Most IT Leaders Think Their ITSM Is Better Than It Is. Here’s Why That Matters.

There is a question we ask at the start of almost every assessment engagement.

We ask IT leadership to estimate how mature they think their service management is. Then we ask the same question to the people doing the work.

The gap between those two answers is, without exception, one of the most revealing things we see.

Leaders tend to rate their ITSM higher. Not because they are wrong about what exists, the processes, the tools, the policies, but because they are often insulated from how those things actually function day to day. They see the framework. Practitioners live the reality.

The three beliefs that create the gap

In twelve years of independent ITSM assessments, three patterns come up repeatedly.

The first is confusing ownership with effectiveness. Most organisations have named someone responsible for Incident Management or Change. Having an owner and having an effective, consistently followed process are not the same thing. Leadership sees the governance structure. The service desk sees the workarounds.

The second is mistaking framework adoption for maturity. "We implemented ITIL" is something we hear often. ITIL, SIAM and ISO 20000 are excellent bodies of knowledge. But adopting a framework and embedding it into how your organisation actually behaves are different things. An independent assessment tells you which one you have.

The third is measuring the wrong things. Most IT functions measure what is easy to measure: ticket volumes, SLA percentages, resolution times. These numbers tell you about activity. They do not tell you whether your processes are actually working, whether root causes are being addressed, or whether your teams have the knowledge and capability to sustain and improve what they have.

Why it matters now more than ever

The gap between perception and reality has always existed. What has changed is the cost of getting it wrong.

Organisations are making significant investments in AI-enabled IT operations, automation and digital service delivery. Almost all of those investments depend on ITSM foundations that are more capable than most organisations realise they need to be. Clean data, consistent processes, clear ownership, mature change management: these are not nice-to-haves. They are the prerequisite for everything that comes next.

What independent assessment actually surfaces

When we go in, we are not measuring framework compliance. We are measuring how service management actually performs: through structured interviews with leadership and practitioners, scored across 30 disciplines using our own independent framework, and filtered through a Behavioural Baseline that assesses the cultural habits that either accelerate or undermine everything else.

The perception gap between leadership and practitioners is not a failure of leadership. It is a natural consequence of distance from operational reality. What matters is knowing it exists, and understanding where it is widest, because those are almost always the highest-priority areas for improvement.

Most IT leaders think their ITSM is better than it is. The ones who find out otherwise, and do something about it, are the ones whose organisations are genuinely better positioned for what comes next.