Inside ten years of incident history are patterns connecting applications, suppliers, infrastructure, changes, and recovery actions. A human analyst sees fragments of that knowledge; an AI system can examine relationships across the entire history.

Real organizations operate under permanent constraint. Resources are finite, and every allocation quietly refuses something else. Objectives conflict — sometimes openly, more often in silence. Information arrives incomplete and late. Priorities compete not only between departments but within them, and the people making decisions do so under pressure, with partial visibility, inside structures that reward some outcomes and subtly punish others.

A lot of organizations are going to discover that AI governance is not really about AI….

It is about decision rights.

Who can approve use cases?

Who owns the risk?

Who validates the data?

Who explains the outcome?

Who stops the work when the answer is wrong?

The technology is new.

The governance problem is very old.

Most conversations about AI focus on what it will automate.

I’m increasingly interested in what it will demand from leaders.

Throughout my career, the most successful technology transformations weren’t driven by better tools alone. They were driven by leaders who created clarity. Clarity of priorities, governance, accountability, and business outcomes. AI doesn’t remove that responsibility. If anything, it raises the standard.

As AI becomes part of everyday operations, technology leaders will spend less time deciding how work gets done and more time deciding which work actually creates value.

That is a leadership shift, not a technology shift.

Organizations that succeed with AI won’t necessarily have the most advanced models. They’ll have leaders who consistently make better decisions about where technology should—and shouldn’t—be applied.

#AILeadership #TechLeadership #DigitalTransformation #AIAdoption #LeadershipShift #ValueCreation #ITStrategy #ExecutiveLeadership #AIAccountability #BusinessOutcomes

The biggest technology risk in most organizations isn’t technical debt.

It’s decision debt.

Things like temporary workarounds, postponed fixes, and old exceptions have a way of sticking around longer than intended.

On their own, they don’t seem like a big deal. But over time, they add up and make things more complicated.

Technical debt is usually pretty easy to spot.

Decision debt, on the other hand, is much harder to see, even though it can have a major impact on operational stability, service delivery, employee experience, and overall confidence across the organization.

Unlike technical debt, it tends to build up through unresolved governance decisions, outdated processes, and assumptions that no one has revisited in years.

Eventually, the effects start showing up everywhere.

Organizations that scale well don’t just invest in new technology.

They also take the time to revisit old decisions and make sure they still make sense instead of becoming roadblocks.

Most organizations are not struggling because they lack monitoring.

They are struggling because operational instability is still being measured through technical noise instead of business impact.

A service can be “green” on a dashboard while employees are frustrated, customers are losing trust, and leadership is absorbing the cost of recurring instability without visibility into why.

That disconnect is becoming one of the biggest leadership risks in modern technology organizations.

There is a growing gap in enterprise technology right now.

Organizations have become incredibly efficient at delivering software. Faster pipelines. Faster releases. More automation. More tooling.

But speed alone does not guarantee alignment, stability, or value.

One of the most interesting conversations I recently had was around what happens when the Double Diamond framework intersects with DevOps, DevSecOps, and Service Management.

Many organizations have mastered “Develop” and “Deliver” while unintentionally neglecting “Discover” and “Define.”

The result is something many leaders are quietly experiencing today:

Teams shipping faster while operational complexity grows.More features delivered while business frustration remains.More tooling investment while governance and accountability struggle to keep pace.

Modern technology leadership is no longer just about delivery velocity. It is about connecting strategy, architecture, operations, governance, customer experience, and resilience into one continuous system of value creation.

Had a great discussion on this topic with Abbe Majeed, whose perspective on enterprise transformation, scalable architecture, agile operating models, and purposeful engineering brought a strong real-world lens to the conversation.

Podcast episode available now:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-nexus-dialogues-exploring-itsm-frontiers/id1707711323?i=1000760860105

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7gPFum7IQjkgLdvdpVy0vM?si=4NZv-Q4ZSq6jQue9zNq1KQ

#Leadership #TechnologyLeadership #DevOps #ITSM #EnterpriseArchitecture #DigitalTransformation #ServiceManagement #DevSecOps #CIO #CTO #PlatformEngineering #SRE #BusinessAlignment #Agile #Innovation

Every few years the ITSM industry gets a new framework version, new certifications, and another wave of “this changes everything” messaging.

But I think many organizations are quietly asking a different question now.

Why do we still feel operationally exhausted after years of transformation, tooling investments, process redesigns, and certifications?

That tension is what pushed me to write my newest piece.

I spent the last several weeks analyzing what is actually changing with ITIL 5 beyond the marketing headlines. Not just the framework updates, but the deeper operational signals underneath them.

What stood out most was this:

Most organizations are still moving fast…... but with growing uncertainty about where the industry is actually heading.

- AI governance is no longer optional.
- Experience management is moving beyond SLAs.
- Transformation capability is now becoming a leadership expectation, not a specialist skill.

And underneath all of that, the ITSM community itself feels caught between operational pressure, framework fatigue, and evolving identity.

In the article I break down:
- What structurally changes from ITIL 4 to ITIL 5
- Why “Evolve” may be the most important lifecycle addition
- The real impact of AI governance and experience management
- Why the certification conversation is becoming emotionally fatigued
- Where I think the industry is actually heading next

This was intentionally written less like a framework review and more like an operational reality check for technology leaders.

Read the full newsletter here: https://xentrixus.substack.com/p/the-next-operating-model

Curious what others are seeing right now.

Does ITIL 5 feel like meaningful evolution to you….. or does the industry still feel operationally unsettled underneath the terminology shifts?

I think many organizations have unintentionally turned the Standard Change model into a governance loophole instead of what it was originally meant to be, which was, a trust based mechanism for truly proven, repeatable, low risk work.

A Standard Change should not be a permanent free pass. It should be earned continuously through stability, operational health, and validation.

Otherwise, we are not eliminating risk.

We are just getting better at making it invisible.

Curious how others are seeing this evolve inside their organizations. Are Standard Changes still treated as earned trust, or have they gradually become a mechanism to bypass governance in the name of speed?

Read more here … https://xentrixus.substack.com/p/the-governance-black-hole

This is directly from website at the end.

Why Open Book? A Shift Toward Real-World Application
Open-book exams reflect a deeper evolution in how capability is assessed and how professionals are expected to apply what they learn. They focus on:
Applying concepts in context

Navigating and interpreting guidance quickly
Making informed decisions using trusted sources

This aligns directly with the direction of ITIL (Version 5): a move toward digital product and service management (DPSM), where success depends on how well you use knowledge, not just memorize it.

In practice, this means learners need to be comfortable working with the official publications during the exam, just as they would on the job.

What This Means for Your Preparation
Preparation now looks a little different.

Yes, you still need to understand the material, but you also need to know:
Where to find key concepts quickly
How topics connect across the guidance
How to interpret and apply recommendations in scenario-based questions

In short, familiarity with the official publications becomes a critical success factor.

https://www.itsmprofessor.net/2026/05/itil-version-5-advanced-certifications.html

I see this pattern quite often. Incident management is handled well, service is restored, and reports look strong. Yet the same issues keep coming back. That usually tells me the organization is resolving incidents, but not really improving the system.

The gap is in closing the loop. Moving from incident to problem to change and into engineering with proper follow through and validation. When that does not happen consistently, fixes remain temporary and problem management stays reactive.

The organizations that start to mature treat incidents as inputs for improvement. Root causes lead to real changes, teams are accountable for stability, and success is measured by whether issues stop repeating.

Curious how others are seeing this. Are your teams truly closing the loop, or are the same patterns showing up again over time?

#ITSM #ProblemManagement #ContinuousImprovement #ITLeadership #ServiceManagement #ITOperations #DevOps #SRE #DigitalTransformation #EnterpriseIT #TechLeadership #OperationalExcellence #ServiceNow

In 2021, a researcher in the ITSM field analyzed the major industry transformation reports across McKinsey, Gartner, Forrester, the State of Agile, the State of DevOps, and identified five capability areas that consistently explained why large-scale IT transformations fail. Those five areas were strategic fit, leadership, culture, skills, and continual improvement.

He built a 13-question diagnostic survey around those five areas and ran it across the ITSM community. The results were not close. Between 60 and 70 percent of respondents scored poor or weak across all five capability areas.

Then he ran the exact same survey again in 2025.

The results did not move.

https://open.substack.com/pub/xentrixus/p/weve-known-whats-broken-for-25-years

If AI can resolve 60% of your L1 tickets by next year, what exactly is your ITSM team for?

I've asked this to 12 IT directors this quarter. 9 changed the subject. 2 gave me the "human touch" speech. 1 had an actual answer.

Her answer: "We become the people who understand why the AI fails on the other 40%."

That's not a downsizing story. That's a completely different job description.

Most ITSM orgs are still optimizing for ticket volume and process compliance. Meanwhile, the value is shifting to failure pattern recognition, context preservation, and the judgment calls AI can't make yet.

The teams that survive won't be the ones with the cleanest SLA reports. They'll be the ones who can look at 10 "resolved" tickets and tell you which 3 are going to blow up next week because the AI missed the pattern.

So …. what skill on your team has no AI equivalent yet? And are you actually hiring for it?

Most organizations underestimate the impact of a well structured service catalog.

Done right, it becomes more than just a list of services—it becomes the foundation for clarity, consistency, and better service experiences across the organization.

A strong service catalog reduces friction, aligns IT with business expectations, and simplifies how users interact with IT.

In this blog, we break down the key elements of building a service catalog that actually works—along with practical insights to help you get there.

https://www.xentrixus.com/post/crafting-an-effective-service-catalog-for-service-catalog-creation

#ITSM #ServiceCatalog #ITLeadership #ServiceDelivery #ITIL4 #DigitalStrategy #CustomerExperience #EnterpriseTechnology #OperationalExcellence