Shortly after my (what I consider) triumphant success at the Pink Elephant conference last month (you know, that whole gamification thing I yammered on about for a while), I set my nose back to the grindstone and began an encore endeavour of fusing social media with IT service management. I did this for two reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to show off. Second, I really wanted to see if I could use S***-**w’s social media feed to create incidents, search knowledge, and essentially prove that social IT can be used for facilitating ITSM processes beyond the general scope of communication. After a few sleepless nights of development, I’m happy to say that I made some pretty good progress and am very pleased about the results (check out this Youtube video for proof – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXltl4UMJg4). But before I go any further on this project I would like to share my personal view on why my efforts are worthwhile, and not just something I’m doing to impress my colleagues (even though that never hurts).
To begin with answering the “why,” I’d like to bring up the general topic of social media. It’s had a tough time in IT, and I think there will always be debate about where it exactly fits in with ITSM and how best to utilize it. I’m not going to give evidence to sway your opinion one way or another, but I will state that, in my ever so humble opinion, I think we’ll be seeing more adoption of social media as a primary framework of how IT operates, as opposed to the pigeonhole of being a secondary form of communication or collaboration. That being said, and along with the basis that the goal ITSM is about helping the “business” achieve value, we should start looking at social media and how to incorporate it into our regular IT processes. So instead of communicating in one tool during the incident process, and then later going to another tool to create the incident, why not have both functions achieved in a single step? OK, capturing chat history into an incident is not a big deal, but I’m not just talking blogging about capturing data. I’m stating that eventually, we won’t need separate incident, problem or change forms. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to capture that data, and it definitely doesn’t mean we can do away with those processes (sorry – I would keep your ITIL books – all 6.981 KG for 2011) . What I am trying to describe is a type of environment where all our IT work is accomplished through the use of social IT (and for the record, I had a similar conversation with William Goddard while at Pink 12, so I won’t claim originality on the vision).
This is the part of the blog article where I would be expected to present evidence for justification of this “vision.” My simple answer is for you is to visit a local college or high-school and ask a few students how they interact with their peers. My guess, and I think it’s not far off, is that they’re using Facebook and Twitter for most social communication and phone calls are simply a last resort for when someone has been unfairly grounded from their iPhone. The reason I point out the behaviours of the next generation is because these are the IT brains of tomorrow. In fact, even if they don’t go into technology, they’ll likely be our customers/end-users.
To add one more thought on “the next generation will work this way” argument; I’d like to detract from a superficial explanation and dig a little deeper into some sociology (I’m qualified for such a task since my wife’s a behavioral therapist and I’m an aptly trained husband). Why is social media so widely used by the youth and seems to have trouble gaining acceptance with “more experienced” generations? My current theory, and it’s a theory and will go no further then this blog post, is that it’s not because it’s quicker for adolescents or young adults to learn new habits or behaviours, but rather, they live in environments where social change is very quick to occur and new innovations are willingly accepted by the culture. Think about it; colleges are typically liberal havens where experimentation is encouraged and failure is overlooked (I should know, I failed quite a lot in college). School in general has an environment conducive to learning and education, which in turn is furthered by trial and error. So on that thought, it’s not so much that “young” people are quick to learn how to utilize social media, but rather, they live in cultures that are more accepting of change. This goes along with my belief that people are inherently social and would prefer to work and communicate in company, which means groups of humans that have no, or limited, cultural restrictions on change are likely to behave that’s most natural to them. So it’s not that social media can’t succeed due to our inability to adapt (we naturally want to be social), but rather, there are some barriers that’s preventing us from doing it.
So now you (hopefully) understand why I see social media as gaining more acceptance as time goes on. I have the (blindly optimistic?) belief that we, as humans, want to be social and it’s natural for us to work in that manner. As cultures change, social IT will become more prevalent and it’ll eventually take the center stage with how we go about our IT processes. So why not start incorporating our IT Service Management into social IT today, and be ahead of the curve for tomorrow? I, as well as a few others out there, have the vision that we can create incidents, search knowledge, follow problems, create changes, request access, and complete a myriad of other ITSM tasks all through social media. Will it ever be perfect? Probably not. Do I care? Absolutely. If things don’t go that way I’ll look like an idiot and probably regret writing this blog post. On the other hand, if I’m right, I would have earned several seconds worth of bragging time on Twitter.
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