The future of Service Management

Posted to my company slack. I’m posting it here so I can be on record in case someday I want to say “I told you so”:

I’ve said this a bunch of times but I’m demented and repetitious and do I’ll repeat my reckless prediction, while y’all roll your eyes:

I think Service will go the same general direction, and adopt the same rough division of labor that Product has…

  • Service Managers or Journey Managers will be the analogue to Product Managers. They’re the 24/7/365 worried-about-every-aspect-of-every-detail people, interfacing with executives, designers, researchers, marketers, customers, front-liners, and everyone. They’re the CEO-track psychos who live, breathe, sleep whatever service they own.

  • Business Operations people will take on a more hands-on engineering type role. They’ll start driving more of the service blueprinting and implementation, with service designer’s support, mainly from the experiential behavioral motivation side. I’m guessing more and more operations folks will be fully absorbed into service management. It would be cool if COOs became CSOs, with operations execs under them.

  • Service Design will be pushed back into a sort of service-sensitive polycentric experience design — just as UX designers have lost some of the control over product vision they at least aspired to in the early days of proto-UX. Service designers need to understand JM/SM and operations, but that’s part of their horizontal T. The depth and expertise of the T’s vertical is polycentric experience design.I’m confident enough this is the future shape of our industry that I’ll bet up to $100 on it. Preferably less.

I’ve had this prediction dismissed enough already, that I’m pretty keen to say it at least once before it becomes common knowledge, and everyone thought it all along.
As William James didn’t say:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

I might even be too late. If do you think this is a stupid prediction, please, please go on record now, so I can prove the obviousness of this prediction was only retroactively so.

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