great emphasis on end-to-end value creation and delivery. Thus, the outputs or deliverables created by one person or team are not nearly as important as the outcomes achieved when teams collaborate to help get a customer job done. Repeatable process is fine, but only insofar as it does not create its own silos or impede the ultimate results intended.

Value Streams are broader than . Originating in the world of lean manufacturing, value streams tend to cross over multiple processes and teams. While the goal of a process is to turn an input into an output, the entire purpose of a value stream is to create or maintain a valuable product or service. Additionally, creating a value stream map is an initial step in identifying areas where there is waste or inefficiency and then finding ways to remove it (usually by altering the sequence of activities or leveraging automation).

A given organization could have dozens, even hundreds of value streams. Common value streams include:

• the end-to-end creation of new products and services
• customer onboarding
• new employee onboarding
• order fulfillment
• continuous improvement initiative

An additional benefit of using value streams is that it helps overcome the “” mentality. In other words, it is often the case that departments blame each other for poor service performance. The reality is that when using a value stream approach, we all win or lose together. After all, our customers do not care which of our teams are performing well and which are lackluster. They only care about the end result . . . and so should we.

What are the Components of the VeriSM^TM Operating Model?

An operating model depicts the primary activities of an organization and how these activities work together to create valuable products and services. As VeriSM^TM describes it:

The VeriSM^TM Operating Model is comprised of several components:

• Consumer – The VeriSM^TM model starts and ends with the consumer. The consumer provides requirement, receives products and services, and aids continual improvement by providing feedback.
• Governance – The means by which the organization is directed and controlled. In this case, we are referring to enterprise .
• Service Management Principles – These are based on governance and are considered “guardrails” that help manage quality and risk.
• Management Mesh – Describes how the organization combines Resources, Environmental factors, Management Practices, and Digital Technology to create and maintain products and services (more on this below).
• Define – The activities that gather requirements, design solutions (products and services).
• Produce – Build, test, and deploy the solution and ensure that it meets consumer needs.
• Provide – Make the new or updated solution available for use. Place it in live operations.
• Respond – Support the customer by handling issues, questions, and performing maintenance to ensure that products and services continue to deliver value.

The VeriSM Operating Model

What is the VeriSM^TM Management Mesh?

The Management Mesh is one of the key tools of the VeriSM^TM framework. Even so, it is easier to describe what it is not than what it is. According to VeriSM^TM, it:

• is NOT for IT only
• is NOT a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
• Is NOT an Architecture or Network Diagram
• does Not provide definitive detail.

In fact, although the Management Mesh is one of its major aspects, VeriSM^TM says that you do not even need to use it if you have a better way of understanding your products and services. To paraphrase VeriSM^TM:

The Management Mesh is a high-level representation of elements supporting a service management enterprise. It illustrates how resources, environment, management practices, and emerging technology integrate and operate to deliver service value. It is a view at a point in time that changes with the organization and will develop and mature as services are used, improved, and retired.

In layman’s terms, when an organization is evaluating whether it should offer a new product or service or when it is thinking about making changes to and improving an existing offering, it can use the Management Mesh as a tool to understand the impact of the change on various aspects of the organization. It can also leverage the Mesh to understand, at a high-level, what it needs to do to move from the current state to a future state that is able to support the desired changes.

What are the Components of the VeriSM Management Mesh and How Does it Work?

The VeriSM^TM Management Mesh has four “poles”:

• Resources – Internal enablers such as people, budget, knowledge, assets.
• Environment – Internal and External factors like organizational culture, internal process maturity, internal metrics, and regulatory environment.
• Management Principles – Standards and frameworks used to help govern, ensure quality, provide guardrails.
• Emerging Technology – Digital technologies and new technologies that are specifically used to develop and support new or changed products or services. (The focus is not on existing technology and infrastructure; rather, it is on the possibilities offered by new technology.)

Think of these as four major categories that need to be considered when introducing or making changes to products and services. Each one of these poles can be decomposed into specific criteria. The criteria are not prescriptive, and while some criteria such as “budget” and “regulatory” are common to most organizations, each organization is likely to have its own tailored criteria for each pole.

VeriSM Management Mesh

Interestingly, there is no one way to use the Mesh. One can imagine that it is a gameboard that comes with only a vague set of rules for how the game is played, and that each group of players can adapt the specific rules to their own liking.

Iteration 1: Evaluate the Current State

In general, three to four iterations are required to get full value from the Mesh. In the first iteration, you examine the current state of your organization.

Step 1: First, start by evaluating the criteria you established under Resources. Ask questions like, “Do we have enough people?” “Do we have budgetary constraints?” “What level of skills do we have in relation to what we want to do?” Draw lines or color in the mesh under Resources.

Step 2: Next, work counterclockwise and evaluate criteria under Environment with questions like, “What level of support do we get from our organizational culture?” “How mature are our internal processes?” “How well do we do with measuring key performance indicators?” “How well do we manage the regulatory environment?”

Step 3: Move to the Management Practices section and for the standards and frameworks you selected, evaluate how well you adhere to them. Note that these Management Practice, as with all criteria, are different depending on the organization and industry. For example, an organization heavily focused on providing IT Service Management is likely to identify ITIL as a management practice. However, automotive or consumer products manufacturing companies are more likely to use standards associated with their own industry.

Step 4: Next, evaluate your current state against emerging technology. Once again, do not focus on IT exclusively, we are not referring to back-end systems of record and infrastructure here. We are talking about digital technology that is needed to build and maintain new customer-facing products and services. Not surprisingly, since there are a wide variety of industries and products and services, the technologies listed in this area vary quite a lot. While one organization needs to rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning, another focuses on 3D printing.

Iteration 2: Evaluate What is Needed

After using the Mesh to understand the current state, use a blank Mesh to determine what is necessary for you to deliver a new or changed product or service. Work the Mesh counterclockwise in the same way that you did in Iteration 1. Note that although you may use many of the same criteria in Iteration 2 as you did in Iteration 1, there is also the possibility that you add or evolve criteria in this iteration as you understand more about the product or service you intend to offer. (This is what we in the project management world might consider a version of progressive elaboration.)

Iteration 3: Overlay the Future State on the Current State

At this point, overlay your future state Mesh on the Current State Mesh. This is essentially a visual depiction of a gap analysis that shows you where you are with each criterion compared to where you need to be.

Iteration 4: Fill the Gaps and Establish a Baseline

In the “final” iteration, determine a strategy to fill the gaps from the current to the future state. This establishes your baseline for the product or service in question. In some sense, this is not really the “final” iteration. At some point in the future, you may decide to make incremental improvements to the product or service. In this case, you start with your baseline mesh as the first iteration and your second iteration indicates the changes you wish to make. Thus, theoretically, updating the Mesh for a given product or service is a continual process that is never truly complete. You can even use the Management Mesh when you decide to products or services. When you retired a product or service, how much time or budget will it take to do that compared to how much time and budget it frees up? How will your customers respond to the change? Is there a digital technology that can turn its replacement product or service into something that brings competitive advantage?

An Example of How the VeriSM^TM Management Mesh Can Be Applied

This may be a bit of an understatement, but the first few times you work with the VeriSM^TM Management Mesh may prove a bit confusing. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Keep it Simple and Practical – This is one of the ITIL Guiding Principles, and it certainly applies here. The Mesh is meant to be a visual and conceptual model that helps to spark conversation at a high-level. It is more heuristic than scientific so applying excessive rigor to it defeats the purpose.
• There Is Only One Way to Use the Mesh – As a conceptual model, the Mesh is intended to be flexible; to suit your needs. For example, the criteria in each pole vary depending on the organization and product or service. How you qualify and/or quantify your current or future-state assessments of any criteria are completely subjective and up to you. For example, one organization may subjectively assess their organization culture as good and color in five on the Mesh. Another organization may establish a more quantitative way of rating culture based on the results of an employee engagement survey and color in just three . A good suggestion is to apply less rather than more pseudo-science to it.
• Involve a broad array of stakeholders – The Mesh is not just about IT (even when we are talking about IT products and services). Within reason, you need to involve stakeholders from multiple areas of the organization for a holistic view. Project managers, product and service owners, and line managers provide critical input. Even a minor change to an existing product or service can impact other areas of the organization and have unintended consequences. Even line managers within your organizational change management (OCM) teams should be involved since they can help plan future iterations.
• Work Counterclockwise – Although there is a lot of flexibility in using the Mesh, start with Resources and work counterclockwise. A lot of organizations start by thinking about digital technology, and the risk here is that the “cart is being placed before the horse.” In other words, when we start with technology, we think of technology as the solution but often forget about the challenge we are trying to solve and the end-to-end value stream.

How a Healthcare Provider can Apply the VeriSM^TM Management Mesh

Let us work through a simplified example of how to apply the VeriSM^TM Management Mesh.

Here is the scenario:

A healthcare provider organization would like to introduce a new remote cardiology monitoring service for patients that might be at risk for a heart attack.

The proposed service will involve a patient using a wearable device that monitors heartrate. The device continuously transmits results to the Cloud and ultimately to the healthcare provider and/or physician’s office. Not only does this involve technology, but it also means that there must be a way to alert the physician if a patient is likely to have an impending heart attack so that some sort of intervention can occur. In addition to helping individual patients, the healthcare provider intends to anonymize and aggregate cardiology results and perform trend analysis which can contribute to long-term research studies and medical journal articles.

Iteration 1: In this first pass, the leaders interested in introducing this new remote cardiology monitoring service assemble key stakeholder from across the organization. Given the potential importance of the new service, they invite the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Medical Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer to contribute. Additionally, they involve several key physicians and representative staff members, key IT leaders, data analysts, and researchers. Collectively, they determine the most appropriate criteria to include on each pole.

A subset of this larger group then begins to evaluate the current state of the organization along each pole, using the agreed-upon criteria. They decide to keep the analysis high-level so that it is easy for all to understand. Details will be injected later if the proposed new service is approved.

Iteration 1: Current State

There are a number of observations that can be pointed out since the team identified twenty-three criteria (i.e., the orange words around the mesh). To summarize some of the major ones:

• Along the Resources Pole, a relatively large budget is the organization’s biggest strength. However, it only has an adequate capacity in terms of people, a limited amount of extra time to work on new initiatives, underdeveloped data analytics skills, and low-level relationships with supports.
• In looking at the Environment, they believe they have a good organizational culture, but their internal processes and metrics are still not mature. Additionally, they do not believe they address competition very well and are probably meeting market demand for legacy services but not necessarily future-oriented services. They address current regulatory requirements, including HIPAA relatively well but have few established relationships with partners.
• In the Management Practices section, they have identified primarily practices that relate to healthcare standards and safety. They rate themselves as high with most of these. However, they are relatively immature when it comes to HC3 Mobile Device Security, which deals with security of mobile devices used in a healthcare context.
• Finally, in the Emerging Technology section, a number of technologies related to digital healthcare have been identified such as AI, Mobile Health Apps, and Mobile Development. However, the organization rates itself as relatively weak in most of these areas.

Iteration 2: In the second pass, the organization thinks about what is needed to roll-out and maintain the proposed remote cardiology monitoring service. At this point, additional subject matter experts are brought into discussions since they likely have more realistic information regarding high-level requirements.

Iteration 2: Future State

In theory, they could identify additional criteria along any of the poles. In this example, they chose to use the same criteria that was identified during the first iteration. Here is a summary of the major findings:

• In the Resources Pole, a significant number of people will be needed to stand-up and maintain the new service. Close relationships and possibly integration with suppliers will be needed to be successful. Additionally, significant budget will be needed and both implementation and maintenance will require a large time investment. Data analytics skills need to be high.
• In considering the Environment, a supportive and innovative organizational culture is key to success. Market demand for new remote cardiology monitoring services is high as is the competition in the marketplace. Regulatory hurdles are also deemed high. A close relationship will be necessary as will top-notch internal processes and well-defined, tracked and reported internal metrics.
• In terms of Management Practices, not surprisingly, items such as HC3, NIH Standards, FDA Standards, and Patient Safety Standards are high, whereas ITIL and NIST requirements are relatively low.
• In the Emerging Technology pole, required criteria are high across the board since the remote monitoring service heavily depends (in fact, cannot exist without) Mobile Health Apps, Mobile Health Devices, AI, and Big Data.

Iteration 3: In the third pass, the organization mashes-up or overlays the future state mesh on top of the current state mesh. This gives them a high-level sense of where they are now compared to where they need to be. At a high-level, it is a gap analysis.

Iteration 3: Gap Analysis

Here are the summarized results of the gap analysis (in the Mesh graphic, gaps are denoted by the pink areas of the bars):

• Overall, the Resource requirements for the new service exceed the resources the organization currently has. In brief, they need more people, closer relationships with suppliers, more available time to put into the effort than they already have, better data analytics skills, and even more budget.
• Likewise, in the Environment, gaps exist. Although the organizational culture is as supportive as it needs to be, the organization needs to do a much better job in dealing with competition and meeting market demand for the new service. There are additional regulatory and HIPAA requirements that the organization is not yet prepared to meet. A significant amount of effort needs to go into establishing partnerships to be successful. Internal processes and metrics need to be greatly improved.
• Management Practices are a mixed bag. On the positive side, the current state of the organization’s ITIL skills and ability to meet NIST requirements is high (in fact, for ITIL, higher than it needs to be to meet future state requirements). However, neither of these areas is particularly relevant for the new service. Additionally, the organization has no discernable gaps in terms of meeting NIH Standards and Patient Safety Standards. On the other hand, the organization is immature when it comes to HC3 and is new to dealing with FDA standards.
• When it comes to Emerging Technology, the organization is likewise weak across the board. Significant investment must be made in AI, Mobile Health Apps, Mobile Health Devices, and Big Data.

On the surface, the results of this gap analysis do not bode well for the organization to offer the new remote cardiology monitoring services. The current state is underperforming the required future state in almost every area. Several executive stakeholders initially suggest that the initiative be “killed” before it even begins. However, after additional conversation, they determine that they need to forge ahead with offering the service due to great market demand. In other words, they will be left behind by their competitors if they do not develop this (and other) digital health service. Indeed, this is a case of forced digital transformation and is likely to prove disruptive to the organization at first.

Given the inability of the organization to address many of the requirements using internal resources, technology, and capabilities, they decide to partner with another organization that has some of the capabilities they lack. Although there is some risk associated with this and the profit margins will be lower, it is the most reasonable way to proceed given the circumstances.

Iteration 4: In the “last” pass, a new Mesh is created which combines the current and future state meshes into a new graphic. The includes any changes to the meshes that were made during each iteration. The new Mesh becomes the baseline or minimum viable product (MVP) for future improvements.

Whenever the organization makes significant changes to the remote cardiology monitoring services, they begin by examining the baseline mesh and using it as a starting point for a new “iteration 1.”

Iteration 4: Baseline and MVP

What Publications Are Association with VeriSM^TM?

There are four main VeriSM publications:

• VeriSM^TM: a Service Management Approach for the Digital Age (2017) – This is the first and core publication. This book covers topics such as how organizations enable value, how supply chain within the organization support value delivery, and how capabilities support these supply chains.
• VeriSM^TM Foundation Study Guide (2018) – This is a self-study guide for the VeriSM^TM Foundation, VeriSM^TM Essentials, and VeriSM^TM Plus qualifications. It is a companion book to training courses and is based on the syllabus requirements for VeriSM^TM Foundation, VeriSM^TM Essentials, and VeriSM^TM
• VeriSM^TM: a Pocket Guide (2018) – This publication introduces the key concepts of VeriSM^TM in an abbreviated format.
• VeriSM: Unwrapped and Applied (2018) – This book explains how to use VeriSM^TM and develop and apply the Management Mesh.

All of these publications can be purchased in printed or digital formats from the Van Haren Publishing group here.

Does VeriSM^TM Offer a Certification Scheme?

In theory, VeriSM^TM offers three levels of certification, which are:

• VeriSM^TM Foundation – The focus is on learning basic terminology and concepts.
  • VeriSM^TM Essentials – This certification is part of VeriSM^TM Foundation and is geared towards professionals who are working in Service Management for the first time. The target audience includes undergraduates and graduates, and for people who would rather take VeriSM^TM Foundation certification in two parts.
  • VeriSM^TM Plus – This certification is also part of VeriSM^TM Foundation and is also geared towards those who are relatively new to the Service Management sphere. The course introduces new management practices such as DevOps, Agile, Lean, SIAM, and others. It also discusses emerging technologies that should be on the radar of service management professionals. For candidates who already hold an ITIL Foundation ​or ISO/IEC 20000 Foundation certificate, passing this certification allows them to bridge to the VeriSM^TM Foundation certification​ (without taking VeriSM^TM Essentials)
• VeriSM^TM Professional – The focus is on learning how to apply the approach.
• VeriSM^TM Leader – The VeriSM^TM website indicates that this certification is expected to be released in 2020, but as of the writing of this articles, it has not been released and no new information is available.

What Topics Are Covered and What Is the Format of the VeriSM^TM Foundation Exam?

The VeriSM^TM Foundation exam consists of forty multiple choice questions, and candidates have one hour to complete the exam. The exam is closed book.

The Foundation exam covers the following topics:

• The Service Organization
• Service Culture
• People and Organizational Structure
• The VeriSM™ Model
• Progressive Practices
• Innovative Technologies
• Getting Started

The target audience for VeriSM^TM Foundation is broad and includes professionals new to Service Management, people that have been working in the field for a long time, students, and executives.

What Topics Are Covered and What Is the Format of the VeriSM^TM Professional Exam?

The VeriSM^TM Professional exam consists of thirty multiple choice questions, and candidates have ninety minutes to complete the exam. The exam is closed book.

The Professional exam covers the following topics:

• A digital world
• Digital leadership and structure
• Transformation techniques
• Governance and strategy
• Applying VeriSM^TM
• Promoting VeriSM^TM

VeriSM^TM Professional is geared towards managers and senior managers (and those aspiring to these positions) from all areas of your business (once again, VeriSM^TM is not just about IT). This is meant for anybody formulating and executing on the strategy of your organization, anybody managing aspects of your organization’s value chain, and those who need to design and apply the “Management Mesh.”

Additional VeriSM^TM Resources

There are several resources where you can learn more about VeriSM^TM:

• VeriSM^TM Website: Although the VeriSM^TM website has not been updated in some time, it has a nice resource page that provides a blank version of the Management Mesh, several whitepapers and case studies, a toolkit to help you apply the approach, and a VeriSM^TM poster complete with key concepts. As of this writing, you can download the two main VeriSM^TM publications for free in exchange for your contact information.
• VeriSM^TM Official LinkedIn Group: There are several VeriSM^TM LinkedIn groups. This is the official/main one, and they tend to post frequently.
• The Van Haren Group Website: This is the company that publishes the VeriSM^TM All books are available for purchase here.

How Does VeriSM^TM Compare to ITIL 4?

Comparisons between VeriSM^TM and ITIL 4 are inevitable. They both were being developed and released at more or less the same time (technically, VeriSM^TM was released in 2018 and ITIL 4 followed in 2019). VeriSM^TM builds on many of the concepts from ITIL v1 through ITIL v3. In turn, ITIL 4 includes several themes and concepts that are also covered in VeriSM^TM. For example, both discuss the importance of value streams and cooperating across teams; and both are focused on involving the customer in value co-creation. Both VeriSM^TM and ITIL 4 have similar operating models, (though VeriSM^TM in some sense combines both a business model and an operating model in one graphic). VeriSM^TM’s Management Mesh is similar in some ways to ITIL’s Four Dimensions concept, though they are used differently in each framework. They both emphasize outcome-based thinking and promote “no blame culture). Indeed, much of the VeriSM^TM terminology is similar to ITIL because both frameworks share some of the same authors who “grew up” in the universe of IT Service Management.

VeriSM^TM certainly considers ITIL as an important and useful management practice. However, VeriSM^TM sees itself as being even broader than ITIL. In other words, ITIL is a “framework of frameworks” within the world of IT Service Management (ITSM); whereas VeriSM^TM claims to be an overarching framework for all of Service Management (not just ITSM). There is some truth to this claim. After all, VeriSM^TM’s starting point and reason for being is that the founder’s believed that ITSM is too limiting and creates an artificial separation between IT and the rest of the organization and the organization and its customers. At the same time, although ITIL started in the late 1980s as an IT Service Management framework, in ITIL 4 it has largely evolved to address both digital transformation and enterprise service management.

As to the claim that ITIL is too prescriptive, nothing can be further from the truth. This has never been the case . . . at least not since ITIL v3 (which is when I was introduced to ITIL). ITIL has only been prescriptive when those who misunderstand it try to reduce it to a set of sequential process maps and overly simplified “playbooks.” Or, as I’ve heard it described: ITIL is advice to the wise and rules to the foolish. Experienced ITIL practitioners know to take what they need from ITIL and “adopt and adapt” it to the particular ecosystem of their organization.

Leaders sometimes ask, “which one of these should I use, VeriSM^TM or ITIL?” “Which one is better?” Of course, this is a false dichotomy. Both VeriSM^TM and ITIL are valuable and interoperable. While ITIL is a “tried and true” framework, it has evolved to address issues that go beyond IT and go straight to the heart of the business. Nevertheless, formal ITIL (as opposed to seasoned practitioners who often incorporate new ways of thinking) has up until now been slow to venture beyond the IT engine room.

By contrast, VeriSM^TM has started where previous versions of ITIL left off. While many of the concepts are similar to ITIL, VeriSM^TM leverages new metaphors and new ways of explaining the reality of service provisioning and consumption. It addresses digital transformation head-on (in this respect, in much the same way as the ITIL 4 Digital and IT Strategy Publication).

The Reports of the Death of Service Management Are Greatly Exaggerated

A funny thing sometimes happens in the world of bodies of knowledge and management frameworks. A subset of these thought communities becomes dogmatic about the framework they are familiar with to the exclusion of all others. They almost develop their own professional (and even personal) identities around the framework instead of leveraging it for what it is . . . a tool to help us better understand and manage the work life around us. Though some traditionalists are quick to throw stones, there is nothing wrong with another way of viewing similar concepts. That is what VeriSM^TM brings . . . a new and complementary way of understanding and solving the challenges that we and our customers share.

One thing that is for sure, for those naysayers that have raised their dissent in recent years and proclaimed that service management and documented frameworks are dead . . . in this crowded marketplace of ideas, they would be wise to think again.