Effective IT service management depends more on human interactions than on specific tools or frameworks. Success is defined by how service delivery makes people feel, emphasizing empathy and care over mechanical ticket processing. Prioritizing the human element ensures that IT becomes a supportive resource rather than a bureaucratic obstacle.
Successful ITSM requires alignment between technical teams, leadership, business users, and external customers. Leaders must model service-oriented behavior and translate technical metrics into business value. By focusing on communication and transparency, organizations can transform IT into a strategic partner that prioritizes user experience and long-term relationships.
Twenty-eight years. Three industries. Multiple continents. Dozens of tools, frameworks, and platforms. More ITIL versions than I care to count.
And if you asked me right now to boil it all down to the one thing that separates great IT service management from the kind that slowly drains the soul out of an organization — I wouldn’t say process. I wouldn’t say tools.
I’d say people.
Not in the vague, “people are our greatest asset” way that gets printed on motivational posters nobody reads. I mean it practically. Specifically. In a way that should change how you think about every meeting, every ticket, every service desk interaction your team has tomorrow morning.
Let me explain.
The Restaurant Test
Think about the last time you had a genuinely great experience at a restaurant.
Not just good food. Great experience. The kind where you’re telling someone about it three days later. The kind where you’re already thinking about going back before you’ve even gotten the check.
What made it great? Probably not the menu software they used to take your order. Probably not the POS system at the register. Maybe the food itself was exceptional — but I’d bet the thing that really locked it in was how you felt while you were there. Seen. Taken care of. Like the people serving you actually gave a damn whether you had a good time.
Now flip it. When was the last time a user walked away from an IT service interaction feeling that way?
That’s the question that should keep every IT leader up at night — and most of them aren’t even asking it.
What 28 Years Actually Taught Me
I started my IT career in 1998 on a trading floor in Tokyo, supporting American bankers in an environment where downtime wasn’t a nuisance — it was a financial event. Before that, I spent eight years in the Marine Corps, where the mission always comes first and the people executing the mission are everything.
Those two experiences shaped how I think about service in ways no certification ever could.
In the Corps, you learn quickly that the best-planned operation falls apart without the right people executing it. The plan matters. The equipment matters. But the human beings carrying it out? They’re the variable that determines the outcome. Every time.
IT service management is no different.
I’ve seen organizations with world-class ITSM tooling — ServiceNow, fully configured, beautifully integrated — deliver a miserable service experience because nobody on the team actually cared about the person submitting the ticket. I’ve seen organizations running on basic ticketing systems deliver service so good that users thanked the team. Voluntarily. Unprompted.
The difference was never the platform.
The Four People Who Make or Break Your ITSM
Here’s how I think about it. There are four groups of people in every ITSM ecosystem. Most organizations pay serious attention to maybe one or two of them. The ones that get it right think about all four.
1. The Technologists (Your IT Team)
These are your frontline people. The service desk analysts, the infrastructure engineers, the platform admins. They are, in the most literal sense, your service delivery mechanism.
Here’s the hard truth: how you treat your technologists is exactly how they will treat your customers.
This isn’t philosophy. It’s mechanics.
If your service desk analysts feel like ticket-processing machines — measured only by handle time and closure rate, never invested in, never consulted on how to improve the service they’re delivering — they will eventually deliver a service that feels exactly that mechanical. Efficient, maybe. Human, no.
The teams I’ve seen deliver exceptional service consistently have leaders who treat their technologists as professionals, not processors. They ask for input. They explain why, not just what. They celebrate service wins, not just SLA hits. They build people up instead of managing them down.
You cannot outsource care. You can only build a culture that models it.
2. IT Leadership
Leadership sets the tone for everything. And in my experience, the single biggest driver of poor IT service culture is leadership that is fluent in technology but illiterate in service.
There’s a particular type of IT leader I’ve encountered throughout my career — technically brilliant, deeply knowledgeable, and completely unable to articulate the value of what their team delivers in terms a business stakeholder would care about. They speak in uptime percentages and patch compliance rates while the business is asking “why does it take three days to get a new laptop?”
Great IT leaders translate. They hold the technical standards that keep the lights on and they sit in the room with the business and understand what “good” looks like from the other side. They use their position to remove friction for their teams and advocate for the resources needed to deliver — not just maintain.
Most importantly, they model the behavior they want to see. If leadership treats IT as a cost center to be minimized, the team will deliver a minimum viable service. If leadership treats IT as a strategic enabler of business outcomes, the team will find ways to deliver that.
Culture follows leadership. Always.
3. Business Users
Business users are often the forgotten middle of the ITSM equation — treated as either complainers to be managed or end-users to be processed, rather than what they actually are: internal customers with real work to do and legitimate frustrations when technology slows them down.
I’ve found that most business user frustration with IT isn’t actually about the technology. It’s about feeling unheard.
They submitted a request. They don’t know what’s happening with it. Nobody proactively told them anything. The system sent them an automated email they couldn’t understand. When they followed up, they had to re-explain the whole issue to someone new.
Sound familiar?
The fix is rarely technical. It’s communication. It’s transparency. It’s treating the person who submitted the ticket like they matter — because they do, and because they have a real job to do, and because their ability to do that job is directly connected to how well IT performs its function.
When I’ve built tech practices that actually worked, the business users became advocates for IT. Not reluctant tolerators — actual advocates. Because they experienced what it felt like to have IT genuinely in their corner.
That relationship is earned one interaction at a time.
4. Customers (The External End of the Chain)
In some organizations, there’s a fourth group that IT rarely thinks about at all: the external customer. The person at the end of the business value chain whose experience is directly shaped by whether IT delivered well.
If you’re in financial services and your trading systems go down, there’s a client on the other end of that. If you’re in manufacturing and the ERP goes sideways, there’s a customer order that doesn’t ship. If you’re in advisory services and the collaboration tools fail, there’s a client meeting that goes sideways.
IT rarely gets credit when these things go right. But we are absolutely part of the story when they go wrong.
Keeping this in mind changes how you prioritize. It changes how you think about SLAs. It changes the weight you give to incidents that don’t have a loud internal stakeholder but have a quiet, consequential downstream effect on the customer experience.
The best ITSM leaders I’ve met think about the external customer even when nobody is asking them to.
The Metric Nobody Tracks
We track a lot of things in ITSM. Mean time to resolve. First contact resolution. SLA compliance. Customer satisfaction scores. Change success rates.
These are fine metrics. Some of them are genuinely useful.
But nobody tracks this one: Do your users walk away from IT interactions wanting to come back?
Not “were they satisfied with the resolution of their incident.” Not “did the ticket close within SLA.” I mean: did the interaction leave them with the feeling that IT is in their corner? That reaching out was worth doing? That next time they have a problem, IT is a resource rather than a last resort?
Great service — the kind you remember at that restaurant — does that. It makes you want to come back. It makes you feel like someone genuinely cared about your experience, not just the transaction.
That is the standard we should be holding our IT service organizations to. Not just “did we fix it” but “how did they feel when we were done?”
What Actually Matters
Twenty-eight years gives you perspective. Here’s mine:
Process matters. ITIL matters. Your tooling matters. A well-configured CMDB matters. Change management matters. All of it matters.
But none of it matters if the people in your organization don’t care about the people they’re serving. And none of it works if leadership doesn’t create the conditions for that care to exist.
The organizations I’ve seen struggle with ITSM — the ones where morale is low, ticket backlogs are permanent, and business relationships are adversarial — almost always have the same problem at the root. Somewhere along the way, they started managing processes instead of serving people.
The fix isn’t a new platform. It isn’t another ITIL certification. It isn’t a reorganization.
It’s remembering why the service is there in the first place.
People needed help. You showed up to help them.
Keep that at the center of everything you do — the way you build your team, the way you lead, the way you design your service interactions, the way you think about the customer at the end of the chain — and the metrics will follow.
Get that right, and you won’t just have satisfied users.
You’ll have customers who can’t wait to come back.