A two-sided or multi-sided platform creates value not by producing goods, but by enabling interactions between distinct groups whose participation makes the platform more valuable for everyone else1,2. Amazon.com is the canonical case: buyers attract sellers, sellers attract buyers, and the platform owner curates, measures, and governs the exchange.
I believe IT platforms should be treated exactly this way — as business platforms. The service requester is the buyer. The IT service provider is the seller. The platform engineers — the change-the-bank (CTB) personnel who build the systems — are the makers whose products stock the marketplace. None of these groups creates value in isolation. The IT Operations manager, or Service Owner, is the platform strategist: the one who envisions the big picture, orchestrates the sides, and aligns every interaction with the organization's value-creation goals. This is the co-creation of value that ITIL 4 places at the center of service management3 — but expressed in the language a business school would recognize.
These networks are not merely adjacent; they are interlinked. Each linkage is an exchange where value is created or destroyed — and therefore where measurement and governance belong.
Service users' feedback is the platform's primary demand signal. Like marketplace ratings, it must flow back to providers and builders unfiltered, and it must visibly shape the roadmap — or users stop giving it.
Observation of the platform's own performance — repeat-service frequency, first-call service provision, fulfilment behavior — is the operational analogue of marketplace analytics. Repeat demand for the same fix is a defect signal, not a workload statistic.
When external vendors or in-house product engineering hand over a system, IT Operations becomes the service user. A structured Permit to Operate — documentation written with deep empathy for the people who will run the system at 3 a.m. — is the seller's obligation in that exchange, and it directly compounds operational efficiency.
Support and service-delivery staff are simultaneously providers and consumers among themselves. The subject-matter expert for a product may sit in Japan; what does the EMEA operator do at handover if that knowledge is not shared in a humane, structured way? Follow-the-sun operations succeed or fail on this internal knowledge market.
Service catalogs (ServiceNow, Saviynt, and their kin) are the platform's storefront: dynamically embedded instructions, automated provisioning, and — critically — a warranty. A catalog item without assured fitness for use is a listing without a seller guarantee; ITIL has always paired utility with warranty for exactly this reason3.
A marketplace that does not police quality degenerates; so does an IT platform. Every activity above must therefore be designed to measure quality and governed so that quality has consequences: rewarded and made visible when it is high, examined and roadmapped when negative signals are detected. Governance here is not bureaucracy — it is the trust mechanism that keeps all sides of the network willing to participate, the same role that ratings, guarantees, and dispute resolution play in commercial platforms2.
This is not an armchair theory. I have been fortunate to be offered the chance to practice every element of it — orchestrating global service networks, designing catalogs with dynamically included instructions, instituting operational analytics, receiving systems into operation, and building the knowledge-sharing structures that let a follow-the-sun team act as one. The repositories under this profile are working artifacts of that philosophy.