What does a service community need to be?

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I was in a meeting the other day with a group of individuals from various companies talking about forming a new Service Management/Innovation focused community. During our discussion, I IM’ed the leader the question: “What will Service Innovation be like in 10 years? What would an service community need to do, to have an impact?”

The Wikipedia definition for service management is very limited and IT outsourcing focused, in this XaaS world. Even the definition of Everything as a Service is a bit too information technology centric, when the whole concept of a business is more dynamic and aggregated.

Unfortunately, since the market is enamored with cloud the topic is too often viewed using only an IT lens. For a service management and innovation organization, the perspective needs to ensure that IT enables business value delivery and is not a limiting factor. It can help measure, track, forecast and hopefully automate services for business. Let’s not confuse that with IT being the services goal, in itself. Keeping the business agile, legal and goal oriented needs to be in the forefront. Lessons learned by efforts in one industry can be leveraged into others so sharing ideas across a diverse base of members is a key starting point.

With the ever changing and expanding collaborative capabilities available to communities today, added to the evolving definition of “service” -- a service support community will need to have quite an agile vision of where things are headed and what will be required, just to keep its constituent’s relevant.

What thoughts do you have on what a service focused community will need in order to be relevant?