Something We See Everywhere
After ten years of ITSM assessments and transformation programmes across organisations of all sizes and sectors, we have accumulated a clear picture of the patterns that drive poor ITSM performance. Most of them are discussed openly in the industry — inconsistent processes, poor governance, tool-first thinking, underinvestment in knowledge management.
But there is one pattern we see as consistently as any of these, and which is discussed far less honestly: the gap between what ITSM initiatives promise and what they deliver — and the industry's complicity in that gap.
The Promise Gap
ITSM initiatives are consistently oversold. Vendor demonstrations show mature, AI-driven, seamlessly integrated service management capabilities. Consulting proposals describe transformational outcomes in carefully hedged language. Framework training presents an idealised view of what ITSM looks like when fully implemented.
None of this is dishonest in a simple sense. The capabilities demonstrated are real. The outcomes described are achievable. The frameworks depicted represent genuine best practice. But the distance between where most organisations start and where those demonstrations and descriptions live is almost never fully acknowledged.
What Gets Left Out
What gets left out is the difficulty of the cultural change required, the length of the journey, the number of previous initiatives that have failed to deliver lasting change, and the honest probability that this one will too unless the approach is fundamentally different.
It gets left out because organisations want to believe the promise, and because the people selling ITSM services — tools, consulting, training — have a commercial interest in telling them what they want to hear.
"The most valuable thing we can do for a client is tell them the truth about where they are and what it will actually take to improve. That conversation is harder to have than it should be."
Our Commitment
Our confession is this: we have not always been as direct as we should have been about the gap between aspiration and reality in ITSM improvement. The commercial pressure to be encouraging rather than honest is real, and we have not always resisted it fully.
Going forward, our commitment is to start every engagement with the most honest assessment we can deliver — including the uncomfortable observations — and to build improvement roadmaps that reflect the real starting point, the real constraints and the real effort required. Not the version that wins the work. The version that actually delivers it.
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