Service Management Transformation

 

 

Introduction: an honest starting point

If you’ve worked in service management long enough, this probably feels familiar.

A platform is implemented with good intentions. It solves real problems. Adoption looks promising.Then the business grows. Expectations rise. Edge cases appear. Customizations creep in.

Over time, the system becomes harder to change, harder to upgrade, and harder to explain.
Eventually, someone asks the question no one really wants to ask:

“Is it time to rebuild?”

Most organizations don’t get this wrong because they lack expertise or effort. They get it wrong because they repeat the same patterns, just on newer technology.

We’ve both seen this from different sides of the equation: one from within the platform ecosystem, one from working hands-on with enterprises navigating large-scale transformation. And we’ve reached the same conclusion:

Service management doesn’t need another rebuild. It needs a different mindset. 

 

Why service management transformations keep repeating the same mistakes

Across IT, HR, Facilities, Security, and other business functions, service management initiatives tend to follow a predictable path:

• Focus heavily on the tool
• Recreate existing processes to feel “safe”
• Migrate data because it’s always existed
• Design for edge cases instead of outcomes
• Declare success at go-live

The problem is that none of those things guarantee adoption, value, or better experience.

What’s missing is “intent”.

When transformation is treated primarily as a technical exercise, teams optimize configurations rather than rethinking how work should actually flow. Familiar processes are preserved because changing them feels risky, even when they no longer serve the organization well. The result is predictable, complexity gets rebuilt instead of removed.

What often gets overlooked is something simpler, and harder to admit:

Until people can actually use a system, no one truly understands how work flows, where friction lives, or what needs to change.

Transformation stalls not because organizations lack technology, but because value is delayed. When nothing is live, learning doesn’t happen. When learning doesn’t happen, trust doesn’t form. And without trust, adoption never really starts….This is where many initiatives quietly lose momentum.

 

Why this feels more urgent now

For years, service management challenges could be absorbed by effort.

If volumes increased, teams added people.
If processes became complex, approvals were layered in.
If demand spiked, new queues or portals were created.

That approach worked, when work stayed mostly within individual teams. Today, it doesn’t.

Service management now operates at enterprise scale. Requests cross functions. Ownership is shared. Dependencies are harder to see. Delays compound quickly. At the same time, expectations have shifted.

People don’t judge service by internal efficiency metrics. They judge it by how easy it is to get help and how smoothly work moves forward.

This combination, enterprise-scale complexity and experience-driven expectations, is what makes old transformation approaches feel increasingly brittle. And it’s the context in which both of the perspectives below are grounded. 

What’s actually changed, even without AI

For a long time, service management challenges could be absorbed by effort.

If volumes increased, teams added people.
If processes became complex, approvals were layered in.
If demand spiked, new queues or portals were created.

That approach worked, until it didn’t.

Today, service management operates at enterprise scale. Work no longer flows neatly within a single team or system. Requests cross IT, HR, Facilities, Security, Finance, and Legal. Ownership is shared. Dependencies are hidden. Delays compound quickly.

At the same time, employee expectations have shifted. People don’t judge service by internal efficiency metrics, they judge it by how easy it is to get help and how smoothly work progresses.

This combination- enterprise-wide complexity and experience-driven expectations, is what breaks traditional transformation approaches. Rebuilding the same processes on a new platform doesn’t solve this. Optimizing one function in isolation doesn’t solve it either.

This is the context in which modern service management transformation is happening, and where the need for a different approach becomes unavoidable.

 

Tanushree Panigrahi’s perspective

Principal Partner Solution Strategist, Atlassian

I’ve spent more than two decades working across service management platforms and transformations. I’ve seen organizations invest enormous time and energy into new systems, only to find themselves stuck in a familiar place a few years later.

The pattern is rarely accidental.

What usually happens is that organizations treat transformation as a technical exercise. They focus on configuring the platform instead of rethinking how work should flow across teams. Familiar processes get carried forward because changing those feels risky. Over time, layers of customization accumulate and quietly turn into technical debt.

What’s different now is that employee expectations have changed faster than service models have.

People don’t want to navigate portals or figure out which team owns their request. They expect intuitive, contextual experiences that meet them where they already work, with simplicity, speed, and clarity.

At enterprise scale, meeting those expectations through manual effort alone becomes unrealistic. This is where technologies like AI start to matter, not as a silver bullet, but as a spotlight. AI doesn’t fix broken processes. What it does is make friction harder to ignore.

 What I’m seeing across organizations is a growing divide. Some are still trying to rebuild their way out of complexity. Others are starting to ask more fundamental questions about experience, flow, and ownership, and those questions are leading them in very different directions.

 

Adam Jackson’s perspective

Global Head of Enterprise Service Management, Valiantys

From the transformation side, I’ve supported many organizations through service management migrations, and there’s one conversation that comes up almost every time.

“We need to move everything.”

All the data.
All the workflows.
All the history.

My question is always the same: why?

Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack information. They struggle because they haven’t clearly defined what success looks like.  Migrating data without intent often recreates the same reporting noise, the same dashboards with no story, and the same operational blind spots.

Another reality that doesn’t get talked about enough: transformation is uncomfortable. It requires commitment, deadlines, and clear outcomes. Without that “burning platform,” initiatives stretch on, decisions get deferred, and momentum fades.

The difference between success and frustration isn’t the absence of pain, it’s whether that effort is intentional, time-boxed, and tied to outcomes the business actually cares about.

The teams that eventually break the cycle tend to do something differently early on. It’s not always obvious, and it’s rarely perfect, but once it works, it changes how the business engages with service teams.

That’s when IT stops being seen as the team enforcing a tool, and starts being trusted as a partner in how work actually gets done. 

 

Why this conversation matters now

What’s emerging isn’t just a new set of tools or features. It’s a shift in how service management is approached.

Less focus on rebuilding everything up front.
More focus on learning through use.
Less emphasis on perfection.
More emphasis on momentum, trust, and outcomes.

These themes are showing up not just in practitioner experience, but in broader market analysis as well, including independent insight from Forrester that validates many of the challenges organizations are wrestling with right now.

 

What actually needs to change

If there’s one lesson that holds true, it’s this:

You don’t break the rebuild cycle by picking a better tool. You break it by slowing down and stepping away from the tool altogether.

Start with what the business actually needs today, not what it’s always had, and not a wishlist. Define outcomes first. Design the processes and ways of working that support them. Then introduce technology to optimize what already works.

Measure value, not activity. Treat adoption as real work. Design for how people actually operate.

Get this right, and platforms stop being the problem, they become the enabler.

 

Why the on-demand webinar matters

This article is intentionally a starting point.

In the on-demand webinar, we go deeper into these themes through a mix of real-world practitioner experience and independent analyst insight from Forrester, including:

• how organizations sequence transformation without overwhelming teams
• where migrations typically stall, and how to avoid it
• what “real” MVPs look like in practice, not just on slides
• how leaders build buy-in across the business and sustain momentum

The discussion brings together enterprise practitioners, platform expertise, and Forrester’s market perspective to ground these lessons in what’s actually happening across organizations today.

If you’ve ever been part of a service management initiative that felt like déjà vu, the session will resonate.

 

Before your next transformation, it’s worth asking one simple question:

Are we rebuilding what we had, or designing for what we actually need now?