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As ServiceNow's CEO sees it, service management automation shouldn't be limited to IT.

In IT service management news feeds are rising as a key repository for answers says Frank Slootman. And eventually social news streams will displace the fielded database as the dominant information repository for IT service management.

It's more than a few years back, and this IT pilot fish has the on-call beeper for the weekend -- which really isn't necessary, because he doesn't get a call all weekend. But oh, on Monday morning...

Support pilot fish is tasked with replacing a phone because a professor at the local college can't hear his voicemail -- and his boss tells fish to make sure it's one of the new digital phones because of the prof's hearing aid.

This pilot fish works on an incident management support team that uses instant messaging almost constantly to communicate, both between teammates and with others. But just because the message is instant doesn't mean the communication is.

This pilot fish is part of a group handling IT issues at a "forward deployed military installation," which means they're on the IT front lines in more ways than one. But they still have one user who causes most of their IT facepalms.

This IT pilot fish is in the Air Force and working as a telecom engineer at a base where the telephone switch has a special command for administrators to show the passwords -- a challenge fish can't resist.

Network support pilot fish working at a chip fabrication plant gets a priority-one ticket: One of the fabs is completely down.

We are seeing IT-centric innovation become the key to competitive advantage. IT is not longer about delivering a rock-solid general ledger system and a CRM system that lets you deliver incrementally better customer service than others in your market. It's also about incubating ideas that can make sure you're the disruptor, instead of the disruptee.

Flashback more than a few years, to when this pilot fish is working at a big bank and the IT boss is absolutely certain about, well, everything.

IT pilot fish gets a message from management: Review this list of old directives and identify which ones need to be updated, republished or retired -- and then see if the Big Boss agrees.

Now that technologies can be turned on and off like a spigot, scaled to demand, and iterated to real-time business challenges, CIOs need an elastic talent model to maintain their agility.

A deputy minister in this provincial government is exactly the kind of user that does not make things easy for IT. Among his other demands: He insists that any system or application that requires a login use his first name as the password.

For years, IT leaders have been talking about business alignment. And we should continue to do so. IT, after all, exists to support the business. It does, however, take two to tango. So while IT continues to try to better align itself with the business, it might also make sense for the business to participate more aggressively in achieving that alignment.

The family-owned company that this pilot fish works for is bought by a megacorp as part of a nationwide expansion -- and that leads to the need to inventory and label everything in the company. HQ's solution: stick-on labels with barcodes.