Rockstar ITSM Celebrity - Anyone? Anyone?
"... Digital Business is littered with success stories. But a supplementary question concerning a lack of celebrity IT presenters on television sent me away thinking about IT’s image." A while back Financial Times Digital Business supplement carried a rather interesting editorial from Peter Whitehead on celebrities in IT - or rather the lack of them.
Think about the internet and there are a host of celebrity names that spring to your mind. The first wave dot com celebrities had a substantial number of celebrities - Jeff Bezos of amazon, Pierre Omidyar of ebay, Sabeer Bhatia of hotmail fame. The story becomes even more spectacular with the web 2.0 wave - Mark Zuckerberg of facebook, Larry Page & Sergey Brin who co-founded google, oh well I could go on all day.
Think about IT Service Management. Now think about ITSM celebrities. Whose name springs to your mind? Any one? Any one at all? Sigh ...
But do we really need an ITSM celebrity?
Ask a bunch of kinds what they want to be when they grow older - honestly, wouldn't you be shocked if someone says - I want to become an ITSM Change Manager or a Database Administrator! Not that I want kids to become dreamy-eyed when they talk of a career in ITSM. But still, that would be nice 
Alright. So, who's an ITSM celebrity?
Here's who Wikipedia lists as a celebrity - A celebrity is a widely-recognized or famous person who commands a high degree of public and media attention. The word stems from the Latin verb "celebrere" but they may not become a celebrity unless public and mass media interest is peaked.
So what does that tell me?
- There are no celebrities in the ITSM world. Or,
- There are ITSM celebrities. But they are so far away from the public and media attention that they are not well recognized or famous.
Perhaps both. But I think the real reason lies in the latter - the focus of the public and media attention. ITSM is one space that sees more incremental changes than most others - and, that is not really front-page material is it? Even within an IT organization, how prominent is the ITSM strategy? A while back I had blogged about the new CIO - Chief ITIL Officer. How true is that? Or are we still far far away from seeing ITSM take a more prominent stage within the organization?
Is there really an ITSM celebrity?
Comments
Majid Iqbal, Gartner, ex-CMU scientist at ITSQC
David Canon, HP Principal
Michael Nieves, Accenture
George Spalding, Gary Case - Pink Elephant
Posted by: Manik Patil | November 11, 2007 09:21 AM
Solid profiles all without a doubt, Manik.
But the very point of my entire blog was - how many of these names are recognizable outside our IT circle, let alone the ITSM circle? Are we expecting too much to see a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs emerge in the ITSM space - not in terms of products developed or wealth generated, but in terms of fame and celebrity status?
Of course, some folks may argue that we are comparing potatoes and tomatoes. And that fame and celebrity status are things one would associate only with more "glamorous" work.
But I am waiting for someone to prove that wrong!
Posted by: Arvind Raman | November 16, 2007 04:20 PM
Well, Sharon Taylor for one - due to her tours and webcasts, maybe.
How about Charles Betz? His book and website are becoming popular, too...
Posted by: Indranath Mitra | December 2, 2007 06:31 AM
This is turning out to be a rather interesting list of ITSM celebrities!
Keep adding.
Here's one that ITIL highlights. It's mentioned in the v2 version of ITIL - section 8.9.1 of the Change Management chapter (Service Support) which calls out John Zachman as a Configuration Managment guru. Charles' blog on his work is quite thought-provoking.
Posted by: Arvind Raman | December 4, 2007 01:06 AM