Episode 129: Innovation, Trust, and the ITSM Churn Cycle

Stephen Mann from ITSM.tools joins Barclay and Ian for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, adoption, and why the industry keeps going round in circles. The discussion covers the gap between what emerging technology promises and what organisations are actually set up to receive.

Why do organisations keep churning through ITSM tools rather than improving what they already have? Stephen makes the case, as he has since 2011, that real capability improvement often only happens when a new tool project creates the funding and focus to do what should have been done all along. At the end of the day, most tools do broadly the same things, and swapping one for another rarely solves the underlying problem. The group also picks apart the gap between selling a tool and retaining a customer, and what it means when those two things are handled by different people with different measures.

The thread running through the whole episode is trust: trust in new technology, trust that the foundations are in place to make it work, and trust that the benefits will follow. Stephen's argument at the end is that the innovation most needed right now isn't in the tools themselves, it's in helping organisations get to a position where they can use them properly.