Progress
Everyone has a go at pop-thinking these days so here's my little contribution. Sure I'm guilty of contributing to the ill-informed conjecture by the many whose only qualification is an internet connection, but I'd rather social conjecture than the pop-ITSM which also surrounds us.
I think every pop thinker by now knows we have moved through four primary ages of Man: Hunter-Gatherer, Agricultural, Industrial, and Service.
Each one is an advance in how we produce, and hence how we socially organise and how we conduct our economy. The mode of production drives the rest of the transformation.
No new age completely displaces the preceding modes of production; it just drives them from the centre of our world and changes the way we do them. We still farm, we still manufacture, we even still shoot things.
We just might be entering a new age already - the cycles are getting shorter. That age is Knowledge; the rise of the knowledge-worker. Or knowledge-centred productivity could just be an artefact of the Service economy. I reckon the latter.
But we are not seeing a new Age of Social. Stop that. We've always been social. The last 200 years in the Western world got a bit disconnected with that passing aberration known as privacy (and the itinerant nuclear family) but we are almost back to normal now thanks to the internet-based global village. Once again, everybody works out who you are bonking and your employer knows what you do in the weekends. All this social tools excitement isn't a new thing; it is the rediscovery of a lost state of connectedness.
The relevance of this pop sociology to ITSM? Service management describes how a service organisation works. Not one possible theory on how it works. ITIL is one possible description of ITSM. ITSM is reality in a service economy. ITSM says in any situation you will do service portfolio, risk, supplier, acquire and build, test, change, incident, request.... HOW you do them may differ by approach and context, but you will always do all of these practices one way or another.
So until we move into a new Age of Man, service management will be front and centre. Only how we describe it will change.
Made in New Zealand 
