How ITSM became the petty tyrant’s toolkit
We were promised process maturity. What we got was ticket tyranny.
IT Service Management (ITSM) was supposed to bring sanity to IT chaos. Instead, it’s become the go-to weapon for non-technical directors with middle-manager syndrome. A way to say “no” with policy. A tool to make engineering teams kneel—not scale.
From useful framework to bureaucratic chokehold
ITSM isn’t inherently evil. But in the wrong hands—and those hands are everywhere—it becomes a chokehold masquerading as discipline. What was meant to streamline operations now exists to suffocate them. Think Six Sigma cosplay with extra checkboxes.
Enter the VP of “Operational Excellence” who can’t SSH into a box but sure can mandate CAB meetings for typo fixes.
The real problem? Control theater disguised as governance
Nobody’s actually improving services with ITSM anymore—they’re just maintaining the illusion of control. Every ticket, every approval flow, every soul-draining review meeting is less about risk mitigation and more about political insulation.
Want to deploy a harmless config change? Better book a meeting with the Ministry of Change Control and offer tribute in the form of a JIRA artifact. This isn’t process—it’s posture.
Spite-driven governance is the new operating model
Here’s what nobody says out loud: half the ITSM bloat isn’t about rigor—it’s about resentment. Spite governance is alive and well. And the targets? Engineers who don’t genuflect at the altar of process.
If a DevOps team ships something useful without submitting to the sacred service request template, someone somewhere in Enterprise Architecture breaks out in hives. So, they retaliate. With forms. With freezes. With Kafkaesque workflows designed to remind builders who’s really in charge.
The house always loses
Everyone loses here. Engineers waste time playing bureaucratic Twister. Managers track metrics that don’t matter. And orgs convince themselves they’re “mature” because their service desk SLA is 92%, while actual delivery velocity circles the drain.
This isn’t accountability. It’s spreadsheet theater.
How to fix it (if you dare)
If ITSM is ever going to be more than a control fetish with an acronym, it needs to be gutted and rebuilt from the inside out. Not by compliance officers. By practitioners. The people who live with the pain.
Strip it back to principles. Empower teams to adapt it—not enforce it. And kill off any process that exists purely because “the tool requires it.” Because if your workflows are designed around a software limitation, you’re not managing services. You’re managing excuses.
Otherwise, keep doing what you're doing. Just don’t act surprised when your engineers leave, your delivery slows, and your ITSM tool becomes the most expensive doorstop in the org.