Forrester is big on music. Conference rooms are named after bands or musicians and headquarters just held a music festival.   As for me, I am a big Drake fan.   Therefore, to honor Drake (shout out to Noah “40” Shebib too!) and with a nod to the love of music at Forrester Research, I have combed through his lyrics and here’s the top 5 things I think Drake can remind us about service management:

  1. “I be yelling out: money over everything, money on my mind”  Especially after a long week of dealing with outages, changes gone awry, or a huge volume of service requests, it is good to remind ourselves why service management is so important.  At its heart, service management solves critical business problems or enables business success.  Good service management can make employees more productive which in turn makes the company more profitable.   How are you measuring success?  More on that later.
  2. “There ain't really much out here that's popping off without us” Whether it is business processes or applications that support functions such as HR, Finance, R&D, Marketing, or Sales, service management is at the heart of it all.  Service Management should be enabling, monitoring, and measuring all of these business processes and therefore making you relevant to the business success or failure.
  3. “It’s hard to do these things alone” Services are reliant on the networks, servers, databases and all other parts of IT to run smoothly.  Boundaries can easily pop up between functions of IT.  Work hard to break down those boundaries to make everyone’s job easier. 
  4. “Here’s what I’ll do, I’ll take care of you”  Whether you run a help desk or a service desk or any flavor in between, the primary goal should be to take care of the employees who are dependent on your help to get their job done.  Typically our measurements have promoted a culture of quick interactions rather than good interactions.  How can we change this paradigm?  More on that later.
  5. “Even though nothing was the same”  BYOD (Bring Your Own Device),  additional applications spread out between the cloud and on premise, more tech-savvy employees and an emphasis on personalized services are just a few factors that are currently making service management challenging.  Got a topic you’d like addressed with additional research?  Let me know in the comments.

Any other Drake fans out there that think I missed a hidden message about managing services?  Think another musician or musical band is channeling service management better than Drake?  Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.   (Extra bonus points for anyone who knows which songs these versus come from!)