Hi Jonathan, always interesting to talk.

That’s a really good question, which highlights that there’s always the tendency to define our community through our own lens (more of that Social Constructionism, I guess!). What I’m specifically addressing would be the community that has typically grown up from the servicedesk inwards: encompassing frontline technical support of internal users (or managed service customers) along the lines described by ITIL. On a day-to-day level this would include those concerned with Incident, Problem and Known Error Management, Change and Release Management, Knowledge Management, and often lots of “operations crossover” subjects such as the CMDB, availability, capacity, etc. Strategically they would be involved in the definition and management of “services” again along the lines defined by ITIL (although that’s a shifting target in itself).

There has always been crossover with more infrastructure-focused IT Operations Management practices and tooling, of course, but even taking that into account I see ITSM as a distinctly identifiable community which you might find at conferences like Pink, Fusion, itSMF, Service Desk and IT Support Show, etc.

The fact that we even make this soft distinction between ITSM people and operations people isn’t really a good thing, in my view, but it has been a well-shaped reality for decades. DevOps is probably the most significant existential threat to that “reality” that I have seen.