Time for a change: Claire Agutter's reflections on news as ITSM Zone join the Globalution Group

This week we announced that ITSM Zone and Scopism are joining the Globalution group of companies.

I’m very excited to share this news, as there are so many links between how we think and what we do. For our existing network, not much will change. ITSM Zone will continue to deliver best practice eLearning and Scopism will continue to provide SIAM content, events, and virtual consultancy.

However, we’ll also be expanding what we do. We’ll be developing services related to mutable business and what it means for individuals, teams, organizations and society (get an introduction to mutable here).

So how did this all happen? After 14 years of running my own business, what’s led to this decision? It starts with a question that many of us face as ITSM professionals - how do you describe what you do? For many of us in service management, this is hard to answer. Our friends and family might know we work ‘in IT’, so they’re surprised when we can’t fix their computers.

I’ve struggled with this question even more since I started my own businesses. ITSM Zone (originally ITIL Training Zone) came first, and that was fairly simple – I was a trainer, doing some business management around the edges. Scopism followed in 2016 and then things got more complicated. Working with huge groups of amazing volunteers to create the SIAM BoKs and then the VeriSM publications, what was my role? Project manager? Facilitator? Plus we were organizing events, setting up a virtual consultancy practice, doing research and producing whitepapers. Was I a service manager anymore?

Looking back, one thing I can see clearly -  my career and my areas of interest have evolved as IT and service management have evolved. First, ways of working changed, and so we broadened our portfolio at ITSM Zone to include topics like DevOps, Agile and BRM. Then, as IT sourcing became more complex, SIAM adoption grew and I founded Scopism. And finally, as more and more organizations adopted the concept of digital transformation, VeriSM described how service management needed to adapt to support digital products and services.

I’ve expressed my frustration many times with the concept of ‘digital transformation’. It’s too technology focused, and far too likely to result in a six month transformation project that delivers no real benefit. Last year, I started to work as an associate with Bloor Research, a Globalution company, as one of their Navigator team and learned about the mutable business concept. The mutual ideology is “…to achieve the greatest economic and social value, organizations must operate in a permanent state of evolution.” Mutable gave me one of those penny drop moments. It’s an enterprise level operating model, but I can see how management methodologies like SIAM can help to deliver a mutable organization. Through the conversations I had with the companies in the Globalution group like Bloor Research, we identified a lot of shared values. I really believe it’s a way to bridge the gap between what we know needs to happen in service management and our inability to reach the enterprise level.

And that’s how we got here. If you’ve got any questions for me about all this, just get in touch, and watch this space for more developments.

Kindest regards,

Claire Agutter, director at ITSM Zone and Scopism