A major UK utilities group had invested heavily in IT service management over the years — with limited success. When a new IT Director commissioned an independent assessment, the findings pointed somewhere unexpected: the biggest drag on IT performance wasn't IT at all. HR, Facilities and Legal were all operating as service functions without any service management thinking. The solution wasn't just an IT fix. It was an enterprise one.
The organisation had tried to improve IT service management twice in the previous five years. Both initiatives had produced process documentation that sat largely unread, and a ITSM platform that was used as little more than a ticketing system. When a new IT Director arrived with a mandate to finally make a difference, their first decision was to commission an independent assessment rather than repeat the same approach for a third time.
The assessment findings were illuminating — but not in the way anyone expected. Yes, IT had process gaps. Incident ownership was unclear, Problem Management was non-existent and the service catalogue was years out of date. But the interviews with frontline IT staff kept returning to the same theme: a significant proportion of IT's workload was generated by failures in other service functions.
New starters arrived without the equipment, access or desk space they needed because HR, IT and Facilities weren't coordinating. Legal requests were coming through email chains that IT was being asked to action without the authority to do so. Facilities faults were being logged as IT tickets because nobody knew where else to send them. IT was absorbing the consequences of an organisation-wide absence of service management thinking.
"We kept trying to fix IT. But a significant amount of what looked like an IT problem was actually an HR problem, a Facilities problem and a Legal problem — all landing in IT's lap because there was nowhere else to go."
We presented the full assessment findings to the IT Director and the wider executive team — including the heads of HR, Facilities and Legal. The conversation that followed was frank. The data was hard to argue with: a significant proportion of IT's demand was originating outside IT, and the only sustainable solution was to apply service management thinking across all four functions simultaneously.
The ESM programme that followed was structured in three phases, with IT's own improvement running in parallel throughout.
The first challenge was cultural, not technical. HR and Facilities leaders initially saw the programme as IT imposing its way of working on them. We spent the first two months running joint workshops that reframed the conversation — this wasn't about ITIL or IT frameworks. It was about each function making clearer commitments to the people they served, and having the visibility to know whether they were keeping them.
With cultural alignment established, the programme moved to service design — defining services, establishing ownership models and agreeing performance standards for each function. Only then did the technology conversation begin. A single ITSM platform was selected and configured to serve all four functions, with a unified employee portal providing a single front door regardless of which function the request was for.
Twenty-two months after the initial assessment, all four service functions were operating under a unified service management model with shared visibility, clear ownership and consistent measurement. For the first time, the organisation could see the full picture of internal service demand — where it was coming from, where it was going, and how well each function was responding to it.
The impact on employee experience was immediate and visible. The single most complained-about aspect of working at the organisation — the chaotic onboarding experience — was transformed. New starters who had previously spent their first week chasing multiple departments for basic access and equipment could now track a single onboarding request through a unified portal.
The financial case, which had been built conservatively, proved understated. Efficiency savings across the four functions — from reduced misdirected requests, faster resolution, eliminated duplication and lower administration overhead — came in at £800k annually against a programme investment that was recovered within 18 months.
"The uncomfortable truth from the assessment was that we couldn't fix IT in isolation. The better outcome was that when we addressed the whole picture, the results were far bigger than anyone had originally hoped for."
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