Chris Dancy joined ServiceNow about a month ago. It has been great to have him as part of the family, but we all know he's been a critical member of a much bigger family for years before he arrived at our doors.

I've watched the reactions of folks in the ITSM industry, both in and out of ServiceNow. Most have been excited at the news, but there has also been some disbelief.

Hundreds of you have worked with Chris personally. Thousands of you have listened to him on the ITSM Weekly Podcast or heard him speak at an IT conference near you.

Nobody wants to lose a family member. People, relax. Chris is still family. He is not running away. If anything, he is now more part of the family than ever. Like Cousin Eddie, Chris just parked his RV in your driveway. And like Clark Griswold, we all need a Cousin Eddie to save us from ourselves, even if we don't see how that makes any sense right now.

Chris wouldn't have joined ServiceNow if this opportunity didn't provide him with a platform to do his thing at scale. We simply hope ServiceNow will provide a big enough driveway for his Chris' RV.

If you are just tuning in, two items of consequence have happened in the ITSM industry in the past five years. First is the impact of ServiceNow on the technology. Second is the impact of Chris on the people. Here's the Cliff Notes version of what happened (according to me):

ServiceNow grew from nothing to become the third-largest ITSM vendor in the world in about six years. Our competitors think it was because we were the first to do SaaS for enterprise ITSM. While true, they are missing the point. Our customers didn't buy ServiceNow for SaaS, in fact, I'd argue in many cases SaaS was a detriment in the sales process because it was new and different. What Fred Luddy and the ServiceNow team did was take every aspect of an old technology and broken business model and modernize it. Everything from the user interface to the customer experience was changed for the better.

During the same time, Chris came to the party with years of experience in IT in every capacity...implementing IT tools, working the help desk, developing and broadcasting his vision for the future of IT service management and much more. Today, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Influencers positions Chris in the upper right hand corner with a 50% probability that nobody is more influential in the industry. He's become the apophenist for our little IT clan.

The industry is changing whether we like it or not. Do you want to know what your job will look like in three years...in five years...in a decade? Do you want to know what tools you will be using, or more importantly, not using, in the future? Do you care if your skills are still relevant? Then pay attention.

You might think ServiceNow is doing just fine without Chris' RV parked in our parking lot, but we need Chris. We changed the industry once but this isn't
good enough. We are about to change it again. Chris will help us change things the right way.

To our European friends, you will get your fill of Chris this month. You can find him at no less than four events in the next four weeks, starting with his presentation yesterday at #itSFMUK11.

Chris' sessions and keynotes won't be about ServiceNow. They will be about brain damage and trying to get through one of his sessions without suffering too much of it. Don't let the inevitable change spagett you into extinction. Join us in the chase and watch this space.

For me, personally and professionally it has been a kick in the pants to have Chris on board. We go back a few years. Our paths first crossed at Pink Elephant 2009. I think Chris and I were two of four ITSM people (with @rtiller and @cadence_ITSM) on Twitter back then. Chris was one of about ten people who showed up to the ServiceNow vendor session. We were spewing crazy talk about SaaS and Web applications. Not many people understood what we were trying to do back then, but Chris believed and saw something in ServiceNow. He was Cousin Eddie with early symptoms of apophenia. Now we work together in an RV in San Diego. But remember, it's a big RV, fit for a really big family. Yep, this is going to be fun.