For better or worse, AI is everywhere, and conversations about it may be even more widespread than AI itself. A recent conversation with Jay Lentz got me thinking not just about how we use AI today, but about what service management might look like tomorrow. Clearly, I don’t have all the answers, but putting these thoughts on paper helped me work through them, so I wanted to share. Imagine an environment where more than 90% of changes are standard changes, executed by AI agents. Routine work moves quickly, human intervention becomes less frequent, and teams spend far less time coordinating individual implementations. What should service management practitioners focus on in that environment? The quality of the system that authorizes, executes, verifies, and learns from those changes becomes central to their work. The percentage itself should remain a scenario, rather than a target. A high standard-change rate tells us little about whether services are improving, risk is ...
What does the IT in ITIL® stand for? The historical answer is “information technology.” ITIL originated as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, although today ITIL is used as the framework’s name rather than spelled out. But that simple answer raises a more interesting question: What do we actually mean when we say “IT”? When I first explored this question in 2012, the concern was that people used the same term to mean different things. That concern still matters. Cloud services, digital products, automation and artificial intelligence have made the boundaries even less obvious. ITIL (Version 5) brings a broader perspective through digital product and service management. It also gives us a good reason to revisit an old question: When someone says, “That belongs to IT,” does everyone understand the same thing? One Term, Several Meanings The following are practical ways people use the term IT in everyday conversations. They are overlapping perspectives, rather tha...